Top myths about "electronic music"

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I hope this isn't too shameless, but I'm preparing to give a talk in Barcelona on the topic of "Everything you always wanted to know about electronic music (but were afraid to ask)," and I've decided to structure it by rebutting a number of popular myths about electronic music -- everything from the old straw man that it's cold and inhuman, to the idea that "electronic music" is a particular, self-sufficient genre that leaves out hip-hop, rock, salsa, etc. Just for the hell of it I'm going to bounce off a 1997 piece by Michiko Kakutani that I always love to come back to in which she takes techno to task for its "cold, distinctly antihumanistic agenda." Anyway, I'd love to hear others' favorite myths about electronic music; the ones that work best, I'll work into my talk. So bust out those straw men and fire up the torches. Thanks!

philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:38 (twenty years ago)

Electronic music is from the future.

spacerobot, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:39 (twenty years ago)

James Brown is dead

gygax! (gygax!), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:40 (twenty years ago)

Electronic musicians aren't real musicians because they use samples and not real instruments.

Xii (Xii), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:41 (twenty years ago)

Electronic music is just mindless dance stuff.

Xii (Xii), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:41 (twenty years ago)

Watching people twist knobs and stare into laptop screens during their live performance is boring.

greg ginn thought neubauten was bullshit, why don't you? (smile), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:43 (twenty years ago)

Electronic music is "easier" to make.

donut debonair (donut), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:43 (twenty years ago)

"That shit takes no talent. My kid has that program - whaddya call it, Acid??? - and he just sits there slapping these bullshit premade loops - or whatever - together, and calling that a song."

Tantrum (Tantrum The Cat), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:44 (twenty years ago)

"it all sounds the same"

it's tricky (disco stu), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:44 (twenty years ago)

Watching people twist knobs and stare into laptop screens during their live performance is boring.

actually, that one's true...

mark p (Mark P), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:45 (twenty years ago)

*wink* *wink*

greg ginn thought neubauten was bullshit, why don't you? (smile), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:45 (twenty years ago)

That electronic music is somehow 'rootless,' that it has no true 'source' or the like -- a confusion of the technology that made it possible with the potential impulses behind it. Related to that is the fact that a generation or two has come of age where electronic music has been core to their experience -- that those ARE the roots. Telling me decades old music in other fields is supposed to be 'roots' music doesn't jibe with my experience, where for me it's "Don't You Want Me" and "Tainted Love."

Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:48 (twenty years ago)

All "electronic" musicians do nothing live, or just twist knobs and stare.

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.

mike h. (mike h.), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:48 (twenty years ago)

"Sitting at a computer doesn't constitute playing 'live'. Watching somebody check their email on stage isn't a live performance"

(xpost x 5)

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

MindInRewind (Barry Bruner), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:50 (twenty years ago)

Oh yeah, and people that listen to electronic music use glowsticks. Always.

mike h. (mike h.), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:50 (twenty years ago)

http://www.rockcritics.com/features/discocritics5.html

chuck, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:52 (twenty years ago)

Oh yeah, and people that listen to electronic music use glowsticks. Always.

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

MindInRewind (Barry Bruner), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:52 (twenty years ago)

Haha, doesn't Moby play at least seven different instruments in his live shows?

Curt1s St3ph3ns, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:53 (twenty years ago)

That "electronic music" is a genre.

adam.r.l. (nordicskilla), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:55 (twenty years ago)

um...that "electronica" isn't a genre.

also:

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

chuck, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:56 (twenty years ago)

that most people have any idea what the words "techno" or "house" are supposed to mean this week (or care)

chuck, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:58 (twenty years ago)

arggh! beaten to the punch by the very first post.

Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 00:59 (twenty years ago)

hey, thanks chuck. i knew i'd seen this question posed somewhere.

philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:00 (twenty years ago)

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.

philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:02 (twenty years ago)

"Sitting at a computer doesn't constitute playing 'live'. Watching somebody check their email on stage isn't a live performance"
(xpost x 5)
-- MindInRewind (brune...), February 16th, 2005.

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.

greg ginn thought neubauten was bullshit, why don't you? (smile), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:04 (twenty years ago)

Electronic music is from the future.

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.

Tantrum (Tantrum The Cat), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:07 (twenty years ago)

I was joking too. I can't recall how many times I've seen the "checking email" thing posed as a serious question in print.

xpost

MindInRewind (Barry Bruner), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:08 (twenty years ago)

Can you post or link to Michiko's piece? (Did she used to be a music critic or was she writing about Generation Ecstasy or something?)

W i l l (common_person), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:08 (twenty years ago)

Haha, doesn't Moby play at least seven different instruments in his live shows?

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.)

Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:09 (twenty years ago)

Here's Kakutani's article.

