Software Hoarding

[vurt]

no.
but i do wear bell bottoms.

[IvyBirds]

Well obviously you were forced to learn classical music, because you didn't get it.
Classical composers wrote scores, with suggestions which timbre is most suitable. Musical structures were thus completely separated from timbre, because the music existed primarily within SCORES(on paper) - it was impossible to record and reproduce sound!

There are many adaptions of Bach into acoustic guitar, as well as synths. Try adapting, I don't know, hard techno, abstract ambient into harpsichord, acoustic guitar or piano. It's absurd, because there is no meaningful tonal structure, only "interesting" sound.

Sure you can adapt anything, but that is not what the composer intended. They wrote the music for a specific sound and suggested you use that sound in its performance

It's rather silly to suggest a piece Mozart wrote for the flute , that he wrote with his hand instructions to play it on flutes was not written with the sound of a flute in mind. To suggest that music was separate from timbre is rather ignorant

But I get the fact you are backed into a corner with your nonsense, and need to pretend otherwise

If Mozart has the ability to record a piece of music he wrote for the flute, it goes without saying he would have recorded it with a flute

Does that mean other musicians couldn't use other timbres? Nope but where you fail is the fact of other musicians decide to not use a flute and use some other instrument they are choosing the timbre THEY want to use for the piece. As you said yourself it has to ADAPTED meaning the music was changed to fit a different timbre

So once again they are choosing a sound for music and you can't really separate the sound from the music, they are one and the same

Do you have any other suggestions that prove me point genius?

If I write a piece of music I do so with a specific timbre on mine, and I will use my Synths to create that sound

If someone else wants to use a different sound, awesome that doesn't change the fact that I as the composer had a specific sound in mind

[BBFG#]

Nice pinhole camera you got there.
And the anachronistic mind reading - such a combo!

[Michael L]

i do wear bell bottoms.

Do you also hoard that softwear ??

[Daru925]

Mozart would have made such bangers if you gave him an electric guitar or a synth!
New toys.

[BONES]

Why?The audience only cares about the song. Maybe BONES does, too.

I don't think he's ever thought that far through the process. The simple first steps appear to be enough for him. He seems to be satisfied with surrounding himself with material possessions and never realising the full potential of any of it. It's quite sad, really, that he can't see that there is so much more to be had from it all.

What's next? Are we just going to use MIDI packs and AI and not worry about our craft or the audience?

Are you seriously suggesting that you think you're better than the likes of Kevin Schroeder or Rob Lee? Dude, you are seriously deluded. I figure if Kevin Schroeder is good enough to be making patches for Hans Zimmer, who considers that synth programming is the thing he does best himself, he's good enough to be programming them for me. If you aren't willing to use the absolute best the world has to offer to make your song as good as it can be, then it's you who is selling your songs short. But it certainly explains why we've topped charts and nobody's ever heard anything you've done. That's what happens when you make it all about yourself and not about the music- you fail.

MIDI packs and AI aren't at all the same thing as presets. Presets are just a shortcut to get you to a place where you can actually start writing, playing, and recording. MIDI packs and AI are a replacement to that.

Not really. As long as it all remains editable, they do the same thing. Like a great synth patch, it really just serves as inspiration and it can often take you in directions you'd never have thought of yourself. It just depends how far you want to take it.

If you've ever worked with anyone else, it's just a natural extension of that. If you look at our process, for example, my bandmate comes up with most of the musical ideas, so when he hands something across to me, the bulk of the creative work has been done. Mostly what I do is the boring, technical stuff to get it to the level it needs to be for the next album or whatever. So when we ended up a song short for our last album, it felt perfectly natural for me to go to a MIDI kit and cobble something together, which eventually became a song, which is on the album. You won't know which one it is, it sounds like us, not like the guy who put the kit together. I doubt that he'd even recognise it as coming from his kit.

I think most people (at least those who work smarter, not harder) know their synths' presets and start with one that gets close to the sound they want, and they tweak it only as needed, perhaps adjust the attack or the cutoff. Then they get on with the music.

What I mostly do with the synths I like working with is to make changes to presets and save them as I go through the factory bank, so that I end up with a little "user" bank of starting points that are already different from the factory preset. By the time I tweak it further for a song, it's completely changed, but heavily inspired by the original.

And BONES is 100% right.

100% of the time. You guys would save a lot of time and energy if you'd remember that.

Here is the deal, all that matters to me is the song.

So where are they, then? Seriously, I'd love to hear what you actually do with that insane set-up of yours. I tend to judge the value of anyone's contributions around here by what they've actually done. So anyone who doesn't have a link to their music in their signature, for example, makes me think they've never done anything they think is worth sharing so I tend to discount the value of their contributions.

Bones is wrong the moment you care enough about the song to move beyond that into things like Additive, FM, Physical Modeling, Spectral Synthesis, and a host of other things

Done it all, nothing really special about any of it. I've owned 'em all - DX-9, CZ-101, K5000, DW8000, Korg M1 - they didn't matter. All the best sounds come out of the same old formula of running a simple waveform through a resonant filter. Give me a great sounding two osc synth with cross-mod, a multi-mode filter and the requisite modulation sources and I'll be happy until the End of Days.

