 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Sometimes old grey haired men look back at the past through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and forget the truly awful examples of mainstream music from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Instead they focus on the best examples from those eras and proceed to compare them to the worst examples from the current era. However, I was listening to the Spotify Top 10 this weekend with my teenage kids and I noticed five forms of musical expression which were completely absent from those songs which have been reasonably prevalent in previous generations. Now, one of these I have a particular beef with and I'm going to leave that towards the end of the video. However, some of the others I could kind of take or leave to various degrees. Let's take for example this list of songs. The Beatles, Penny Lane, Mr Big, To Be With You, Whitney Houston, I Want to Dance with Somebody, Bon Jovi, Living on a Prayer, Beyonce, Love on Top. What are these songs all having common? Key changes. All of the songs that I listed had key changes in them and I don't think it was a particularly exhaustive list. Now, we often heard key changes when the writers knew that they were going to repeat the last chorus for example. So I think a part of their function was to avoid monotony. We knew we were going to hear that last chorus again. It's probably been heard several times in the song already. We don't want to sort of test the listeners too much in terms of monotony. So let's put in a key change and it had the added bonus of having an uplifting feeling to it and especially if it was an anthem style song worked really, really well. So all of those songs had key changes in them and none of the songs from the current Spotify Top 10 have any key changes in them. I'm not surprised by that whatsoever. How do I feel about key changes? This is the one on the list that I think I could probably do without. I get their function. I get how useful they can be. I get that they feel uplifting. But I think they were used to a degree where they became corny, somewhat predictable in fact, which kind of negated their purpose, which was to surprise the listener a little bit. Let me know what you think in the comments down below. Do you still include key changes in your writing? I do have to say though objectively that with the list I gave you, especially say for example with Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer, if I try and imagine that song without the key change, then definitely it loses a little something. So I guess they had a kind of a purpose. Now key changes are really obvious things when you hear them. However, the next thing I'm going to talk with you about is often not noticed by the listener. One of my favorite examples of odd time signature or a change in time signature would be Blondie's Heart of Glass, released in the late 70s and very much a mainstream song. However, if you listen to the instrumental towards the end, the band are playing in 4-4, but they occasionally throw in a bar of 3-4. It creates a nice little skip in the song and a nice little surprise for the listener. However, when they repeat that instrumental, they just stick to 4-4. Now as composers they obviously decided, hey, let's throw in a little surprise for the listener, something to keep them interested, but let's not overdo it. Wise choices in my opinion. Now in terms of more overt examples of odd time signature, I would say a good one would be Money from Pink Floyd, which was in 1978. And one of my favorites, Golden Brown by the Stranglers, which is in 1938. But it doesn't have to be that obvious and I still think it could be done in modern music without it being sort of disturbing to the listener. Here's an example of a piece of music where you probably didn't notice there was an odd time signature thing going on and that is from Outcast called Hayer. Now there is a little bit of a myth going around about this piece of music on the internet. I have seen on several web pages that they say the song is in 11-4. I completely disagree with that. I think it could be described as being in 10-4, but most of us would think about it as two bars of 4-4 and then one bar of 2-4. Depends how you look at these things. Now it's not quite as exotic as the myth, but I still think it just creates some really nice interest in the song. Again, a kind of a skipping feeling to the song. That's probably not going to surprise you to know that in the current Spotify top 10 that I listened to, there are no odd time signatures and no changes of time signatures going on. Probably a little bit disappointing from my perspective was that they were all without exception in 4-4. Now that shouldn't be too surprising, but there's a lot of songs which have used at least 12-8 in the past. Now I still think of 12-8 as a kind of a 4-4 time signature. It's just got the four beats with three pulses, yeah? One, two, three, two, two, three, three, two, three, four, two, three, making up the 12 pulses, but it's still basically one, two, three, four. Sadly, the current Spotify top 10 didn't even have that time signature in there. Now this is the Australian one, there's different top 10s. I suspect there are still a few 12-8 songs out there because certainly in hip hop it does get used, but it's a little bit disappointing to me that there was just no variation whatsoever when I listened to this group of songs this weekend. Now time signatures as I say can be subtle, odd time signatures can be subtle, but the next thing I want to talk about was not subtle at all. It was very, very obvious and for most of us who wrote songs during this area, it was without exception going to be in the song somewhere. It was just a question of where, but in the current Spotify top 10 it is nowhere to be found. Instrumental solos, let's face it, I could have called this section guitar solos since that's what they were most of the time. However, there were some great keyboard solos and a bit of a prominence of saxophone solos during the 70s and 80s, but in the current Spotify top 10 that I listened to, no solos whatsoever. There are some odd instrumental sections here and there, they're fairly short and they're just kind of riffs if you like, definitely not solos however. Now I would say that one of the reasons for that is that guitar solos were prominently also used in rock music, probably still are, but there are no rock songs whatsoever in the current Spotify top 10 and you'd have to go a long way down I think before you find them. So the decrease in mainstream rock music, because rock music is still very much alive, but the decrease in mainstream rock music has probably contributed to the decrease in instrumental solos as well. Now do I miss them? I've got to say some of my favorite pieces of music from the past have been guitar solos, it was probably guitar solos that influenced me as a young boy to play guitar at all. Sometimes I think they were pretty much overdone and I know that when I was in a band back in the day and we were writing songs, we almost assumed that there would be a solo, we'd say well where's the solo going to go as if songs always had solos and that probably wasn't a good thing to be that predictable. So I don't entirely miss them, but I do miss the fact that they create a break from the repetition of vocal, vocal, vocal, vocal, vocal, vocal. I'm a vocalist, I love lyrics as well, but sometimes I just want a little break from what that vocalist has got to say. I don't mind coming back to it later, but give me a little break, stimulate my ears with something a little different and I think that's part of the function of an instrumental solo is to break that repetition and it's also what I think is the function of the next thing that I'd like to speak about. The middle eight, so-called