"they were better before they learnt to play their instruments properly" - could this (ever) be applied to electronic acts?

The history of rock music would suggest otherwise

but the league's "crush" and OMD's "junk culture" are both classic examples of what happens when synth-poppers start worrying that they're not real musicians and begin to dick about with respected american producers/horn sections respectively. eeuch.

postpunk postmodernism, innit?

and yes, i think N_RQ is right about "properly" being the key. i mean, i wrote some fucking cracking songs (even though i say so myself) yet i've never had any formal guitar tuition and would struggle to form the simplest textbook chord. but obviously i "learned" something from experimentation and trying to replicate sounds; and i have a very basic understanding of harmony etc which i must have somehow "learned" during those ill-fated piano lessons all those years ago. even though poor mrs joyce would probably beg to differ.

i guess i'm lazily equating "proper" playing with dazzling displays of virtuoso brilliance etc - "hey guys, listen to this diminished minor seventh with hanging frappucino and toast to go" - which just makes me want to go back and listen to "being boiled" on endless repeat.

This interests me as back in the late 90s/early noughties I was involved with a group of amateur IDM musicians. It seemed that anyone with a computer could make a noise, some passable, some fantastic, mostly dreadful. I myself have made some cracking (if I do say so myself) tunes on freeware trackers and ripped software.

I'm planning to learn myself some Cubase and I'm wondering whether this will have any impact on my music making. Will the extra technology make the tracks better? In electronica/dance etc, are there any examples of acts whose genuine ruggedness has shone through the lack of production?

as for "tesla girls" ... hmph, it's no "telegraph", is it? beginning of the end, if you ask me, all that parping stuff. the only thing i really like on JC is "never turn away", and even that's too digital and polished-sounding to stand up next to the first four albums. i listened to "dazzle ships" the other week for the first time in ages and it still, after all this time, blows me away. one of my top five albums of all time, and no mistake. how on earth did they think going to montserrat with a horn section was a suitable follow-up?

apparently mccluskey is now svengali-ing (if it's not a verb, it should be) another girl band ... there was a wee piece in the last observer music monthly. they sound promising, but i can't remember their name. fuck. (no, that wasn't it either.)

Maybe so, but it's contextually irrelevant. People love punk rock because it's rough and ready and sounds like it was played by people who raped and killed their teacher every time they had a music lesson.

Didn't "Acid Trax" come into existence basically b/c DJ Pierre hadn't properly learned how to use the 303?

As well as production/mastering what about musicianship as well?

And no it's no "Telegraph".

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as to the main question, i'm not sure if there is a 'proper' way to play a sampler, anyhow. does one take sampler lessons in elementary school? hasn't electronic music always kind of been about breaking/bending the rules? and using equipment 'improperly' ?

I do find the argument that more "proficiency" = "worse music" to be a bit reactionary and reductivist. I think that if you have no ideas/imagination, then, and then only does it not matter how well/badly you can play. It is a useful ideological cover argument for crap musicians to make, though, isn't it?

Diplo: ...and now they've created something that's purely Portuguese, using backwards drums in cheap programs, with no plug-ins. They do it all by hand on the computer.

Pitchfork: It's a bit of a headfuck to think that all this new music is being made on computers from a generation or two ago...

128RAM IS THE NEW PUNK ROCK

6335 is OTM upthread - these guys were trained, "proper" musicians and engineers doing things nobody had done before with the equipment, things which weren't written in the manual.

you could say "electronic music was better before they wrote books on how to produce electronic music"

The songs on Bollocks are simple in form but I don't think there's anything ragged about them, esp compared to something like Slanted and Enchanted. If that's 'shambolic' then Kiss and Alice Cooper are 'shambolic' too.

also i wonder if the designers of (X) drum machine didn't have specific uses/sounds in mind when they created the things. certainly they did. and i woulldn't doubt that if they heard early chicago house or whatever it was actually being done with the things that they were all "wtf?! my machine in the hands of barbarians! this is not how i imagined it. sorry, (switched on) bach. i've soiled your legacy."

Geir? Is that you? You seem so....different.

I agree with this ... I'd also say that "electronic music was better before they got involved in an electronics/software arms race". This will sound curmudgeonly, but artist used to build/modify their synths, programme all their own lead synth patches, etc. Even though they were working with primitive instruments (I include software under the umbrella of "instruments") and might have been amateur musicians, it's not accurate to say that they didn't know how to play their instruments well. Having to work within their instruments' limitations meant that there were few easy solutions. If you weren't getting the sound you wanted, you had to figure out a way around it or modify the instrument. Now, you can just buy something else. There's no need to spend the extra time learning more about one instrument when you can go out and buy something that might do the job better.

This is coming out all garbled, but basically, it's better to learn fewer instruments, but learn them well than it is to learn many instruments superficially.

OMD, maybe, but Human League saw the two most musically talented members leaving to form another band (and yet they improved), so I don't know if that applies to them.

woo, fucking hell, really? i would love to hear that. wow. you don't have the saville tour book, do you? what was the set list?

sorry, sorry. i don't know anyone else who saw them at that time. and i was, umm, nine years old, so i most certainly didn't :(

as for the proficiency thing, though: come on, they were hardly virtuosos, were they? "learn-to-play-me bass", as tony wilson described it, and beautifully simple keyboard lines. both paul and andy (er, particularly andy) were astounding songwriters, and yes, they fucking rocked, but ... well, i guess this is a semantic argument over the nature of proficiency. same point with the human league, geir: martyn ware and ian craig marsh were gifted, revolutionary songwriters but in the beginning neither were musicians in the traditional sense. MW was a computer programmer, if i understand correctly, who approached electronic music in a similarly methodical fashion.

and i'd argue that as BEF/H17 started using "proper" arrangements and instrumentation - ie as they learned more about how to play "properly" - they became a thousand times less interesting.