WHOA! Your host CAN NOT do this...

[Hink]

Rellik, I am like you...I take forever to finish songs...but there's nothing like the kick you get you finish is there?...if you finish. It seems I can end up making several versions of one song...so Reality is my songs wont be done until I am...

edit I added the link because my song reality is one such song....first done on a cutec 4 track in '83

[bluedad]

sounds great imo.

where's your music, Robert?

[Robert Randolph]

sounds great imo.

where's your music, Robert?

I think if you read the first part of the post you'd see why I have very little. That and Ive focused on engineering for the last few years.

I have posted in the music cafe some very old music I did.

I will post something new soon though... Thanks for the interest. Music has been something that has totally escaped me for a while now, even being that I work with it every day, almost all day...

hence the creation of this cathartic post.

edit: Also note, on IRC (#k-v-r) Ive posted links to my past work, and work in progress multiple times.

Edit 2: Posted in music cafe something I did a few days ago.

[morelia]

Did you change your name Robert. I could have sworn it said Robot Randolf this morning. No I am not being smart and I am not on any prescribed or illegal drugs.

[Robert Randolph]

Did you change your name Robert. I could have sworn it said Robot Randolf this morning. No I am not being smart and I am not on any prescribed or illegal drugs.

It was robot randolph for a day or so... just for the sake of one post...

It's been Robert Randolph for about another 1500 posts or so heh.

[Innominandum]

I used to write all of my music on guitar, but then I was limited to by the techniques I knew and my ability. So now I write my music using MIDI and Microsoft's Windows built-in Wavetable Software Synth. This way I am able to concentrate on MUSIC with no distractions! Then I will figure out how to play it on guitar, or if I need any synths, etc.

[atomic_(no)afro]

You know I've been hearing alot of stuff from folks who have been playing physical instruments for a long time, and I understand your luddite tendencies. However, as a dude that started making music with Mario Paint in elementary school, played a few instruments but was never good at it, and later moved from Acid Pro to FL Studio I can say that software has been the single reason why I'm making music today. I was always too lazy to pick up a guitar or a keyboard and practice chords, but when I made music on a computer or a video game console I actually felt a real connection to the music that I was making. Given I was never making anything truly great, and even now I'm just starting to touch the real magic that the "naturals" spend years practicing to achieve. Being just a broke kid with a dream of making music for a living I found that software gave me the right tools to make music at a price point that I could afford, with an immediate result that physical instruments don't have until you learn how to play them. Personally I don't find that I've lost inspiration from software, given where I came from. Perhaps my goal of making money through music will never come true, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop expressing myself from behind a monitor. Hate on me if you will, but software sequencing and plug-ins is how I make music.

ATA

Here's some of my new trax if you want to hear a 100% computer muso do his thing:

http://www.atomic-afro.com/music/hip/madmonster.mp3
http://www.atomic-afro.com/music/hip/k-bit.mp3
http://www.atomic-afro.com/music/hip/vlap.mp3

[chagzuki]

I've gone the other way. I've gotten tired with playing instruments and now compose mainly with the piano roll. I miss the social aspect of playing in real time with instruments, but for composing/arranging I just don't need them anymore.

[D-Fusion]

I have the same problem...

I use reason 2.5 and can create every sound i have in my head with it, but i still look on the net for the next superb monstersynth & Sequencer.
It´s like an obsession

But after trying all the demos i find.
I still go back to reason.... Bcoz i love it´s simplicity

[Meffy]

Well, the thread is pointless now, the last few posters have completely distorted it *shrug*.

As the next-to-last poster, I'd appreciate knowing how adding my thoughts and opinions, clearly labelled as such, have distorted what you wrote. No, this isn't a slam. I'm puzzled, that's all.

Your points are well taken, interesting, and relevant. But a meaningful discussion rarely (if ever) consists of stating your points, then watching as everyone who hears nods in 100% agreement and comprehension. Everyone has his or her own inner voice, and each responds to what catches his or her attention. Two people, both of whom who understand a situation and agree on it, will still often have entirely different takes on that situation and different opinions. Three, five, ten... and everyone's on a different tangent. This isn't a bad thing, it's just how we are.

Topic drift's going to happen, related points and sideshows will crop up, and discussion will take paths not intended. C'est la vie. Keeps things interesting, IMO.

I see you've repeated critical points in shorter posts. Don't feel those are a chore, they're clarifications that help the rest of us to see where you're going. Communication can take a little work. It's worth the effort when the topic is something you care about.

Perhaps there is something to people learning the english language is well.

*ahem* Capital "E". ;-) Sorry, the temptation was too great. Reading over the replies, there's some poor language. But in most cases meaning shows through without too much difficulty.

Robert, I understand a lot of what you're saying, and agree with some. I do think you're overreacting to a situation that's pretty much permanent. Reacting more vehemently than I would anyhow. (S'okay, the world needs divergent opinions and styles or it would be boooring.)