It's usually easier to start from scratch to achieve that than it is to browse through hundreds of presets to find something similar and then modifying it

That's definitely true. I find 100 or so presets to be about the maximum number you can deal with before it becomes more of a chore than it's worth. Fortunately, though, good synths allow you to categorise presets, either through favouriting things you might want to use or, better still, to be able to mark them in multiple ways. e.g. The way U-He has the different colours you can favourite things with - red for bass, green for pads, purple for leads, etc. (That's just my system.) So I spend a couple of evenings going through the massive preset banks we seem to get these days, sorting the wheat from the chaff. After that, I have a manageable set of presets to call upon whenever I need them. At least that's the theory. The reality is that I always mean to do that but I rarely get through them all before I get bored and move on.

That's called having passion and commitment to your craft

Sounds like a big wank to me.

You forgot the third type the MUSICIANS who hear melodies and harmonies, and rhymes, and rhythms, and the timbres that make up those things and feel compelled to bring them into the world.

Anyone who calls themselves a "musician" is definitely having a wank. So full of themselves.

[BONES]

About hoarding : it's easier to spend time downloading, buying and trying plugins than actually crafting a song until the end.
It's also easier to spend time browsing forums talking about gear and arguing about gear and hoarding than making music ..

It's also easy to find the time to do all of these things if you have the will to do them. It would be a truly sad f**ker who only has one thing going on in their life.

To make music I'm satisfied with would require 4 hours keyboard practice, 4 hours studying everything from Bach to Vangelis, Lady Gaga, Eminem, whatever, and then in the evening, when it all settles down in my consciousness, I would do some of my stuff
Sounds really exhausting - even unhealthy!

That sounds really easy to me, compared to the actual process.

I don't think it's possible to separate the music from the sound of the instruments playing that music

Whilst I definitely agree with the sentiment, I also believe that truly great music works regardless. Die Krupps, for example, did an EP of electronic versions of Metallica songs, to show that even if you take them out of their genre, the songs still stand up because they are such great songs. I'm not a fan of Heavy Metal or Metallica but I love that Die Krupps EP. And there are bands that do stupid things like Polka versions of big hits that work well enough. Who doesn't love Switched on Bach?

For me, the sounds often inspire the music but I'd like to think that the good stuff would work no matter how we presented it. I've never hesitated to replace instruments in old songs if I think they make the thing sound better. Sometimes you throw something in and before you get to the patch you were looking to use, you come across something way out of left field that makes the song work better than ever, so I try not to be rigid at all in those sorts of decisions. You know, just because this or that sound inspired the song you wrote, doesn't mean that it's the perfect sound for it. I'd never spend any time trying to exactly recreate some sound I might have got stuck in my head. To me that's way too limiting. Real creativity requires a much broader, more free-flowing style of thinking where everything remains on the table until you're done.

I'll add here that this thread has got me thinking about my personal history and that while I've earned a career and finances from music and other things closely related to it, that a lot of it honestly was to justify the love of the the playing them more than the "fame or fortune" of it. I love performing, but really can't stand the audience after-fawning. And having access to a complete range of playthings along with other musicians to play with is the major part of it.

Yeah, I find fans kind of spoil it. I mean, it's nice to see people in the audience singing along and/or yelling out song names they want to hear while you're on stage but any more than a "thanks, mate, that was great" after the show can get "icky" quite easily.

I've never wanted to make money from music (just as f**king well, too!). I've always been afraid it might turn into "work", which would ruin everything. It's always felt too precious to take that risk. I've done music for a couple of short films and I did some stuff for a corporate video once and I did not enjoy the experience at all (although I did quite like the money). I've always understood there was no market for the music I want to make, so all I'd be doing is chasing an audience and compromising everything to try to earn enough to get by. f**k that! Give me total creative freedom or give me death!

There are many adaptions of Bach into acoustic guitar, as well as synths. Try adapting, I don't know, hard techno, abstract ambient into harpsichord, acoustic guitar or piano. It's absurd, because there is no meaningful tonal structure, only "interesting" sound.

Excellent point, well illustrated. That said, it doesn't necessarily invalidate that other stuff but it does go to how uncomplicated it is, which is why those who are into it have to look at the minutiae to find any value in it and the rest of us see very little.

[Hyperbole]

You forgot the third type the MUSICIANS who hear melodies and harmonies, and rhymes, and rhythms, and the timbres that make up those things and feel compelled to bring them into the world.

Anyone who calls themselves a "musician" is definitely having a wank. So full of themselves.

Seriously? This is what it has come to? The world is overflowing with talentless hacks who call themselves "producers" because even they know it's laughable to refer to themselves as musicians. That term is reserved for people with musical ability, not laptop jockeys who can't play an instrument and know absolutely nothing about music, which is reflected in the crap they "produce." Wankers.

