Music terminology help

November 5, 2021 7:50 AM

There is a chord/sound in a new song called Tell Me Something Good by Ewan McVicar that my brain is not a fan of, can someone tell me what it is/what to call it? It’s the first sound heard in the video that is repeated throughout.
posted by ellieBOA to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Best answer: Is it an orch hit?
posted by moonmilk at 7:54 AM on November 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

Best answer: those are called stabs, as in orchestral stabs or orchestral hits.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:58 AM on November 5, 2021

Best answer: Yep it's a orchestra hit or stab, here on wikipedia.

That's a particularly shrill/bad one, and used poorly, to my ear. There are lots of related sounds that are less grating and they can be used much better imo, ymmv.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:07 AM on November 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Here's a Vox video about orch hits. IMO the reason why this sounds so bad is the echo. They've processed the sample with a digital echo, which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. The purpose of the orch hit is to be abrupt, like an exclamation point, and they're drawing it out and making it not exactly an ellipsis, but maybe like a comma, to keep my punctuation metaphor going. It's creative and I appreciate the repurposing, but... some experiments fail.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:29 AM on November 5, 2021

Response by poster: Thank you all! Grating is also a word I was looking for.
posted by ellieBOA at 9:03 AM on November 5, 2021