General Music Chat

Guys, I am not arguing with you. I am simply revealing the other side.
Many out there might not know how close what I'm talking about is.
It's here right now in its infantcy. It will grow and because it is cheaper
it will be used to save money in every venue.

Just being informative.

THEATER: Will technology replace musicians?
Posted by Anthony Del Valle, Theater Critic
Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2010 at 01:50 PM
That old music issue is raising its head again.
Periodically, I've written columns about the sad lack of orchestras for local musicals. Who wants to see a live musical with dead music? Some theater directors have written me about how impossible the costs of musicians are --- while meanwhile, actors, directors, designers, etc. do not get paid, except perhaps a stipened.
Here's an interesting letter from a local musician whom I have frequently seen working around town. He asked that I not include his name:

I am a local musician who bites at every chance to play music, what ever format: musical theater, orchestral, bands, even teaching. In recent years, requests for my playing have dwindled down considerably where I am now lucky to play once per year for a gratuity; occasionally, for free. I really don’t mind doing a freebie every now and again, because I use the excuse of trying to keep my
chops up. Musical theater gigs used to happen two or three times a year. But now, I am not getting any calls whatsoever.
MTI has introduced a product called OrchEXTRA that was originally meant to enhance an orchestra by filling in a part or section, so they claimed. But I have seen this awful sounding synthesized arrangement being used in place of entire orchestras. I have also seen it fail several times, and as an audio engineer, I can't stand the audio quality or the performance of the parts. The synth sounds they use
sound dated and lack the true feeling of a live musician. Audio engineers I speak with hate using this product because when it fails, it is out for a couple of days until a replacement can come from NY.
Also, the audio board operator has to become the musical director and blend the parts into a workable score. And finally, they, and the button pusher, cannot scan through a piece when a singer jumps a verse or part of a score. In recent years, I have lost several jobs to this product. The companies claim that they just can't afford an orchestra. I also get reports from actors and singers that say it makes them extremely nervous when they have to sing to orchExtra.
I know that if you got caught using pre-recorded music from a tape or CD, you would not only be fined, but black listed by musical theater publishers, and the musicians union. Today, the shake down is that production companies cannot afford a live orchestra, but for a reasonable fee, several thousands of dollars, you can use this pre-recorded midi score offered by the same company that made it illegal to use pre-recorded music in the first place. I call that racketeering.
On a new note, there is now another predator of living breathing music out there called MTpit. This is a company based in Utah that actually records the music for musical theater with overdubbed strings, percussion, winds, etc. This company sends out a CF player, locked down, with the edited music recorded inside, specifically for the clients' performance with cuts, repeats and other vamps. Users are not allowed to copy the audio or tamper with the player under contract agreement. The user also has to send a request to MTpit for any other changes, and for an additional cost. This is one step away from canned music, but I don't necessarily dislike the product. It is recorded with real musicians, doesn't crash nearly as much as OrchExtra, and doesn't cost half the price of OrchExtra. Their slogan is that you are actually hiring an orchestra -- MTpit -- to play the show. How nice, but what I really dislike is the testimonials praising the product, mostly by high school theaters and school musical directors.

This product is destroying the music programs in schools, in place of canned music. What kind of education is that? I think parents and school administrations should insist that band and orchestra director do their jobs and provide living breathing students to play for their own theater. The musical directors in these schools should be fired if they insist on using MTpit in place of their own students. If they cannot teach the students in real life situations, they are simply failing teachers and should get out.
I am not only concerned about my future as a musician, but for all musicians that play music for theater, as well as high school musical theater which is also under attack with products like OrchExtra and MTpit. A loss of education; how sad. Learning how to play percussion for the past 33 years, I had noticed that pit orchestras never got the respect of a concert orchestra or concert band. But eliminating live music at theatrical events, community theater and school performances, will be the death of live theatrical music. Will OrchEXTRA replace the singers next? I have a bad feeling about that. Will MTpit replace the band for David Letterman soon? I think that may be the next step. Will we no longer see proficient musicians in the near future? If things keep going the way they are, that is highly probable.
I want to preserve this great American art form.
Please join our facebook page supporting this cause.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=1 ... 990&ref=ts

nothing today even come close to that era.

First song. Have to sit through a commercial. But the whole concert is there.
The whole show has the NASTIEST (in an awesome way ) guitar sound EVER. Songs, musicianship etc is crazy good. Doesn't hurt that John Paul Jones from your fav era is on bass!

http://video.pbs.org/video/1397479116

I think that's a Small Stone effect on the guitars, Grohl pounds the crap out of those drums.