[Jac459]

You forgot the third type the MUSICIANS who hear melodies and harmonies, and rhymes, and rhythms, and the timbres that make up those things and feel compelled to bring them into the world.

Anyone who calls themselves a "musician" is definitely having a wank. So full of themselves.

Seriously? This is what it has come to? The world is overflowing with talentless hacks who call themselves "producers" because even they know it's laughable to refer to them as musicians. That term is reserved for people with musical ability, not laptop jockeys who can't play an instrument and know absolutely nothing about music, which is reflected in the utter crap they "produce." Wankers.

I think you are making the things more complex than they are .. If you are playing or producing music that the people you target are happy to listen to, then you are a good musician. If not then you are not.
Then you can argue about your technicality or knowledge being better, it is all bullshit. It is like a tennis match or MMA fight. You can argue that your form is better. But if you lose the match, you lose the match. Period.

[Hyperbole]

I think you are making the things more complex than they are .. If you are playing or producing music that the people you target are happy to listen to, then you are a good musician. If not then you are not.
Then you can argue about your technicality or knowledge being better, it is all bullshit. It is like a tennis match or MMA fight. You can argue that your form is better. But if you lose the match, you lose the match. Period.

I would hardly call someone who makes "music" that appeals to crass, musically illiterate people a musician. Depending on how charitable one feels, "successful businessman" or "shameless self-promoter" seems more appropriate. They might as well be making plastic lawn furniture.

[Jac459]

I think you are making the things more complex than they are .. If you are playing or producing music that the people you target are happy to listen to, then you are a good musician. If not then you are not.
Then you can argue about your technicality or knowledge being better, it is all bullshit. It is like a tennis match or MMA fight. You can argue that your form is better. But if you lose the match, you lose the match. Period.

I would hardly call someone who makes "music" that appeals to crass, musically illiterate people a musician. Depending on how charitable one feels, "successful businessman" or "shameless self-promoter" seems more appropriate. They might as well be making plastic lawn furniture.

It seems you didn't read me properly.
I didn't say the quality of what you do is measured by your commercial success. It is measured by your capacity to reach your target audience. Whatever your target audience is...

[frag]

Well obviously you were forced to learn classical music, because you didn't get it.
Classical composers wrote scores, with suggestions which timbre is most suitable. Musical structures were thus completely separated from timbre, because the music existed primarily within SCORES(on paper) - it was impossible to record and reproduce sound!

There are many adaptions of Bach into acoustic guitar, as well as synths. Try adapting, I don't know, hard techno, abstract ambient into harpsichord, acoustic guitar or piano. It's absurd, because there is no meaningful tonal structure, only "interesting" sound.

Sure you can adapt anything, but that is not what the composer intended. They wrote the music for a specific sound and suggested you use that sound in its performance

It's rather silly to suggest a piece Mozart wrote for the flute , that he wrote with his hand instructions to play it on flutes was not written with the sound of a flute in mind. To suggest that music was separate from timbre is rather ignorant

But I get the fact you are backed into a corner with your nonsense, and need to pretend otherwise

If Mozart has the ability to record a piece of music he wrote for the flute, it goes without saying he would have recorded it with a flute

Does that mean other musicians couldn't use other timbres? Nope but where you fail is the fact of other musicians decide to not use a flute and use some other instrument they are choosing the timbre THEY want to use for the piece. As you said yourself it has to ADAPTED meaning the music was changed to fit a different timbre

So once again they are choosing a sound for music and you can't really separate the sound from the music, they are one and the same

Do you have any other suggestions that prove me point genius?

If I write a piece of music I do so with a specific timbre on mine, and I will use my Synths to create that sound

If someone else wants to use a different sound, awesome that doesn't change the fact that I as the composer had a specific sound in mind

You keep missing the point, I'm only saying that some musical compositions have incredibly high degree of independency from timbre.
I have some compositions which I can play using simple sine wave, piano, synth, whatever - THE MEANING IS ALWAYS SAME. All I need is clear pitch!
Sound based tracks, on the other hand, work only with particular timbres. Their meaning is tied to particular timbres. This makes them incomprehensible to people unfamiliar with the style.

[agharta]

Coming back to hoarding, the availability of cheap bundles has enabled me as a collector of plugins and libraries.
I picked up Arturia V Collection 7 and especially Komplete 13 Ultimate cheaply.

I don't feel the need to get to know all the instruments well and don't have the time.
But because I own them, when I decide to use one that has been unused or rarely used, I don't have the issue of it being a demo.

I certainly wouldn't own anywhere near as much as I do if it wasn't for the opportunity to pick up older versions of bundles cheaply.

[vurt]

Mozart would have made such bangers if you gave him an electric guitar or a synth!
New toys.

he was the og punk rocker!

[BBFG#]

Mozart would have made such bangers if you gave him an electric guitar or a synth!
New toys.

he was the og punk rocker!

Franz Lizst