Re: s using Pre-Recorded Loops Cheating?

["Matt Davignon" <mattdavignon@gmail.com>]

Hmmm, there are some fine lines and not so fine ones. 

Since the late 60's, the amount of craft that goes into recording an album has made many albums sound less and less like live performances. Attempts to match those production values have certainly made live shows more interesting, but I don't buy the idea that live performances should be loyal to the studio recordings by the same musicians, or even that all musicians should be expected to perform live. Here's my stance: 

Things that are OK: 
--Looping Live
--Triggering short samples of pre-recorded material
--Using a cd player as a sampler - pausing between short samples. 
--Feeding a musical phrase from a CD player into a looper
--Record scratching
--Looping musical phrases from records
--cueing up and playing short sections from a record player. 
--Setting up multiple cd players to play audio recordings unpredictably so the results are different each time. 
--Playing/looping a drum machine in real time.
--Having your drum machine play an extremely simple loop, where you add the fills by occasionally hitting snares or bass drums
--building drum machine loops in real-time using the drum machine's internal programmer.

Things that are not OK: 
--Using pre-recorded loops on a looper as background material
--Recording tracks of yourself and other musicians to a cd/computer/workstation, and using that recoding to be the backing song while you sing or solo over it. (At my venue we call this karaoke.)
--Playing long sections of records (over 30 seconds, for example) unaltered. 
--pre-programming a drum machine, sampler or keyboard to play the backing track from beginning to end with no help from you.
--Using an automated drum machine to replace a real drummer. 
--Using unaltered loops from any cd of "loops" (for example, the drum loop cd's that are sold for users of ACID).
--Referring to dj's who play somebody's song from beginning to end, then somebody else's song from beginning to end as "musicians". 

Why is the stuff that's not ok, not ok with me? 
1) In most cases, it tells me that the musician is not yet at a level where they're ready to put on live shows. I don't mean physical preparedness in that the musician hasn't bought enough stuff - I mean that the musician hasn't put much thought into what their fans would want to hear in a live performance. (See #2) 
2) When I go to a show, I want to hear the process of creating music. Backing tracks and drum machines are music that's already made. 
3) Backing tracks lack the dynamic of a musician who is reacting to the space they're in, and as such, they have a deflating effect to me. 
4) Way more often than not backing tracks are a distraction from the actual music-making that's happening on stage. Either they cover up shoddy live-music-making onstage, or they keep me from hearing good music-making. 
5) No matter how many bells and whistles you bring, your live performance in a club will never sound as good as your cd does on my home stereo. If I want to hear the cd, I'll listen to the cd. 
6) Live performances are a chance to provide a different perspective of yourself as a musician. Either you can prove that you *can* play all that stuff live, or you prove that you're creative enough to reinterpret the songs with the materials you have at hand. Personally, I think the latter makes for a more interesting performance.

I'll close by saying that I don't think there should be a requirement for all musicians to play live shows. 

Matt Davignon