Why is Tiny Dancer such a great song? [video]

The YouTube algorithm is always trying to get me to watch Rick Beato, and the few times I have it’s been incredibly dull content with very little insight or value. I watched all 21 minutes of this one and learned almost nothing. Ads cutting in every two minutes did not improve my enjoyment either.

> Funeral for a friend / Love lies bleeding https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p_xAToFzck

I'll second the recommendation for this one in particular! Although I knew most of Elton John's hits from listening to the local classic rock radio station growing up, I didn't know many of his deeper cuts, and I first heard about this song after hearing a Dream Theater cover on one of their live albums. I absolutely loved the song and looked it up, and I was surprised to see it was by Elton John! I think he's actually underrated as a musician in some ways; it takes one type of talent to put out chart-topping hits, and another type of talent to put together a technical masterpiece that stays riveting for over seven minutes, and he definitely has both.

It's great because you don't want to understand it? That's echoing the same argument that people have against studying science--nature is beautiful, and somehow understanding nature makes it less so.

To be honest I don't think you'll get as much out of theory if you don't personally write songs. Despite what so many people say about music theory (they say "it explains music, it's not a set of rules to follow"), music theory is a fantastic tool to help write songs, kind of like how perspective is a fantastic tool for drawing pictures. Not a tool anyone is forcing you to use, but a tool nonetheless.

I'm no expert, but I've dissected a few songs. There are some songs that you might think, "Oh, damn, that's cool!" So you transcribe it or get a transcription or even just a chord chart, try to figure out what you liked about it or explain what you heard. And then, down the line, when you're writing a song, you might try to use one of these devices you found in a song you analyzed. At some point, the things that you hear in your favorite songs become a part of your repertoire for making your own songs, something you can build upon, and analysis is not strictly necessary but it sure as hell facilitates things.

i'd say i'm quite the opposite!

i can find myself listening to a part of song or a tone over and over again until i can tell what's going on and reproduce it

i'll go as far as downloading original stems on pirate sites just so i could hear each track isolated

this is a bit like when i was a kid i used to play with Dev Tools in the browser

Art is so much better when you understand it.

I don’t have much music knowledge, but I’d imagine the same is true for music as well.

What I do suspect will happen is that a lot of music you currently enjoy, because it’s played in our environments all the time, or is popular, will start sounding terrible once you start realizing how uninteresting and/or derivative many of the popular songs are.

Oh yeah, I have to give props to Professor Cecil Lytle, without a doubt, the nicest prof I ever met at UCSD. I asked to meet with him because I was struggling with the class. We sat and talked in his office for 3 hours. He asked me all about my family, told me about his, and even played stuff for me on his piano. It was surreal how nice and sincere he was. Truly a great human.

https://music-cms.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/emeritus_faculty/c...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbEje902h-Q

As Richard Feynman says, "Knowing how something works only adds to its beauty, doesn't take it away".

Completely disagree with you on this.

a more apt title for his youtube series would be "What Makes This Song" since he just breaks down the components of a song without explaining what makes it great. 12Tone is better in that regard, though

"The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory" by John Seabrook covers the Max Martin phenenomenon and more. I greatly enjoyed it, and if you enjoyed Rick talking about Max Martin then I reckon you'll like it too.

(I'm also +1 on 12Tone. I haven't found a dud from him yet, unlike Rick Beato who sometimes is superficial as in the original link)

big fan of Max Martin here too (check out swedishsongs.de btw.)

i'm so surprised Max is so unpopular and unknown, yet he's the mastermind behind all of the recent and not so recent successes in pop music

I wasted twenty minutes because I don't have a degree in music theory to understand most of what the pretentious twatwaffle was saying.

People who do have a degree in music theory, don't need to watch the video.

Rick’s explanation is he has some friends at music labels who give him the original stems (isolated tracks) for educational purposes

you can find the stems of many songs online and some artists often offer remix packs (which you can easily obtain by contacting their label/publisher)

you can also try splitting them yourselves with some ML: https://github.com/deezer/spleeter

There are a few AI-based tools for spliting music into stems. An open source one I know is https://github.com/deezer/spleeter

Now this is a question I'd like to know the answer to.

Because it is a sped-up/chipmunked version of Roger Miller's "Whistle Stop". And Roger Miller was freaking awesome!

( https://youtu.be/JPt1n2AdQd4?t=35 )

You can write songs either way around. Maybe your AI assistant can't generate catchy melodies on top of a chord progression, but humans can.

Sometimes when you hear a melody in your head, there are parts of it which you can't really explain when you try to fix the melody on paper. Often what's going on is you're hearing inner voices in the harmony in your head--you're really writing harmony and melody in concert, rather than one or the other.

There are plenty of catchy pop songs which get handed off to someone else to write a melody on top. It's common enough that there's a name for the job: "topline songwriter". Someone who writes the "topline"--the melody and lyrics sung by the vocalist, on top of a backing track that somebody else made.

And of course, then there are people who take an existing song, keep the melody, and reharmonize it. Dirty Loops is probably the most famous for this.

It’s called Chord Melody and it’s pretty advanced. Great musicians such as Elton John make it seem so easy to write. Add in Voice Leading, another music composition tool, and you have yourself some sophisticated music. What’s great about Elton John is he does all this complicated stuff yet it seems so natural, it never sounds forced or contrived. That’s why Elton John is a master, and it’s all part of what makes this song great.

I worked with a guy that would go around singing this. It's the only way I can hear the lyrics now. Thanks Loren!

It's like my wife, she always sings the Ghostbusters theme "who you gonna call, then her name", or that song "this is how we do it" which she replaces with "pick your nose and chew it"

It's not just you. :-D

Are we Human, or are we Danza?

Joseph Gordon Levitt did that song in the lip sync battle on Fallon and he did “Tony Danza” the whole way through.

it's almost as though different age groups are trying to message about something

imagine being able to play a guitar in front of some random girls at a park

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LADbw4IgCv8

i have to substitute with piano, but acoustic guitar would be so much better

As someone who has played guitar at a beginner-intermediate level for 15+ years and started learning piano within the last few months, why don't you start now?

My extremely limited guitar knowledge has still given me a head start, and I've found that the common advice - that music theory is simply much easier on piano - is very true.

You can get a shiny new budget digital piano for ~$500 (I have a Roland FP-10) and get to a point where you can comfortably accompany your singing in a single year. I got my piano a year ago, as an adult with no prior knowledge or experience (I could play the guitar a little), and it's been great. It's not even that difficult, and every bit of progress is so rewarding, the feedback loop between doing things right and hearing the beautiful tones come out of the thing is very tight.

I can't really stress this enough, if you have ANY desire to play the piano and you can spare a bit of space and a bit of time, go for it. It's a good idea. It is all you imagine it to be.

Just in case you don't know, yet, this is a reference to Pat Finnerty's series of videos which calls out the pretentiousness of Rick Beato.

Start with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQWfMI4CVFI but all of Pat's videos are incredible.

I didn't know that. Not surprising, though.

You sure it’s not just cuz he’s a old?

I mean it gave him a pretty good life as well. Possibly fair trade.

Internationally reknown eternal legend who has made hall of fame lists, been knighted, praised and adored far and wide by everyone, and lives in a castle.

For 1/3 of his hearing.

He's 75. Hearing loss isn't uncommon for the elderly.

My eyes are getting worse every year, knees, ears, hair, memory. All the senses. Pretty much everything getting worse and worse.

Only choice is to keep reminding myself, it's better than the alternative.