Improvisator

[mr]

TBA soon it says.
I will be nice to hear experts opinion about this.

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/3102.html

[stanlea]

The demos with the strings are nice.

[jancivil]

ever read the story The Time Machine, by HG Wells?

that's where you're headed if you want a machine to do all your 'creating' and figuring out (improvising?!:roll:) for you.

gee, works just like a toaster, no fuss no muss

[stanlea]

that's where you're headed if you want a machine to do all your 'creating' and figuring out (improvising?!:roll:) for you.

gee, works just like a toaster, no fuss no muss

Yes/No : toasters are sometimes useful, when you want to toast... I mean that creativity is there or not, it doesn't depends on the tools you use. I wouldn't say that the use of Improvisator is mandatory, but it can be helpful in a creative process.

[jancivil]

sure, and it's useful to make such a thing, I get all that.

but, look. the point, is that depending on a tool to figure out harmonic relationships for you

[or, to 'make beats' for you, instead of getting some rhythm together WITH YOUR HANDS]

jebus, to 'improvise' for you (please)

versus doing the work

!) makes you soft, pretty soon, you've no muscle to draw from your own self
2) this lack of chops tells on itself REAL quick with the music
3) you get everyone and his momma thinks they are 'producers' and a glut on a market which once upon er time kinda sorta required the services of musicians

and you get this music that truly is worthless all over the place, in an unprecedented degree, and no one says boo.

now, this is a historical process, which I pointed to with the HG Wells reference, and is probably inevitable.

But you can choose to recognize it, or not.

[musikjock]

boooooooooo.




I'm sorry, all tools like this do is bring more phonies to the table (if that's even possible right now).

double boooooooooooo.

[nuffink]

sure, and it's useful to make such a thing, I get all that.

but, look. the point, is that depending on a tool to figure out harmonic relationships for you

[or, to 'make beats' for you, instead of getting some rhythm together WITH YOUR HANDS]

jebus, to 'improvise' for you (please)

versus doing the work

!) makes you soft, pretty soon, you've no muscle to draw from your own self
2) this lack of chops tells on itself REAL quick with the music
3) you get everyone and his momma thinks they are 'producers' and a glut on a market which once upon er time kinda sorta required the services of musicians

and you get this music that truly is worthless all over the place, in an unprecedented degree, and no one says boo.

now, this is a historical process, which I pointed to with the HG Wells reference, and is probably inevitable.

But you can choose to recognize it, or not.

There is an alternative. You can embrace the tools that are developed and use them to produce great music.
Yours is exactly the same sad little rant that "proper" musicians have used about new technology since the year dot.
It could be used wholesale (as doubtless you have) against samplers and drum machines. Which you presumably blame for much of the "worthless" music around.

[jonathan.sb]

Hi!
I have written the Improvisator plugin and find it very good that this serious question is discussed wether it is an improvement at all to have an automata do more and more of a musicians work. My opinion is the following:

Today everyone can produce music without spending huge sums of money or spending years of practising to play an instrument. Thats a fact.
Fact is as well, that the knwoledge of harmony theory is not represented as much in todays music production. That is, I guess, because it is not availible via a mouse click in contrast to the higher musical level (structure) and one level below (instruments and sound processing): You still have to learn things by heart, (and by fingers, which can take years) and you have to spend some amount of time in calculating your voicings by hand - which in fact few people do today if you look at the music that millions of people listen to.
The aim of Improvisator is not to let the musician lean back while his new song is produced (before he looses his job). It is to make people realize the value of harmonic theory by making it accessible. Of course the creative part is to choose between the millions of possibilities, to get them to know and to build on them. I hope that one user or another asks himself after having clicked chords for a while: whats the mathematics behind? If someone feels like expressing his moods harmonically it will never be satisfying to just click chords until they fit more or less, you want to have them in your fingers and mind.

How should one get fascinated by harmonic theory if the only way to get to know it is to visit a school of music? Do you disagree?

Best regards...
Jonathan

[musikjock]

Who says you have to school? There are plenty of resources that will allow you to learn it on your own time if you wish.

