Electronic Music SUCKS!!!

[mike holiday]

There is a quote that Jerry Garcia made to David Grisman when David was saying he wanted him to drop the electric guitar and play acoustic.
He told him

"David once you put a microphone in front of something it's all electronic."

Never thought I'd quote Jerry but I think it's a good point. It's what your ears hear and not how it gets there that matters.

Righteous! There's another Garcia quote that I can't remember verbatim, but it's along the lines of 'it's your limitations that give you your personal style'. I always thought that was helpful.

Shoot The Grateful Dead threw out their piano player in 1979...because he refused to play electronic keyboards...

...enter Brent!!


ohh..I just saw Grisman recently..His percusionest played a bathroom wastebasket (and beatboxed) the entire show!

[mike holiday]

For example more flexible tempos and better sequencer features for
dealing with it. Live bands vary tempo a great deal, from verse to verse,
chorus etc etc. It really does make the experience more enjoyable and
before you say dance music has to be constant, it's better to dance too as
well when suspense is being built via tempo changes.

-Ben

umm how the heck could you beatmix a track that changed tempo??

[SongCarver]

umm how the heck could you beatmix a track that changed tempo??

same way that a pianist can play many melodic lines at once as voice-leading and bring out the expressive melody within each voice. Practice, performance technique, and the best instruments. I'll add my two cents. Electronic instruments on the whole are very very primitive in terms of the quality of the interaction with the player. We have immense amounts of sound manipulation at our disposal, but the actual interaction is primitive. Lets take your example, mike.Say you want to beat-match tracks with changing tempos.

there are some key concepts which are missing in most modern interfaces which need to be addressed if you want to do this.

1) haptic feedback (the sense of touch)


Lets add some haptic feedback for those tracks, for starters. What if you could run your hand along a length of interface, and feel where the bumps (say of the kick drum) were. Now you can drag around these drags, with the feeling of where you are in the tracks.


2) Testing the waters

Most synth technology only allows you to hear the note once it has been triggered. We want to hear the sound/ feel the impression of the note before it sounds. Sounds like a Zen statement, but in most accoustic instruments, you get a lot of feeback about the note before you play. You can feel the strings, feel the frets etc. What if in our example you could 'feel' along the sample to get a sense of where tempo is changing before it comes apon you?

Another aspect of this is controllers. Say you have a parameter like a knob assigned to linear pitch adjustment. you want to take the whole track down a tone, well without being able to 'feel' where a tone is, you need to play the track first, what if you could 'feel' virtual notches for note pitches?

Or to touch a drum pad to feel when it's notes are firing, without needing to actually play the pad.

This feedback could be visible as well (at the p.o.i) or even -gasp- audio.


3) Closing the loop

Electronic instruments need to give better feedback to the performer AT THE POINT OF INTERACTION. Maybe your synth is running out of polyphony, perhaps that should make the notes harder to play.

What if live is about to change sections. could it 'tell' you in some way? a slight effect on the main audio out that only you would recognize? Or a language/ sound world that gets sent to your main cans? after all, most acoutic instrument do produce some acoustic noise like key-clacks, etc.




IMHO the actual sound producing end of the interaction is quite good. the problem is that we get little feedback from the machine at all.

[MrYellow]

haptic feedback (the sense of touch)

Good point.... Most professional pianists can bend the pitch of their notes
by the way they press the key... It's so subtle most don't even realise
they are doing it.

The place I see this most in my own playing is when I'm playing bass...
There is so much muting and string manipulation that goes on, and it's all
so fast, that I can't even begin to explain to someone how to do it or what
I'm playing, the notes and their length are often only 1/10th of the groove.

-Ben

[MrYellow]

Not to say you can't get the much tactile response from electronic instruments.....

Stevie Wonder - Superstitious is a good example...
It's a simple line, but he's so in-tune with the osolations of the synth.

A good example of an electronic instrument with tactile response is
FutureMan's (Roy Wooten) "Drumitar"... It's a "Synthaxe" with added
piezo triggers. The triggers have an analog response while the strings of
the Synthaxe are... well strings....

One place many of us fall down is with our instruments... For example
how many of us have an expression pedal plugged into our midi
keyboards... How many of us use it for triggering Live to record or
whatever, and how many use it as an expression pedal.

-Ben

[SongCarver]

thanks for the reply Ben...

I like Futuremans' music. however,maybe I'm not being clear, or misunderstanding Futuremans instrument.

As well as getting more actual data from the performance, haptic feedback is just that, FEEDBACK from the instrument.

Let's take your example of an expression pedal. it's still just a form of input. The expression doesn't give you feedback about it's status, it doesn't allow you to feel significant points in the variable, it doesn't offer feedback from the computer.

And it's always changing mode, so you never quite know what it is going to do.

MIDI guitars have the benefit of an actual physical string which you can feel etc (although most of the performance information is thrown away)

knobs, keys, buttons, pads etc don't give you anything back. nada.

[lopark]

There seems to be a stereotype that all electronic music is nothing but pre-recorded loops spliced together into a song with little or no musical talent involved. While this may certainly be the case with some, I think it is unfair to generalize a genre of music by it's lowest common denominator. Is rock music nothing but a redundacy of power chords? Is hip-hop nothing but samples of other works beneath the vain vocals of rappers and MCs?

