You can in fact bend a guitar string flat with a whammy bar, i.e. a vibrato bar. That is of course assuming you have a whammy bar on your guitar.
Thank you for not calling it a tremolo - Leo Fender got a lot of things right, but got that name wrong.
I use the whammy on my Parker to bend down, and since it floats, I can use it to bed up too, but if I want to bend anything but a chord up, I just bend strings.
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As far as the record companies 'dumbing down' music, I say they are partially to blame.
Record companies want the bulk of their catalog to be the musicians they can exploit the most - and that usually means inexperienced ones. They will have some artists that get big dollars because their records are 'automatics' and don't need a lot of promotion to be a hit. The rest of the recording universe is filled with one-hit-wonders (in the past) and one-CD-wonders (in the present).
When Motown was courting us, we had experienced entertainment management and lawyers. When Motown made their final offer of .02 per record (they got publishing rights and half the songwriter credits for anything we wrote) --- the royalties were to pay for (1) the inflated cost of the recording session (2) inflated promotional costs and (3) inflated tour operating costs. Management did the numbers and figured we'd need to sell almost 2 million copies to break even, and in the late 60s there weren't half as many people on the planet as there are now, and 2 million was very uncommon on a first record.
They hired their second choice band to cut the records.
If we hit 3 million on the first record, we would have had a chance to be an 'automatic' and get a better deal on the next record.
The record company made much its profit from the band paying back those high mark-up services.
So by using mostly inexperienced people, they end up with simple music because the musicians may be talented, but haven't had the time to get more in their brains.
Secondly the record companies decided that songs had too long of a shelf life in the 1960s and 1970s. They could make twice as much money if the song went from hot to passe twice as fast. So the music should not have the staying power of a "Hotel California", "Bohemian Rhapsody", or "Stairway To Heaven" anymore, but last 3 weeks on the charts and then be replaced with something new. Simple music does that.
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The general public likes what it is told to like in the media. Especially the younger ones who want to be 'in' with their peers. If the record companies wanted the public to like jazz, they could do it, but the production costs for jazz are higher, and the artists want more money, so the result is less profit for the corporation.
So the public is trained to listen to the simplest of the simple music.
And that's the problem with corporations.
A small business only needs to make enough profit to pay the salaries of the employees and make some profit for the owners. Anything else is extra.
Most corporations have up to 49% of the business owned by people who do not contribute anything physical to the corporation. All they have is money in stock, and they want that stock to be worth more and more every quarter.
Now in order for the corporation to make more and more and more and more money every quarter, it has to sell more and more and more and more widgets. If they just stayed steady like a small business, the stock wouldn't grow and the stockholders would bail out.
But nothing can grow forever, sooner or later it reaches saturation, the big record companies did what they could to keep making more and more and more profits, but many of the things they did to make more profit resulted in a decline of the quality of the music, and it only stalled the moment of saturation, (nothing can grow forever) and now they are on the decline.
But that's all drifting away from the thread topic, which I said I would agree to disagree on.
So I maintain this position, I feel if a singer cannot sing on pitch, he/she is not a singer. It is like a ball player that can't hit or catch a ball.
Some of you feel that AT is only one more effect and you have the right to disagree with me.
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