Top myths about "electronic music"

actually, that one's true...

Someone said this to me once, then used Moby as an example since he wasn't really familiar with any "electronic" music. Opinions about the music aside, mentioning someone who has a moderately sized touring band was the worst example he could give.

(xpost x 5)

You might want to talk about vinyl's role in "electronic music" and explain why some people prefer vinyl to CD.

Yes, it isn't *required* to be on drugs when you're listening to this stuff. Really!

also:

http://www.rockcritics.com/features/discocritics1.html

Just to clarify, the knob turning thing was a joke. I spend a good amount of my free time knob twisting (man, that sounds wrong) and twidling around with software. Of course most good live electronic acts are doing something much more detailed and interesting and usually have something else to their show. I was being facetious earlier.

I've always thought that someone should do an EP of house or techno and call it "The Sounds Of Last Week... Today" just to offset all this "music of the future" nonsense. Techno and house have always been the sound of Right Now, and, truth be told, have both been around long enough to have a sonic canon...

One of the surprising ones, maybe: that all "electronic" music is made by DJs. I think DJ Shadow's album confused a lot of people; they assumed, after him, that any sample-based music must have been made exclusively with turntables. Just yesterday, on another list I'm on, someone asked for DJ recommendations, because he needed to commission a remix.

Yeah, I'm disheartened that this still gets trotted out - the second that I tell people I make house / dance / techno / whatevah, it's always "Oh, cool! Where do you spin?" Meanwhile, I can't beatmatch to save my life. I've even contemplated BECOMING a DJ just for the alleged street cred. Sigh.

xpost

I dunno if this is true anymore but when I've seen him he's usually jumping around so much it hardly matters whether he's playing anything or not--he does anything BUT "stare." (until that stupid "Thousand" standing-on-the-keyboard thing at least, which I hope he doesn't do anymore.)

Escape Artists

By Michiko Kakutani (NYT) 988 words
In a 1987 novel called ''little heroes,'' Norman Spinrad created a sinister portrait of a huge corporation named Muzik Inc., which manufactures megahits by replacing ''bands, orchestras and even backup vocalists'' with high-tech machines and ''a black box full of wizard-ware.'' The company has ''turned hit-making into a science'' and is now in the process of making real, live musicians obsolete.

Only a decade later, Spinrad's dark vision of the future seems weirdly prophetic. Techno -- the electronic dance music that has been around for years but is now being pushed as the next big thing by MTV and record labels eager to find a successor to alternative rock -- relies on computers, synthesizers, drum machines and samplers to purvey a cold, distinctly antihumanistic agenda. Many of its practitioners are key punchers, not guitar players; deejays and computer geeks, not musicians.

The names of techno groups conjure up a chilly world of science and technology -- the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Orbital, Model 500, Altern 8, Program 2 -- and so does most of the music: a relentless, synthetic drum beat mixed with dissonant, computer-generated blips and screeches. On the rare occasion that a human voice can be heard, it's the robotic chanting of one or two numbing phrases: ''Baby got an atom bomb, baby got an atom bomb. ...''; ''sick to death, sick to death, sick to death. ...''

The accompanying video images similarly celebrate man's obsolescence. There are lots of trippy pictures of sexualized machine parts and strobe-lighted montages of computer-generated graphics. When people appear, they are zombielike creatures or bionic Frankensteins, half human, half machine. Techno, as the liner notes to one CD reads, is ''music made by machines for people who can't stand the way things are.''

Whereas earlier counterculture figures like Allen Ginsberg railed against the military-industrial complex -- in ''Howl,'' he denounced post-atomic America, ''whose mind is pure machinery,'' whose ''breast is a cannibal dynamo'' -- techno-heads celebrate what the writer Mark Dery calls ''the convergence of human and machine.'' Hippies flocked to Woodstock to practice free love and protest the Vietnam war; techno-heads flock to raves -- all-night dance parties that, in one raver's words, are ''about forgetting who's going to be President and having a good time.'' Techno has little to do with cultural politics, messy human emotions or even sex. It's about trancing out to a metronomic beat, obliterating all feeling and thought. Grunge and alternative rock rebelled against the status quo with dark, despairing songs about death and alienation. Techno (also known as electronica) spurns the human world altogether, embracing a brave new millennial world in which technology promises transcendence and the body is shrugged off as dead ''meat.'' Many practitioners don't even crave renown as artists -- they pride themselves on their anonymity, their subservience to the digital muse. The old counterculture marched to a different drummer; the new one zones out to a drum machine.