Gearmania will always be with us, as will an over-emphasis on things instead of music. Please try to see past it. The musicians who really do know what they're doing (I suspect that includes you) are making good, even great stuff. Those of us who haven't what it takes to be great (that's me) still enjoy the tunes made by those of you who have, and slowly we get better.

Sure, for some people it's a little like the 1950s hot rod era, when showing off your possessions in the flashiest, loudest manner possible was the way to gain status. But not everyone gets caught up in that. Keep the faith! Keep leading by example, don't despair if things don't seem to be going well, and do what your mind's ear says to do.

Meffy

[Meffy]

Gearmania will always be with us

Little-known fact: the ancient Romans, impressed with the trumpets and pipes made by a group of Western European natives, named the entire region around the makers of these "native instruments"... you guessed it, Gearmania. The name persists to the present day, in slightly altered form.

Meffy

[HanafiH]

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 think you’ve fallen into a trap that software creates for the musician. The computer-assisted perfection you describe has not actually delivered better music, just the notion that better music is a set of better choices. It’s the notion that instrument X isn’t any good (as a personal judgement) because it won’t ‘do’ the things one’s looking for.

I started out in 1972 making flip-flop oscillators soldered onto Veroboards and played with banana plugs tapping the ends of resistors. The fundamental attitude to a synth then was ‘what can I make THIS do, what can I discover?’ The dominance of the Rompler in the nineties was dire, but it’s left this legacy that a synth is something that delivers an a priori expectation, not something you explore, as a new space. If it’s true that there’s nothing new in music anymore it’s because musicians have stopped looking for it. Style is a mechanism, genre a prison for the mind, and message is a fashion selection like you might choose exotic foods at a hypermall, and present a kind of dish that adheres to the aesthetic of your chosen food fad.

The quest is for a better Trance, a more convincing Hip Hop or a more lusciously expressed House filter sweep. Yes, what nuance of the resonant filter has not been exhaustively explored, calibrated, packaged and refried for the masses to consume? The problem’s not in the machine, it’s in the wet stuff. I recall encountering the TB303 when it came out. Like so many people then, I discarded it as being a worthless fart box. Yet a whole generation of kids bought the TB303’s my generation threw out, at trunk sales and second hand shops, and having nothing else, evolved whole genres of music from it.

I don’t believe anymore that having 6000 pads will give me, or anybody else, a better creative horizon. On the contrary, having just 5 is going to drive any musician worth their salt into digging, inventing, exploring and creating far more effectively. This is a very big part of why I junked almost all my soft stuff and settled for just two instruments. If you want to go where the streets have no name, you have to take risks, you have to work. That’s the excitement. Today’s music is tomorrow’s music hall. You ain’t going to find tomorrows music, buying synths that deliver what people already know. I guess it’s time for punk to come around again.

[scuzzphut]

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.

I agreed with most of what you said, except this part.

We are spoiled by what's available and very little makes me go "wow" any more.

[tetraplan]

"Pan, these 'pipes' of yours are letting just any doltish kid get into music. Mark my words, before long you won't be able to chase a nymph ten paces without some vacuous rustic popping up and tootling at you!"

This one made my day.
Io Pan, and all that jazz.

Sure, there's a lot of junk music around. It was ever thus...

<cent type="euro" number="2">
It was ever thus. It will ever be so.
Solution: don't make junk music, and if you don't like it, stay away from it.
Some dude who used to ride around in colourful busses once said: "Just turn your back on it and say: f**k it".
It really works (1).
</cent>

Groet, Erik

(1) just don't go living upstairs from bars that play the junkiest of junk music.

[foosnark]

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.

So I guess the Baroque period was a dark era for music, when the role of the performer was to play a technically perfect rendition of the composer's work?

When you read a novel, which is more important -- the actual words that make up the story, or the typeface and the ink and paper and glue? Is a novel written on a word processor somehow less entertaining than one that was written with a fountain pen?

Music isn't always a performing art. Especially the kinds of music many of us make. I don't make music than can be performed, really.

People have stopped using these things as tools, they are replacements for the vital parts of life.

I love tools. It's when your focus is the tool, and not what you make of it... and that's what everything seems to have become.

Now people buy XX host just because it has 5 eq bands built in rather than their buddies host that has 4. OR buy one sample library just because it has more sounds than another. OR buy this synth because it has more oscillators or more presets or "better" filters.

Maybe some people do this. I use FLStudio as my host and make use of freebie plugins as often as I do z3ta+ or Rhino or Cameleon or TERA. (Of course, I'd probably have fewer of those if not for gearlust... but I don't think my music would be better without them.)

If I had the money I'd get myself a Kyma and yet I'd still be using mda ePiano and DestroyFX stuff...