A New MUSICAL CONCEPT Text written in Rio, 1987. It still defines the professional aim of my life.
In The history of the PARADIS guitar sound, you can read more sound philosophy.
for me is about all we can see, feel, imagine, all the energies
and matter we can perceive and also all we cannot see, feel
imagine.
I find it useless to discuss whether there is one or several or no God or Saints or Spirits since we do not understand much about it and each person collects its experiences about it and imagines a different system above us. Its as if the ants would kill each other because some believe in the power of the cows and others of the storm.
I think God is about as perfect as nature and mankind is. Understand however you want: Perfect. Its root means: made to the end, reached the end, impossible to develop further, dead. My God lives and develops - with our help!
If there is something that can represent God to some degree, its the Sun. It has spilled the Earth, holds it close and feeds it with energy. I even suspect there is information in this energy. I spent a long time thinking about whether its male (o sol) or female (die Sonne) and came to the conclusion its both.
The moon is important as a timer for the earth, and its amazing that it became almost of the same size as the Sun, but its not the opposite, its much less important.
I love to watch Sundown in silence. its the opportunity to look at the strongest thing we can perceive. Each time is different. I call it Gods show.
Only after 40 years I realized that the full moon rises when the Sun goes down (the worlds best schools did not teach me this!). I discovered a few places where we can observe this monthly spectacle.
Is my oldest and most radical principle. Its a pleasure and luxury to be able and free to express all we think and feel - just like eating healthy every day :-)
It takes some more comprehension of my friends and more from
unknown people who often get my return for free... but gives them
confidence and clarity about what I want and do. I often hear that I
am a good mirror, which is one of the most important functions of
friends.
In some cases it may be useful to hide some knowledge from others
and a wise man might be able to help someone with a lie, but in my
experience, sooner or later, the reality comes through, harder.
I observe a serious moral crises, mainly in the christian world, where the church is not respected by a big part of the population and thus ceases to "re program" the basic moral rules in peoples minds every sunday. It seems that the artists could assume this role today, but most are not aware of their responsibility and many destroy important bases...
We obviously have some means to exchange energy with the whole of
the creation or at least with a much bigger part of it than our
visible world. Our organ of communication with this level may be
conscience and consciousness (only one word in Portuguese!). Through
it, we can consult the creating forces and become aware of the plans
and principles that are given to us as law of nature an moral. But
its an exchange: In the interest of the whole, we can ask for support
for our particular destiny and even discuss the law to improve it.
This belief tends to make us stand up or even become arrogant. But to
my experience, the most important condition to get inspiration is to
keep modest and accept our smallness and thank for the given energy
instead of feeling like owners of it.
Ideas are free and public and may come to several persons
simultaneously.
We are owners just of our own work, not of the ideas behind it.
I find people tend to confuse inspiration with instinct (reaction patterns, burnt into the small brain by the nature, experiences of the past generations) and intuition (the capacity to quickly associate and estimate without being able to exactly deduct or argument the result)
Spirits may explain things to us through music. We may learn from the harmony in sound how to harmonize material live.
is a very wide idea. I have some talent in leaving people better by talking to them, playing for them, touching them. I am initiated in REIKI, which helped me a lot to apply this talent. The palms are the main port for the curing energy to flow out of our body, but there are infinite other ways.
I feel that in music, similar energies flow, or it can help people to connect to the energy themselves.
Once we analyse the other persons problem and react with an opinion or remedy, we take over responsibility, because we can never really know what the persons problem is. But the REIKI way of helping is not through knowledge but through good will without personal (egoistic) wish. Then, having contact, we may feel the persons problem.
the main resources we deal with every day. Interesting persons never have enough time to do all they are interested in and could help to. It seems that hardly anybody thinks they have enough money either. but most try to invest time for more money and fewer try to buy more time. I am of the last kind. I am 20 years behind with what I should or could do. Although there were not many, I regret the hours I watched TV and sat in bars yelling small talk. I also should have spent less time to search for the cheapest outlet and spent more time doing without some of the "time saving devices". They are fascinating and thus often take more time than they save.
While time and money are extremely precious to achieve and enjoy, too much of them (as of anything) is dangerous. It takes responsibility to deal with them.
I prefer not to be radical and try everything. Radical vegetarians shock people instead of being a good example. But it IS very important that we eat less meat, to save the land and rainforest and to preserve our tranquility! Once or twice a week is ok.
I create my own bread and jam,
make my muesli every day out of the marvelous fruits that grow in Brazil
and eat full rice and beans (or lentils) and salad in the evening. I avoid
cans, white sugar and alcohol.
If somebody invites me for meat, I eat it (except unknown chicken). I love tuna
fish and find it a crime to be canned.
I find eating one of the biggest pleasures and love to extend it. I love to eat small bits of chocolate, especially Lindt :-)
I clean water and salad and some fruits with ozone.
I find important to use very little chemicals to clean and disinfect since they are poisons (they are supposed to kill small beings, so they influence us and all...)
are the group of people I have the easiest contact with. I share
their rhythm of live in many respects (I sleep from 4 to 12 AM and
never dress a tie :-).
Without the contact to them, I would not know about music and about
all the various stages and the variety of creation I am interfering
with my developments.
Usually I develop first what I want and then show it to musicians to
expand and adapt to common needs.
