Ok, this is going to be a long post, get ready
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I tried to listen to some atonal compositions on youtube. I felt extremely uncomfortable that I cannot put into words here. It made me feel tense for a good amount of time after hearing it. Absolutely unbearable.
I don't know if my opinions will change after I get used to atonal system, I do not know much about it (this subject was just briefly mentioned by one of the instructors at my music course) but my intuition says that atonal music is a great tool for ear training. If one can just voice a prime tone row I don't think that he/she will ever have any problems with anything related to tonal music.
To connect this with tonal music, I think this will definitely expand your horizon when composing. After all, the tonal music theory just gives us an abstraction which lets us know "which way the river should flow". Atonal music, on the other hand lifts this abstraction thus giving us more freedom in terms of musicality which means having options on where you should go.
But, atonal music is dangerous for people like me whose ear is nowhere near perfect. This danger is not to be trifled with, I can imagine getting comfortable to atonal compositions and being able to listen to them effortlessly, yet this will come at a cost. This will make me comfortable with hearing notes outside of the tone range, and I simply cannot afford that. I don't have a deep musical ability or understanding or an amazing music ear, all I can rely on is how I feel when I hear a stream of notes. If I'll lose this, music would be meaningless for me.
I would love to explore the mysteries of music regardless of the subject's property but in this case, I can't dare to do it for the reasons I described above. In addition to these, roughly an hour passed since I listened to the atonal composition and I still got that tense, distracted feeling. But I don't mind learning more on the subject without hearing anything of it
. These are my opinions after a brief research on the atonal music.
Back to our course, I think I have found the root of my sync problem. It's simply relatively under-developed picking hand. I just joined Todd's shred bootcamp, luckily his first lesson was focused on the development of picking hand.I discovered that my arm joined to the picking motion slightly, it was extremely subtle yet it made my picking inconsistent and prevented the improvement of my wrist motion, not a big deal at low tempos but it gets exponentially bad as tempo increases. I have been working on wrist-only movement of picking motion and I can say that the progress was more than I have made in the past 5 months.
I went to a jam session with a fellow guitarist and a drummer. It sucked, I could barely played anything. This led me to realise that I have the skills to play guitar at a decent level but my repertoire is nearly empty. I'll post a record on the latest task within a week, after that I'd say lets stay true to the Rampage and work on a repertoire-oriented route, is that ok for you? I know I'm changing the focus too much out of frustration, but I feel this is the right path to take, finally. What do you think?
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