Techno is the most visible part of a digital subculture with a willfully hedonistic credo that's cynical about politics, social change and just about everything in the here and now. As Dery writes in his book ''Escape Velocity,'' the digital life-styles magazine ''Mondo 2000'' is dedicated to ''social irresponsibility'' and ''highjacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games'' -- an outlook that weds New Age narcissism with the messianic futurism of Alvin Toffler. It is an outlook echoed by a glossy new book called ''Techno Style,'' which declares that ''partying is the be-all and end-all of techno.

At first glance, techno seems an entirely fitting sound for the ''whatever'' generation, a generation that has turned affectlessness into a fashion statement and detachment into a life style. While ambient techno creates a bland, New Agey mood, the more hard-core trance genre has a coldly compulsive feel to it -- like disco without the humor or sex. Its numbing pace celebrates a society reeling from information overload, just as its repudiation of conventional melodies and lyrics reflects a world increasingly skeptical of linear narratives and accessible truths.

There are more distressing aspects to the techno revolution, however, that underscore how far the rest of our culture has gone toward repudiating the basic tenets of humanism -- namely, a belief in social responsibility, individualism and the uses of sympathy and the imagination. Four decades ago, Lewis Mumford warned that America's worship of the machine would make life increasingly ''overmechanized, standardized, homogenized.'' All ''inner waywardness'' in man, he warned, was being ''brought into conformity by hypnotics and sedatives.''

Today, the very things that struck Mumford as dangers are being cheerfully embraced by many techno-heads. Just as Andy Warhol -- who famously declared, ''I want to be a machine'' -- left a legacy of hip commercialism and mass reproduction, so techno-heads embrace a future in which the authentic gives way to the synthetic, the idiosyncratic voice to the noise and glut of the mass mind. Just as the rave aims to submerge individual consciousness in group bliss (or the ''hive mind''), so techno aims to make its listeners submit to the beat of a tireless machine.

Yet despite all the recent buzz about techno, there are signs that American audiences aren't ready to renounce rock-and-roll -- or become ghosts in the machine. So far, the heavily promoted new album by techno's most heavily hyped act, the Chemical Brothers, hasn't even cracked Billboard's Top 10; it's far behind albums by the Wallflowers, Paul McCartney and even the Bee Gees.

STOP RIGHT THERE.

(Spinrad had his points but Little Heroes was his attempt to go cyberpunk that failed because you couldn't imagine ANYTHING more rockist. Apparently the only good thing musically after the sixties was Springsteen and the rest was plastic. DIE DIE DIE.)

!!!!!

this was my first question too, it scans very out of date...

still to this day i get told 'but you have to be on drugs to enjoy electronic music' or that 'it's not real music'. when the piano was invented many people thought that machine was an aberration.

Actually, wasn't there a UK union ban on synths around 1970 just for this very reason?

like: certain kinds of electronic music sound "dated."

or:

"people who don't care about innovative electronic beats are rockist"

or the almost too obvious:

"certain kinds of electronic dance music are intelligent"

or whatever.

"people who listen to the kind of electronic music that calls itself intelligent obviously have pointy heads and don't enjoy dancing."

or, again, almost too obviously:

"most electronic dance music isn't mindless, but trance sure is."

Drew, the article was from July 7, 1997; I think it ran in the NYT Magazine, actually -- the header from the web archive is "Magazine Desk."

I'm definitely eager to include plenty of myths from "within" the canon (jesus, my fingers are going to get tired, doing all these scare quotes on stage). My years of IDM-list subscription have definitely turned up plenty; in fact, just today someone claimed that "experimental" electronic music isn't, or can't be, pop music, because it's not "popular." No matter that it incorporates pop structures, follows a pop market logic, etc. It may not be pop in the way that Kylie is pop, but it seems to me that it's a question of *types* of pop, not mutual exclusivity.

