Music Recording and the Recording Industry

Records have become an essential source for popular music history. The article discusses the technical development and global expansion of the international recording industry from the 1890s to the 2010s. Production peaked in 1929 and started to grow again after the Second World War. As the technology developed, independent recording studios were established, and the infrastructure for making records became widely available. The article also discusses the special case of record production in the Soviet Union. In the early days of radio, stations produced music themselves, but since the 1960s, radio has mostly relied on records. Many public broadcasters still have large music archives. Television has also been important for documenting and marketing music. Since 2000, the recording industry has made a successful transition to the internet. Access to social networks has given birth to a large number of microproducers, and the role of music videos has increased.

There's Music to Play, Places to Go, People to See! An Exploration of Innovative Relational Spaces in the Formation of Music Scenes: The Case of The Hague in the 1960s

It was not so much Amsterdam, the cultural capital, but The Hague which had the most vibrant Beat music scene in the Netherlands in the 1960s. Part of the explanation for this lies in the presence of a sizeable group of youngsters who were born in the former colony the Dutch East Indies and who were already well acquainted with contemporary American popular music. This laid the foundation for the city's musical effervescence that contributed to placing it firmly on the map of the country's popular music history. We analyse the social and networked dimensions of this local music scene by departing from Howard Becker's concept of art worlds and relating this to concrete places where key actors could meet. We show how abstract agglomeration economies touched down in The Hague and, to be more precise, in a selected set of venues and clubs. We thus present a micro geography of innovative relational spaces where musicians, managers, gatekeepers and a motley crew of hangers-on met, exchanged knowledge, inspired and pushed each other to become (in cases even internationally) successful artists.

Popular music, history and geography of our society: a pedagogical approach for students

The present work seeks to determine popular music as an object of study before the cultural interconnections given by globalization and, at the same time, presenting the musical field as a pedagogical tool for education. Through a project by researchers at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, a pedagogical methodology that provides the student with tools necessary for an understanding from the regional to the global of the object of study is weighted, this being the musical field or any other object of which music can serve as a tool for the acquisition and understanding of knowledge. It also proposes the construction and protection of documents that help shape our history, understanding that intellectual operations encompass both languages and multiple discourses as well as artistic expressions in general.

From Bach to Helloween: ‘Teutonic’ stereotypes in the history of popular music and heavy metal

Throughout the centuries, German popular music has caused various foreign reactions from admiration to outright rejection. Sometimes, international audiences perceived it as too ‘Teutonic’; other times, this was exactly the reason for its appeal. This article traces ‘Teutonic’ features in 400 years of German popular music history, seeking to identify the emergence and development of ‘Teutonic’ stereotypes as well as their perception inland and abroad. The metal discourse was analysed based on a corpus of nearly 200,000 pages from magazines such as the British Kerrang! and the German Metal Hammer, Rock Hard and Deaf Forever. Stereotypes such as perfectionism, precision and rigidity seem to stem from historical roots, yet their projection onto ‘Teutonic metal’ is over-simplified and often out of context. History suggests that German metal bands were most successful when they exaggerated Germanness. Occasionally, bands became successful because their German features made them sound unique, even though they did not promote their heritage proactively. More often, though, bands that were unintentionally perceived as typically German were less appealing to a foreign audience. In the magazines, discussion of Teutonic attributes almost vanished in the twenty-first century. Global production practices needing to conform to international expectations of ever faster, tighter and heavier records likely made metal artists around the world adopt qualities that previously defined ‘Teutonic music’. It will therefore be interesting to see if or how German stereotypes in metal music will live on.

What Makes It Sound ’80s?

Popular music of the 1980s is remembered today as having a “sound” that is somehow unified and generalizable. The ’80s sound is tied to the electric piano preset of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. Not only was this preset (E. PIANO 1) astonishingly prevalent—heard in up to 61% of #1 hits on the pop, country, and R&B Billboard charts in 1986—but the timbre of E. PIANO 1 also encapsulates two crucial aspects of a distinctly ’80s sound in microcosm: one, technological associations with digital FM synthesis and the Yamaha DX7 as a groundbreaking ’80s synthesizer; and two, cultural positioning in a greater lineage of popular music history. This article analyzes the timbre of E. PIANO 1 by combining ethnographic study of musician language with visual analysis of spectrograms, a novel combination of techniques that links acoustic specificity with social context. The web of connections created by the use and re-use of DX7 presets like E. PIANO 1, among hundreds or maybe thousands of different tracks and across genres, is something that allows modern listeners to abstract a unified notion of the “’80s sound” from a diverse and eclectic repertoire of songs produced in the 1980s.

GENERAL OVERVIEW TO DRUM KIT IN TURKISH POPULAR MUSIC DURING THE PERIOD 1970-1980

The invention of Drum has been known to trace thousands of years.However, the drum kit came to exist in the early 20th century. Considering its historical development and our country's popular music history, development of this instrument in Turkey is the starting point of this research. In this study, the cults and playing attitudes that influenced the drummers, the location of drum kit in the studio environment, the set up prefrrences in the band with equipments used will be commented by analysing the data obtained via interviews. Within this framework, questions in 4 main topic have been asked to Osman İşmen and Turhan Yükseler, two of the significant arrangers of the period; Okay Temiz, one of the significant drummers of the period; Cahit Berkay, one of the founders of the band Moğollar; İsmail Soyberk, the bass-guitarist; the drummer Mert Türkmen as the representative of Cezmi Başeğmez. In accoedance with the data obtained, it has been concluded that jazz and rock drummers influenced our country, Anadolu Pop attitude was seen in the playing attitudes and set ups of that period drummers, Studio Hayri and sound technician Sıtkı Acim (tonmeister) rose to prominence in terms of studios where drum records were made, Ludwig drums were used together with Turkish brands in equipments. Keywords: Drum kit, drums, popular music, turkey, drummers, drum playing