Episode 1 — Hearing music in new ways
The opening episode sets out the whole mission of Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces: to explore where music comes from, how it evolves, why it exists at all, and how anyone — not just trained musicians — can start hearing it differently. Steve moves from Charles Darwin and evolutionary theory to conch shells, bone flutes and trumpets, from a tour of his overcrowded shed-studio to the limits of music theory, and finishes by throwing 1,300+ genres into a virtual tombola to decide the next episode’s experiment.
Along the way he links the Natural History Museum, On the Origin of Species, conch shells as instruments, Ice Age vulture-bone flutes, brass acoustics and binaural recording into one big argument: music isn’t an optional extra, it’s wired deep into how humans think, feel and communicate. Entertaining Noises, Music Theory and Genre Tombola are all introduced as recurring ways in — playful, practical and occasionally ridiculous.
What we cover
Musical evolution: From Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful” to the idea of musical evolution via iteration, culture and technology.
Shells, trumpets & resonance: Conch shells, buzzing lips, the harmonic series and how modern brass instruments grow out of simple natural resonators.
Ancient instruments: 50,000-year-old vulture-bone flutes vs 10,000-year-old bread — why humans were building instruments long before farming.
The shed tour: Binaural walk-through of Steve’s studio with Jo: drums, synths, horns, toys, conches and dangerously many speakers as a micro-museum of music tech.
Music theory, demystified: Theory as description, not law; Western classical bias; why “music is a universal language” is only half true; and why notation never captures the whole performance.
Genre Tombola begins: Wikipedia’s absurd metal subgenres, cultural respect, and a random draw that lands on pop rock for Episode 2.
The tone of the series: Curiosity over snobbery; experiments, mistakes and midlife shell obsessions fully allowed.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello and welcome to the show. My name is Steve Pritty and this is my brand new podcast, Steve Pritty on the origin of the pieces. It's a show about where music comes from, what music is, and why music even exists in the first place. And I've got quite grand ambitions between you and me for what this show is, because I want to try and help you to hear music in new ways, and also help myself hear and understand music in new ways. I'm a musician myself, I'm a professional musician, as I'll talk about a bit later, but this is not a show just for professional musicians, by any means. This is a show for anyone who's got an interest in music, whether you play it either professionally or at an amateur level, maybe you play in bands, maybe you play in an orchestra, maybe you play it, maybe you sing in a choir, maybe you just noodle at home on the guitar late at night, tinkle away on the piano, sing in the shower, whatever it is, or maybe you just like listening to music and you're just kind of interested in some new ways of listening, some new ways of understanding what's going on with your favourite music and maybe opening your ears to some brand new music as well. Coming up on the show today in a section called Entertaining Noises, I'm going to be bringing in a guest to my studio, this glorified shed at the end of my garden. And they're going to ask me some questions about the weird and wonderful stuff that I've got going on in here, the noisemakers and the musical instruments and all the gizmos and stuff. And then in a section called Music Theory, I'm going to be examining the nuts and bolts of music, how it's put together, taking it all apart, and then trying to put it back together again. I know that the words music and theory put together often strike either fear or boredom into people's hearts. And I can understand why. And I'm going to be trying to persuade you to understanding a bit about the ins and outs of how music works will benefit your listening and your enjoyment of music more generally. And to finish off, we are going to be putting a virtual hand into my virtual genre, Tombola. Now, this is a list of all of the music genres that Wikipedia lists. And believe me, there are a lot. We're going to be reaching in and picking one out at random to examine in next week's show. And I'm going to be giving you my thoughts on the usefulness or otherwise of categorizing music into genres. So stay tuned. All sorts of fun coming up. I hope you enjoy it, this first episode. Here we go. But before we do any of that, I want to talk briefly about the title of the show, because of course the show is called Steve Pretty On The Origin Of The Pieces. And some of you have probably already worked out that that is a slightly dubious pun on Charles Darwin's great masterwork On The Origin Of Species. By the way, if you're not a fan of puns, I'm afraid, strap in, there might be a few more bad ones before the episode is out. I will try and limit my number of puns per episode, but apologies. I'm a dad, it's what we're supposed to do. Right, so it's called On The Origin Of The Pieces because I am interested in this idea of musical evolution. Charles Darwin, of course, in On The Origin Of Species talked about the idea of evolution via natural selection. And as Charles would