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.


philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:16 (twenty years ago)

In a 1987 novel called ''little heroes,'' Norman Spinrad

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.)

Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:18 (twenty years ago)

Many of its practitioners are key punchers, not guitar players; deejays and computer geeks, not musicians.

!!!!!

MindInRewind (Barry Bruner), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:19 (twenty years ago)

That essay reminds me of the Our Dumb Century Onion headline from like 1903: "The Machine: Will it Replace the China-Man?"

Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:25 (twenty years ago)

electronic music will never be as complex or as organic as a recording of a person playing a piano in a room.

Disco Nihilist (mjt), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:34 (twenty years ago)

Wow, imagine a time when people cared enough about electronic music to be afraid of it- when was that article run Philip?

Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:37 (twenty years ago)

"when was that article run Philip?"

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

Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:40 (twenty years ago)

electronic music is a genre, or a collection of genres.

thee music mole, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:50 (twenty years ago)

There's a loopy-as-all-get-out passage in Jeff Nordstedt's Pet Sounds essay (found in DeRo's Kill Your Idols anthology) where Nordstedt claims Brian Wilson's productions lead to "the development of synthesizers," and how he argues this betrays an ignorance about everything connected to synthesizers so deep it'd take a couple of hours in a mano a mano conversation to straighten out all the myths.

Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:50 (twenty years ago)

the checking yr email jibe is so old. it's all about checking out the porn in 2005.

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.

stirmonster, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:50 (twenty years ago)

What's weird is what happens if you compare the "rock is back!" Strokes/White Stripes triumphalism of a few years ago with the dire "Oh no, electronica is going to kill rock, wait never mind ha ha it doesn't stand a chance" of that article, it's as if the public discourse machine in America just can't stop fantasizing about some attack on rock n roll. I guess this is because the ideology of rock is propped up by the myth that it is somehow embattled, in danger, an underdog, occupies the position of "victim" etc. somehow. Electronic music is rhetorically useful so long as it stays in a purely subaltern position throughout this little drama.

Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:53 (twenty years ago)

Also: "electronic instruments will put real musicians out of a job." It's arguable that this in fact happened -- it's put foward by someone in Analog Days that the synths really did render a lot of musicians who worked in commercials completely redundant.

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

Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:55 (twenty years ago)

indeed there was michael. the musicians union campaign slogan was 'keep music real'. i think i've got the sticker somewhere. hilarious.

stirmonster, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 01:58 (twenty years ago)

you know, most of these myths are from *outside* of electronic music; seems to me there may well be just as many myths from the *inside.*

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.

chuck, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 02:04 (twenty years ago)

or, for fairness's sake, the converse to the latter:

"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."

chuck, Wednesday, 16 February 2005 02:08 (twenty years ago)

Would "smart drinks" be out of the purview of the talk, Philip?

Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 02:10 (twenty years ago)

Oh! Oh! I know! 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.

Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 02:14 (twenty years ago)

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

Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 02:16 (twenty years ago)

All I know is that I'm definitely going to need a smart drink or so to pull this one off. Heh.

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 (philip sherburne), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 02:30 (twenty years ago)

someone needs to tell the idm list that britney's "toxic" is idm and then relish the freak out. 500 words on the similarities between "come to daddy" and "toxic".

it's tricky (disco stu), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 03:12 (twenty years ago)

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.

Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Wednesday, 16 February 2005 03:13 (twenty years ago)

even worse - in the rare instances when I find someone who actually wants to know how I did something, and I just tell them honestly, "I don't know, it just sounded good to me", they are invariably disappointed. I believe this is because people expect something that sounds complicated to have a complicated explanation. I can then back up and try to explain what is going on, I don't know, harmonically, theoretically, whatever, but by then they are usually disillusioned and probably think I'm bullshitting them.

moral: hatred

Dominique (dleone), Thursday, 23 March 2006 20:38 (nineteen years ago)

300ms or 302

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!!!!

reacher, Thursday, 23 March 2006 20:39 (nineteen years ago)

Dom I actually have very basic equipment-level questions about how you do stuff! There are certain sounds you make that don't quite correspond to any way I know how to make sounds -- i.e., they don't sound quite like synths or acoustic instruments or soft synths or voice or samples or anything. I may have to make a list and email you about it.