Anyway, that's the IDM-list for you. I subscribe so you don't have to.

-- philip sherburne (psherburn...), February 16th, 2005.

*shudder*

I was on there for awhile, but people kept saying boneheaded stuff about women in electronic music that made me steamed and provoked me into getting on my high horse and going into Feminism 101 lecture mode, tedious for all involved. Glad it still exists though, for some reason . . . .

Chuck you are OTM about there being internal myths too to electronic music making, frequently the rhetoric around it reminds me weirdly of the language poetry scene.

I definitely remember an interview where he claimed that he only remixed songs he didn't like, because if the song was good to begin with then there was no need to remix it.

Around that time, he contributed to "Further Down the Spiral" and is credited as "reconstructing" rather than remixing. I'm fairly sure that was one of the cases where he didn't like whatever song he was supposed to be remixing and submitted his own work with Trent Reznor's screams thrown in.

And was Eurodisco really fixated on a strict metronomic 4/4 because Europeans had such a lousy sense of rhythm?

I believe I read a Giorgio Moroder interview where he made this rationalization.

-- greg ginn thought neubauten was bullshit, why don't you? (reed.rosenber...), February 16th, 2005.

The similarities I see are these (and i have in mind the loosely defined "IDM" scene and the loosely defined "language poetry and its aftermath" poetry scene):

1. small stakes: not many people are into either one
2. much griping and player-hating of the scene's ostensible "stars", who are, naturally, not actually celebrities in any meaningful sense, except to the tiny group that knows n cares
3. certain technical tics and stylistic predilictions that seem to code or signify as necessarily "innovative" and "experimental", even as these tics/styles are themselves aging and not all that new anymore (which is neither good nor bad, except insofar as there's a misfit between talk of "experimentation" and the reality of a constrained praxis)
4. both scenes provide a sense of membership in an elite cadre of people who can get pleasure out of something that a vast, faceless horde is imagined to find repellent or baffling or unpleasurable; an inordinate amount of time is spent picturing/mocking the cluelessness of those outside the group, or "what they'd do when faced with [insert artistic object/work X here]"

I think this dynamic is true of lots of small scenes- I guess what's particular to this overlap is that talk about "complexity" / "difficulty" pervades both the IDM scene and the language poetry scene; these are caricatures, I'm being fast n loose here obviously.

PS: I do love some "IDM" (ugh, that name) a lot and I do love some contemporary poetry/language poetry a lot, takes one to know one . . .

Rae Armantrout = Phoenecia (funkier, earthier)
Lyn Hejinian = Autechre (superdistinguished pioneers)
Michael Palmer = Mu-Ziq (ye tuff originator)
Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge = Richard Devine (technical whizzes)
Trane Devore = Phthalocyanine etc etc etc.

and I so wish I could say Clark Coolidge = Matmos because of his book of Old West themed language poems but I am in Matmos so I better not write my own ticket like that

as for "What Is The Rockism of Poetry?", I'm gonna say:

Seamus Heaney = The Rolling Stones
Ted Hughes = Eric Clapton
but I know others could do that part better than I . . .

How about:

Anne Carson = Cat Power?

Doesn't DJ /Rupture collaborate with a poet on his new album?

counter-myth # 2: "Watching people twist knobs and stare into laptop screens during their live performance is boring." yeah, cos that's *totally* untrue. dancing to the music being made is not boring, but watching people staring into a laptop...?

So illuminating!

It's so funny that this 1991 cliché is still regarded as cutting edge (or just a valid signifyer) by movie execs (or set decorators, at least). I just watched the rather terrible '51st State' on tv the other day, and this is from like 2001. Nevertheless, at a supposedly really hip warehouse party, everybody was waving glowsticks in the air like their life depended on it, to some bland house beat. It didn't even look great.

Is it *really* true that Richard James once submitted a random worktape as a remix of some cred-seeking band's song? Has that been confirmed as fact, because everytime I've seen this anecdote cited, it's referred to as a rumor.

I read an interview like six years ago where he said himself that he did it. The band was: The Lemonheads.

