PROGRAMMING / SEQUENCING - are thet really music making?
 

Noticed in another thread about what instruments folk played that a few said "Sequencing" or "Programming".

To me that's not playing an instrument, or making music, it's something a mentally-challenged chimp could do, there's no soul or feel involved, and all the patterns are generally set in stone once done

Thought I'd stir the pot and see what those of us who play REAL instruments, and strive every day to get better at what we do think.

I am a bass Player and I also do Programming. Unless you have a chimp with a degree from Harvard , programming is a bit difficult. Would I rather play bass? yes, but I wouldn't give up programming.

I dont see why anyone would rather sit down at a computer or whatever and digitally "assemble" music, which I would think is no fun at all, than play an instrument and make REAL music, and gain REAL musical talent, which is definitley fun. I play four intruments, and have been involved in REAL music for over eight years ( im only 14), and I would take the bassists and guitarists over the computer technitians anytime.

You can do thousands of thigs that are physically impossible, manipulate sound to an unheard of degree with almost unlimited flexibility, and all you're worried about is if its 'really music'?

I think your priorities are out of whack if the most important thing to you isn't the sound you're making. Try making a piece of music sound like The OCRemix Mario Paint Remix 'Intense color' on a 'real' instrument.

Then listen carefully to that piece of music and tell me its not well made.

And dont claim the 'remix' argument either. That remix is almost in a world of its own compared to the original.

Besides. Just because something is music doesnt mean it needs musicians. Many composers, for example Yoko Kanno, who is almost unnaturally talented, has composed many pieces of beautiful music while not playing a single instrument beyond her keyboard, and so have many others.

Hell, Joe Satriani wrote the song 'Midnight' on nothing but A blank stave. He didn't even have his guitar with him at the time. He had to learn to play that song AFTER it was finished.

I find most people who complain about electronic music isn't 'real' still wish it was the 70s and bands like Led Zeppelin were still around.

Bands like Led Zeppelin ARE still around. They're just filled with idiots or wrinkly old men who have nothing to add to the musical world whatsoever except old rehashes of things.

How is music made on a computer not real music? ._.

I personally don't have enough money for a drum set or a saxophone or the plethora of instruments I'm able to use while creating music on a computer. ._.

I only have an electric guitar and a keyboard for real.

I can use every instrument on computers, and it sounds real sop what's the problem?

It's perfectly playable with real instruments anyway.

the second you can add the emotion jimmy page can put into his guitar into a programming riff then its music... considering thats impossible... pushing buttons isnt makign music

i guess you should tell that to all great pianists... moron

I lol'd

Caster, you sound like the people who got pissed because Elvis shook his hips on stage.

:rofl:eh hehe....:banghead:

pianists can add emotion to thier music..

He was making a point about what you said about button pushing. Why can't someone on a computer 'inject emotion' into their songs by pushing buttons?

and yet... all they do is press buttons! they use these buttons to affect the volume, attack, decay, and pitch of the sound being generated... which makes the piano just another machine no different from a computer. similarly, on the computer, people change a sounds' properties and juxtapose it with other sounds to evoke emotion. and all without having to pretend yo momma just died

And anyhow, while I won't get into a debate over this, 'emotion' can be anything. Take Dream Theater. Most of you say their music is lifeless and alientating. To some people that represents an emotional state.

The emotions I generally associate with Dream Theatre-- mild annoyance, frustration, boredom....

I was just making the point that Slipknot represents the height of emotional expression for a lot of people.

okay fine... i dislike it and prefer when people do things thereselves... i dont think real music making can be learned in a class... it has to be experimental and whatnot... if we completely revert to programming wont it keep us to learn things such as finger tapping or natural harmonics?

i guess some could call it music making i just highly dislike it

I just thought I'd point out that I find it amusing that someone with an AC/DC avatar is talking about how music has to be experimental. :D

Don't worry, I know what you mean by 'experimental', but I don't see the link between programming/sequencing and music making being confined to a class... or how programming/sequencing can't be experimental.

Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, The Mars Volta, thousands of OCremix tracks, etc.


All of them make extensive use of the technologies you are espousing as emotionless and lifeless.

I will put this bluntly.




If you still think this, you have obviously not got a clue what you are talking about. If you spend enough time tweaking parameters that need tweaking, you can recreate any sound on earth and plenty that aren't without ever touching anything except a QWERTY layout and a mouse.

Its not like you're just sitting there pressing buttons and music comes out. Take a course in music technology and listen to some of the synthesised orchestral remixes on OCRemix and you will have a far better idea of how much musical knowledge it takes to synthesize a part above and beyond the generic synthesized beeps (And some of those are pretty damned complicated and require a thorough knowledge of waverforms filtering and modulation besides)


And all of that before you even take into account variations in instrument technique (overblow, palm muting, pinch harmonics) or any note placement.

......Wanting to smash their miserable boring heads in.....:yikes:

ALL BORING, EMOTIONLESS CRAP, All "Emporer's New Clothes music", if folks don't hold it in the highest regard, they're somehow inferior, incapable of understanding, - In truth, most folks see it for what it is, boring and soulless.

The folks who espose this rubbish are just sheep following other sheep who are getting rich and laughing about it.
Rap,modern R'n'B and "Dance music" are the same.

GET A GRIP - GET A LIFE!

Or maybe they're just fans who like the music?

I think you'll be hard pressed to claim that King Crimson is emotionless. But that's the typical attack on prog... if a few musicians are a wee bit more experimental and perhaps less restrained with their chops than your typical classic rock musicians, let's assume they're pretentious and dub them as emotionless sterile old men.

Nice to see the Luddites still alive & well.

If you are creating something original then yes -
there is a lot of talent in extracting samples also
besides - if someone is using their finger instead of a paintbrush when painting, they are still painting

Lemme guess, '96 is the year music died.

oh god

I hardly think my musical taste screams sheep or emporers new clothes. Besides that, I have an A level in music and will be working towards a degree in music and popular musics come september, along with my near decade of guitar playing.

So basically what I'm trying to say is: You fail at life now please let go of your idiotic misconceptions and appreciate the sounds made rather than the method of making them.

It doesn't matter to me how the sounds are created.

Musique concrète is one of my favorite forms of music. This experimental "music" goes back to the 40s (Pierre Schaeffer). It's made by manipulating magnetic tape, though this will probably seem more organic than the point-and-click method available to us on a desktop computer. Tape looping was also developed by these old-school composers of electronic music. Obviously, that was the precursor to modern-day sampling.

One of the most famous early Musique concrète composers was featured on Sgt. Pepper's cover. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died recently. Definitely someone I hope everyone here knows.

Technology can help or hinder, but you can't blame it for our shortcomings.

The 20th century has spawned a strange electro/acoustic musical phenomenon. "Virtual music" is a good term.

As soon as you amplify/mic something or record it, you are physically altering the waveforms produced by the musical source. Samples are a result of the further manipulation of sound sources.

two comments...

1 - anyone who tries to claim there is no skill involved in making electronic music because it's just a matter of pressing buttons has probably never tried to actually make a new sound in a synth beyond the default presets.

2 - SQUAREPUSHER

........

Yeah, but at least they played their instruments, and spurred on literally millons of others to do the same.

While I agree the computer can be an amazing tool, it's still soulless, emotionless and bland when used as an "Instrument", and probably always will be.

Ask any aspiring musician who their influences are, and I'll guarantee 98 - 99 % of them will be REAL musicians,who play REAL instruments, not "programmers" or "assemblers" .

I started this thread, being very tongue in cheek, to get some opinions and lively debate, but it seems you're not capable of making a case without resorting to personal insult of everything and everyone you don't agree with.
GROW UP!

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So going by your argument if I spend 5 minutes learning how to play a couple of chords that makes me more musically adept then Brian Eno.





