I don't like to judge music by the method with which it was created. The method should be irrelevant. Only the quality of the artist's creativity should be significant because that is the primary criteria by which all other forms of art are weighed. Take Jackson Pollock for example. He used a very simple method to paint, one which could be performed by anyone, even an untrained painter, yet his works are concidered brilliant for the creative impulse he employed.

However, in response to those who claim electronic music lacks any quality of musicianship, I say that this seems a rather unfair comparison because electronic music is mostly based upon the merits of producers and composers, not musicians. One does critique Mozart by the skills of those performing his masterpieces so why should anyone care if electronic music is performed by a "real" musician or a sequenced computer? Why is so much emphasis placed on the performer when the actual recorded music is what most people will hear, enjoy, and appreciate?

[mike holiday]

i was talking about beat mixing on turntables

often times for the electronic musician (if they are skilled on turntables)
djing with mix tricks becomes the form of live expression.

due to the mechanical limitations of turntables, the only way to hold two (or three or even four) records mixing in time together is for the track to hold absolute time (one changes time the whole mix is a horrible wreak.) Djing brings a whole new element placed on top of the studio work. the records themselves become merely tools for which the dj can use to express them-self

no i'm not talking about the standard issue jukebox you may find at any typical american diner. Im talking about djs/studio musicians who know how to maximize the most out of both situations (skilled)

mike

[SongCarver]

Yes I agree, measure the results. and use whatever tools are needed, whether that is pencil and paper, a broken guitar or a fancy-pants computer.

A good point to keep in mozart and bach were kick-arse performers. There is a quote from a contemporary of bach that goes something like "his compositions are great, but wow, you should see the guy improvise".

although holst, by the time he was finishing 'The Planets' couldn't even hold the pen anymore, he had a thimble attached to a nib.

having said that, i still thing the instruments themselves are still limiting the compositions.

[raapie]

SongCarver, you have a very interesting point of view and I agree to most of what you're saying.

I believe there are a few serious technical issues:

MIDI
MIDI is a very slow and old fasioned way to control a sound. It also lacks resolution, 127 steps is not enough for dynamics, fader control etc.

Digital processing and CPU cycles
I believe that only the fastest convertors can operated at 1 ms Speed. I am talking Analoge-Digital processing here. Running a signal through an ADDA convertor adds at least 2 ms to a system. When I use a digital device in my guitar amp I alway end up having phase problems because of this latency.

CPU's thesedays in combination with modern Operating Systems can allow latency values lower than 6 ms, which is cool (add at least 2 ms for AD/DA to this btw), but still way to much to get the resposiveness of like a pick attacking the strings.

Native Instruments Guitar Rig sounds cool, but even using 1.5 ms latency (+2 ms compensation) makes the 'feel' of playing through it, totally different from playing though a real amp.

Maybe someday we will overcome some of these problems... I don't know, but probably instruments which are not processed will always be faster, more resposive. dynamic and in general more musical sounding.

[rikhyray]

I agree about midi lack of speed and all sorts of other reasons. The bloody companies are so unwilling to use better technologies. Till new Virus came out Clavia was the only 24/96 synth but since 1994 !
I wonder how you go around these problems Marco, is staying inside Reason any better ( to avoid the midi delays) ?
My guitar experience say the same- acoustic, then electric with the cable as only effect, then with effects still working, but guitar synth, virtual guitarist ... I gave up dont even check them up anymore.
I go around these problems by having the music in my head and then adjusting technical reality. In case of midi in Live there is a lot of adjusting, Lives midi timing is worse then Cubase not to say about hardware seq. Still I like Live better so got use to its inaccuracy and turn the fault into virtue, the "correcting" gives me chance to add some rhythmic spices.
So long it is studio, have to live with it but live Live is a problem. I wonder if it would work to get another laptop and have only Reason with its controller as synth any comments Marco ?

[ethios4]

"David once you put a microphone in front of something it's all electronic."

Thats great! My "hippie" friends often dog on electronic music for being digital and electronic and i have to point out that 99.999% of the music we hear is electronic whether its on CD, vinyl, mp3, or live through a PA. Eric Johnson is every bit as digital as Autchre, from the sound reproduction standpoint. Now i know thats not what they are getting at, but i still think its a valid point - we've already agreed to allow digital music into our lives, so to block out some music because it has a digital/electronic source is an arbitrary line and seems to me more than a bit sentimental.

[supster]

The resolution of digital sound...never ending story...but I strongly think, that our brain is recognizing endless resolution.

the 'discrete nature of digital can never be real' argument is an old one and imo is not a valid one at all

does something produce sound. Yes? than it can be a valid source for creating music:

quality music or crap music, or anything in between

whether it is discrete or continuous makes no difference whatsoever

yes there are qualitative differences in texture of the sound, but what
quality are you looking for?

If analog works for your song, use it. If digital works, use it.

Both is ever better

[ethios4]

digital resolution/discrete nature of digital.... but the signal is reproduced by analog speakers. Wouldn't speakers smooth out the digital "stairsteps" thus making it continuous? Seems like once you get up to a certain sampling rate and bit-depth, all thats missing is the analog imperfections, which can be modelled.

[chrysalis33rpm]

http://bluemoose.greatnow.com/Div/real_record.mp3

// C

on point!