have it, this genuinely just happened to me, I've just looked down, and the mug I'm drinking my tea from, as I talk to you now, is from the Natural History Museum. It was given to me when I was doing some gigs there last year, and I'm just looking down at it. And it has a quote from On The Origin Of Species on it. Yeah, I'm that kind of guy who drinks tea from Darwin mugs. And it's a really beautiful quote. So I thought I would just read it to you. It's very appropriate to this. I just looked down and thought, hold on a minute, this is exactly what we're talking about. So let me read you this quote, and then I'm going to sip my tea and let that sink in. And we can all have a think about that for a second. So the quote is, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. Nice, right? That's quite a beautiful quote. And it's obviously very beautiful when it's applied to life on earth. But also for me, that does sum up the evolution of music. Because music started with very, very simple beginnings, and we don't even really know why music began. There's not really conclusive evidence on any side as to why we even have music. It's something I'm gonna be exploring a lot over the episodes of this show. But quick summary is to say that on the one side, you have people like Steven Pinker, great neuroscientist, who say that music is auditory cheesecake. This kind of idea that cheesecake's lovely, but you don't need it for survival, no matter what some people claim. But on the other hand, you have the counterargument to that when lots of other neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists have actually claimed that music is, on the contrary, really, really essential to the evolution of human life and particularly societies. And again, we're gonna dip in to why that might be over the coming weeks and months. But I wanna go back to that idea of simplicity and beginning from a very simple point, because it's something that's really captivated me. I'm a trumpet player. That's my main job. It has been for many years. And the trumpet is quite a complicated instrument in a lot of ways. It's got a lot of tubing. It's got a lot of, it's got three valves, which people think makes it very easy. Actually, it makes it, I would argue, much more difficult because you've got to do most of that work with the air and with the lips. But anyway, that's for another time. So it has three valves and all this tubing, a specialist mouthpiece. It's obviously made of metal. It's quite complicated to make. You've got to have quite a sophisticated technology in a lot of ways to make it because although it is essentially a piece of glorified plumbing, you've got to be able to bend the metal around. You've got to be able to work the metal in really specific ways, quite nuanced ways to get the sound of the trumpet. And I've got a trumpet here because I always do because that's what I do. And I'll just play the trumpet for you. A few notes. So, those notes are all played actually without any valves at all. And that gets to the essence of what a trumpet is. So I'm not
pushing my fingers down at all. I'm making those sounds purely by changing the speed of the vibrating air. So the vibrating air for my lips here is just amplified and focused by the mouthpiece here. And then that goes in to the trumpet here, which resonates, we'll come back to that word in a bit, because we're going to explore a lot of that over the coming weeks. And produces a note. It uses the natural resonance of the metal and the way that the trumpet has been built to create those sounds. And that principle is incredibly, in a way incredibly simple and incredibly ancient for us as musicians and music makers. And so I've found myself getting really obsessed by the ancient origins of music. And because I'm a trumpet player, the ancient origins of music for people like me, my ancestors, my musical ancestors at least would have played things like shells, right? So I've become obsessed by conch shells. That's right. My midlife crisis has manifested in becoming obsessed by conch shells. And I guess starting a podcast, but that's, you know, I'm a middle-aged, middle-class white guy. So starting a podcast is pretty typical, although admittedly maybe playing the shells less so. But the conch shells and other associated shells, there's frog shells, there's triton shells. Believe me, I could go on and on, but I will hold myself back for now. But these shells are really, if you cut the end off a shell, which is a relatively straightforward process to do, sometimes that can happen naturally, you get a very similar idea. So I actually, the shell thing has got a bit out of hand, and I now have quite a lot of shells. I'll put some photos up on social media so you can see. But I have, it's