Why I Don’t Use an Artist Name

When you think of musicians and artists you usually refer to them with a pseudonym. A fake name that they give themselves to be identified throughout their career. I have nothing against it’s use but, personally it’s not for me and here’s why.

1. I’m Proud of My Name: James Revels III. I love it. It’s unique(ish) and like the the way it rolls off my tongue. James was passed down from my granddad to my uncle and now me, so it’s like a passed torch. I also love my last name because it’s a memorial  to my (very) distant uncle Hiram Revels, the first African American senator. With that much history behind my name I have a lot to be proud of.
2. Pseudonyms as Alter Egos: I prefer to use my name because when I create my art I feel I’m at my realest. A lot of artists describe themselves having an alter ego or separate personality when they create, I feel the opposite. I feel like this creative side is the true me and when I work my day job I’m putting on a mask. Some artist put on a certain “image” while the only image I wish to portray is an accurate portrait of myself.
3. Google Friendly: Because my full name is relatively unique it’s easier to corner my own niche of keywords to google.  Type” James Revels” and the second auto-suggest is “James Revels the Composer” the third is “James Revels WordPress”. Typing in “James Revels” in general, provides links that fill the entire ever crucial 1st page. This saved a lot of time that would have been wasted on thinking of an SEO friendly name.

So those are the reason’s that I use my real name instead of a made up one. Stay tuned for updates on my upcoming Hip-Hop Project “Escapism EP”. It’s a 5 track original EP that is an escape from the current norms of hip hop. I also released the album cover yesterday (also designed by yours truly) Check it out. If you like it hope you stay tuned as I get ready to release the first single “Genesis” in the next couple of weeks.

 

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America: The Culture of Escapism

Over the last several months I have been working on a project titled “Escapism EP” and it is inspired by the realization that I used drug and entertainment as escapism. Upon further introspection I realized that this problem is a symptom of a much bigger and hidden disease that not only affects me, but the culture as a whole.

Before I delve deeper, let me say I am not against having fun. There’s a time and a place for fun, but I feel that for a lot of people that time is nearly all the time. That over time people use drug, entertainment, and sex as a life escape rather than a life enhancer, which it ideally should be.

Today, people worship the people or things that can take them away from the reality. Actors, Musicians, Sports Stars, YouTube, Video Games, T.V. make ridiculous amount of money because they help us forget the current situation. Take the edge off. This becomes unhealthy when all our mass media outlets are about the Kardashian’s or some sex scandal involving our favorite actors.

While chasing the American Dream at what point should we wake up and chase reality instead?

  Those are just my thoughts. What do you think?  Leave a comment below.

An Idea

The following is me brainstorming an idea so please forgive any grammatical mistakes. Feel free to leave your two cents as well.

So, I was reading “Think and Grow Rich” and there’s a chapter about the “Mastermind”, which is a group of experts you gather to augment any weak points in your own expertise. I’ve always been into S.A.M.M. (Science , art, math and music) and writing. I’ve always had dreams (literal dreams) of me gathering expertise in those fields and we create a network of artists and geniuses to help up and coming talent obtain jobs or collaboration with each other without all the binds of formality and bureaucracy that normal corporation impose. In a way like mentors because we not only have the knowledge but the connection that an artistic master usually had. The only think is a couple of road block occurred that I haven’t wrapped my head around quite yet.

1) Where do I go to find these people and how do I approach them? Especially since this idea is in it’s infancy. The most I can say is I’ve gathered some friends to collaborate musically, but I also need to figure how to get the non-artist mathematicians and scientist. (I’m well versed in both for a laymen so talking technical isn’t an issue)

2) What do we do once I get the initial batch of people?Assuming the initial batch of people I gather aren’t well connected or financed like myself. What do we do to get the attention of those who do. What kind of projects do we create? When I think on this and try to flesh out the idea, I feel like there is a Gate. Like I need a key from someone else or an idea I don’t know really. I know if together we can help solve a problem maybe I need to pin point said problem, but I don’t want to be over-zealous on the first project since I want to prove to concept successful in the early stages.

3) How to get every to work together? This may be something out of my control, but with something like this it’s possible for leeches to emerge or people to disagree. What do I do to mitigate or prevent tension and conflict?

Weird Genres: Musique Concrete

Have you ever sat up early in the morning and listened to the birds chirp and thought “Man, this would make a great tune”? Well, I have and I’ve been looking into weird genres of music and I came across one named “Musique Concrete”. This genre is defined by its use of natural, sometimes everyday sounds. If you’ve ever seen someone create a song with only scissors and a tooth brush. You’ve witness musique concrete. Instead of using words I’ll let the music speak for itself.

Here’s a Modern Version of Musique Concrete where hip hop artist Mac Lethal re-creates “Niggas in Paris” with hair products.

Here’s a 1979 Documentary on Musique Concrete

Liked this article? Check out my post on the parallels of music and linguistics, the study of languages. 

Also Check out my Daily Music Creation Challenge on YouTube

 

 

Music as Language: The Parallels of Linguistics and Music

Before I got into music composition, I wanted to be a linguist. I didn’t necessarily want to learn the language itself, but the structures and rule that governed language and language change thoroughly interested me. For years I’ve heard music is the “Universal Language” or something along those lines and you’d be surprised how close this statement is to the truth.