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 20:47 (nineteen years ago)

(x-post) Yes indeedy. After a full decade of pushing reacher's argument in vain, though, I've come to the conclusion most people don't agree, and electronic music is the loser as a result. I have a friend who says 'that's a bit (German accent) komputer', and I think he means by this that a piece of music is a too bit eyes-over-ears, a bit committee-over-current, and that software, mouse editing, and a big computer screen with a big grid on it is probably to blame for a very predictable, over-refined, over-programmed, fussy kind of electronic music.

ratty, Thursday, 23 March 2006 20:48 (nineteen years ago)

x-post
ok, just be prepared for one of the answers to be "it's because my equipment is bad"

Dominique (dleone), Thursday, 23 March 2006 20:51 (nineteen years ago)

x-post X 3
Repeat after me : arborescence is the curse of the man-machine interface.

blunt (blunt), Thursday, 23 March 2006 20:52 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah but see dead-and-fussy is also the sound you can get from not messing with things enough -- you know, grid-like quantized notes and overly MIDI sounds seem very "fussy," too. This is one weird reversal between, say, rock music and electronics: the less time/work you put into rock, the sloppier and more messed-up it'll sound, whereas not putting much time/work into electronics can often leave it sounding too "nice," too clean and blippy. I'm sure it's largely that I'm just not very good at this stuff, but a lot of the work I put into things is devoted to messing them up! Which I guess just messing with enough controls and parameters to make synthetic sounds have anywhere near the kind of variation and character that acoustic sounds can have.

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.

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 21:05 (nineteen years ago)

there are no MIDI sounds

senseiDancer (sexyDancer), Thursday, 23 March 2006 21:07 (nineteen years ago)

Nabisco so OTM. Playing live, the struggle is to be totally in control and consistent. With programming, it's dirtying things up enough to keep the ear interested.

Jordan (Jordan), Thursday, 23 March 2006 21:13 (nineteen years ago)

Oh fine you big pedant for "overly MIDI sounds" substitute "arrangements with the audibly limited palette and mechanistically 'perfect' performance of basic MIDI note control, as perhaps reproduced on synthetic instruments with a sound limited enough to resemble those of the basic MIDI playback instrument packages included with Microsoft and Macintosh commercial operating systems."

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 21:18 (nineteen years ago)

we're supposed to be dispelling myths, here.

senseiDancer (sexyDancer), Thursday, 23 March 2006 21:22 (nineteen years ago)

The French have an expression for this level of attention to detail : "sodomizing flies".

blunt (blunt), Thursday, 23 March 2006 21:40 (nineteen years ago)

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.

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!

geeta (geeta), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:18 (nineteen years ago)

hah, I'm reminded of arguing with a friend of mine who said "yeah, but I can't really have any respect for remixers, I mean the elements are all there already, aren't they?"

permanent revolution (cis), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:21 (nineteen years ago)

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.

sounds cooler than some old landscape!

Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:31 (nineteen years ago)

Exactly!

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.

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:37 (nineteen years ago)

yeah, i totally agree, nabisco, about the composer idea. interesting about how enough synth programming can teach you how to "play" the piano. i took classical piano lessons at a conservatory for ten years, and i realized recently that i'm conditioned to think of everything in terms of how it'd be mapped out on a piano--i actually have to consciously snap myself out of thinking that way! sometimes i wish i'd started out with synths and worked in reverse.

geeta (geeta), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:43 (nineteen years ago)

I guess I don't really understand how things are mapped out on a synth, then (i.e. if a keyboard isn't used as an interface?).

Jordan (Jordan), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:46 (nineteen years ago)

You don't need a keyboard to play a synth. You just need a sequencer.

senseiDancer (sexyDancer), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:49 (nineteen years ago)

sounds cooler than some old landscape!

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.

geeta (geeta), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:50 (nineteen years ago)

YOU ARE THE ROBOTS

drnt drnt drnt drnt

Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:52 (nineteen years ago)

dude i just found my bootleg kraftwerk shirt! it's one of the only band shirts i own. it says 'the man-machine' on it in magenta!

geeta (geeta), Thursday, 23 March 2006 22:53 (nineteen years ago)

Jordan --

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.

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:04 (nineteen years ago)

its bigger and stronger and rougher and tougher in other words sucka there aint no other...

sumedha wijayasiri (pillzandthrillz), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:10 (nineteen years ago)

FUCK IT
http://www.vintagesynth.com/korg/sq10.jpg

senseiDancer (sexyDancer), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:12 (nineteen years ago)

There was definitely a brief era of tracker software that just had you input note names like chess moves (B3, E4),

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.

Jordan (Jordan), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:13 (nineteen years ago)

Oh god those analog sequencers are mega-fun for sound, but I will totally admit that when it comes to the thought of programming melodic arrangements with them I pretty much shit my pants in fear.

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:18 (nineteen years ago)

there you go again. sequencers don't make sound.

senseiDancer (sexyDancer), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:20 (nineteen years ago)

But they make other things make different sounds than those other things might make on their own, which makes the sequencers "mega-fun for sound" -- and or substitute "mega-fun for [the] sound [designing process involved in electronic music-making]."

gearpedants.com

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:27 (nineteen years ago)

Also sequencers make sound when you scrape them with guitar picks and/or hit them with drum sticks so who's the pedant now, babe?