probably getting on for about 20 odd shells now, which I cut the end off and make myself. And in fact, I had a shell gig, believe it or not, over the weekend. So I'm actually quite busy playing shells at the moment. That's something we'll, again, we'll look at in future episodes. But I have a case down here, just from my shell gig on the weekend. So let me just unzip it. And we'll get out a shell. So I have a shell here, I'm pulling out a shell. And exactly the same principle. So I make vibrating air with my lips, I buzz my lips, and I blow into that in exactly the way I would on the trumpet. It sounds like this. And I can do exactly what I can on the trumpet, which is use the natural resonance of the shell, the way that the shell is formed with the kind of walls, the, you know, swirls inside the shell and the way that the air is directed. I can use that natural resonance to find different notes only by speeding up or slowing down the air. So there's this one. And then simply by changing the speed of the air, I'm going to get the next one up. And you can hear that that is what's called an octave. So in other words, it's exactly double the frequency of note. We don't need to get bogged down in that. We'll look at that in a music theory section at some point in the future. But that's what we can do. There might even be a couple more
notes in here. This is quite a big show. Let's find out. Yeah, a couple of sort of squeaky ones at the top there. So exactly the same principle. And it's really interesting that something like a shell is literally just a shell picked up from a beach, or in my case, from eBay, because my midlife crisis means that I lurk on eBay and wait for people to clear out their aquariums or whatever that they might have be getting rid of. So yes, and I buy up shells. Anyway, someone will have picked that up from a beach at some point back in our distant past and tried to play it. And that's quite an unusual and strange thing to do as an animal, because you think, well, what will be the, what's the point of that? You know, what's the evolutionary value in doing that? And perhaps the first person who picked it up and tried to play it maybe hit it, or, you know, try to get some sounds out of it that way. I'm sure percussion instruments will be certainly a lot older than wind instruments, because it's something more obvious to hit things together rather than to blow them. But then eventually maybe that person's descendant refined that, picked it up, and thought, I wonder if I blow through it, just blow. That doesn't sound great, does it? Sort of sounds like the C maybe. But it doesn't sound, you know, doesn't sound like a nice musical sound. And then over generations perhaps that person's, that person's descendant may have then picked it up and buzzed their lips into it. And suddenly this sound emerges, all right? And this sound, there is something quite amazing about this sound. I mean, I'm very biased, but there is something that feels to me like it connects us with our ancient past. So let me just play it for you now. And even more so if I put some reverb on it, because these things would have been played outdoors in caves or in dwellings where you would have this perhaps natural resonance of the space as well as the shell. So let's try again with some artificial reverb to recreate the ancient cave. And we really just have one note there, or one note, and it's octave, so the same sort of sound, but double the frequency. And there's something for me, and I know from firsthand, from doing these shell gigs and working in places like the Natural History Museum, playing shells in the main hall there, that just this one note can somehow speak to us as humans, and can kind of tap into something that seems to activate our brains on a primal level. And so it's this thing, this thing of picking up something that nature provides, in this case, a shell, and refining it. So, you know, hitting it, no. Blowing it, no. Eventually finding a technique of buzzing the lips, in this case, cutting off the end, refining it in a relatively simple way. But then over generations and generations and generations, the iterative process of our musical ancestors going through and thinking, okay, this shell sounds nice, but what happens if I drill a hole in this? What happens if we put two shells together, then we get these two different tones? Let me try and play two together for you. If I attempt, it's quite difficult to play two together, but I'll
