MAY, 2016
Top 5 headphones
e e r F sue Is
The science of why music is pleasing to the human ear
Check out the top 10 headphones The world of audio recording, you can buy right now! instruments, software and equipment Featuring new upcoming musical talent in our locality 1
May, 2016
CONTENTS 05
Editorial Letter from the editor
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Top 5 Headphones Find the best headphones that suit you
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The Electric Guitar Know about your editor’s favourite instrument
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Audio Recording Softwares Softwares that can record and mix like no other
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Why do people like music? Know why you are happy when you listen to music
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The Goan Shack Review of the best Goan restaurant in Dubai
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Battle of the Bands The battle begins; see who wins
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Dos and Don’ts while listening to music Are you a good music listener?
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Guitarists in our community
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How does one read music?
Featured - A metal guitarist from Manipal
See how a musician reads notes turns them into sound.
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Guitar Photography Feed your eyes with some guitar portraits.
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The man of Many Instruments This man’s talent will amaze you.
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Top 5 headphones
Letter From the Editor “Music is a big part of each of our lives. Whether you can sing or not, music is a great source of pleasure to all humans.� This magazine aims to delve into the music culture of our city and current generation and explore how the teens and youth of today enjoy their music. Every issue of this magazine will bring to notice new innovations in the music world that might enhance music or the make the act of listening to music more satisfying. Music is a big part of my family and culture and that has influenced me a lot, and you will see a lot of that reflect in the forthcoming pages. Guitar has also been a big part of my life, and is my favourite instrument. This magazine is aimed at musicians and younngsters who are looking to get in the world of music production and recording, to help them in their decisions, and educate them about new technologies, but it is also for people who are just looking for an interesting magazine to read. Hope you enjoy this issue of
:)
- Kenneth Peres
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May, 2016
Top5
Headphones My pick on the top 10 headphones currently available in the market, that give you the biggest thump and probably the best bang for your buck.
Shure F-150s The Shure F150s are professional grade, noise cancelling headphones. They are made by one of the best audio companies in existence today and compete with companies such as Senheiser. These headphones offer superior audio quality and Shure claims that they offer equal distribution of the different frequencies, unlike some headphones that only amp-up the bass. These headphones can be used for professional studio use as well as for daily listening.
Sony MDR-ZX310 Sony created these headphones for the average consumer who needed decent audio quality and a rigid built, and not an over the top design. The headphones are very comfortable for daily listening and do not hurt (in terms of fit) even after long hours of usage. Most consumers of today perceive good audio quality as louder bass, and Sony made sure they could get enough bass out of these Sony MDRZX310s.
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Top 5 headphones
AKG K619 AKG’s Premium Headphones offer good build quality and sound. They are said to be fit for DJ use and have a rigid and tight fight to combat the hard usage. The Closed-back headphones help to block out ambient noise. This particular version is an addition to AKG’s new line up and they claim that it outweighs all headphones prior to this, in all respects.
Marshall Major II These premium Marshall Major headphones offer superior comfort utilizing very soft cushions in the ear cups. The headphones offer noise cancellation and block out unwanted noise. The headphones are developed by marshall, a great guitar amplifier company that specializes in quality sound. The headphones have adjustable ear cups to suit any size.
Beats Studio Wireless Wireless headphones are becoming a lot better in their audio quality, and these headphones are one of the best wireless headphones in the market right now. They offer superior audio quality with a great comfort and feel, and also come with a small and convenient carry case for storage and portability. The heaphones also have a slick design to match the high quality sound.
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May, 2016
The Electric Guitar Electric guitars are recognised as the ultimate ‘cool’ instrument by the masses, where as some people just find its sound annoying and loud. These instruments have helped shape a lot of music in the 20th century including genres like rock, blues, country, etc. Guitar is regarded as the fundamental instrument for music composition, apart from the piano. From, pop music to rock and metal, these instruments have a distinct role to play in songs and transcend them to another level. But why does an electric guitar hold such importance and regard in music culture? and what lies beyond this great feet of musical invention?