Other myths:
Electronic music has "no agenda". Brainwashed with 1968 utopian naïvity (which was great enough in itself), the hippies and their children always critisize electronic music and rave culture for having no verbal and packaged vision. Talk about trying to project your own values and historuý onto someone elses's project.

A myth from within the scene: DJ's and musicians who take a liking in becoming public figures "destroy the scene". As if 'the scene' consists of entirely alike people, all of whom have a dream of playing the same boring tech house records forever and ever. If scenes are "destroyed", it is more likely that rather complex workings are going on. But as no-one really cares about 'the house scene' or 'the techno scene' or 'the drum'n'bass scene' or the IDM scene' anymore, they are not that likely to be "destroyed" anyway.

Ha ha this is the underlying structure of ALL of America's paranoid dreams though yeah?

yes, 1968 was "all about the hippies" wtf! and what's naive exactly about having a political agenda? how were the '68s 'brainwashed'? (were the class of '88 seers of the truth in some sense inaccessible to the hippies?)
i think it's evasive in the extreme to translate 'political agenda' into 'verbal and packaged vision' here, as if it gets rid of the problem: and as for 'projecting' on to other people's 'project', does that excuse the apolitical stance of most rave culture? or does it just say 'lay off man, i don't need politics'?

now people are finding other ways into being political electronic artists: herbert doing his thing and anticon raving on about the world's fucked up-ness in a language that doesn't sould like punk or hippie talk.

i think, by the way, that the whole punk/electronic comparison is interesting. both laughed at the hippies and their vision. but the punks also hated everything else, and that generation still has troubles coming to terms with today's market-based reality. they tend to simply reject it sometimes, which is not really all that constructive.
it seems to me that the 1990ies rave people are adjusting much easier to that. they have infiltrated the cultural life, they are the people who demand organic vegetables in the shop and they don't have problems going to meetings with people in suits if that can lead to something. i'm not sure if all this is right, though.

i just think you know nothing of the sixties if you equate 'hippies' with '1968', and how were either of them 'schoolbook'? both hippies and 68s wanted to change the world in a way more comprehensive than throwing parties and designing really deck fliers. punks may have laughed at hippies, but took a lot of '68 idealism. as for "today's market based reality": what was non-capitalist about the 1960s? was it 'unconstructive' to protest the vietnam war?

It usually helps to read the whole thread when taking jokes out of context.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1409788,00.html

sigh. i'm not sure that this is the forum. of course it was not. as i said, that generation did just fine, and we owe them a lot. but as for electronic music, it's just funny how some people couldn't comprehend how rave culture was an outlet for creativity, too, albeit a less verbal and more hedonistic one.

yes thanks for telling me some people in dance music dislike trance, I had never noticed.

the fact is anyone in Europe is by default far more immersed in trance anyway, enough so that they don't have to treat it as some fantastic alien other. To cite trance as Chuck does (for how many years now????) is to treat it just as differently as the most vehement trance-hating dance fan.

The fact is anyone in Europe can see that the modes of consumption and the club scene in trance is not radically different from that of microhouse or whatever other genre, but plainly this doesn't work in reverse, Chuck still persists to see "serious" dance music as something nobody actually ever dances like an idiot to.

This lame excercise in debunking and this persistence in hacking at the semantics on dance periodically on every thread with the same tired arguments, only to eventually make a few half baked concessions and give up, has gone on for so so long now.

I mean seriously, how long has Chuck been making the exact same tired arguments as a half excuse for his total disengagement from any number of electronic dance scenes? Like I actually want to know, it's at least 3 or 4 years, but surely even pre ILM it went on too. That rockcritics interview was a particular highligh, out of all the critics, only one refused to engage with the topic repeatedly. Must have only taken about 5 minutes to return that email! It's a fucking weary bugbear by now and you wonder why he still bothers. Perhaps it's a good way of reassuring himself he's not missing out.

So as not to derail, perhaps Phil, you could mention how discussions of European dance music among music critics/fans are routinely stopped by people forcing the same discussions into issues of semantics and questioning the very existence of the entire scene.