give it a go. It sounds kind of fog horny. But yeah, they may be played to together. They may take the shell and add things to it. Maybe then once people started working with wood, they started making instruments with the same technique, blowing through bits of wood, maybe hollowing out bones. And eventually over generations and generations and generations, you get the trumpet with exactly that same core principle idea of how it's played, but just refined and able to play not just a couple of notes like the shell can there, but a whole range of what we call in Western music, the chromatic scale. And a whole range of different tone colours and all of the rest of it. And for me, what's amazing about that is that it's the abstraction of it, right? Because it's just sound, it's just sound waves that are hitting our ears and hitting our little bones in our ears and causing us to have these emotions. And I think for me, what's so amazing about music is it taps into the emotions in a way that most other art forms or most other things that we do in our lives can't because human emotions are incredibly complicated. Often we think, are we happy, are we sad? And we don't necessarily think of the nuance in between. And for me, language isn't really able to express that nuance as effectively as sometimes even a single note on a shell or a trumpet or a violin or electric guitar, or of course a voice can. And that is something that we're gonna keep coming back to, this idea that music and the development of music technology is basically the story of the development of our ability to express ourselves and our complex emotional lives. So just to wrap up this section, I just wanted to leave you with one of my favourite facts about all this stuff. And that is that in the Dura mountains in France, they've discovered bone flutes made from the thigh bones of vultures and these bones have been hollowed out. They've had holes drilled into them quite an elaborate amount of work has gone into creating these flutes. And these are at least 50,000 years old, right? That's what they've been dated to. And it's quite hard to get your head around that, but the way I like to think about it is in reference to something much newer, but still something that we think of as completely fundamental to our lives, most of our lives. And that is bread. So bread and agriculture have been around for less than 10,000 years, which means that for at least 40,000 years before we started making bread, we were making flutes. We were not just banging rocks together and singing in caves and doing things that don't require a lot of skill and dedication and time and human effort to go into. We were making flutes, hollowing them out, sitting in caves, making flutes. And then it was only 40,000 years later that we thought, I wonder if we should try bread as well. So I wanted to leave you with that little fact to muse on. We're gonna be talking again more about some of this stuff over the coming shows. But now, it's quite a deep entry point, quite heavy, wasn't it, that first bit? So I think let's crack on. Let's move on. On with the show.
So, this is the entertaining noises section of the show. And if you're not wearing headphones already, I suggest that you put some on now if you're able to. Little earbuds are fine, or, you know, fancy closed back headphones. It's fine if you're listening on speakers, no problem. It'll still work. It's just if you're listening on headphones, you get the full effect, because I have decided to record this section as often as we can in binaural sound. And that means basically that your perspective as a listener will be exactly the same perspective as the person I'm talking to wherever I'm talking to them. And today, I'm gonna be talking to my partner, Jo, in my studio. So I've strapped some little tiny binaural microphones to her ears. So if you're wearing headphones, everything you hear will be exactly from her perspective. It can be slightly uncanny sometimes, because it really feels like you're in someone's head. But the idea is although today we're just in the studio, in future we might be out and about at a gig or a concert or some place of kind of ancient musical significance or a guitar shop. I don't know. It's a bit of binaural fun. So strap on your headphones and enjoy. Let's go into the studio. They will be in the same position as yours. So in other words, as you move your head. So if I'm talking to you straight on, if you look, there you go. And go around there. And if I come over here, we can do some ASMR. Some ASMR. Oh, it's creepy. It's a bit creepy. Yeah. We were trying to avoid the creepiness. Firstly, who are you? Who the hell are you? And why are you here? I am Jo. I am your partner. And I live in the house at the end of the garden with you and our children. And I occasionally come in here, but not very often. And every time I come in, there is somehow more stuff. Yeah. It's kind of, it's quite chock-a-block in here. And do you want to take people through just very quickly what you can see? Because there's a lot of, I know there's a lot of stuff. It's a very small space, I should say. So it is a lot of stuff, but it's also, if you spread it out over a larger space, it would feel like less, tiny. Okay. You justify it how you like. So, okay, so going from left there is a drum, an African drum of some kind hanging up. There's a speaker on a stand, then two stacks of, I don't even know what these things are, cables and amps, maybe. Is that what they are? Lots of twiddly things, lots of knobs, lots of lights, lots of ports to plug stuff into, mini keyboards all over the place. And then you've got a whiteboard with some ideas on it, which, including something that says the strict no-winging policy. A reminder for my children when they're in here, and also for me if I start whinging about my career, which is basically making silly noises for a living. In front of that board, there are several guitars tucked away, some big speakers in the corner. Your desk is mad. There's loads, there's a huge screen, a smaller screen, another screen, another, another