[jancivil]

sure, and it's useful to make such a thing, I get all that.

but, look. the point, is that depending on a tool to figure out harmonic relationships for you

[or, to 'make beats' for you, instead of getting some rhythm together WITH YOUR HANDS]

jebus, to 'improvise' for you (please)

versus doing the work

!) makes you soft, pretty soon, you've no muscle to draw from your own self
2) this lack of chops tells on itself REAL quick with the music
3) you get everyone and his momma thinks they are 'producers' and a glut on a market which once upon er time kinda sorta required the services of musicians

and you get this music that truly is worthless all over the place, in an unprecedented degree, and no one says boo.

now, this is a historical process, which I pointed to with the HG Wells reference, and is probably inevitable.

But you can choose to recognize it, or not.

There is an alternative. You can embrace the tools that are developed and use them to produce great music.
Yours is exactly the same sad little rant that "proper" musicians have used about new technology since the year dot.
It could be used wholesale (as doubtless you have) against samplers and drum machines. Which you presumably blame for much of the "worthless" music around.

no, man, I use samplers (kontakt 2, and BFD) almost exclusively in the tracks I post here, which you might check out, because they sound Real Enough, and that's down to having the chops to do it, which takes doing the work,

it's not a rant, it's an argument; yours ("...doubtless you have") might be a rant. OR an excuse to pick a fight, in which case try HPC.

anyway, if one reads what I wrote, it is clear enough that I blame what I believe to be crap music proliferation on an unprecedented scale to the attitudes of people who believe that machines will allow them to avoid the process of standing on their own two feet.

I did say, 'it is useful to make such a thing', with the implication: as per a learning tool.

as a tool to 'improvise' for you, that's the most suspect thing I've heard in a long time.

[nuffink]

So, can you explain exactly where the cutoff point is with computers? In what area of music do they have no part?
You've embraced them for their ability to reproduce tones and, presumably, for their sequencing and recording capabilities.
You've grudging allowed that they may have a place in education.
You've rejected them absolutely for any help in articulation or improvisation because "that's down to having the chops to do it, which takes doing the work".
How about harmonic support? Or computer aided composition? Disallowed?

Where do you draw the line?

[jancivil]

well, if you wanna get a real take on where I'm coming from, there is about half an hour of my music on here.

I am a sound designer, and synth programmer as well as a composer, a drummer and electric guitarist.

There is no cutoff point, if one is making their music from scratch, in my view.

My take is that depending on presets and loops, and patterns that some other person (who often enough did do the work to get to the point of creating that) has done for you, is entirely suspect, it's lazy, and it brings the bar down, in a global sense.

(Why is it necessary to say I've done a thing 'grudgingly'? that's mind-reading IMO. you're a fighter, I respect that, but you jumped the gun again, IMO.)

In education, totally, there's a lack of coherence (which is of a piece with my 'rant' on the attendant attitudes that come from having Rosie the Robot do all the work), and obviously use all tools available; this appears to be a great tool, my embarkation point here was that saying a machine will improvise for you (it's excellent marketing, given the state of things today) is inane and insults the intelligence.

making a sequence, a chord progression and a bass line and a halfway decent beat, having a machine do that for you so you can practice and get chops together, that's fantastic.

That's not what I'm dealing with in this argument, which is a sort of philosophical one.

What you get is many people seeking this out will crank out some mechanical garbage and act like they actually made something. You got these samples in hiphop that are just tacked on to 'tha beatz' with no clue as to how it fits, cause it didn't, and that is your stylee now; you get people using drum samplers that sound plastic as fuckall, and people get used to that, and the critical faculties of average listeners (trust me, weren't always like that) go downhill in a vortex, logarithmically.

*nothing is true, everything is permitted* is where we're at, it's inevitable, but only some of it will I actualy embrace.

[papatomany]

Hi!
I have written the Improvisator plugin and find it very good that this serious question is discussed wether it is an improvement at all to have an automata do more and more of a musicians work. My opinion is the following:

Today everyone can produce music without spending huge sums of money or spending years of practising to play an instrument. Thats a fact.
Fact is as well, that the knwoledge of harmony theory is not represented as much in todays music production. That is, I guess, because it is not availible via a mouse click in contrast to the higher musical level (structure) and one level below (instruments and sound processing): You still have to learn things by heart, (and by fingers, which can take years) and you have to spend some amount of time in calculating your voicings by hand - which in fact few people do today if you look at the music that millions of people listen to.
The aim of Improvisator is not to let the musician lean back while his new song is produced (before he looses his job). It is to make people realize the value of harmonic theory by making it accessible. Of course the creative part is to choose between the millions of possibilities, to get them to know and to build on them. I hope that one user or another asks himself after having clicked chords for a while: whats the mathematics behind? If someone feels like expressing his moods harmonically it will never be satisfying to just click chords until they fit more or less, you want to have them in your fingers and mind.