KLUGMO, I'm sure it's nothing more than a Milli Vanilli moment and will pass like these things always do. Live music will always be the biggest draw.

Neanderpaul, good stuff! Here's another one of my favorites.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flcF4vNa61U

^ Epic. Chills make my scalp crawl.


WAIT! Is this gentry typing? !!

I think that's a Small Stone effect on the guitars, Grohl pounds the crap out of those drums.

I have heard and played with many small stones. Just a phase shifter. I've never heard a guitar sound that angry. Like an animal in a trap. Maybe small stone and a unique distortion pedal combined might get that but I've never heard that sound. Meh, you're probably right.

" Is this gentry typing?" Daaaaaammmitt Neanderpaul! Can't a person sneak in incognito and bug people anymore?

You will not hear what you don't want to hear. It is not a moment to pass. There is a clear market for it and Unions will only delay it. It probably wont effect the local bar band for quite a while but the bigger the venue the bigger the savings. Hell, Madona and Britney shows are just like Broadway shows. Those are the ones that have big incentives to use it I think.
Imagine the savings not having to haul a big ass band and gear all over the world. Another negative for musicians is the loss of high end jobs
to evolve into because only the elite players and those well conected
will retain them. Many background singers have already been replaced
with harminizers. Now that is a money saving trend.

Making the Virtual Orchestra a Reality
By Gary Schmidgall

When the fiery clash between Broadway producers and musicians was resolved after a short strike in March, David B. Smith, chair of the program in Entertainment Technology at New York City College of Technology, was delighted. “All this rancor was not good for Broadway, and I think the agreement ended up in a fair place.”




David Smith working with students
City Tech’s resident sound wizard had a keen professional interest in the Broadway cliffhanger, however. When Smith is not focusing on his campus duties, his thoughts are apt to float through the looking-glass into the astonishing sound world of the “virtual orchestra”— a terrain populated by MIDI files, DML’s, “patches,” and TAP edits. In especially dreamy moments, Smith—who earned a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition and electronic music from the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music—will sometimes peer into the future and see million-point Fast Fourier Transform convolution and performance spaces boasting a thousand speakers.

Welcome to the leading edge of virtual orchestral sound design, to which Smith has devoted his professional attention for 15 years—virtually, as it were, from the birth of the field in the late 1980s. His interest in computer-generated music began in the heyday of Switched on Bach and the Moog synthesizer (that is, Professor Moog of Queens College), when he was well along in a 15-year stretch of violin studies.




The Sinfonia “box”
In 1999, Smith and Fred Bianchi, a digital music colleague from his Conservatory years, decided to put their expertise to the commercial test and formed the Midtown Manhattan firm Realtime Music Solutions. (Bianchi is director of Music Technology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.) Their company was involved in the producers’ Plan B, in case a lengthy musicians’ strike threatened to silence Broadway. “We rehearsed our virtual orchestra with two shows, Les Misérables and Thoroughly Modern Millie, with full casts,” Smith says. “Rehearsals went well, and the producers were happy.”

But Smith was well aware of the dangers of making a debut with his new technology—trademarked Sinfonia—in such a volatile situation. “Neither the Broadway producers nor I want to replace a whole live orchestra with a virtual one. Broad-way is Broadway, the top of the art form, and it will always require human musicians in the pit,” Smith says. He did not want to become a “screaming focal point” of anti-sound enhancement demonizers.

Many with sharp ears have considered Broadway sound a disaster for years. Indeed, Smith considers his new and always-being-refined Sinfonia as a form of disaster relief from various old-fashioned sound enhancers that are commonly used in Broadway pits. “Our main focus is not to replace live musicians but to replace enhancement solutions that straitjacket a musical performance.”

The unmusicianly villains—unmusicianly because unresponsive to a conductor’s control—that Smith has in mind are synthesizers, sequencers (computers that control synthesizers—think player piano), click tracks (prerecorded parts that unfold at a given metronomic pace—think canned music), not to mention behind-the-curve sound retrieval and amplification systems.