screen. Several more amp-y things, a keyboard, more twiddly things, more speaker. I don't know how many speakers there are in here. There are speakers on the ceiling, which look dangerous, I'll be honest. Then on to the right of the desk, there's a lamp which is rigged up with some conch shells. There are mutes for putting into trumpets. Then there's three keyboard-y, piano-y things all stacked up. Some with flashing lights, some fairy lights, a nice homely touch. Into the corner behind me, there's something that looks like a harp, I guess, but it's made of wood. I don't know what that is. Some, there's a little drum kit, electronic drum kit, I think. Some, what I think is soundproofing. Okay. Is that a trombone? You don't play trombone. On a drum, another drum, sort of African style drum, lots of drumsticks around. Some shelving with various books, music books and sheet music. Lots more, there's so much stuff on these shelves. More keyboards, microphones, cases. Underneath the shelf. Drums. Oh my goodness, look, is that, okay, that's not a trumpet. That's a phonium? I've got a baritone horn. And a tenor horn. I don't know what that is, hold on. Oh, I'm sitting on a cajon, which I wouldn't have known if I wasn't with you, but I am fond of saying cajon. It looks like a lot of trumpets under there. I don't know what's what. Yeah, just loads of stuff. And quite a lot of dust. It's a good summary. Keep pedals on the floor now I'm down here. A lot of cables. Yeah, so there we go. Okay, could you use everything in here in a day? Not everything. No, not everything, but I could use, I would say 80% of the things in here. Maybe not 80%, maybe 75% of things in here within a week. And that would be doing lots of different things or doing one project? Well, that's the thing. So I do a lot of different things. I do a lot of live playing. And for the live playing, I have live set ups for my trumpet and with electronics and with other things. And so there's all of that side, and it's a very small room, so I've got all of that side. So I get that stuff out and practice with that and play with that. But then there's the recording side. So I might also do a session where I'm recording trumpet for someone. And so that's why the mics are here, different mics and different. The stuff you called amps is a good approximation, but they're called outboard gear. So they might have different types of ways of processing audio, basically. So you plug a mic into them and they do slightly different things, different sounds and stuff. Yeah, so I might be doing that. And then later the same week, I might be composing for, I don't know, occasionally write for ads or for TV. Or I do something called production music or library music, which is where you compose. And you can be doing that in all sorts of different styles. So the
moment, for example, I'm doing some work in that area where I'm doing styles that are as varied as kind of ambient music, which uses a lot of the electronic stuff and pretty much entirely acoustic stuff where I'm using one of the keyboards and getting musicians in to play and recording them. So it's a really small room with a lot of stuff in it. And it does, maybe you could argue it's got a bit of a hand, but at the same time, it serves a lot of different purposes, I think. And so, I think for me, it's also just born of a real curiosity about music. And so one of the things about this podcast is talking about the origins of music and where it comes from and music technology and all of these things, what I find so interesting about everything in here, no matter whether it's a simple cable or the most elaborate kind of electronic effects box that I've got. They're all part of that same story of humans making musical instruments and musical entertaining noises for themselves and for others. And so I just endlessly fascinated, I think as a lot of musicians are, by different instruments and different ways of thinking about music. And that's why, I should say, I'm not unique in having a music studio crammed full of stuff of all different types, but I think this room being as small as it is and as full as it is, is a little extreme. So over the coming episodes, I think we're going to bring you in here, or sometimes we might do it out and about if we're at a gig or if we're around and about. And so I think you and maybe some other friends and colleagues and guests, I'm going to be chatting to about the different entertaining noises that various of these things can make, different insights from different gigs or from different approaches to music. So when I bring the kids in here, it's a bit of a wonderland for kids and