"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon (Oct. 9th, 1940 - Dec. 8th, 1980)

A beautiful quote by probably the most famous name not only rock and roll history, but in the history of music as a whole, John Lennon!

My name is Joshua Tombran.  I am a 17 (soon to be 18), year old student at Sheridan College.  I'm enrolled in the program "Advertising and Marketing Communications - Management", with hopes of one day being able to use the skills I acquire in this program to promote my band.  Now, what you must be thinking at this point is, "what the heck does this kid know about music or rock and roll"?  Well to give you a short answer to that,  I am a music enthusiast.  It has been an active part of my life for as long as I can remember.  I've been playing guitar, singing, and performing for almost thirteen years now, and man do I love my rock n roll!  More specifically, 60's, 70's and 80's rock.  It's all I've ever listened to, and all that I've grown up on.  Only recently (within the past few years) have I been venturing into other styles of rock n roll, and other genres of music...  So, I do hope that this encourages you to take a peek through my blog. I assure you that it'll be worth it!!

Music... a fashion show?

Take a look around you, at our ever changing society.  Notice anything?  All the girls and guys in magazines and on TV are "hot" 21 year olds with barely any clothes on, partying hard, with the perfect hair and skin, and look like they just came out of a movie.  Now, take a look at music videos of today.  Same thing, except the girls are dancing like they belong in strip joints and the guys look high outta their minds.  Now, compare our modern society to 40 years ago.  When Black Sabbath, ACDC, even Hendrix was popular.  Did you see much music videos around? Did you see half naked women plastered everywhere?  I'll bet you the answer is no.  Just branching into the music aspect of this posting, music today has been turned into one gigantic fashion show!  Artists today make music video after music video for every single song they release.  IT'S UNNECESSARY!  It's all a HUGE  propaganda to make you go out and try to be like them! To make you go out and buy their clothes, and their hats, shoes so that they can keep living in their mansions, racking in dollars by the millions and sitting back, feeding you crap (read my post "new music sucks you say?").  Music back in the day, was for the music man!  If there was a music video made, it was of the band literally standing around on a staged stage, and playing their music, looking around laughing, smiling, having a blast!  Thats what music should be!  They couldn't care how they dressed.  Most had the long hair, the retro tie dye shirts, and the hippie glasses! That was cool, and that wasn't distracting.  People didn't care about how their fav bands looked because they couldn't really see them, and they were more interested in the music for what it was.

If only society could go back to how it was back then in terms of music, we could then put an end to the like of musicians like Beiber and such.  

New music sucks you say?

Quite recently, I've been doing a little bit of research on how music was recorded back in the day, and how its evolved, and what I ended up noticing was it took SO much more skill back 30 or 40 years ago, and it was MUCH more expensive.  Back in the day, when you wanted to record something, you lugged all you stuff down to a studio, payed for the space, payed for an engineer, sometimes you would pay for an instrument or two.  What used to happen was you'd all plug into the soundboard, the drummer might be in a separate room, and the singer was definitely in a different room because they needed to get the clarity of all the instruments alone.  What the engineers would do is they would essentially place microphones all over the room! They'd put one near a guitar amp (for example) to catch the clarity and tone of the instrument, and then they'd place a mic a few feet or so away to get a natural reverberation or echo sound.  Pretty much to make the instrument sound real and like it was big and booming!, and everybody would play at the same time! The band would get going all-together, and if somebody messed up, they all stopped and started over!  Which aided the band, as it allowed them to enhance their tightness and their chemistry when performing live.  It also called for perfectionism which, speaking as a... Led Zeppelin fan for example, I'd be pretty pissed off if I'd bought their LP and they were making mistakes left right and centre.

Musicians and artists of today have it so much easier! and cheaper too!  They literally just need to have a laptop and they can mix and master anything that they desire to.  Musicians of today, in my personal opinion, have a very minimal amount of talent.  Back in the day, not only would the bands play their stuff, they'd sit down and mix it as well.  Artists today literally just show up, record their crap and (most of them) walk right out, leaving the engineer alone to work in their music.  Everything for them can be fixed if they make a mistake.  They don't care to be perfect because they know they can cover it up with auto tune and with other specialized effects to make the song sound "pretty".  That's why whenever they are in concerts, playing in front of thousands of fans who payed good money to get in to their show, they sound like absolute crap.  Because 99.9% of them nowadays think they can just cover everything up.  Everything is computerized.  Computerized reverb, echo, chorus effects, special effects etc...  

Music today involves nothing more than pressing a space bar and moving around a couple of effects to make things sound pretty.  I know this because as a musician, I experiment, and I tried writing a techno song.  All I needed was Garageband and I had everything I needed.  Once finished, I trashed the whole project, just for the simple face of, I didn't consider it to be music.  

So at the end of the day, music is just supposed to be appealing to the ear of the listener, and if you're judging it solely on that principle, then you're probably going to argue this whole posting and neglect a lot of what I just said about new music, but if you went out and did your research and knew behind the scenes and the production of new music and how easy it is compared to before, you'd agree with me when I say, new music sucks.   The final product may not, but the production of it does.

Rock n Roll is... Country?

Yes it's true.  Rock and Roll music (and essentially every music out there), can be traced back into country western roots.  If you think about it, what did people have to listen to back in the early days?  Country and Blues.  Blues music came popular later on into the 20th century with the African American community.  But Country had been around for such a long time before then.  Country music was the driving force behind blues music, which in turn was the driving force behind classic rock (60's and 70s music).  Which is the driving force behind the majority of todays music.  I remember watching an interview with Jimmy Page showing his collection of records from the 1950's and back.  He listened to artists like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and so forth.  Toni Iommi listened to the same people, and so did Angus Young.  (For those who don't know who these men are, they are the guitarists of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and ACDC).  The list can go on from artists of back in that genre of their influences.  But artists of today generally listen to artists such as Zeppelin.  So Zeppelin has influenced Green Day.  Not only does Green Day take Zeppelin as their influence, but they take all of Zeppelins influence as well.  Which is the old blues guys, who were influenced by the old school country guys.

So to sum up, everything and anything that you'd listen to today, has some form of subtle country influence involved in it.  You may not hear a banjo pounding away on the track, but the chord progressions of the guitar, or the drum beat may have been stolen from a once very popular Johnny Cash song.