@@aclonymousif your parameter for success is "the music sounds happy", then they all more or less succeeded. If your parameter for success is "the music was clearly, audibly, and consistently using the Phrygian mode"... it's debatable, but I think they did all manage to incorporate at least some elements of Phrygian into their compositions.
1. You’re here?! Awesome! 2. Absolutely, it holds me in this space where I feel a sort of relaxation. Like everything is going to be okay. An amazing work!
This was WAY too much fun! Cant say "thank you" enough for inviting me onto this collab, it was a honor to be included along such talented folks =) And I must shoutout Beardstank for drumming on my track and Roger Reupert for laying down those tasty trumpets!
I've been watching your channel for a while and I was psyched to see you in one of these challenges. You nailed it, man! Can't wait to see you in another one!
Go see his channel if you want to easily understand theory and have a look on that practical side of it, which is often left out in music schools. It's a gold mine for every begginer/ intermediate musician or the advanced one to refresh the knowledge/gain another perspective :)
This was so fun! Just an FYI, guys, we mostly grew up in the west, so we're deeply encultured to hear Phrygian (and related modes) as being "dark." That might not be the case everywhere, and that's what's so cool about music, it means very different things to different people! It's not a universal language, and that's great. One unfortunate thing to note is that there's also a long tradition of using modes like Phrygian with that scale degree b2 to exoticize non-western music, especial North African, Arabic and Persian music in American popular media and movies. The scale - the sound itself - represents "the Other" - to so many people who have watched these movies and experienced that popular media. It's unfortunate, but I think doing these scale challenges has helped me break of out a lot of sonic prejudices that I had!
Ahh! Thoughtful addition. We see reflection on implicit (historically grown) biases across many fields of society in recent years. I feel that the musical world - especially the classics - is still to have this discussion in a prominent place. Self reflection as you exercised here can only help. Also +1 comment for the algorithm ;)
I think Jake was the one who best nailed the instructions of the game scale-wise. He kinda went to a B part with a major chord and then returning to the Phrygian minor tonic. But it all felt very cartoonesque and tongue in cheek, sorta. And if you put a reggaeton type of break behind it all you'll surely have one happy phrygian track.
Phiesta feels like a song you'd hear in an indie game in like, a really dangerous late-game area, in a subsection where a bunch of friendly characters are just having a party and ignoring the danger
when Jake Lizzio was listing the "happy" instruments i was sad to not hear him mention the most jocular brass, the tuba, but so happy to see he used one after all! TUBAAAA
The absolute audacity of making a happy song in a dark mode as a challenge and then prominently featuring the lyric 'I just can't stop crying' and have it work regardless. That's just next level.
Hyperpop is amazing for this, I just discovered the genre from the ugly-lydian video a few months back and I'm absolutely in love with it. 100 Gecs make some ridiculous and sometimes warped lyrics feel so spunky and slap so hard, it's unreal
@@ItsAsparageese When I heard 100 Gecs, I hated it so much, I looked at my friend and said something I'd NEVER say, "This is so bad I need to take a break from music for a while." Lol. A hyperbolic joke of course. In the beginning it sounded like an animal crossing character vocalist who grew up listening to emo music learned how to use a DAW. Some songs like stupid horse are still terrible, but now I actually love a few of their songs. It grew on me like noise rock. Hyper pop is cool, but the vocals aren't for me. Hypocritical I guess, because I love aggressive death and black metal vocals.
@@GG256_ Nothing hypocritical about subjective taste, because it's not a function of objective criteria to begin with :) And yeah I love thrash and punk style harsh vocals in particular but also am a big fan of genres with growls/screams/cackles, so I get you on how it feels weird sometimes to be turned off by any vocal style. Usually they all grow on me, I like some unusual vocalists (Bobby Blitz comes to mind). I wouldn't have expected myself to like hyperpop if I was told about it before hearing a piece. I have sensory hyperacusis issues and the lows and highs and distorted noises would be problems for me if I listened through a fancy sound system but my cheap Bluetooth speaker I use for everything helpfully cuts down the frequencies that are the worst problems for me, so hyperpop has become sorta like very mild exposure therapy for me and helps me get comfortable with harsh noise in a way. But it I hadn't been caught off-guard by it from Justice Cow's piece, I'd have avoided the genre from its description lol. Her song made me viscerally uncomfortable the first time I heard it (though of course she wrote it to be discomforting), but I deliberately listened a second time because it was fascinating and the horror vibes were desirable in a way, and then the jam itself grew on me, and next thing I knew I was getting into 100 gecs and fell totally in love with the genre lol. I think "stupid horse" is a blast haha but subjective taste and all that :) I wonder if you'd dig Dorian Electra, their sound is definitely gec-adjacent but a fair bit less manic/goofy, and more edgy and dramatic.
