where next with software instruments?

[SadPuppyBlues]

You know, if NOVAkILL got on Letterman, to 99.9% of the audience we would be playing something, the likes of which they had never experienced before in their lives.

Oh WOW.

[kuniklo]

It requires real discipline to maintain focus and build on the strengths, without being distracted by all the possibilities. I'm almost starting to feel a wee bit sorry for you, being trapped in a cage of your own making.
...
You know, if NOVAkILL got on Letterman, to 99.9% of the audience we would be playing something, the likes of which they had never experienced before in their lives. We could be lauded as pioneers and innovators when the truth is that we are just a couple of try-hard bastards rehashing the glory days of early 90s EBM. "EB-what?", you say. My point exactly.

I'm not sure what point exactly you're trying to make here but I'm not surprised that you don't feel constrained by your tools when you're working in an electronic style from the early 90s (which I'm old enough to remember well from the first time around). Of course you can make that music with virtualized copies of the tools from that era. I don't mean this as a slam on your style - it's a perfectly valid artistic decision. You're just not going to feel the "cage" if you never press up against the bars.

The musical ignorance of the general public doesn't seem too relevant to me either.

What *I'd* like to do is take the kind of stuff Bernard Parmegiani has done a step further, without spending 20 years at some arcane IRCAM console.

[BONES]

You're missing my point [or choosing to ignore it]. I don't feel constrained AT ALL. It has nothing to do with the style of music I make. I feel that if I wanted to do anything at all, the tools are out there to tackle it. If I wanted to do an orchestral film score [or an electronic one], I reckon I could do it, although I might have to buy a couple of sample libraries to pull it off. If I wanted to make a heavy-metal rock album, the tools are available to allow me to do that easily. If I wanted to create a soundtrack to accompany the end of the world or the onset of the next singularity, I'd be able to pull that off, too. If I just want to spend the next 20 years gazing at my navel, that's also possible.
The fact that I use such a limited number of tools is indicative of the style I choose to work within, but the miniscule proportion of what's out there which that represents is what makes my point. Throughout my musical "career", I have always had to adapt the available tools to do what I wanted. i.e. No-one has ever made a hardware synth with EBM in mind [especially in the 80s, when I was doing it without knowing what it was I was doing]. Until I started making them myself, I had never had the luxury of using tools for their intended purpose. I always had to improvise but generally I feel that was good for my creativity, rather than any kind of limiting factor. [Where it was often bad was in the sound-quality area, but you can't have everything.]
That's why I don't believe for a minute that any technological evolution or revolution is going to change anything. If you can't do it now, I don't see that any amount of incredible new innovation or anything else is going to change that.

[Stupid American Pig]

Bones has a very good point there. If you cant do it now, its not for a lack of tools...

[kuniklo]

You're missing my point [or choosing to ignore it].

Hardly. My point is that quantitative improvements in tools eventually effect qualitative changes in the experience of using them. This is a point you yourself make all the time when you feel like slagging off hardware so I'm not sure why you find it so difficult now.

To restate - I could easily spend the rest of my life exploring something like Absynth and never exhaust it. That doesn't mean that there aren't easier, faster, and more inspiring ways to get to the same results *AND* to take advantage of that new efficiency to achieve *NEW* results. That you see 2008 technology as the endpoint of this evolution is your failure of imagination.

[BONES]

But you're looking for the next big leap forward and I just don't see where the impetus for that will come from. OTOH, I see exactly where the impetus has come from to get to where we are now, hence the hardware slagging, etc. But if you look at how things have been over the last 3 or 4 years, compared to 3 or 4 years before that, we've reached a plateau of sorts, where we are just refining what we have because the need to leap forward just isn't there any more.

[kuniklo]

But if you look at how things have been over the last 3 or 4 years, compared to 3 or 4 years before that, we've reached a plateau of sorts, where we are just refining what we have because the need to leap forward just isn't there any more.

I agree with you that we've plateaued. Even worse, I think people have started piling on a lot of extraneous bells and whistles in an attempt to sell another round of upgrades. This is exactly why I think it's time to take a step back and think about real innovation again. It is hard right now to imagine what form this will take but that's always true of real innovation.

If we look at the path other digital creation tools have taken in the last few years it seems reasonable to expect that new instruments won't do anything current instruments *can't* do, they will just make those things easier to the point that instruments start to get used in new ways.

Electronic music has stagnated, in my opinion, because it's only possible for people with *both* deep technical skills and real creativity to push it forward. These people are extremely rare. I think we can to a lot to relax the first requirement.

[aciddose]

if you were all tool-makers you'd understand there are in fact a lot of tools and features of tools left out today - and most of them because guys who don't make tools don't take advantage of those sorts of features. in fact you have almost anything (not everything certainly!) available to you and you actually use about 15% or so a majority of the time. nobody likes to experiment, or produce something that really stinks it seems. nobody wants to face failure or ridicule.

that's fine, just don't go thinking there are no limitations or that you're anywhere near reaching the existing limitations.

now go plug the envelope follower signal from your favorite compressor into the resonance input of your favorite filter, use the rectified and filtered output of the filter to adjust the threshold on the compressor, then run your favorite synth's envelopes through the compressor before going into the filter's input frequency modulation depth, then connect the output of the envelope minus the compressed envelope to the cutoff.

doing sounds that the inexperienced have never heard before is no problem, that's just rediculous. all you need to do is use the instrument wrong and boom, nobody's heard that.

who can guess what synth this is before the middle of the clip? http://xhip.cjb.net/temp/public/neverheardbefore.mp3

QED.