Phonetics: The Acoustics of Language

Acoustics is essentially the study of wave phenomenon, usually sound since it’s the easiest to reproduce and observe.  It’s like Physics for sound. In linguistics, this is paralleled by the branch called phonetics. They study the acoustical properties of sounds used in human speech. They also study how sounds are articulated and how they are perceived.

Phonology: The “Music Theory” of Language

Music theory is a study and classification of common structures that occur across different songs. Phonology does the same but with languages. They study how sounds are group together and organized in a given language. Phonologists study the phonotactics, or rules and constraints for how sounds can occur in the syllables. Phonologist also study the “prosody” or quality of a sound. This includes its stress, intonation, and pitch, all three of these also important for analyzing music as well.

Grammar: The “Music Composition” of Language

Music composition is how different musical motifs and phrases are placed together to create a unified whole. In language this is reflected in grammar, which is the study of the rules that govern how words and phrases can be combined to create sentences.

There’s a lot more I could go into, but for now I’ll leave it simple.

Check out Yesterday’s article on my musical ideals or check out my Youtube playlist where I post a daily short musical piece as practice.

Ideal Music: Melody

For an artist to understand his craft he has to have a vision or ideal of what he thinks music should sounds like. I’ve been thinking over this for the last week so I decided to write a couple of blog post describing what my ideal music should sound like.

I’ll start with melody which is the most important element of music. (at least in my ears) When people hear songs they usually hum back the melody. For me a melody line has to have these features.

• Unique yet memorable: Melodies should be unique, yet memorable. Have you ever heard a song that you loved the melody yet couldn’t remember the song 2 minutes after listening. That’s a unique melody with out memorable parts.
• Flowing Movement: Melodies should move, but in a flowing way with very few note leaps (unless to set a specific mood),
• Transformation: Melodies should move and transform into other melodies to keep the song from getting stale yet have a related stem that bring them all. Classical music usually takes transformation to its extreme making it difficult for average people to follow, but Pop & Hip hop music tends to lack this feature repeating a phrase multiple times with little or no variation. Ideally there should be a balance between movement and stable parts.

 

There we go my ideals on melody. I’ll probably revisit this late, but for now next time I’ll be writing my ideals on Harmony & Accompaniment.

Don’t forget to check out my playlist for my “Daily Music Making Challenge” Where make a short 1 or 2 minute instrumental a day

Creative Pantheism – the religion of creativity

Since I have limited access to internet due to laptop running slow I haven’t been able to upload youtube content, music etc like I want so I decided my next project is going to be a book exploring my personal philosophy and philosophical topics in general. So in preparation for this project, I have wrote this article. Mind you I typed this from phone off the top of my head as a kind of “freewrite” so forgive me for any mistakes.
People sometimes ask what my religion is and I’ve never known what to say. This is my attempt to put a label on it. I call it…
Creative Pantheism. What is it? Well Pantheism is the belief that all things are God. I believe that everything and everyone is as to God as cells are to us. The sum of all the parts of this universe equal to God and each person or thing is designed to play a specific microscopic role even if we aren’t aware of its macroscopic implications.  Creative Pantheism adds one more principle to Pantheism, that is, the idea that an act of creation and creativity is  the universe’s purpose. I’ve always said “The universe is a void screaming to be filled.” But what about destruction? Well, destruction is a type of creation in  the way that it frees up raw material to be  rearranged like lego pieces (this is why I believe legos are so popular, they reflect a fundamental principle of the universe)
Boom! There it is, creative Pantheism.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed like, follow and share so you can be alerted when the next philosophical tid bit is released.

Sampling in Music: Creativity or Robbery?

So sampling. Yeah I get a fair amount of request from people to make instrumentals that include samples of famous (copywrtitten) sound bites from TV shows, songs, etc and I am like “No!”. I’m not against sampling, which is using sounds from another source to use in music. I am against lazy sampling. Lazy sampling is where the producer just takes a clip from a famous song and just loops it. Adding maybe a fatter bass line or slightly pitch shifting but you still know where it came from. Examples of sampling I hate. Dance (Ass) by Big Sean, Anaconda by Nicki Minaj or the worst Never Been by Wiz Khalifa.

Never Been is the Laziest example of sampling and I hope the producer didnt get paid to make this for wiz because he literally took a song from a video game took 16 bars and just added a heavy bass line? don’t believe me ok. Here’s Schala’s Theme from Chromo Trigger

Here’s Wiz Khalifa’s Never Been

Just an exact copy with added bass. Super lazy and the reason I RARELY sample unless its from an original sound source or I mutilate the original copywritten source so drastically that it’s not possible to tell where it came from because if I don’t I legally couldn’t sell the instrumental. (unless I paid the copyright holder)Plus, Wouldn’t it be more fun to compose your own music instead of copy paste some else loop?

I understand the in  the beginning days of some music genres. Particularly hip hop, the pioneers sampled because at the time it was extremely difficult for people (especially in the Bronx, hip hop’s birthplace) to get the necessary equipment to create songs from scratch, but sampling from vinyl was easy. That excuse, however, is not defensible in the 21st century. Considering that there are numerous free or cheap programs (my first program I composed in Cakewalk Kinetic 2 $50 in 2007!) and the wealth of information Google provides about music theory and composition, Any form of lazy sampling is inexcusable…unless you have hundreds of thousand to pay record labels and copy right holders.

So yeah. There we go my views on (Lazy) sampling.