Oh for a day when minimal techno can be written into a book about AC/DC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually, a few years back I wrote a piece about the multiple parallels of Biosphere and Burzum (conceptual and musical).

read the fucking thread dude

see, the thread says "MYTHS ABOUT ELECTRONIC MUSIC" not "WAYS IN WHICH ELECTRONIC MUSIC IS OPPRESSED"

I mean what dance fans mean when they suggest oppression is surely a lack of understanding, and there's plenty of that out there, it's remained a fairly weird scene for people to understand anyway.

ha ha, this was one of the "myths" I listed up above:

>"people who listen to the kind of electronic music that calls itself intelligent obviously have pointy heads and don't enjoy dancing."<

(And I've been listening (and writing about) techno and house music (a lot of which I love) since, oh, 1986 or so, by the way. (And I've barely ever "cited trance" one way or another, here or elsewhere.)

if the above is true Chuck, why show up on so many threads to point out myths from within the electronic scene, or debunk the entire thing? what do you hope to achieve by picking at a genre which is not going to take over the world any time soon?

(and where have I ever tried to "debunk the whole thing"? again, I LIKE plenty of techno, including plenty of the so-called idm stuff, though I admit I have a hard time keeping up with the seemingly ever-changing inner taxonomy of the stuff. Which inner taxonomy strikes me more as funny than anything else. But why *not* make fun of the stuff? It's *fun*! Especially on this thread, where debunking myths was specifically requested, and where so many folks were worrying about how deluded non-electronic-music fans are about electronic music, but ignoring how deluded electronic music fans themselves often are about the stuff. Why should only the former myths matter?)

myth: that electronic music played no part in 1968 utopian naïvity

xp

Note: I'm not arguing against the idea of progression or evolution or change, but against a teleological view of it, where new developments make obsolete the former.

I also think it's a myth that there is any meaningful distinction left between the categories of electronic music, musique concrete, electric music, electro-acoustic music, etc. as they pertain to recorded music. On one side of the aisle you have the lumpen techno-hater who doesn't realize that his favorite rock band use sampled drums, autotune and amp simulator plugins in the studio. On the other side you have the dance music purist who dismisses Radiohead or chart pop, R&B and hip-hop despite the fact that these artists may use the same modes of production as any given IDM superstar.

Or what exactly? The person who believes in nothing at all presumably.

The person in the center would be someone who doesn't try to use "electronic music" as the sort of grand category it once stood for in the early days of electronic music vs. musique concrete. Such a person would not attempt to judge or categorize music based on the mode of production (ultimately an unknowable for the listener) but would instead focus on stylistic or idiomatic qualities. This would presumably include most of the people who post here.

It's not a matter of which music you like but how you dismiss that which you don't like. If someone doesn't like beepy-boopy electronic noises, that's fine but they shouldn't pretend that their favorite rock band is more natural or authentic when their record is probably just as reliant on samples and electronic technology as any hip-hop. And if someone else has a distaste for guitars that's fine as well. But it's a little unrealistic to pretend that guitars are sonically regressive and the 30 or 40-year-old sounds of electronic music are still cutting edge.

-- it's tricky (tricky@), February 16th, 2005.

No, these days it's all about kick'n'snare. But I hate those motherfucking sellouts that INSIST on adding a shaker. Commercial bastards. No integrity whatsoever.

T

Who said nowadays? I'm talking about at least the last 20 years.

I have heard, as we all have, music created with presets and sample discs that has a paint-by-number quality, but that is a problem with the artist, not the tool. In my experience, writing a piece of music that I'm proud of is no "easier" with a synth than with a nylon string guitar.... It's kind of like hearing someone say that it's not "art" if an airbrush is used, only standard brushes create legitimate art.

Paul Ellis

Bring on the completely autonomous digital life-forms!

the problem with completely autonomous is that no one knows what it really means!

Ok, that is probably not a pre-existing myth (and one that holds no positive/negative connotations at that) but it made sense the other day while listening to the new Daft Punk album. If robots WERE human after all, wouldn't they try to get the job done as efficiently as possible (same drum samples, non-changing song structures etc).
Oh, just some midnight ramblings...

S.

