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Looper's Delight
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Trevor wrote: >Sean, are you comfortable playing with a keyboard? Or do you like the >feel >of how the guitar/midi thing controls it? Those rare times I have felt >the >need to record a synth sound (usually I just stack a few delay pedals, >distortion, and an ebow) I just goofed around on a keyboard untill I >could >play the part. Yeah, I'm a guitarist, but I've played keyboards on my recordings. (Heck, I've played keyboard solos. I've even played _better_ keyboard solos than guitar solos--however, at the time, I had to transpose the keyboard so I could solo in C :) >I read in an interview with Andy Summers where he slagged the whole midi >thing. He said something along the lines of 'If you want to sound like a >harmonica, learn to play a harmonica'. I think that might be a bit close >minded, but It has always been easier for me to learn how to play the real >thing than its emulations. > >I had a drum machine for about three years before I had regular access to >a >drum kit- in six months, I was twice as good at the real thing than on >the >machine (except for the timing thing- oops!). Well, "except for the timing thing" is kind of a crucial bit. After several years of drumming, I certainly couldn't come close to my drum machines ability to play 32-nd note fills at 144 bpm in a 13/8 song. Anyway, I'm not really sure how this connects to the complaint about MIDI not being expressive enough--I'm not sure if you're being pro- or con-. However, seeing as I'm a chromosomally-imperfect individual, when has that ever stopped me from replying? Let's see if I can tie this in with the "I'm all looped-out" thread. I'm gonna get a tiny bit philosophical here, but I promise it won't be too hoity-toity. Where to start? It's about _the music_. The point of the whole show, the point of the technology, whether pro- or con-, is to make music. No, no, wait, let me step back just a little further. It's not good enough to say it's for music. Music is not just some abstract remote entity. Music is simply a human endeavor, so the right place to look is at the underlying motivations of the humans involved in the process. At this point, I could say lots of high-fallutin' things about the nature and purpose of art, but let's sidestep this with the simple assertion, "people make music because they enjoy the act". I admit this may not always be true, but I hope it is generally true. One of the nice things about this view is it ignores the distinction between deeply artistic art and pop culture production--e.g. "literature vs. romance novels", "Music-with-a-capital-M vs. top-40 music". Well, if you buy into the above claim, we can wrap up the whole anti-/pro- technology thing right quick: "Do whatever makes you happy, man[*]." But I'm not ready to wrap it up, so just ignore that reply. ([*] please forgive the sexism of this 60's slang) Is music particularly distinctive from other forms of artistic endeavor? Probably not; or rather all of the non-verbal arts (music & visual art) are probably radically distinguishable from the others. Interestingly, though, music is still very different from visual art. For example, both music and books are basically linear; most visual art is not. Additionally, music is an "enforced" linear; the listener is forced to proceed apace, unlike books (although if you listen to spoken literature, this aspect of the experience will change). The most radical difference between the media used for music and those for other art forms lies in the very distinctiveness of the process of listening. (With this rambling assertion we begin our descent towards the actual content of this mail.) Can you imagine what it would be like to read a book if the letters were forced into your eyes no matter what you were looking at? If you could two books at once with no difficulty in seeing them (although presumably only being able to "focus" on one at a time)? (Really, really, we're descending towards the actual content... there's a cliff coming up right around this bend.) Music exploits one of our strangest sensory apparatuses. Our ears our wired up so that if two sounds occur at the same time, we can hear them both no problem. Add in a third and a fourth, and we are still fine. Compare this to visual art; while you can layer and blend between two images, the result is generally unparseable, and three or four makes it impossible. (There are alternative things you can do, using opaque splicing, not blending, but this is no longer very analogous, since it hides the overlapping portion, which prevents any analogy for this next bit [ooh, I'm foreshadowing].) Not only do we hear each of two sounds independently, we also hear them together, we hear them _harmonically_. Thus the nature of what music is stems rather strongly from the nature of what human hearing allows: a sequence of sounds over time, where value is derived from the choice of sequence (melody) and the overlapping of more than one sound at the same time (harmony). Note that for this definition I haven't distinguished between pitch and tone, both of which are important, although we normally use "melody" and "harmony" to refer to pitches not tones. Because the medium of "music" allows for layering (for multiple simultaneous sounds), it is natural to break apart the layers, and thus to think of most pieces of music as the "performance" of some number of instruments over a period of time. Now return to my original assertion about why people make music. Actually, ignore the assertion, just remember there's one or more artists behind the music. An artist wants to create music; in the end, music pops out. Let's define an "instrument" as a "thing which is used to achieve the above end". That is to say, forget the musical preconceptions about "instrument", and look at one of the core meanings: "a means whereby something is achieved, performed, or furthered" (from Webster on-line, http://www.m-w.com ). >From the point of view of a composer writing for an orchestra, the orchestra itself is a single vast multi-timbral instrument. Alternatively, it is a large collection of instruments. From the composer's point of view, her instruments are "performed" by the writing of the score, and what happens after that is somewhat outside her control. Of course, from the point of view of one of the orchestra musicians, things are very different (the details are left as an exercise for the reader). Similar results obtain for the members of a rock band performing pre-written music, although it gets a little hairier when they've written their own songs. Now, let's take the stereotypical person writing and recording music and playing all the instruments themselves. Their ability to play more than one instrument is mediated by some sort of multi-track recorder technology. If you think of the instrument as "everything between the performer's hands (mouth/feet/brainwaves) and the final product", then where a live guitarist's "instrument" is "guitar-cable-amp-FX-speaker", the above studio "composer"'s instrument might for example be "keyboard-FX/box-multitrack tape-mixdown FX". (And I'm not even factoring in 'warm consoles' and all that other stuff.) There's a slightly weird thing in the above--the performer, at the time of performance, only hears the first half of the chain, not hearing the effects of multitrack tape or the mixdown FX. Thus, many people typically pursue the goal of making their multitracks make as small a change to the sound as possible. On the other hand, the use of postprocessing (especially during the mix) is rather strange. Obviously one can view the person doing the mixdown as a performer; the _practicality_ of adding effects during mixdown is clear. Yet I have trouble picturing it being done to classical orchestral music (especially the widely recommended compress-the-whole-thing-as-a-unit trick). But, then again, remember that the classical orchestral _composer_ has to live with having somebody _conduct_ the music in the end; it's not as odd as it sounds. So what's my point? My point is that pretty much anything is a viable instrument. Whether it be a miked acoustic guitar, a direct bass guitar, an electric guitar through an amp and a speaker and a microphone and an analog mixing board and a piece of tape, or even a MIDI guitar controller controlling a synthesizer--they're all different unique sounding instruments, yet with remarkably similar "human interfaces". To return for the briefest moment to the first question asked above: the act of playing the keyboard, and the act of playing the guitar, are both radically different. The natural vocabularies you might find on either of them are quite different. Andy Summers' dissing of technology is certainly right in one sense--the best way to sound like a harmonica player is to be a harmonica player. But that's merely a diss at all "replicative synthesis technology". There's little specific about keyboard vs. MIDI guitar there. Why do people diss MIDI guitarists who play a string pad, but not keyboardists? A keyboard controls nothing like a real string section. And it controls nothing like a xylophone either. Somebody who's grown up only hearing consonant harmony may find a tritone unacceptably jarring. Many of us, however, find a tritone to be a tasty and useful dissonance. Some of us even enjoy the distinctive sound of a tritone through a lot of distortion. As audiophiles (and I don't mean in the traditional sense), we've acculturated ourselves to a lot of things. And one of the things we're used to is the disctinctive vocabulary most instruments have. People have evolved ways to sound "good" on each instrument, and we know them quite well. But is this "good" really inherent, or simply acculturated? Musical equipment manufactures have gone to a fair amount of effort to create replicative synthesis sound sources-- because that's what they can sell. And when you play those from a controller without an ear towards the traditional vocabulary for the instrument it's supposedly replicating... it hardly sounds like that instrument. To which I say: so what? The new instrument is: MIDI guitar controller-MIDI cable-cheesy organ sound-multitrack Ideally, like all instruments, this one may have a particular vocabulary that will sound the best. And it won't necessarily be the same vocabulary that would be appropriate for a real cheesy organ, nor that which would be appropriate to a plain guitar. But what's _wrong_ with simply playing straight guitar vocabulary into this instrument? People don't complain much about the fact that the vocabulary doesn't change when a chorus pedal is added to an electric guitar "instrument". And everybody lives with unknown-at-performance-time post-processing. You can picture this scenario as being "I record an electric guitar, and at post processing we use the magic effect box that turns it into a cheesy organ sound". Now, _you_ may think it sounds bad. But the musician doesn't. At least, hopefully, the musician is _enjoying_ the process, and really, that's an important step. Whew... anyway, my point is that I see any and all technology as valid. All instruments are just an extension of expression for the performer. If somebody sits down and strums an open chord on a guitar with a piano patch _and finds a musical use for it_, or shreds like Yngwie through a xylophone patch _and finds a musical use for it_, great! And you know what? Unlike industry pundits, or Andy Summers or Robert Fripp, I bet there _are_ musical uses for those performances. I certainly agree with all those people that it makes sense to find the "natural vocabulary" for these new instruments, on one level; and yet I don't hear people saying this about keyboardists. Is this because keyboardists don't suffer from this syndrome? Or is it because the guitar vocabulary is so idiosyncratic? Wow, this has gone way too long. I wanted to turn this discussion back to looping, because the looper as an instrument (or really, the, say, guitar+looper+vortex+speaker as instrument) is quite interesting and different, since a looper inherently subsumes aspects of the multitrack. Remember how I said that since the human ear naturally allows multiple sounds to be heard at once, it makes sense to break down a given bit of music into several separate "instruments"... the looper is neat because of the way it interferes with this breakdown. But I guess I'll leave y'all to think about this issue yourselves. Sean