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:28 (nineteen years ago)

*bzzzzzzzOUCH*

blunt (blunt), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:29 (nineteen years ago)

on their own?

senseiDancer (sexyDancer), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:30 (nineteen years ago)

(Alternately: "I really like Sterling Morrison's guitar playing -- he's got a great sound, you know?" / "Sterling Morrison doesn't make sounds, his guitar does.")

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:31 (nineteen years ago)

there you go, running back to rock

senseiDancer (sexyDancer), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:32 (nineteen years ago)

ANYWAY my point was more that working with analog sequencers will create all those odd effects like slight detunings and off pitches and so on -- effects you'd have to spend time laboring over to get intentionally out of MIDI interfaces -- that makes them "great for sound," meaning you'll get interesting tones out of whatever you're controlling, tones you might not so naturally otherwise get. Ya see?

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:38 (nineteen years ago)

nabisco: I would recommend you look into an all analog set-up. It would save you some time.

senseiDancer (sexyDancer), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:39 (nineteen years ago)

I second (or is it third) the observation that with acoustic/electric, the sound has to be tightened up, whereas with electronic, the challenge is to lossen/dirty up the sound. To that end, writing electronic with 'feel' involves writing without quanisation (and quantising as little as possible), running sounds through unstable outboard and analogue feedback loops etc, using pitch bend wheels and fade-ups etc live and recording that without corrections later, mixing on the desk live with index fingers howevering over mutes and fades, not balancing the instruments too much, not aiming for too much sound separation, etc. It can be done, to some extent. I don't think it's achieved by sodomising flies (ha!), but by not allowing unchallenged computer correction of real time errors.

ratty, Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:40 (nineteen years ago)

I forgot to mention the most important thing of all - every bar should be written afresh. That is, each part should be played again into the sequencer, not copied and pasted. Does this take a long time? I think it maybe takes a few more minutes. The payoff is a subtle sense of forward travel in the music, even if the parts are repetitive in the musical sense.

ratty, Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:45 (nineteen years ago)

Ha, Dancer, the trick is that I am not any good at making music and don't particularly aspire to be, so I doubt I'll be spending cash on loads of analog gear anytime soon! (Plus I couldn't take it to the coffee shop with me on Sunday mornings and make weird noises on the patio -- not unless I got some kind of groovebox, which would actually be pretty sweet.)

nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:46 (nineteen years ago)

the other night somebody told me that coldcut invented jungle by playing hiphop breaks tracks at the wrong speed.

vahid (vahid), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:46 (nineteen years ago)

the trick is that I am not any good at making music and don't particularly aspire to be

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

geeta (geeta), Thursday, 23 March 2006 23:51 (nineteen years ago)

n: yeah, you'd have to spend several hundred dollars to go all analog.
I would assume anything a groovebox could do could be imitated on a computer program, but I don't use software that much, so I wouldn't know.
r: it's as easy with a midi keyboard and recording program as doing the same thing with a live instrument and punching in on a 4 track. Or if you're if talking about avoiding making recordings based on loop edits in a program ala protools, then I'm all for it.
There's something in the sound of sequenced electronics given the "real time" treatment through natural variables of an analog signal, however digitally interpreted.

sexyDancer, Friday, 24 March 2006 00:56 (nineteen years ago)

I still don't get why something has to be hard to make for it to be good.

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.

Period period period (Period period period), Friday, 24 March 2006 06:41 (nineteen years ago)

one month passes...
#1337: YOU DON'T PLAY AN INSTRUMENT? YOU'RE NOT A MUSICIAN.

Roque Strew (RoqueStrew), Monday, 24 April 2006 10:00 (nineteen years ago)

calm down, son.

strongo hulkington is a guy with a belly button piercing (dubplatestyle), Monday, 24 April 2006 11:52 (nineteen years ago)

where/how can i hear nabisco's music?

Konal Doddz (blueski), Monday, 24 April 2006 11:58 (nineteen years ago)

Myth: Jimi Hendrix wasn't ABSOLUTELY an electronic musician.

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

Myonga Von Bontee (Myonga Von Bontee), Monday, 24 April 2006 14:06 (nineteen years ago)

nabisco still records as Prom Queen, right?

Dan I., Monday, 24 April 2006 15:18 (nineteen years ago)

The guitar is all very well john, but it's not a proper instrument like the synthesiser or sampler

Aunt Mimi, Monday, 24 April 2006 15:22 (nineteen years ago)

"i hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something REAL."

lost my edge, Monday, 24 April 2006 17:20 (nineteen years ago)


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