-- Michael Daddino

He said this himself in an interview which I read, where I can't recall. The band was the Au Pairs I think. He ran off the tape while the courier was waiting outside. So he says.

That dance music is dead.
That 'trance' is a genre in its own right, with trance values absent from house, techno, pop, and most other genres. And I'll dob myself in for this one:
That the 'Old Skool' was better. The music, that is. I say nothing of the scene that surrounded it.

It was The Auteurs, not The Au Pairs- but a real Aphex remix of the Au Pairs would be rad (as would another random Aphex track disguised as a remix, natch)

I remember the Aphex remix being for the Lemonheads,
although it's possible he pulled that trick more than once.

Moby performs live?

That people like Bo Diddley, Link Wray, Dick Dale, Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, J Mascis, etc are not "electronic musicians" because they play guitar.

But they (especially Diddley and Dale from what I've read) worked with electronic equipment, no? Modifying amps, pickups, etc. to get the sound they wanted.

electronic music often uses samples, and if not, its often 4 seconds of playing of an instrument in a simplistic way recorded into a database, and when someone wants to change a chord as its all computerised they just need to press 1 note down instead of using timing and knowledge to add notes, riffs and melodies to make the piece of music progress. They dont even need to be able to play chord changes at the speed you hear them at on the record.

To be honest the overriding point is that if we all started doing this, music would die as an artform. That is not to say electronic music cant be artistic to some extent, however everyone has to get their samples from somewhere, from someone who can actually play an instrument in the first place.

Who is to say that this can't be the electronic artist him/herself, though?

I'm not sure I like where the "skilled musician" thing goes.

You have no idea how much I wish electronic music were as easy to create as people who don't like it imagine it is! I can't wait for the day when I can just sit back and watch TV while Ableton writes melodies and makes my songs progress for me.

I met a guy in a bowling alley once who was bitching about all this music "where you just press a button, like Howard Jones." Then he said he liked Steely Dan. And then I tried to say a whole bunch of stuff about how keyboards are keyboards but I was too busy sputtering.

though having heard your music, nabisco, it's clear you put a lot of effort into it. there certainly are people out there who make shitty dance music with little to no thought put into it, just as with any other genre. i mean the first time i messed around with fruityloops and a sound clip of an amen break, i was well on my way to making a shitty track within about ten minutes flat!

[Yeah, making crappy sample collages is very easy, which I assume is why people sometimes imagine all electronic music is equally easy -- what doesn't seem to occur to them, though, is that, you know, Four Tet albums don't come included in the Casio presets! Machines can make the sounds, but they have to be instructed in HORRIFYING detail exactly which sounds you want them to make!]

I mean, just for example, I had a free day a while back, and I felt like fooling with some new songs. I recorded two songs of approximately equal length. One of them was a rock song: I set up a tape four-track, recorded a bunch of guitar and percussion stuff, sang, did some post-production, and I was done. It took about three hours, total. The other was an electronic track: I started in with the synth and the computer. After about six hours of that, all I'd finished was a thirty-second synth intro, with no bass or drums or leads or vocals even included yet. And that was much more grueling going than happily playing the guitar.

Part of it is that instruments sound a certain way, and so it's totally acceptable to have them just sound how they sound. Electronic music has much more of a chance to sound like anything, and so in addition to needing to specify exactly how you want it to sound (in ridiculous software-based detail: do I want the release parameter on this synth oscillator to be 300ms or 302?), there's much more of a push to make it sound amazing, and much more of a creative crisis over exactly what "amazing" sound you're shooting for.

Part of it is just that on some days instrument-music feels like painting a mountain landscape, whereas electronic music feels more like creating the same landscape in Photoshop using only a 20-pixel square of sky blue, a picture of a small rock, a drawing of a leaf, and the pen tool.

That squares up with my experience too.

They dont even need to be able to play chord changes at the speed you hear them at on the record.

This has been true of live players since the advent of tape recording, though it's usually more about guitar solos than chord changes. Even all those early Beatles singles are sped up a few cents to bring out the energy. Also dance music isn't as big on chord changes and also surely it's a GOOD thing that folks like Max Tundra can offer us fantastical chord changes near-impossible for most human beings k thanx bye.