Most people know that an electric guitar is different from a ‘normal’ acoustic guitar quite simply because it uses electricity to produce a louder sound. However, electric guitars are quite complex in their construction. The theory is that once a string is struck by a player, those vibrations produced are converted into electrical impulses, using a ‘Pickup’ that hides under the strings. The pickups utilise magnets, to receive or pick up these vibrations, and this is what science students would identify as the principle of ‘electromagnetic induction’. This is what makes it possible to wake your neighbours up at 3 am the morning. :) The signal that comes out of these pick ups is too weak to drive a loudspeaker, so the guitar is plugged into an ‘amplifier’ first to amplify its sound, and then into a speaker where the heart melting sound of this amazing instrument can be heard. What comes out of an electric guitar is an electric signal and this signal can easily be altered by electronic circuits to add “color” to the sound or change the sound. Guitarists use effects such as Distortion and delay to modify the signal, thereby producing a processed sound, which is more pleasing to hear. History: Early records of the electric guitar can be traced back to some Jazz guitarists in the year, 1931. These Jazz players played in orchestras and bands that included instruments such as saxophones, trumpets, horns, drums and other percussion instruments which all have one thing in common; they are all loud. And there in the back, sat the Jazz player with his acoustic guitar, trying to pick and strum as loud as he can, but all his efforts in vain. Thus, Jazz guitarists sought the electric guitar.
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The Electric Guitar
Tuner heads The tuner heads are turned to tighten or loosen the tension of the strings, in order the keep the guitar in tune.
Headstock The strings are stretched between the headstock and the bridge.
Neck The Neck connects the headstock and guitar of the guitar.
Strings A player strums or picks the string of the guitar.
Body The body of the guitar contains the pickups that pickup the sound of the strings.
Components of an Electric Guitar 9
May, 2016
Recording
Audio
Softwares
Audacity Audacity is a free, easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. It is a basic but very reliable audio recording software, and is liked by many for being a free software. Free software is not just free of cost. It is free as in freedom. This means programmers and other people looking to get more out of the program, can actually modify the program to suit their needs. Programs like Audacity are also called open source software, because their source code is available for anyone to study or use. However, audacity is starting to age, as newer better softwares come out.
Garageband Garageband is a music production software that comes standard, included with all macs. It is a great software that makes music production a breeze. the software comes with a complete sound library, with different loops, samples, and audio files. Also included are software instruments, presets for guitar and voice, and virtual session drummers. Garageband is liked a lot by many for being very easy to use and for having a very organised presentation of the different tools and features. The software is used by many beginners as it comes preinstalled with macs. According to research, people have also started playing guitar thanks to the software.
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Audio Recording Softwares
Logic Pro X Logic Pro is a digital audio workstation and Musical Instrument Digital Interface MIDI sequencer software application for the Mac OS X platform. Logic Pro provides software instruments, audio effects and recording facilities for music synthesis. It also supports Apple Loops – royalty-free professionally recorded instrument loops. Logic Pro can handle multichannel surround sound. Both can handle up to 255 audio tracks, depending on system performance (CPU and hard disk throughput and seek time). Logic Pro can work with MIDI keyboards and control surfaces for input and processing, and for MIDI output.
Pro Tools Pro Tools is a DAW (digital audio workstation) for Microsoft Windows and apple’s OS X, developed and manufactured by Avid Technology. It is the industry standard software for audio music production and editing. The software can work with a wide variety of third party plug-ins and extensions which is why it is preffered by some over Logic Pro. The software can be used as a stand alone software using just a laptop, or with Audio Interfaces and Studio Mixers. Third party plug-ins are made by musicians and coders all around the world, and then uploaded on to the internet where they can be used by Consumers in their own Pro Tools Interfaces. Seperate mixing windows in the software also give it an upper hand, and greater control to the user.
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M
usic is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music — or well beyond prized, loved it. In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts, download music files, play instruments and listen to our favorite artists whether we’re in a subway or salon. People invested significant time and effort to create music, as the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest. So why does this thingless “thing” — at its core, a mere sequence of sounds — hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value? The quick and easy explanation is that music brings a unique pleasure to humans. Of course, that still leaves the question of why. But for that, neuroscience is starting to provide some answers. More than a decade ago, our research team used brain imaging to show that music that people described as highly emotional engaged the reward system deep in their brains — activating subcortical nuclei known to be important in reward, motivation and emotion.Subsequently we found that listening to what might be called “peak emotional moments” in music — that moment when you feel a “chill” of pleasure to a musical passage — causes the release of the
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neurotransmitter dopamine, an essential signaling molecule in the brain. When pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum — an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine. But what may be most interesting here is when this
Why do people like music? neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might call the anticipation phase. The idea that reward is partly related to anticipation (or the prediction of a desired outcome) has a long history in neuroscience. Making good predictions about the outcome of one’s actions would seem to be essential in the context of survival, after all. And dopamine neurons, both in humans and other animals, play a role in recording which of our predictions turn out to be correct. To dig deeper into how music engages the brain’s reward system, we designed a study to mimic online music purchasing.