How should one get fascinated by harmonic theory if the only way to get to know it is to visit a school of music? Do you disagree?

Best regards...
Jonathan

I think it's admirable, Jonathan, and I'm all for it. People learn theory in a myriad of ways. Some of the world's greatest jazz players learned just by emulating people they liked (it goes something like this: Hey! that goes to there...what if I take it here instead...yeah!) People learn by hit and miss, and by playing songs they like, and any number of other ways. A tool like this CAN give a nice jump start to those of us who are theory-ignorant. We're not talking about a pop singer using pitch-correcting tools because they can't carry a tune, we're talking about learning tools.

[jancivil]

Hi!
I have written the Improvisator plugin and find it very good that this serious question is discussed wether it is an improvement at all to have an automata do more and more of a musicians work. My opinion is the following:

Today everyone can produce music without spending huge sums of money or spending years of practising to play an instrument. Thats a fact.
Fact is as well, that the knwoledge of harmony theory is not represented as much in todays music production. That is, I guess, because it is not availible via a mouse click in contrast to the higher musical level (structure) and one level below (instruments and sound processing): You still have to learn things by heart, (and by fingers, which can take years) and you have to spend some amount of time in calculating your voicings by hand - which in fact few people do today if you look at the music that millions of people listen to.
The aim of Improvisator is not to let the musician lean back while his new song is produced (before he looses his job). It is to make people realize the value of harmonic theory by making it accessible. Of course the creative part is to choose between the millions of possibilities, to get them to know and to build on them. I hope that one user or another asks himself after having clicked chords for a while: whats the mathematics behind? If someone feels like expressing his moods harmonically it will never be satisfying to just click chords until they fit more or less, you want to have them in your fingers and mind.

How should one get fascinated by harmonic theory if the only way to get to know it is to visit a school of music? Do you disagree?

Best regards...
Jonathan

I don't disagree, not at all. Kudos to you, major kudos for the insight and wherewithal to do it.

Calling it Improvisator, well, that's another story, and I think I know what you're up to with it, it's just good marketing. IMO, it's an inane thing to call something.

I ask you this, though (seeing your last idea on the satisfaction from mouse clicking versus real contact): is it at all possible, do you think, that such tools can take the fingers (muscle memory) out of the equation somewhat, by making it this easy?

On what I emphasized in the quote:
My thought is that these persons who will truly be fascinated will find a way to figure it out, in the library, it's free.

I think it's great what you've done, regardless of the implications I pointed to, with you'd called it something else tho

[gnu23]

Hi!
I have written the Improvisator plugin and find it very good that this serious question is discussed wether it is an improvement at all to have an automata do more and more of a musicians work. My opinion is the following:

Today everyone can produce music without spending huge sums of money or spending years of practising to play an instrument. Thats a fact.
Fact is as well, that the knwoledge of harmony theory is not represented as much in todays music production. That is, I guess, because it is not availible via a mouse click in contrast to the higher musical level (structure) and one level below (instruments and sound processing): You still have to learn things by heart, (and by fingers, which can take years) and you have to spend some amount of time in calculating your voicings by hand - which in fact few people do today if you look at the music that millions of people listen to.
The aim of Improvisator is not to let the musician lean back while his new song is produced (before he looses his job). It is to make people realize the value of harmonic theory by making it accessible. Of course the creative part is to choose between the millions of possibilities, to get them to know and to build on them. I hope that one user or another asks himself after having clicked chords for a while: whats the mathematics behind? If someone feels like expressing his moods harmonically it will never be satisfying to just click chords until they fit more or less, you want to have them in your fingers and mind.

How should one get fascinated by harmonic theory if the only way to get to know it is to visit a school of music? Do you disagree?

Best regards...
Jonathan

I agree. Looking forward to the release of Improvisator, Jonathan.