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Looper's Delight
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>>I think you misjudge some of the modern
equipment. On it's surface it seems all instant gratification but if
you dig to the next layer there can be a wealth of tweaking at your
fingertips. The Roland MC-307 had a step sequencer that let you change
up your beat on the fly, and when I replaced it with an E-MU XL-7 I
upped the ability to tweak on the fly 10X. Anyway, I'm all about the
good old days, but there are amazing tools still being put out today.<<
but there it is: "if you dig to the next layer..."
you've got "oh just use the library sound" on one side, because editing is such a pain- like painting your hallway through the letterbox, as one musician friend put it.
and on the other side you've got people like me who want to edit the sounds while they're playing. whatever the module costs, there's going to be a lump extra for a midi controller that can get at the stuff hidden away in the menus, and then only if the box supports such remote twiddling.
see, my idea of gratification is to create original textures and sounds, where someone else's idea of it is to combine established tones in new ways. both are valid, and anything in between, but the latter is too much of using your eyes and ears instead of your imagination for me.
and to achieve this gratification, I'd like a good solid hardware interface in order that, traditionalist that I am, the musician can interface with the instrument as god intended, with musicianly body parts and not some poxy little lcd window or (worse) a damn windows-box.
you want to be able to alter timbres while you're playing- onstage, even. (I've tried this) poking around in a 16x2 backlit requires laserium and dry ice as a distraction if you're going to get away with it.
does that make me a bad person?
when you complain to the manufacturer, they point to examples of companies that went bust because the front panel had too many knobs on it. and that, sadly, is where my own instant gratification went, along with moog, SCI and latronic (makers of the notron). it's a good job I bought some of this old stuff anyway and learned how to look after it
>>I'm not sure I agree about the whole instant gratification thing. I
think that our culture has too deep of a division between musician and
everyone else. Too many teachers begin giving students dry drills.
Turns them off to music forever... or at least to the idea of being a
musician. A box that's got some instant fun involved can spark a fun
aspect and get a student to move forward. Many, of course, will
realize it's not for them and drop it, but I think it's not necessarily
a bad thing all the time.<<
I sort of agree with you a bit, I think.
what I was getting at is that more people now find a creative outlet through music. it has been one of the easiest popular artforms to commoditise. success at it can and does bring rewards in terms of fame and fortune to a lucky few, and so it appeals more than, say, sculpture, to those people who intend to embark on an artistic career but can't decide which one.
it's become disposable, whatever level of the music industry you look at. modern musicians can expect a career lifespan shorter than most athletes.
there's a risk that the relative ease with which equipment (like the latest generation of grooveboxes and romplers) can produce recognisable textures, will fool people into thinking that this validates the results artistically aswell as technically.
a parallel trend for nicking whole chunks of other peoples' records and passing the results off as new is unfortunate in that while it's not creatively barren (far from it), it has this stigma, because of a few people and their uncleared samples.
(there's the usual crowd of snobs here where I work- sample spotters- "oh, I've got the original of that on vinyl." "I know where that sample's from" &c&c. well, why didn't /you/ reacquaint the world with it then, smartarse? you might have got to number one..... they're like the folks back in the 70s who told me that synthesizers played themselves if you just switched them on. well, here's a synthesizer- off you go!)
don't get me wrong, then- I'm all for the empowerment of whatever creative muscle people might have left that's not been atrophied by mass-marketing hysteria and ennui. anything to get them up off their arses and away from the telly.
but those of us who want to try that little bit harder are up against it with some of the bigger manufacturers and media conglomerates, both in making what we make and in shifting it out to an audience. that's why the folks on this list have ended up using such specialised tools, some or all of which were made in short runs and are now pretty much unsupported. the irony is that a suitably equipped magpie turntable jockey would have had a ball with a repeater. if only the thing had been shaped like a technics 1200....
duncan.
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