Our goal was to determine what goes on in the brain when someone hears a new piece of music and decides he likes it enough to buy it. We used music-recommendation programs to customize the selections to our listeners’ preferences, which turned out to be indie and electronic music, matching Montreal’s hip music scene. And we found that neural activity within the striatum — the reward-related structure — was directly proportional to the amount of money people were willing to spend. But more interesting still was the cross talk between this structure and the auditory cortex, which also increased for songs that were ultimately purchased compared with those that were not. Why the auditory cortex? Some 50 years ago, Wilder Penfield, the famed neurosurgeon and the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute, reported that when neurosurgical patients received electrical stimulation to the auditory cortex while they were awake, they would sometimes report hearing music. Dr. Penfield’s observations, along with those of many others, suggest that musical information is likely to be represented in these brain regions. The auditory cortex is also active when we imagine a tune: think of the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — your cortex is abuzz! This
Why do people like music?
ability allows us not only to experience music even when it’s physically absent, but also to invent new compositions and to reimagine how a piece might sound with a different tempo or instrumentation. We also know that these areas of the brain encode the abstract relationships between sounds — for instance, the particular sound pattern that makes a major chord major, regardless of the key or instrument. Other studies show distinctive neural responses from similar regions when there is an unexpected break in a repetitive pattern of sounds, or in a chord progression. This is akin to what happens if you hear someone play a wrong note — easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar piece of music. These cortical circuits allow us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events. They are thought to accumulate musical information over our lifetime, creating templates of the statistical regularities that are present in the music of our culture and enabling us to understand the music we hear in relation to our stored mental representations of the music we’ve heard. So each act of listening to music may be thought of as both recapitulating the past and predicting the future. When we listen to music, these brain networks actively create expectations based on our stored knowledge. Composers and performers
intuitively understand this: they manipulate these prediction mechanisms to give us what we want — or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better.
patterns and yield expectations, and our ancient reward and motivational systems, may lie the answer to the question: does a particular piece of music move us?
In the cross talk between our cortical systems, which analyze
-Kenneth Peres
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May, 2016
The Goan Shack
A Restaurant, bar, pub and a stage, all in one? Welcome to Goan Shack, the only place where you can actually feel your in Goa, when you are not.
All the things just make you feel like you are enjoying your holiday in one of the best holiday destinations ever. From the live band, to the ambient lighting, to the traditional Goan food, you can be sure that you are going to
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have a fun evening. Many things contibuted to the essence of the place, but what people enjoyed the most, and what really bought so many visitors to the restaurant was the live band. From traditional Goan songs and rhymes - to modern rock ballads - to classical hindi, and other south indian bailas, this
band has it all. The band consisting of three members - Kim, Anushka, and Savio had been playing for 5 years together. During the time we were there, we saw them perform classic songs like ‘Hotel California’, ‘Sultans of Swing, and some classic hindi songs like ‘Churaliya’. The ‘Konkani Masala’ section (Goan traditional songs) started later in the evening at about 9 pm, and they played
Top 5 headphones
“It’s hard working in the day time and performing in the evenings, but this is what I love and I do it for the Goans.” -Savio, lead guitarist of the band
famous konkani numbers like Maria Pitha She, Claudia, Mogonaason Bo Re, and Yo Baile Yo. The Band took few breaks during their performance, and we took the chance to speak to the members. Savio, the lead guitarist had been playing guitar for 9 years now, and he just seemed so omfortable with the instrument. When asked whether he worked in a normal day job apart from this he replied, “Yes, I work from 8-3, and then its an immediate dash to this restaurant. It’s hard working in the day time
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and performing in the evenings, but this is what I love and I do it for the Goans. We play here from 8 pm to 12am and it can sometimes though tiring, be still enjoyable, especially when people from the crowd or the audience come on to the floor to dance. As a band this motivates us to play, and helps us keep going.” “We also let the audience request songs of their choice for us to play, thus engaging them further into the entire music experience”, says Anushka the eastern singer. “Also, interacting with the crowd is something we look forward to during our breaks, as we get a chance to receive direct feedback, as well as appreciation.” The band also sang the birthday song for a few people celebrating their birthdays, making the celebrants feel special as they dined at Goan Shack.
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Name: The Goan Shack Location: Ascot Hotel, Bur Dubai Timings: 6:00 pm -1:00 am
To compliment the music and going by the name of the restaurant, and its theme, the cuisine offered a lot of Goan delicacies together with other varieties. Located in the heart of the city of Dubai, and one of the prime areas, Bur Dubai, the restaurant manages to attract many customers. All in all, the Goan Shack can provide a memorable experience with its biggest highlight being the energetic music of the multi-cultural live band.