it's terrifying frankly when I bring the kids in here because there's a lot of stuff that's extremely delicate and breakable, but it's also really nice for the kids to be able to come in here and poke around and play with what they want to under strict supervision. So what I want this podcast to be really is a way of thinking about music as if you're a primary school kid, just having fun with it and exploring it. So given that the kids come in here and monkey around and can place any noises with whatever they want. Do you want to have a go? I mean, is it all plugged in? It's pretty much all plugged in. If it's not, it can mainly be, yeah. Oh yeah. Very nice. We might talk about that one week. Okay, there's another one. Ooh. That one is entertaining. And then this one on the top. Very nice. Three different keyboards. We can talk about why you've got three different ones on another episode and what they each do and some insight into how they work and why we use synths and stuff as well as pianos. Yes, please. Yeah. All right. Thanks very much. Okay, so we get to the music theory section of the show. Now this is
where each show I'm going to take music apart, look at all the weird nuts and bolts, and then put it back together again. But for this very first episode, in this section, what I actually wanted to do was not take apart music, but to take apart the idea of music theory itself. Because it's quite a problematic idea, music theory, in a lot of ways. I think a lot of time when particularly those of you who might have studied for grades and had to do any music theory, it can be very dry, and it's thought of as this list of rules, of prescriptions of how music is written and how music must be performed. But fundamentally, it's really important to remember that that is a complete reversal of what music theory is. Because music theory is not a prescription about how the world works. It's a description of how the world works, just as scientific theories are descriptions of how the world works. They're observations that are then pulled together into a set of rules that we then use to understand the universe. It's the same with music theory. They're observations about music that are pulled together as a way of helping us to try and understand music better. But it's really important to remember that for those of you who have been through grades and have learned any theory that way, or have done music exams wherever you might be in the world, the music theory that you're learning is probably very specific to one type of music. Now, if we take the music theory that I learnt when I did my grades and music A level and that kind of thing, what we're talking about really is Western music theory, specifically Western classical music theory. The way that we think about scales, the way that we think about rhythm, the way that we think about melody, all of these things, and especially harmony actually, all of these things, some of which we will definitely look at over the coming episodes, but all of these things are culturally specific. Now, just slight diversion for a second to talk about this idea that music is a universal language, because I think it ties in with this, all right? Music on one level is a universal language because every culture on earth has music. It's actually one of the very few things that pulls our species together. There's very, very few things culturally or otherwise that all cultures have, including things like numbers. Numbers are not universal necessarily. There are a small handful of cultures who don't use numbers above one and more than one, but music is central to every culture on earth. But for me, the crucial thing is that the type of music and the way that music is conceptualized and thought about and written and performed and improvised is very, very different across almost every culture and society on earth. People think about music in a whole myriad of ways, and I think that's what's really exciting about music for me. I think, you know, we'll come to this in the genre tombola section later, but I think the fact that music has so many different uses, so many different expressions of itself, so many different ways of being conceptualized, that for me is what's so endlessly fascinating and beautiful about music. It's not that it's a universal language because if I'm playing the trumpet and my background is as a jazz trumpet player or playing with pop acts in a kind of Western style