Adam's piece gave me the same kind of confused but undeniably happy feeling a Bill Wurtz video evokes. Poison Ivy though... what a bop. Happily and energetically singing about terrible things never gets old. Definitely a new favourite.
I liked Courtney's one because it felt happy, but emerging from a place of uncertainty and tragedy. Like happiness from finally coming through a long struggle. Fits with her intro. Very pleasant
Initial thoughts: “Wow, I really love these! As a composer/arranger, I wonder how I could get in on one of these sessions.” After hearing Trust Fund Ozu: “I have no idea what I am doing with my life anymore. How do I even create something like this?!?”
You are not that far off @JEMAW_ . But i think the closest would be from Paper Mario 64: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BkxDO1k9rGE.html
Adam adding his own vocals was great!!! I feel like that's been happening occasionally ever since the rap covers video, in which Adam sort of recontextualizes singing/rapping your own words and the vulnerability it takes to make music
SAME. First video introduced me to it and got me hooked, this video just catalyzed my obsession lol. Hyperpop is legitimately the best thing to happen to me in a long time, I can't get enough
I think Jake Lizzio actually nailed it. Most of the other pieces did not sound very happy to me personally, but Jake's really sounded Phrygian, and really overjoyed. Good job to everyone else too though, this seemed like an impossible challenge to me, but I was really surprised by each song.
@@FluffyBunniesOnFire The Andalusian cadence in the Phrygian mode is the iv-III-II-I progression. The only borrowing is that the I chord borrows it's major third from the relative major key....otherwise it would be iv-III-II-i, which sounds great but isn't the cadence. I've never seen it written i-bVII-bVI-V. I guess that could be the chords of the relative Aeolian/minor mode (where the final (V) chord still borrows a major 3rd) but it's not that progression in Phrygian.
Holy wow - how hadn't I heard of Trust Fund Ozu before? All of these people are exceptional musicians - but Trust Fund Ozu just *KNOCKED* *IT* *OUT* *OF* *THE* *PARK* . Instantly have a ton a respect. Wow! Jake's felt really happy, too. The most "smiley-happy" to me.... with perhaps only a touch of mischeif - especially in that Zappa-esque moment (which made me very happy).
I LOVE the whole concept of giving the group a challenge and sharing how each artist solves it. What better way to encourage emergent artists to explore the possibilities and find their own unique voice? Excellent idea, fascinating results. Thank you all SO much!! 💜
Agreed, this is one of the coolest challenge/prompt concepts I've ever seen in music and it's absolutely wonderful. Perfect way to inspire musicians of all kinds to break every barrier ever. We live in such an exciting era of new experiments in music/production like humanity has never seen before, and I'm confident this series already is playing a major part in catalyzing the wave. So, so cool.
Alegrias are in major keys. Maybe you're thinking Bulerias? Carnatic music also has a lot of really cool upbeat pieces in Phrygian derived raag "modes”. Raags are not really modes though.
@@petterhouting7484 Yes, the chords and strong beats clearly outline major in Alegrias but the singers end up singing in phrygian a lot or at least throwing trills and licks in phrygian.
All around me definitely sounds more on the positive side but still has this slightly somber side to it. It sounds happy but Courtney managed to preserve the darker quality of the phrygian scale. Brilliant
Phrygian is my favorite mode. That flat 2 is just so good. Ozu just killed it...I think I need to explore more hyper pop type stuff. (everyone else was good too!)
Yes, we do need more Adam singing. This was an enlightening video - my phrygian mood is always late autumn, slipping into the death of winter, but these pieces sort of... revel in the kicking through piles of leaves and shouting obscenity at pumpkins. I'm digging it.