Top 5 headphones
The Ipod classic is back! Now be sure to carry your whole music library with you. With 160gb of storage, be sure that space will never be an issue again.
Available at stores near you now. Sharaf DG, Emax and Carrefour offering discounts now.
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May, 2016
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Top 5 headphones
Battle of the Bands
Bits’ band, ‘Phantom Asylum’ performing at the Battle of the Bands event held at Manipal University
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May, 2016 Students have a good platform to display their musical talent here in Dubai. College students especially, get to participate in inter college events and represent their universites to compete against other rival bands. Manipal hosted the carnival this year and the battle of the bands was one of the main events. Manipal’s band and Amity University’s band went head to head and competed for the 1st place. The other events, namely the Dance, singing, drama, fashion, and other cultural events had just finished, and the Battle of the Bands was about to start. The stage was being set up for the bands to rock. Amity’s band was the first to perform, and the crowd was excited in hope to see an electrifyng performance. Amity’s band ‘Phantom Asylum’ performed the songs ‘Nightmare’ by Avenged Sevenfold, ‘Kickstart’ my heart by Motley Crue, and
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‘Hallowed be thy name’ by Iron maiden. Manipal’s band performed ‘What I’ve done’ by Linkin Park. Unfortunately, because of time constraints, they only performed one song. After the bands performed, the crowd and the bands waited to hear the result of the winners from the judges. Everyone expected Manipal not to win, because they only got perform one song. But to everyones surprise, they emerged the winners.
Dos and Don’ts while listening to music
Do
s an
d Don´ts whi le listening to music
1. Dont listen to music while studying. This is a common habit among younsters, and research has shown that concentration is hindered. 2. Do take breaks while listening. Avoid listening to music for long periods and take breaks atleast every hour. 3. Dont prefer earphones over heaphones. Earphones are much more damaging as they go right in and penetrate the ear drum ;) 4. Do clean your earphones regularly. They are a big threat to hygiene as they attract a lot of dirt. 5. Dont keep the volume above 70%. Unless in a loud environ ment, try and keep the volume levels low. Its as simple as - the louder the music, the faster your hearing deteriorates.
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Guitarists in our community
Musically talented students are all around Dubai. Many of them are present right here in Manipal University. This week’s issue features a metal guitarist, currently studying in Manipal University, Dubai. “My entire life was evolved around being creative.”, he says. “Ever since I was a kid, I was the creative one, always coming up with different ideas, thinking outside of the box, etc. Architecture is all about creativity too I that is why I love studying it.” “We all have that phase where we listen to mainstream bands, like green day, linking park, skillet, etc. I think once you start listening to a lot of music, u start to develop ur own taste and as you listen to more and more of rock, you start liking the intense stuff. Initially, you are into rock, punk rock bands, and then you slowly, get into heavier, faster stuff, like Iron Maiden, Metallica. And then you move to an even heavier phase like Slayer, Slipknot, Megadeth.” Himanshu has a great love for metal music. He says the things he went through in life made him listen to this genre. “I had a hard time in high school”, he says, “and I used to listen to heavy
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aggressive stuff to feel better about myself so all of that frustration would just come out and I could get some peace of mind that way. I had problems with being accepted and often got bullied because I was a bit different. But I think everyone feels this way to a certain extent, and we all take comfort in some sort of thing to get some joy. For me, I listened to aggressive music to vent away my emotions and frustration. Basically, that is how I started liking metal music. Once I listened to that genre, nothing else was music to me. Everything else just seemed like easy electronic stuff that you could just make on a computer. But I really liked the concept of a band, from the way it functions, the relationship of the members, to the music you can make, it is like a whole new experience. The thing that people hate about rock music is that its too loud, and some people just perceive it as annoying; filled with noise and destruction. On the other hand, I feel its a really strong way of expressing yourself. And that is what I think
Guitarists in our community
Name: Nationality: Music genre: Guitar:
music should be about - ‘Expressing yourself’. Did you ever like listening to another genre of music? “I used to listen to Hip Hop and Rap before, and I liked to listen to rappers like Jay-Z, Eminem, and Dr.Dre, because I liked the way they expressed themselves. Plus, I had a few AfricanAmerican friends, and so I was influenced by their taste in music. This was all during school.
Himanshu Indian Metal Dimebag Razerback
However, Rap and hip hop never really energised me the way metal did.” Wanna get featured in the next issue of Guitarists in our community ? Send us a picture, write us a short bio of yourself and send it to www.dxbeats.com/guitaristsinourcommunity/ getfeatured
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May, 2016
How does one read music? People love listening to music. As we know, it is a big part of human living, and a great source of pleasure. But how does a musician really read music? Is it possible to read some sort of writing or imagery and turn that into sound that is pleasurable to hear?