or whatever, that does not mean that I really have very much insight into music from South India or from Bhutan or anywhere in the world. These traditions are all very distinct and often they conceptualise of music in completely radically different ways. So what I want to do with this section over the coming episodes, yeah, sure, is to look at things. We might dabble with things like scales and harmony and that kind of thing that you might have learnt in your music theory lessons if you had them. But also I want to think about how other cultures conceive of music, how other cultures think about their theory, how the music's written and improvised and performed. So in this section, I'm going to be talking to all sorts of different people about the ways they think about music, about the ways that they break down their own particular musical style and expression. And just to wrap up this section, I want to just take a second to think about the limits of music theory of any sort as well, because let's take notation, for example, if you think of sheet music, the staves, treble clef and all that business. If you write music down, there's no amount of complex systems for writing down music that can fully express the nuances of a live performance. You can say, I want it a bit quieter here, I want it a bit louder here, I want the tone to change here, I want the harmony to be this, I want it to be performed in this way. But when you write that as a composer, you are in an interactive relationship, sometimes across many hundreds of years, with the people who are going to be performing it. So there's always this kind of dialogue between performer and composer. And at the back of that is music theory to a degree, but that is a changeable thing that adapts over time. And once again, we come back down to evolving, it evolves over time. Right, so that is music theory over and done with for this week. Class dismissed. Okay, so we're coming towards the end of the show, but before I go, I wanted to reach a virtual hand into my virtual genre tombola. And this is where I've taken a list of genres from Wikipedia, and I'm going to feed that list into a random list picker online, and that will pick a random genre from that list. And I'm going to examine that genre each show. But before I talk more about that, this list of genres on Wikipedia is no joke, right? Genre is an inherently problematic thing for a lot of musicians, myself included. My band, Hackney Collery Band, has always, we always have issues when we release music as to which genre category we're put in, and which charts we go on and all that stuff. It can be a bit of a nightmare and quite a problem for a lot of musicians, and maybe we'll address that in a future episode. But this list is pretty extensive. I will say that. So, whilst the most exciting music for me does happen between genres, or to go back to that Darwin quote, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. Now that's when we think about genre, we think about one genre meeting another and forming a new thing and music evolving like that. I think that's a passionate believer in the fact that that's the way music evolves and that's the way music
moves forward. But in the meantime, Wikipedia and Spotify and streaming platforms and listeners and music curators and everyone else, we do think about genres. And Wikipedia in particular has broken it down to a ridiculous degree, right? So I just wanted to read you just the metal section of the Wikipedia genre list. Now bear in mind there are also metal subgenres in other parts of the list, but this is just the bit under metal, right? Here goes. Alternative metal, funk metal, new metal, rap metal, rapcore, avant- garde metal, drone metal, post-metal, black metal, depressive, suicidal black metal, black and death metal, atmospheric black metal, black gaze, melodic black metal, national socialist black metal. Wow, really, really hoping the genre picker doesn't pick that one. Symphonic black metal, Viking metal, Christian metal, un-black metal, death metal, death and roll, death grind, melodic death metal, technical death metal, doom metal, doom doom, stoner doom, extreme metal, folk metal, Celtic metal, medieval metal, pagan metal, glam metal, gothic metal, industrial metal, Latin metal, math metal, metalcore, deathcore, mathcore, melodic metalcore, neoclassical metal, Neue Deutsche Herter, new wave of American heavy metal, new wave of British heavy metal, Nintendo core. Pirate metal, pop metal, power metal, progressive metal, gent, sludge metal, speed metal, symphonic metal, thrash metal, bandana thrash, crossover thrash, and groove metal. That's just the metal list. In other country breakdowns, there are other subgenres of metal as well. So when I say I'm gonna pick a different genre of music each episode, bear in mind, this could last for 1300 episodes if I do this. So wish me luck. And of course the point of this is to try and learn about music that I know nothing about and that probably most of you know nothing about. Even though I have been a professional musician for many years and I've composed in various different styles and I've played in lots of different styles, there's really only a very, very, really small number of genres that I consider myself to be reasonably knowledgeable in and slightly larger number, which I know a little bit about, but not very much. So the vast, vast, vast majority of these, I am going to know almost nothing about. So the idea is that I go away for a couple of weeks, research it and attempt to, you know, dabble in making some music in that style. And I should say, I want to get my apologies in early, that when I'm making music in this style, when I'm talking about this stuff, it is not with a view to kind of cultural trespassing. It is with a very much an outsider's eye and I'm going to try and be as respectful as I can in making this music, but I'm sure most of the time it will not be as the practitioners of that music would claim. Now with that in mind, since I mentioned all those metal genres just now, I thought that for this episode, what I would do was play you a piece that I wrote when I was out of my comfort zone earlier this year. A much loved teacher was leaving my daughter's school and somehow or other, I got roped into writing a piece of music for his departure. And I wanted to get the kids involved. So the kids wrote the lyrics and this teacher was a big metalhead, big fan of heavy metal. And so