I can't do sax ombrochure right. I seem to have forgotten flute, too. :(

But I can almost bow a cello properly.

moral: hatred

the thing is most of the time the 2ms isn't gonna make or break you --------- there's something to be said for working fast, or at least alternating between periods of spontaneity and obsessiveness ---- you don't HAVE to calibrate your decision-making to the fullest extent of granularity offered by the software to come up with something cool ------ accidents are fine! in fact i think that's why I prefer hardware most of the time --- all those fucking menus will def. sap your will to live ---- and in the end, thats AUDIBLE!!!!

But general point being that man, electronic can be way harder. I mean, talk about "pushing a button" -- if I want vibrato on a guitar note, I just wiggle my finger a little! If I want a touch of vibrato on a synth note, I spend 15 minutes setting up an LFO modulation and automating it to hit the right notes.

ha ha! very true, but this also depends on whether you can play an instrument. i know plenty of amazing producers who can't play any instruments to save their lives. i had an interesting conversation with justus k. from kompakt once where he told me he couldn't play any instruments at all--couldn't even strum a chord on a guitar if you asked him to. all he knows is synth programming. i found this surprising, judging by some of the records he's made, but yeah!

sounds cooler than some old landscape!

Geeta, I can totally believe that about Justus! I mean, that's actually the traditional position of the composer w/r/t a symphony, right -- he's intimately familiar with each instrument's capabilities, and can easily notate directions for what each instrument should do, but he wouldn't necessarily be able to hop down there and play the bassoon himself. Slightly different in that composers traditionally play something -- piano -- but otherwise the relationship is similar. The composer knows "how" each instrument is played -- he just doesn't necessarily have the physical ability to actually play it! And I'd guess that after enough synth programming, Justus has developed a decent sense of "how" one plays the piano.

yeah!! it's funny. yesterday i listened to a recording of jeff mills playing 'the bells' with a full orchestra--the montpelier philharmonic orchestra i believe. it just sounded totally WRONG to my ears, to have the song so fully fleshed out and "organic" sounding like that. i actually vastly prefer the chilly synth timbres in his original techno anthem to this huge, expensive, expansive version. but i think i prefer synthesized sounds to "real" sounds in general, which is part of the reason why i fear i'm becoming more kraftwerk with each passing day.

drnt drnt drnt drnt

The graphical interfaces for sequencing often represent a piano keyboard -- so no matter how you're programming them, you pick up at least a little sense of which notes are where, what different keys look like, what shapes the chords fall into, etc.

Old hardware would often give you a little two-octave keyboard to input through; new software often represents a full keyboard. The most rudimentary would be stuff like the Roland 303 (image), which has that super-basic one-octave button system. There was definitely a brief era of tracker software that just had you input note names like chess moves (B3, E4), but I imagine those would have been damn hard to use for melodic arrangements without knowing how to work out the notes on a regular instrument first. There are also computery ways where you could notate a musical score and produce your sequencing that way.

Where this gets tricker is with things like arpeggiators and other MIDI/sequencer tools, which actually do semi-"automatically" create musical effects. You can pick up interesting things learning those, too, though it tends to be theory/composition stuff more so than how-to-play stuff.

Yeah, I've seen those and that's the sort of thing that mystifies me as far as usability goes.

I do know at least one composer/electronics who doesn't "really" play any instrument, but he's such a conceptual genius and has such good musical instincts (coming from the composer direction) that he can fake it anyway.

gearpedants.com

the man lies. he's great. i would YSI one of his tunes but he'd probably kill me.

Or why pulling a metal string is more real than pressing a plastic button.

Or how listening to a CD can ever *NOT* be electronic music. Vinyl too for that matter.

Or why a 4 second loop is bad.

Or how The Rolling Stones didn't sample Howling Wolf.

Or why people seem to have some vested, personal interest where their music comes from; who makes it, using which equipment in which way and are offended on an individual level when this standard is not met.

Or how sampling could "kill music as an artform" and why this would be a bad thing.

(Never actually seen this explicitly refuted in print - just something I wanted to put out there.)