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 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.
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 usefull to hide some knowledge from others
and a whise 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 "reprogram" 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 responsability 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 analyze 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.
I prefer not to be radical. I create my own bread and jam,
make my muesli every day out of the marvelous fruits that grow here
and eat full rice and some beans and salad in the evening. I avoid
cans, white sugar and alcohol.
If somebody invites me for meat, I eat it (except pork). 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.
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):
Brahms
Wagner
Beatles
Eric Clapton
John Lord (Deep Purple)
Pink Floyd
Jethro Tull
Peter Gabriel/Steve Hacket (Genesis)
Marco Cerletti / Stefan Amman (Circus CH)
Patrick Moraz (Yes)
Robert Fripp
Eddie Jobs
William Bruford/Alan Holdsworth
Andreas Vollenweider
Jimy Hendrix
Uakti
Carlinhos Brown
Nana Vasconcelos
After '84, I almost stoped listening to music of unknown musicians
and became influenced only by friends like:
Marcio Miranda
Marcelo Bernardes
Claudio Nucci
Carioca
Regina Ribeiro
Teddy Baerlocher
Chandra
Bira Reis
Serjo Otanasetra
Julho Pimentel
Are the good place to meet musicians, experience music, inspiration and technical needs and failures. I go there to perform and experiment my ways of sonorization and to assist and support others ways as a technician for 20 years.
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 standarized 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 representant 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 allways be best for us. Culture means
improvement and adaption of nature to our needs. So it makes sense to
improve natural spaces and instruments with accoustic and electric
filters and create electric instruments that do not need resonances
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 resistent I am against learning this matter the rational way. I have seen to many musicians basing too much on Ñcorrectì playing instead of Ñrightì (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 hate tube amps. They are too heavy, hot and with high
tension. So I like the sound I made with transistors and now
chips.
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 the 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.