Why would I want my music to sound like I made it 30 years ago?

Da un’intervista a DJ Stingray

“We’re in the 21st century, why would I want my music to sound like I made it 30 years ago, what sense does that make? I like using effects. Say I’ve got 32 inputs in my digital workstation, if I have enough RAM then I can put up to eight effects on every single channel. Each of these effects I can automate, I can manipulate their parameters down to micro units. It’s only limited by your imagination, the power there is phenomenal.”

“Don’t recreate Kraftwerk,” he continues. “That’s what the future sounded like 30 years ago. You wanna recreate that energy, recreate that same awe and fascination as when they first heard that music. You should be pushing for new sounds with each and every release.”

Published on July 31, 2017 12:37.
Filed under: Idee, Musicisti, Sound Tags: ,

Rough and direct live sets are more enjoyable

There is an interesting difference between the computer music presenter and a live act. While the centered tape operator has perfect conditions for creating the best possible sound, for presenting a finished work in the most brilliant way (which might occasionally even include virtuoso mixing desk science rather than static adjustment to match room acoustics), the live act has to fight with situations which are far from perfect and at the same time is expected to be more lively. Given these conditions, it is no wonder that generally rough and direct live sets are more enjoyable, while the attempt to reproduce complex studio works on a stage seem more likely to fail.

A rough sounding performance simply seems to match so much more the visual information we get when watching a guy behind a laptop. Even if we have no clue about their work, there is a vague idea of how much complexity a single person can handle. The more the actions result in an effect like a screaming lead guitar, the more we feel that it is live. If we experience more detail and perfection we most likely will suspect we are listening to pre-prepared music. And most of the time we are right with this assumption.

From “Live Performance in the Age of Supercomputing” by Robert Henke

Published on July 28, 2017 00:31.
Filed under: Acustica, Idee, Musicisti, Sound Tags: , , ,

How not to do music

I spent endless hours on things like this. I learned in detail how not to do music. It was the same trap most people still fall into: focussing on irrelevant detail. Cutting one thousand snare samples, then thinking about how to name these, creating semantics that allow you to find something again quickly….a year passes just on building a sample collection and not one song gets done.

Mike Daliot, from “Presets. Digital Shortcuts to Sound” by Stefan Goldmann

Published on July 25, 2017 18:03.
Filed under: Idee, Musicisti, Samples Tags: , ,