I put this together. And so I thought I would play this section out with my very first piece of pseudo metal. I mean, I don't know which of those 80 or so metal categories it fits into, but anyway, here we go. This is my first piece of metal music with lyrics by about 40 or 50 five and six year olds. Well, there we go. I think we can all agree that Mr. Hamlin is indeed Friday. Yeah, it was a lot of fun doing that. And the kids all joined in, shouting the bits where you can hear my voice. The other voice you can hear, by the way, there is my good friend John Lumley, who is a genuinely fantastic vocalist in various hardcore and punk type styles. So if the right genres pop up in this genre picker, maybe I will be enlisting him for some help. Speaking of that list, the time has come to put all of those 1300- odd genres on the Wikipedia list into the random list picker that I found online. Right, first, though, I've enlisted my kids to give me a drum roll. Got to keep them entertained somehow. And drum roll. It's pop rock. Pop rock, that seems... Wait, wait. It's pop rock. Unbelievable, pop rock. Unbelievably generic. Genuinely annoyed about that. And actually, it just as an experiment, I clicked the button again, and the next genre, you know what it was? Sri Lankan hip hop. So we could have got Sri Lankan hip hop, but instead we've got pop rock. But who am I to argue with the internet? So next week, I will be trying to make some music and talking about pop rock. Bit more accessible than Sri Lankan hip hop for the majority of you, I imagine. But anyway, it's going to be a lot of fun however we dice it. Buh-bye. Well, I think that's it for this very first episode. Thank you very much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. Please do send me some feedback. My social media is at Steve Pretty on most of the platforms. My website is www.stevepretty.com. There's a mailing list you can sign up for there to hear more about the podcast, and lots of other exciting stuff coming up. Speaking of which, the next thing that I wanna really shout about is Wilton's Music Hall. I'm doing a show at the amazing Wilton's Music Hall in London on the 20th of January. Tickets go on sale to Friends of Wilton's, and also to Friends of the Podcast. That's you guys. They go on sale today. That's the Thursday the 5th of October when you listen to this, or if you listen to it after that, they'll probably be on sale, because they go on sale to the general public on the 11th, Thursday the 11th of October. And again, that show is the 20th of January. I'm going to be doing a live podcast recording. So there's going to be a lot of the same kind of sections you've heard here, but done live with an amazing selection of guests. And there's going to be some of my Hackney Colliery band colleagues there. We're going to talk about some of the upcoming work we're doing for the new record and some of our previous albums. We're going to be doing a little mini gig, lots of music, lots of chat, lots of fun. So do please come down to that 20th of January
and Wilton's Music Hall in London. As I say, tickets will be available very soon. The best way to find out and to get a very special discount on that is to go to my website and sign up to my newsletter. I'm going to be emailing around the link once that is ready with a big old hefty discount. So roll up. Meanwhile, the theme is by Angelique Kidjo, and arranged by me, and performed by Hackney Collery Band and the Roundhouse Choir, and of course, Angelique herself. So do check us out if you like that music. As I talked about earlier in the show, we do a whole big variety of different stuff, and it's really fun and exciting and dynamic. That's the plan anyway. And thank you to my friend John Lumley, who sung the Mr. Hamlin song, and all the kids at my daughter's school who wrote the lyrics. Yeah, good fun. Think, is that it? I think that's it. Thank you very much. We're going to be here every two weeks. So that's Thursday the 19th of October, when you can hear the next episode and find out how I've done with my pop rock research and composition and listen to some great guests who we're going to have and lots more discussion and music making and hopefully some interesting stuff. So tune in then. Thanks again. Leave a review, all of that business. Thank you very much.