In the past, idols marked me a lot (in order of appearance):
Johannes Brahms
Richard Wagner
Beatles
Eric Clapton
John Lord (Deep Purple)
David Gilmore / Nick Mason (Pink Floyd)
Jethro Tull
Peter Gabriel / Steve Hacket (Genesis)
Marco Cerletti / Stefan Amman (Circus CH)
Patrick Moraz (Yes)
Robert Fripp
Eddie Jobs (Zappa, UK)
William Bill Bruford/Alan Holdsworth
Andreas Vollenweider
Jimmy Hendrix
1984-86 I stopped listening to music of others and inserted tapes of my own fresh LiveLooping music wherever I went.
1987 in Brazil, a new spectrum opened and the first year I was in love with a music journalist and visited every show in Rio de Janeiro and became influenced by friends like:
Marcio Miranda
Marcelo Bernardes
Vania Dantas Leite
Claudio Nucci
Carioca
Regina Ribeiro
Teddy Baerlocher
Chandra
Bira Reis
Sergio Otanasetra
Julio Pimentel
Monica Albuquerque
and masters I eventually met personally like:
Marco Antonio Guimarães (Uakti)
Carlinhos Brown
Gilberto Gil
Nana Vasconcelos
Hermeto Pascoal
Osmar Macedo (inventor of Trio Eletrico and a lot more)
Lenine
I also met artist of the other arts, and for some of them made pages on this site
Are the good place to meet musicians, experience music, inspiration and technical needs and failures. I visited stages during 20 years to perform and experiment my ways of sonorization and to assist and support others as a sound engineer.
I observed that usually a lot of quality is lost by the too big quantity of speakers spread. All want to be on the save side and spend space, sound quality (phase confusions) and money just for this security while I hardly ever see a concert that fails because the music is not load enough.
Is a very delicate job, between the musician, the public and the production. Its not just reproducing what the musicians play. It means to understand and enhance the principles of their music and the understanding of the public. Production can help a lot in this process or kill it with standardized ideas about what the public likes.
An interesting way to meet expectations is to mix dynamically, showing a bit of everything during some time. An instrument may be shown when it comes up and then overridden by others, because the listener recognized the instrument and will continue to hear it even if its almost or totally inaudible.
Is a sad and holy place. The eternal repeated recording creates the wave in the subtle energy world and crystallizes the quality and essence of the work. The technician as being the first listener and maybe the representative of the public has the following main occupations:
Can be done by constant listening. Playing to what is heard makes concentration and understanding simpler. Musicians tend to concentrate rather on the melody and rhythms and disrespect the sound details. Some even think that they are better or more modest if they do this.
Some technicians have a tremendously developed hearing. I fully
admire them but think that we should not invest much more into
improving fidelity in sound reproduction but rather into turning
equipment and processes more handy and according to musicians and
listeners need.
I find it more important to be able to listen like a listener than to
hear all those details that everyone else is unable to perceive.
Are the base for this work just like for any other. I do not use any math in none of my works. Sometimes I look up a formula and I am grateful for all those engineers that make the effort to create exact and small and complex chips and schematic principles so I can just look them up and modify and put into my creations.
I constantly have to care for the laws about sound to understand what I am doing and why something may sound good.
Basic for me is that bigger means slower means lower pitch means
higher amplitude.
Just compare pitch, movement, volume and food consume of different
animals and dead matter. Sure, you find exceptions.
What nature offers may not always be best for us. Culture means
improvement and adoption of nature to our needs. So it makes sense to
improve natural spaces and instruments with acoustic and electric
filters and create electric instruments that do not need resonance's
to become audible.
I especially like synthetic reverb, the creation of unreal space that
we are able to experience by ear much better than by eye.
I often mix with just one reverb for all instruments: Put all the
music into the same space to make it melt together.
Any kind of matter can be mixed according to the following extreme principles:
- Dominant: One component calls attention, the others are there to
support the dominant component.
- Hard: All components appear clearly separable with about equal
importance.
- Soft: All components melt together to form one new, unknown
one.
is what I studied the least and makes me often feel incompetent as a musician but then again its impressive how resistant I am against learning this matter the rational way. I have seen to many musicians basing too much on "correct" playing instead of "right" (inspired?) playing.
Our perception of harmony comes from the natural overtones, the multiples of a basic note. Therefore, in the bass range, intervals shall be simple (big) and in the high range we can understand and like very small intervals and pitch details.
The rhythmic world is related, about 1000 times slower than sound vibrations.
I learned most about instruments by taking them apart and trying
to improve them. I fixed a lot of all kinds of machines, but mainly
small things. I never liked tube amps. They are too heavy, hot and with high
tension. So I like the sound I made with transistors and
chips. Not sure about software yet :-)
I discovered that machines have something like a should and depend on
our emotions. We can relate to them as companions, dominate the to
some degree (like a dog or horse) but need to respect them and give
the minimum of attention, otherwise they break, get robbed or simply
sound bad.
About half of my clients came with machines that did not really have a
problem. Often the clients themselves could not explain what the
problem was and were amazed that the machines they hated worked on my
table, just like a patient that stops being sick when confronted with
the scalpel.
I think that good sounding instruments have a healing effect first on
their players and then on the public, independent of the
interpretation. Pure harmonic sound heals. So machines that create
this sound end up being Healing Machines.