:laughing:

And what about music composed without the aid of any instrument at all OR a computer? Joe Satriani did that with midnight and had to learn to adapt to a completely new style of playing in order to record it.

Or music composed for instruments other than the composers? Yoko Kanno for example composes piece for everything from synths to orchestras, yet she plays the piano.

I'm not saying that playing an instrument isn't a worthwhile pursuit or skill, I'm saying that you are COMPLETELY missing the point of computer synthesis. The aim is NOT to reproduce sounds exactly, the aim is to make any sound possible given due care and attention. Although it can certainly be harnessed for such purpose, and programs such as Symphonic orchestra gold are, in listening tests, almost indistinguishable from the actual thing, a great advantage for those of us who want to add an extra facet to a song without having to hire a concert hall, mics, mixers, players, and then write the music on top of all that!

You treat sequenced music as if it all sounds like midi beeps and nes chips. It seems to me that rather than giving it a chance, you've let a presupposition completely dictate your attitude to something. Or, worse, you've let your original opinion on sequenced or synthesized sounds remain constant while the world has moved on and improved those technologies and invested more time and effort into them for any number of purposes.

In short, I think you're just being foolish and trying to treat music as if it should bend to your whims. Music has always evolved through technology, be it the movement from harpsichord to piano, nylon strings to steel, etc. None of that makes what came before any less valid but to dismiss a technology completely that is, with due time and effort, capable of reproducing ANY SOUND AUDIBLE TO THE HUMAN EAR, is lunacy in my opinion.

.....

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How can you measure 'feel' or emotion? Music is what conveys emotions, not the instruments used to make it.

I will say I think you've missed the point I was trying to put across, and also, in my opinion composers make music for the purpose of either their own or their audiences pleasure. To try and tell other works what to be and apply that opinion to the world at large, rather than your own enjoyment of said works, in my opinion is far beyond the remit of 'composer' or 'music lover' and more into the merit-netherworld of the 'critic'.


And also, I believe your first reply illustrates the validity of synths and sequencing far better than you intended. Yoko Kanno cannot play any traditional orchestral instrument, nor a saxophone, nor double bass nor guitar nor many other instruments.

Yet despite that she has used the resources available to produce a sound she and more importantly a wide and varied audience finds pleasing, emotive, and satisfying. Whether she wrote for a live orchestra, a la the Escaflowne soundtrack, an acoustic guitar and vocals, a la tracks like Fado or Kingfisher Girl, or whether she sequenced and synth'd, a la GitS, has no bearing on her worth as a composer and never will! The talent and creative vision to sit down and write that music is what we as music lovers admire and the means of producing that sound should never encroach upon our enjoyment of it. (Barring of course mass human sacrifice or other such atrocity, obviously.)

To expand upon that point somewhat, think of this: A physical instrument has limitations and nuances all its own. Progress is always made, like the discovery of artifical harmonics with distortion, or two handed tapping by EVH. The problem with applying this train of thought to a synthesizer is that its not 'there' in front of you. Its incredibly difficult to apply the progressive thought patterns that produced those innovations, to something you can only interact with through controls or codes. But the fact is that same scope of development is there to be utilized as a creative force by anyone with the patience or plain ingenuity to apply a new model of thought to it.

An example that comes to mind of a creative form, is one of a certain OCRemix track I forget the name of. The track in question is fully synth'd, but with a creative approach in much the same vein as the 'unconventional approaches' that brought us feedback from hendrix and clapton, or flange from EVH. The remixer had a synth program that allowed importing of any file as a synth sound simply by renaming the file extension. After hours of trying various files the remixer discovered that a majority of the time the output was useless noise, but that with particular files you could obtain a usable pitch. He then took an established piece of music, rearranged it, and spent a not inconsiderable amount of time choosing which 'synths' should take which parts in the music and tweaking them extensively to obtain the resulting track, a somewhat chaotic maelstrom of distrotion and whirling sounds that obtains a musical effect IMPOSSIBLE to obtain without the harnessing of that technology.