This is a fabulous comment, I love how you took the experience of this awesome music-art and reinstantiated it as such concise yet perfect word-art lol
Trust Fund Ozu for this assignment is my first choice. She made me actually laugh out loud when she got "heavy happy ". Everyone did well and I am thankful for all of you taking the time.
Same, that got me super jazzed up. Definitely check out her other work, I hadn't heard of her before this video either but she's got quite a few other kickass hyperpop bangers out there. I especially love her collabs with Justice Cow, the one who did the epic hyperpop piece in the ugly-lydian video
The only thing that makes me happier than these incredible Phrygian tunes is this happy Phrygian video. These challenges are always so wonderful and really showcase some fan-fucking-tastic musicianship. Great stuff Adam!!!
Ok, so I NEED a full version of ALL of them. Wow, so much creativity and the results were all totally easy to listen to and had amazing moods. I couldn't name a single song I liked just a tiny bit less than the others, despite all being very different and original. Brilliant idea and execution!
I was spending a dreary afternoon auditing client files and I popped this video on. I got SO HAPPY listening to these clips. thanks to all of you for your creativity!
Yeah, I feel like the approach Adam adopts for this challenges doesn't seem to always succeed at giving the feel of the mode. In the Lochrian one he writes a main theme in Db Major and tries to anchor it in C Lochrian with the root droning in the bass, but it still ends up sounding way too Ionian for the purpose of the video, imo
Omg, Trust Fund Ozu, you started describing your production and I started having hyperpop hopes and THEN YOU MENTIONED GEC INFLUENCE AND I JUST-- I only discovered hyperpop recently from the ugly-lydian video and I'm so stoked to discover more, thank you for making this omg! ... Ad break just ended ... and YOUR SONG SLAYS AAAAAAAA can't wait to check out more music from you!!!!!!
Courtney's song reminds me of these slightly less bad days during a depressive phase. It somehow gives hope, but you know already it's a false hope, somehow poisoned, you know it's not over yet. It only makes the next down, the next day, feeling even worse. Being constantly disappointed by false hopes is a feeling worse than only pure despair. Maybe it's my depression, or my immunity to lyrics, but none of them (except one) escaped this eerie feeling of the phrygian scale. The happy textures and rhythms just felt like a music box playing in a horror movie. It should sound happy, but you know there is something wrong. Congrats to Jake for creating something legitimately upbeat.
Hey Adam, I was screwing around with numbers the other day and found an interesting correlation between the modes' representations as binary numbers and the relative brightness/darkness of each one. The explanation for bright/dark I had always heard was that the brightest-sounding scales had more notes to the right of root on the circle of fifths, with Lydian having all notes to the right and Locrian having them all to the left. But there is another method by which you get the same ordering. Let's talk binary. Let a whole step = 1 and a half step = 0. The pattern of steps in the major scale is WWHWWWH, or 1101110 in binary, which is 110 in decimal. The other modes are as follows: Lydian: 1110110 (118) Ionian: 1101110 (110) Mixolydian: 1101101 (109) Dorian: 1011101 (93) Aeolian: 1011011 (91) Phrygian: 0111011 (59) Locrian: 0110111 (55) This is the *exact same* ordering that you get out of the notes-to-each-side method. And while each listener's experience is subjective (and each songwriter's use of modes is also different -- AKA the entire point of this video), I think you could get a very large proportion of musicians to agree with this as an ordering of modes from light to dark. My question to you is: do you think that the actual number values here can mean anything? Is the phrygian mode "half" as bright as Lydian (118/2 = 59)? The largest magnitude of difference exists between Aeolian and Phrygian, which could suggest that the 2 is the most important degree when it comes to determining brightness -- do you think the 2 is that lynchpin? A flat 2 sure is spicy, and it also guarantees that you'll have a flat 3, 6 and 7. This might just be a really weird coincidence but it also might be absolute proof that we live in a simulated computer universe. Anyway thanks for being an inspiration Adam.
I love these collabs that you, David Bruce, and others do. And I love videos about musical modes. I can't wait till you get to mixolydian! Also, thank you for introducing me to Trust Fund Ozu. Amazing music!!
wow jake, the use of that bIII chord tricks us into thinking we're in some relative major of that phrygian tonality that's a good way to make it sound bright
