Shitting on our inheritance (extended rant)

[Ildon]

My point exactly, hink.

[Amberience]

While you guys are all blathering on about music, others out there are actually creating it. Good on 'em I say.

[bermudagold]

I read herodotus opening post and generally agreed,...then i read IIRs and Cabinfevers and thought their argument was stronger,....then along came whyterabbit and turned it all into mud...lol...thats how u know u have a good thread

"So many opinions, so few mute buttons"....LMAO...u made me spit out my kung pao!

on the real though, while tech has leveled the playing field by lowering the entry point,..it has also raised the noise floor...where the resulting point lies realtive to the x axis is up for debate....I think it is definitely harder to make a living making music now....I remember when you had to have 20K worth of hardware in ur house to make music, and we had to wait in line for free time on the equipment....but we had more opportunities to work....are we better off overall now that its so much easier?....depends how u see it and what u want to do with it.....is easier always better?....there used to be saying that nothing worth anything in life comes easy.....i dunno...what i do know is lots of cats who would rather get back in line for time on the equipment

[riffraff]

It seems to me that too many are getting hung up on disagreeing with certain points of the original thread, and the "big picture" message I think he was trying to convey is getting lost.

I didn't feel he was trying to start a debate about the state of the music industry or the merits of being an vituoso vs using samples, or whether record companies are evil or whether mozart concerto should be widely available.

I got the impression that what he was saying could be simply boiled down to "don't take the opportunities that ARE available to you for granted". So many people on these forums do bitch about this feature or that not being in this DAW or that sequencer, and that's legitimate. But we might do well to remember that access to these "incomplete", "featuremissing", "less than perfect" software packages was simply unheard of before. Yes, all programs can stand improvement, that's a simple fact. But I remember back to the first demo I ever recorded in 1987.

This kind of technology simply wasn't around. I had to book studio time and hire an engineer and a session drummer. I had 8 hours to get my guitar sounds, vocal sounds, bass sounds, drum sounds tweaked to where they would be "good enough" to record. Teach the drummer the changes, record the tracks and quickly mix it down. It cost me around $2500 all together to get 2 songs on tape.

Today that same $2500 would buy a smoking computer running top DAW software with top-of-the-line drum sampling, effects, vsts etc, etc, that could be used again and again and again and again, not just stop after two songs or 8 hours. Hell you can take a $400 computer, a $79 interface, a $30 mic and free software like Audacity and natural studio and put together credible sounding demos till the cows come home.

Whether the music recorded is any good in and of itself was not his point I think, I think it was to remind those who complain about the lack of features et al that the tools they do have are the science fiction dreams of musicians as recently as 20 years ago.

Just my 2 cents

(edited for typos - I'm sure I missed a few more)

[VicDiesel]

Because, make no mistake about this, this is the best time in history to be a creative musician.

I agree with many points, but your perspective is a bit limited.

Apart from my electronic music making, these days I'm very much into live music making, with good old-fashioned, unamplified, three centuries old technology. Specifically, the recorder (blockfloete, flute a bec, blokfluit -- not anything to do with tape, in other words); concert coming up this weekend. And apart from the fact that our instruments are probably of a more reliable quality than in the past, nothing we're doing couldn't have been done at any time in the past 3 centuries.

Technology is fairly irrelevant to what I'm doing, and -- unless you play electric instruments -- technology is fairly irrelevant to live music making anyway. It's about some humans getting together and working on being one piece of music together. Apart from musical mind, and a small piece of wood, nothing is required. The same now as ever before.

What do I care that my computer can play a symphony orchestra, when I'm working hard on quartet, quintet, sextet music, and nothing bigger than that. That music was born out of the limitations of the time, and it's fantastic stuff.
Having fewer limitations in terms of instruments does not lead to better music in any sense.

Recorded music. Yes, it's a pity that there is no way to hear what Bach sounded like when he improvised. In fact it's a crying shame. But recordings, no matter how good, are still a poor substitute for the live experience. A penniless friend of mine saved forever to be able to travel to Bayreuth and hear Wagner performed. I cherish the memory of some concerts far more than any CD I have.

And what if you didn't have recordings? You'd probably be much more intimately aware of the style of music making in your direct surroundings, and you'd develop in a more subtle way, seeing more shades in a smaller range of music. Again, technology allows us things that wouldn't be possible otherwise, but the enjoyment of music would merely be different, not less, without it. Each time responds to limitations in its own way.

Ok, just some thoughts.

Victor.

[sonicfire]

You can, in fact, do just about anything.

Just wanted to comment on that.
In my case I think it generates more frustration than pleasure.

And seeing the amount of people reflecting on how they just scratch all the possibilities without getting anything done I think am not the only one.

But this is true for the whole consumerist society we live in.
I feel like I'm overloaded all the time by everything available in every domain and everything I can do.

So maybe only a few people are feeling this way, but personnally I think I would have been a lot happier if I was born before all this.

Exactly.

[Jbravo]

well as things become more advanced, and more the norm, you take them for granted - it's human nature. You don't hear first time housebuyers going around saying how lucky they are not to have to live in caves any more. Peoples' expectations increase in line with progress

[rp314]

Well, I think a case could be made for the notion that complaining is an integral part of forums although there are obviously other possibly more important components. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I do still believe in an educational dimension and as long as we see the usual "Brian Eno produces new Paul Simon CD" type threads, there is that sense that we can point folks in the direction of less frequently mentioned composers like Franco Donatoni.