[kuniklo]

now go plug the envelope follower signal from your favorite compressor into the resonance input of your favorite filter, use the rectified and filtered output of the filter to adjust the threshold on the compressor, then run your favorite synth's envelopes through the compressor before going into the filter's input frequency modulation depth, then connect the output of the envelope minus the compressed envelope to the cutoff..

Like I was saying. You have to be extremely technical and extremely musical to do anything interesting this way. I don't think this is a good thing.

[aciddose]

well, that's always how things have been. software made it easier. software kiddies don't even know how to hook up a vcr anymore and they still manage to do albums. in the past if you wanted to be that naive about the technical side you'd need a whole studio working for you or you'd need to stay really simple. (one guitar+amp, whatever.)

the people doing the original stuff will always be the technical people. you can't possibly invent without being an inventor, it's simple. the most you hear really original stuff these days is when the less experienced people are fiddling, not trying to produce anything. if you're in it commercially you can't fiddle at all - you stick to what works.

so, if you're looking on the commercial side of things the software instrument industry is headed absolutely nowhere. just regurgitations of the same stuff.

there will always be technical people out there though, doing small time stuff for themselves and friends who really do want to get involved. when they get noticed and ripped off, you'll have some small spurts of progress.

[zerocrossing]

Trust me, if I were king all new buildings would look like this guy's buildings... I'm not saying I don't love it or they don't function. I just don't see that many of them. Perhaps I live in 'ol podunk San Francisee and we spend our time on creating bands of homeless and legalizing gay marriage, but the buildings that have been going up around here seem like slight increments of change, not drastic ones. For every interesting building I see about 10 glass and concrete boxes go up. Maybe it's a bad analogy as I live in a place where the earth tends to try to shake off anything that's too tall or cool...

Or maybe it isn't.

I still hold out that for all the processing power we have at our fingertips these days we're hitting a wall where we won't be able to deal with much more complexity. Better controllers will help for sure but I can't help but look at the past to predict the future. MOST stuff will look a lot like what we have today but with less aliasing and more polyphony. We've to the technology to make new cool controllers, but the ones that have been made have been failures in the mass market. Try finding a MIDI controller with aftertouch. There aren't even many of those! Oh wait.

MIDI is what... 25 years old now.

That's right. The standard language our tools use to talk to each other hasn't changed much from the standard that Sequential Circuits developed in the late 70s. We can't even change that. I just can't see a drastic change in instruments considering that the market seems to be mostly obsessed in the recreation of synths from the 70s and 80s. Development isn't always about what's possible but about what is desired. Why aren't there a ton of cool cheap midi guitar controllers like the Starrlabs stuff? People just don't want them.

I'd love to see some really interesting new stuff... it's just that even what's considered "cutting edge" now seems an awful lot like tools from the 70s and 80s... they're just about 1000 time cheaper. I also agree with the other poster who said "we've got more than we can handle now, we've got to catch up with our technology." I kind of agree with that. If all development stopped today I could spend the rest of my life playing and experimenting with the amazing tools I have... wait... let's have the development stop after Alchemy... just... one... more...

They'll always be experimental buildings and instruments. Mostly they're novelties though. How many of us live and work in buildings like that? Few.

Calatrava's buildings are hardly avant garde novelties. They're functional public buildings.

WRT music, I'm sure we'll be modulating filter cutoff from a mod wheel for many years to come. I just don't see why anyone should suppose that's as good as it gets.

I'm on your side. I don't think it should be as good as it gets. I'm just a pessimist. Unless we drive demand it's not going to happen.

[kuniklo]

Unless we drive demand it's not going to happen.

I agree with this. We deserve the tools we get, for better or worse.

Somebody with some guts and some first rate programming chops is going to have to spend a year or two hacking on something that's going to blow us all away and make us wonder why things got so stuck for so long. I don't think it's going to be somebody from my (late 30's) generation.

[kuniklo]

in the past if you wanted to be that naive about the technical side you'd need a whole studio working for you or you'd need to stay really simple. (one guitar+amp, whatever.)

This is exactly the problem. Musicians are now expected to wear three or four hats at once and wear them well. Hardly anybody is actually capable of this. Let's let the computer take over some of that.

[pdxindy]

I'd sure like to have a new controller with Poly Aftertouch and a breath controller input and great key action as well as a bunch of endless knobs, foot pedals and well built.

Controllers today are mostly shit. If you want poly AT you gotta buy an old synth. Lots of the controllers today with Channel Aftertouch the subtlety is crap. Many of them are more like an on/off switch than a smooth controllable range.

We've gone backwards on that front

[Sascha Franck]

Regarding GUIs (which I think could and should be massively improved), there's a new plugin coming (can't tell right now) which tackles the approach of quick, easy and more or less intuitive changes while still being able to manipulate about each and every parameter quite perfectly. I for one have never been stunned as much by a GUI before. Might not be for everybody, but if you want fresh and new sounds without too much randomization happening and without becoming a synth geek, it might become just the best thing since quite a while.
As said, can't tell right now.