WHOA! Your host CAN NOT do this...

[Robert Randolph]

I have noticed a trend here at KVR. We have become spoiled. That is it. I have noticed two specific examples; one in my own experiences and one that seems almost universal at kvr.



Uninspiring VST's

I began my conscious life as a musician. The very first thing I remember is music related. I have spent my entire life in recording studios and music schools. When I was still "learning", as we all always are, everything was exciting. You hear a new guitar pedal that sounds different then your world is opened up to new textures, ideas, sounds, genre's. Even if the pedal didn't really sound great. Hearing an echo unit for the first time it was amazing to see a box that did those cool sounds you hear in the movies. Modular synths were for genius's only, and you needed a Phd to operate one.

Now, it's all in a little box. Anyone can do it, has done it, and is looking for something new. I see a new EQ and if it is not absolutely flawless sonically I feel it's total shit. What happened to new sonic possiblities? New ideas? Inspiration? Giant modular synths are replaced by a few inches of crystals on your display that only need a small button to be pushed for instant results. IT doesnt take a Phd, in fact your iq could be well boarding 40 and still be competent. I think this is easily shown by the multitude of fruity users.

How many of you agreed with the fruity comment? I bet a lot. That's the exact point Im making! Something so powerful, that we just toss aside because something else can do similiar and more. We have software that is amazing in what it can do, like flstudio, that we now gauk at. Do you remember the first time you learned you could actually playback real sounds!?!? Now you laugh at things that do a million times more.

It is so uninspiring to sit down with something so powerful only to realize there is something else. Im not even amazed when something revolutionary comes along like melodyne. You can correct someone's voice very easily, within a limit, and make amazing sounds as well. It has taken doctors hundreds of years to even learn how the human voice WORKS. What a miracle the human body is! To talk, what an amazing thing!! To correct a sampling of one of the universe's greatest creations? Unimpressive and uninspiring.

There is an entire world of imagination, experience and thrill many are missing. I am missing it. What is left to be excited about when you experience so much, so simply. Tape machines are marvelous, technically superb invetions of the physical world, but we laugh at them.

We f**king laugh at it all. Nothing is amazing, nothing is thrilling, nothing is sacred, nothing is worth being inspired about.

Performance

Performing musicans. Something a good portion of Kvr, and myself, has forget exists. Things like receptor, or neko get mass skeptics. Have we forgotten the beauty of music being performed without flaw or stress? Just pure adrenaline, and sonic pleasure. These tools are amazing beyond comprehension. Refer to first point above.

How long will it take before the inhabitants of KVR start laughing at people who own real guitar amps? HAHAH, I have guitar rig man. Guitar amps are out-dated. Or the current trend of hardware synthesizers? Some people are afraid to even say they own them anymore! Very soon there will be nothing left to emulate, what will you do then?

What is the purpose of making music that can, or will not be performed? Some people may listen to it, yes. Where is the excitement? The practice and preperation? The real aspects of the musical experience... Where are they? It is a mockery of music for someone to sit down, program a drumbeat and melody and call it music without the intent of ever performing it.

Imagine if people painted or drew, but never showed it. We only got to see the paints used, or the pictures. Or if all art was lithographs? How can music be art if it is not displayed. How can we display our music if we cant even accept the amazing tools given? It is a travesty to look online and see people exhibiting soundfiles containing only the sounds they used to make a song. Yes, I hear a kick drum, a 303, a guitar, a voice... Now show me the music, show me the art. Show me the human side that makes it surreal.




What is left with music? We are engineering, sequencing, sampling our way to an artistic dystopia. Everything is perfect, anything can be done, and everything has been done. The perfection of music is not the molding of the imperfect anymore....the perfection of music is the perfection of marketing, one-up-manship, disguise, legality and complete skepticism of anything that may inspire a creative or imagineering mind.


I wonder how many people read this thread (due to the title) feeling the need to keep up with the jones'...

-R bert

[joakimlinden]

I did some of my best melodies on my Amiga 500, a Casio CZ 5000 and a cheap reverb about ten zillion years ago... Now it's all about microscopic perfectionism. I have fallen into the same trap as you seem to have done, and I don't know how to get out anymore. It's quite depressing really.

