Originally Posted by Dom

What discounts or at least detracts credibility from a computer being an instrument is the fact that in it's not you playing the notes as and when you want to play them, it's you giving the computer a schedule of when to play what note. What I mean by this is that, say on guitar you wanted to play a song, you'd have to play the right notes in the right way at the right time. On a computer you tell the computer what notes to play and then rearrange what time it plays the notes. You couldn't "play" a computer live in that way. This is talking about sequencing, rather than if by "computer" you mean more loosely, such as a synth pad or something