Fact: The earliest form of musical notation can be traced back to a in 2000 B.C. The tablet represented fragmentary instructions and notation that indicated the names of strings on a lyre.
Treble Clef
Staff (or stave)
In Western musical notation, the staff, or stave, is a set of five horizontal lines and four spaces that each represent a different musical pitch— or, in the case of a percussion staff, different percussion instruments. Appropriate music symbols, depending on the intended effect, are placed on the staff according to their corresponding pitch or function. Musical notes are placed by pitch, percussion notes are placed by instrument, and rests and other symbols are placed by convention. The lines and spaces on the staff each indicate a note name. If the clef changes, say from a Treble to a Bass Clef, all the note names change too. These note names have to be memorised in the first grade of music theory. Take for example this piece below; the first piece that most beginners learn, the notes to ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ :-
The song is very simple and is one of the shortest songs ever that is not considered to be a poem. That is why beginners are taught this piece first. This same line keeps repeating for three verses.
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Top 5 headphones
Guitar Photography Location: Union, Diera
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The man of many instruments
The man of many instruments Tell us a little about yourself. My name is Nimit Hegde. I study at Manipal university, Dubai, and I am currently pusuing my Bachelor’s degree in Media and Communications. I have a great love for music, and I like to listen to songs and then try and play them on different instruments. How many instruments do u know to play? I know the Bagpipes, violin, harmonica, flute, and the d’jembe which is an African drum. Was it difficult learning the bagpipes yourself? “Yes, extremely difficult, because at first you have to start with the practice chanter, and you have to get good at that. It’s only then that you move on to the great highland bagpipes. The practice chanter helps you to increase your skill in finger movements and circular breathing techniques, so that one is able to play continously through the chanter. It is only then that you start with the actual bagpipes. It is all about training and learning to coordinate your hand and your breathing.”I always kept playing the
bagpipes and I never went for classes. I am a big fan of military marches and the timing that it teaches you, and I liked the way the bagpipes blended with the snare drums; It all just gives you a good sense of timing. Tell us a little about the Violin. I specialize in western classical music. I’ve played a concert in the Officer’s club, Abu Dhabi. It was an event hosted by the music academy to display our performance. It was a complete concert with a whole orchestra containing musicians with different instruments and from different backgrounds. I played the violin with a few other violinists, in the violin section of the orchestra. I played a solo as well on that day. It was a memorable experience. I first started with the violin because I really enjoyed listening to classical music and I reached level 7, after which I decided to try out something new. What advice would you give to developing musicians and youngsters who would
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want to learn these traditional instruments? I would tell them not to keep their options very narrow, and not to be influenced by mainstream music. But to explore new forms of music, and new artists. Many artists are yet to be discovered all around the world, and it can be interesting to explore the music of these artists. Youngsters should explore new forms of music. Also, every musician has his own style, and youngsters learning an instrument should try and develop their own style once they master the basics, and once they know how to handle the instrument. My main motto is that music has no language. In most of the songs that I listen to, I do not understand the complete lyrics, unless I get a translation, because most of these songs are in Arabic, Egyptian or another Eastern language. However I mainly listen to the music, beats, and the rhythm of the music, and how it flows. This gives you a good essence of the song. Even if a person does not know how to play good music, as long as he has an idea of the different kinds of music, he gets the know how of whether the song is good or not. How did you start listening to Arabic music? “I would say I was influenced, because I was born in Saudi Arabia, and when I was a kid, they used to have just a few channels on T.V. that used to play
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Saudi and arabic music, and so that was the thing I used to watch most of the time. Also, when I was in Saudi, I used to attend few functions in my Dad’s office, and was very interested in the Arabic culture. This got me into the whole arabic music scene, but only as a listener, and i never really attempted to play what I heard on an instrument. This was until I came to Abu Dhabi, and I joined this academy called ‘Bait- Al-Oud’ meaning ‘House of the Lute’, (an arabic instrument). Right now I am going for Lute classes to further explore traditional arabic music. How do you describe yourself as a player? “I play for myself, and I don’t normally bother about impressing people or to get to any level, because the main thing that matters is that you yourself enjoy the instrument. Many people try so hard and think about things like “how am I going to portray myself as a professional player?” or “how will I impress the people around me?” but they miss the main goal that is, if you yourself enjoy the instrument.
*Answer key at the bottom of this page
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