My basic doubts, however, lie in the area of how significant a role technology plays in making creativity easier. I generally suspect that it is a neutral factor that neither facilitates nor hinders compositional ability.

[herodotus]

Who's against software-based music ? I was merely arguing that this is NOT some golden age of music. It's an age where music has gone from community-based to corporate-based.

I feel sorry for you.

There are all sorts of community based musical experiences where I live. From open stages and jam sessions to community orchestras. If one wants to have such experiences they are still there to be had.

Thing is, I can also listen to Balinese gamelan and ketjak, Irish folk music and Rennaissance choral music, Classical, Baroque, Romantic and twentieth century avant-garde music, Balkan folk music, Klezmer, Zydeco, and many more as well as the corporate crap that you so rightly condemn.

How this variety is a bad thing is something I am yet to see any convincing arguments for.

I got the impression that what he was saying could be simply boiled down to "don't take the opportunities that ARE available to you for granted"..... Whether the music recorded is any good in and of itself was not his point I think, I think it was to remind those who complain about the lack of features et all that the tools they do have are science fiction dreams of musicians as recently as 20 years.

Exactly!

[kritikon]

I have a tendency to agree with much of the sentiment...but there's no reason people can't pressure the developers and the corporations to make things even better.


As for...

Have you read much of everyday life *before* the curse of recorded music ? People actually used to SING with each other. In pubs and homes, on holidays, on ships, everywhere - people sang. They had songs to work by, to travel by, to drink by, to dance by. People sang and played real music they generated themselves.

I hate it when I'm (for example) sat on a ferry across the Cook Strait, and some c**t whips out his guitar and sings some folksy shite and expects everybody to both join in, and appreciate his efforts. NZ has a tendency for things like that - I've noticed it especially at New Year etc. Personally I prefer it when that guitar-torturing c**t keeps it to himself and his iPod. iPods are wonderful things for other people. It keeps their dodgy musical tastes to themselves. In fact, they should be compulsory in cars. Why should I have to be subjected to some twat in a souped up Subaru whom I can hear before I actually see them, with their window wide open and some hiphop crap blaring out at 575 Watts with a sub-woofer so loud all you hear is the car chassis rattling apart?

The methods of actually creating music are simply wonderful nowadays - you're right...never been better. But the means of inflicting one's personal taste in music onto others has got worse. You can't even escape shite music on mobile phones FFS. "The Kidz" seem to take delight in entering full cinemas, and entertaining us constantly with f**king Britney/Red Hot Chilli Peppers ring tones.


Although ringtones have their place...did anyone notice one of the Boston Legal episodes where Danny Crane answered his mobile to a ringtone of an Enterprise communicator sound? Classic TV, that.


So...anyway...yeah, it's great. Let everyone make their own music in any way they want. I love it. Let's just stop the c**ts inflicting it on us.

[RTaylor]

The methods of actually creating music are simply wonderful nowadays - you're right...never been better. But the means of inflicting one's personal taste in music onto others has got worse. You can't even escape shite music on mobile phones FFS. "The Kidz" seem to take delight in entering full cinemas, and entertaining us constantly with f**king Britney/Red Hot Chilli Peppers ring tones.

:} How else will they ever get noticed?

[RTaylor]

Who's against software-based music ? I was merely arguing that this is NOT some golden age of music. It's an age where music has gone from community-based to corporate-based.

I feel sorry for you.

There are all sorts of community based musical experiences where I live. From open stages and jam sessions to community orchestras. If one wants to have such experiences they are still there to be had.

Thing is, I can also listen to Balinese gamelan and ketjak, Irish folk music and Rennaissance choral music, Classical, Baroque, Romantic and twentieth century avant-garde music, Balkan folk music, Klezmer, Zydeco, and many more as well as the corporate crap that you so rightly condemn.

How this variety is a bad thing is something I am yet to see any convincing arguments for.

Actually, I think it's an age in which younger "artists" believe that the world has somehow changed and that this present incarnation of the arts is somehow different from past incarnations of the arts.

{Just like every other incarnation of the arts has believed.}

[GypsyJazz]

I find myself agreeing/disagreeing with points on both sides
of the argument.

One thing that doesn't seem to have been mentioned:
For music that is improvisatory in nature, the advent of
recording was in many ways a bad thing....
Recording a piece has the effect of freezing it in time
and creating an expectation in listeners minds that it will
be performed in exactly the same way when they get to
hear it performed "live" ... not a good thing IMHO.....

On the other hand , another thing that boggles my mind is
the constant whining about popular music being so crap in
the current era....

Music is not just about the Top 40 , MTV etc etc

That sort of "popular" music has always tended to be
"Lowest Common Denominator" and constructed to appeal to
the "masses"....
Expecting "good" music to be available through these channels is
just not logical.....

[GypsyJazz]

..c**t..

I'm probably gonna get slammed for this
but I find it hard to give any credibility
at all to someone who uses the word "c**t"
in the way you have in your post.

It's bad taste and just plain ignorant....

[deaf dunderkwac]

hy...us musico typers is bazicly ignorant c**ts..
so fock oferz