because it's normally in the middle part of the song and it's normally around about eight bars long. I think it's a really special musical tool for a composer to have in his or her toolbox. It's interesting because it's probably the least favorite part of the song for most people. It doesn't have much familiarity because it's only once in the song. It usually has a completely different chord structure and melody structure to the other part of the song as well, but I think that's why it works. First of all, we get a break from the repetition of the verse and the choruses, but because it's not very familiar, I think often it creates a kind of a tension and uneasiness in there, which is finally resolved with, ah, we've gone back to the verse or to the chorus and I think it's really important when you're creating music sometimes to create tension, to release tension. Just my opinion and I still include middle eights when I'm writing songs. Now the final part that I'd like to talk about, I do as I say have a beef about it. Before I get on to that however, I'd like to talk about something else which is missing from mainstream music and I don't think it's coming back in a hurry and I think it's because of all the reasons above. The long epic, I'm talking Bohemian Rhapsody, Stairway to Heaven and dare I say 46 minutes of tubular bells, commercially successful despite the fact that these were long form pieces of music and I don't think it was the fact that they were long which made them successful. I think they were successful despite their length and they were able to get away because they use all of these various tools for musical expression, lots of variation and progression in what they were doing. I do not think you could get away with having a successful long form piece of music if it's just verse chorus with a vocal repeated over and over again. I think you need to make use of all of the tools that we've talked about so far in this video to continually stimulate the listener through the passage including the final one which I'd like to talk about now. Tempo changes. I'm not talking about extreme tempo changes that would be particularly noticeable. I'm talking about the subtle tempo changes which happen when musicians perhaps get a little bit more excited during the middle of a piece of music and then when they calm down again typically say for example in a piece of music which is a hundred beats per minute a band may go up to a hundred and two hundred and three maybe up to a hundred and six or something like this without you really noticing because you're experiencing that same energy rush that they do when they get to the chorus or what have you. I think tempo changes are tremendously expressive tools to use in music. For me almost as important as something like velocity or volume changes during the music. Now the problem I have with tempo changes is I think they're a little bit different to the other things I've spoken about. Almost all of the other things I've spoken about could be talked about as if they were just a change in trend. People have decided hey look don't think key change is that great anymore or what have you but I don't think tempo change or the lack of tempo change has come about necessarily because of that at all. I think it's because we are now being guided by the tools we are using rather than using the tools to get what we want. What do I mean by that? Most of us use doors or digital audio workstations to record our music. They're computer programs and if you use them you will know that that computer program is very very happy for you to stay at one tempo throughout the song with that metronome going through as rigid as clockwork. Now let's defend the door a little bit here. It's not because of the door that we have this situation it's influenced by the door. Most doors you can of course change the tempo throughout the song but it does take extra effort. It bothers me that the reason we're having a lack of tempo change is not because we've decided that it's not a great thing to do anymore but because it's just a bit too difficult. That's a shame. I still try to get tempo changes in my songs but I have created music with no tempo changes because it is just easier to go along with a click track for three and a half minutes. I wish that would change if you're making music I wish that you would put a little effort into adding that extra dynamic to the song that little bit of extra energy in your choruses etc that little lift in there which can really affect the emotion and the mood of the listener and that is the point of all of these musical tools to affect the emotion and the mood of our listeners. So who's to blame for this apparent situation where we use a very narrow palette of musical tools for expression? Well I think too often grey-haired guys like me point the finger at the younger generation, talk about their short attention spans etc and leave it all with them but in my subjective and admittedly unscientific view I do of course have two teenagers and I think that when they are presented with the opportunity to listen to music which is a little bit different to the current mainstream they lap it up just like we did they appear to really enjoy it as long as they're exposed to it. Now what's important is the way that they're exposed to it if I come to them as an older guy and say hey you should listen to this they will not listen to me I've had this experience believe me they turn their nose up if the same piece of music is presented to them by TikTok they love it they lap it up they'll get into it. Now again I don't want to blame them for that because we've all been subject to that whether we know it or not when we were younger there was always marketing channels directed at us so that we would hear certain types of music for me back in the 80s growing up in the UK it was Radio One who normally determined what would be successful in mainstream music at that time so I don't think that situation has changed all that much. So who do I really think is to blame for that lack of variation in musical expression well I think it's actually old grey-haired guys but these ones are in suits and they're in charge of corporations it's always been the same in music in movies they like repeatable formulas for creating money they're not here for musical expression I'm afraid they're here to make money and they're the main influencers of this situation in my view they've had success with certain forms of music and they just want to keep doing that now once in a while someone comes along and changes things now the most prominent example of this over the last probably three or four years now is Billie Eilish of course and I think she very much deserves the praise she gets she comes along she changes the formats of the songs and put some different ideas in there she's successful and of course what you see is a few Billie Eilish like replicas coming out that's the corporation at work again so what it actually needs is a steady stream of artists who come along and upset the apple cart and show the corporations hey there's alternatives to what we're seeing at the moment so I'm just going to encourage you as artists as creators if you're not happy with the status quo if you would like some things to you know be different in mainstream it's up to you to create that difference be brave express yourselves in lots of different ways not just with that narrow palette of tools that we see at the moment now one of those tools of course that I spoke about was tempo changes that was my final point and I did say that within doors having a very organic tempo is a little bit sort of troublesome to do sometimes now I've actually made a couple of videos about this one for cakewalk and the other one for studio one if you use either of those doors then go ahead and click on those thumbnails now