[morelia]

IT doesnt take a Phd, in fact your iq could be well boarding 40 and still be competent. I think this is easily shown by the multitude of fruity users.

Thanks

[Robert Randolph]

IT doesnt take a Phd, in fact your iq could be well boarding 40 and still be competent. I think this is easily shown by the multitude of fruity users.

Thanks

Thanks for reading the next paragraph.

[chagzuki]

So what? If people are in it to enjoy gimmicks and gadgets then that's the end of it and that's to a large extent what earns developers their wages.

Whoever is creating music can just get on with it and enjoy the fact that it costs next to nothing.

[Adam_V]

It's far easier easier to buy the latest and greatest, the next big thing, then to go deep into any one thing and make it beautiful and original. People just want their hunger for something new to be satiated, instead of making use of what they have. Unfortunately in this day and age we've all degenerated into a bunch of collectors, with no attention span and no will power to ever delve deeper than the mere surface of many things. You can see it almost every day on this site. But then again, what can you expect when we're constantly being advertised to, constantly being promised "no creative boundaries"? I find we just kinda spend life drifting, floating along only mildly aware that something isn't quite right. Breaking out of this pattern is very liberating.

Good post Robert.

[jtxx000]

Imagine if people painted or drew, but never showed it.

Wouldn't it be more like painting and showing but never repainting the picture in front of people?

[Col.G]

There is an entire world of imagination, experience and thrill many are missing.

I understand what you are saying I think.
I am a musician first, and a computer musician second. It will always be that way. I like to think the stuff I write and submit here is imaginative, whether it is done on real instruments, or computer instruments, or both mixed together. I have shared songs recorded on my semi-state of the art DAW and I have submitted songs recorded on a piece of shit pushbutton cassette recorder with a built in mic. It's all music, and it's all fun for me.
I don't have to keep up with the Jones's. The Jones's never liked me and I don't really care for them either.
Or am I missing the whole point?

[chagzuki]

I've said it before: I could spend the rest of my life writing for piano and I don't imagine that I'd feel restricted by the medium. But it is work to get worthwhile results, and new technology usually promises more results for less effort. Stupid really, but it's tempting to continually buy into it. The technology massively surpasses what anyone needs in terms of sophistication.

[Robert Randolph]

Imagine if people painted or drew, but never showed it.

Wouldn't it be more like painting and showing but never repainting the picture in front of people?

No. You listen to a recording and you hear the sounds, representations of physically devices or perhaps not, played by a real human. Only a representation of the real thing. You dont see what makes it human.

You look at a picture of a painting and see the colors, the paints, but you dont see the mistakes, the subtle transitions in color, the texture... You dont see what makes it human.


Performance is to music as display is to visual arts.

[jtxx000]

In some forms of music it's not as concrete as others... in rock you can perform having a singer, guitarist, drummer, bass player, and optionally a keyboard player. How do you perform algorithmically genererated music... and whos music is it anyway, yours or the programmer of the generator? If you are the programmer then would part of a performance be coding it on stage?

[DrApostropheX]

I will say that making music was a lot more fun BEFORE I had any idea what I was doing

[chagzuki]

Imagine a day when making music is so boring that most people prefer to use internet forums for inconsequential posturing. . .

[Robert Randolph]

Imagine a day when making music is so boring that most people prefer to use internet forums for inconsequential posturing. . .

Let's hope that day never comes

[stale bread]

just my 2 cents but I believe all of the tech advances and software advances have not made music worse in the least, I actualy feel 100% that musicians and people in general are much better off because of them, just wait til things are so easy that you've got a chip in your brain and you don't have to actualy play anything anymore, it is at that precise moment that all technology will push itself out of the way and there will be nothing left but the music. so when I come across a new cool application that does a zillion special things I don't bawk at it at all, I just think we're one step closer to the day when no one will care what host you use what sampler what synth what beat machine, they'll only care about what the music is like, and that is how its suppose to be imho.