While I am first to admit that without due care, understanding and attention, a digital facsimile of any instrument, real or fake; will sound terrible, the fact remains that it is well within the realms of possibility for digital technology to render any sound or combination of sounds possible. Indeed, for the vast majority of purposes, it is or can already be done well enough that a listener in a casual context will not know the difference unless it is demonstrated.

Of course, technology marches on and the lust for perfection continues, so, given the skyrocketing advance of the technology since the samplers of the 80s, or computer generated beeps of the manchester baby in the 60's, its logical to say that we may never attain true perfection, but we'll certainly get close enough to it that only those with the most golden of ears (Or a projecting aural ailment similar in nature to munchausens syndrome) will be able to claim they can tell the difference.

You can always claim that the ideas of 'doing anything' are far too free and airy to be applied in any form of musical context, even if it IS possible (It is, technically)but then again, without things like serialism the world would have never embraced chromaticism, so the unpleasant beginnings can ALWAYS and normally DO lead to fantastic things and increase the variance in music, rather than leaving us stranded in some nostalgic netherworld of ridiculous preconceptions and fear of change.




I'll end this now, as, to quote Captain Jean Luc Picard: This is becoming a speech.


Edit: Actually, one last thing:

You said: Yes, it can produce any sound, as you say, but where's the feel and the emotion - that's the whole point.

The feel and emotion can always be put in place with due effort, technology, or just plain time. the human element of music is irreplaceable but NOT inimitable. However the human feeling is in reality just a different way of saying 'minor imperfections'. Things like accidental dynamics or playing ahead of the beat to set a certain groove. These aren't things laid down in the music score itself, but things introduced by the player themselves to give what is at least intended to be positive effect. However consider the nightmare recording session, where your technically fantastic full of human feeling drummer thinks the piece should have more viv and flair at a certain sections, whereas your fantastic human feeling flute player thinks it needs more tact and finesse.

Those are at odds with each other. Its detrimental, what if the piece was composed to be a dreary yet driving slog through misery? Then the players are BOTH giving a wrong input. With synth technology and a good enough understanding of how all hat works, you can take that possibility out of the equation. You can suddenly program a drummer and a flute player who are far more in sync with the actual intentions of the composer than any real musician could EVER be. We're a long way off from something that complex at the moment (unless someone wants to spend about a year solid tweaking midi parameters and foregoing all sunlight) but it is possible, and things like that are just an extension of current possibilities in the more sane realms of simple timbre and other suchlike.

God, that was long winded!
You've made a lot of valid points there which you'll be surprised I totally agree with!

The two handed tapping thing was done 10 years before EVH by Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, who openly admits it came from old bluesmen, some of which may have heard Pagannini - Nothing's truly new in music, only adapted and progressed.
Same thing with synths and programming, I guess - a follow on and progression of some things that went before.

Must admit I love playing Devil's Advocate and "stirring the pot", but that only works when someone else is truly passionate about a subject, which you, my friend, obviously are.
Just a shame more folks didn't join in to take the whole subject to a new dimension.

Well I was mostly using EVH as an example that was easy to identify with to be perfectly honest. I knew he wasnt the 'original' as it were, didnt know who it really was though. The thought did cross my mind as I was writing it, but explaining would have made an already long winded post even longer :laughing:

The more surprising thing is that every foray I've ever made into the black magic of synth and sequencing has been an utter failure because the programs are so much more complex than I can be bothered learning :laughing:

just a little guitar nerd tidbit.

EVH has stated in interviews that he got the two hand tapping idea from seeing jimmy page in concert - he obviously took it to his own ends though. there's also footage of hendrix fooling around in the studio during the recording of electric ladyland where you can clearly see him doing some slow two hand tapping. mostly just hitting the note 12 frets higher on the neck to get a nicer tone.

Brian Eno did consider himself a non-musician, but I think composition is as much a musical talent as knowing how to play an instrument. Besides, the boundary between Eno's electronic non-music and "real" music has nowadays been completely blurred and confused, even inverted.