Unbeknownst to New Yorkers, Realtime’s hardware-filled “boxes,” about the size of a microwave oven, have been traveling around the nation for several years now with considerable success—and not a single serious mid-performance “crash.” Sinfonia units are currently augmenting small orchestras of between eight and twelve live players with virtual musicians in national tours of Seussical, The Music Man, Miss Saigon, and Cinderella. The Realtime library of shows is currently about 30, among them Annie, Ragtime, Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, and Into the Woods.

How does it all work? Once a score is captured, the individual instrumental parts are edited with a variety of “patches” that indicate how any given note or passage of notes will sound, based upon recordings made in Realtime’s studio by live musicians who have recorded every note in their instrument’s range in every possible manner of articulation.

As Smith, a violinist with 20 years of orchestral experience, explains, the refinement of nuance is considerable. “We have programmed more than 50 different ways to articulate a note on a violin—legato, pizzicato, short staccato, détaché, sforzando, to name a few. Our software, trademarked Sinfonia, allows us to make an initial choice from these for every violin note in a score. If the conductor asks for a change during rehearsals, we can create and/or edit a patch on the spot.”

The Sinfonia player—called, naturally, a Sinfonist—Smith likens to an associate conductor. He also has much editorial flexibility. For any given production or performance, it is easy to transpose songs, cut or rearrange their order, alter the sound volume, and, of course, mute the instrumental lines which are being played by live musicians.

The essence of Realtime’s technology, however, lies in a key labeled TAP. With each hit of the TAP key, the music moves at the assigned value (quarter, eighth, half, etc.), following the tempo of the performance. Sinfonia is able to follow the expressive nuances of the conductor and the stage action just like any other element of a live performance. Other keys at the disposal of the Sinfonist—who must of course be a trained musician with experience following a conductor—are CRUISE TAP (same as cruise control on the highway), A TEMPO, PAUSE (good for long fermatas when a final note is being belted), and VAMP (handy when a prop or set gets “hung up” and the performance is delayed).

Louis Crocco, a Sinfonist who has been on the road with Miss Saigon, considers himself as “live” a musician as any of his colleagues: “It is a musical instrument… It’s about timekeeping, listening to the other players, and watching the conductor. It’s not just plugging it in and turning it on.”

In 1997, Smith arrived at City Tech, whose Entertainment Technology program is the only one of its kind in the Northeast (its current 100 majors specializing in such specialties as sound, lighting, and scene construction, projection, and—recently added—show control). In spring 2000 his student sound engineers and designers were mounting the College’s first application of virtual orchestration in a major musical production, Evita, by the College’s TheatreWorks company.

Realtime’s goal is not a modest one. Smith says it is “to develop a perfect musical instrument for the 21st century,” and he is not shy about making the most of a quickly advancing state of the acoustic art. Music history, he points out, is on his side: “The 16th century was a ground-breaking era in Italian cabinetry, and violin makers like Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivari made brilliant use of the new technology. Likewise, 19th century advances in machine tooling made possible the rapid improvement of old-style, valveless brass instruments.”

In Smith’s view, the ideal is not an entirely ghostly orchestra. An accomplished live musician himself, he enjoys live performances—at Avery Fisher and Carnegie Hall—too much to want that. He wants to fill seats that would otherwise be empty. Finally, Smith hopes his perfect instrument of the 21st century will become popular among composers of the avantgarde. “Forget simulation! Use it to expand the musical palette.” Smith is showing the way, with more than 50 compositions for the theater to his credit. Just possibly because his wife is an operatic lyric soprano, he has also ventured into opera. One current project is a chamber opera titled Brecht at HUAC, about the German playwright’s virtuoso testimony before Congress amid the communist witch- hunting after WWII.

After mentioning that he has also been at work on a sequel to The Magic Flute, Smith laughs and ventures a very plausible hypothesis: “If Mozart were around today and heard about this new technology, I’d like to think he’d say, ‘Sounds great—let’s use it!’”




Class of 2003: Remarkable Students Enjoy Success

York Hails New President; Farewell at John Jay

Weathering the Budgetary Storm

Bronx Borough President on Education

The Virtual Orchestra, a Reality

Obstacles & Perseverance—Salk Keynoter

ING Direct Kids Funds 9/11 Family Scholarships

Novel Proteins and Other Inquiries

Guggenheims for Three Faculty

Teaching the Holocaust at Queensborough

$10M Donation at Brooklyn College

Athletes Capture 43 All-American Honors

City Tech Student Drapes Hussein Statue

Four Distinguished Profs Named

Chemists Rejoice Over New Spectrometer

A Film Festival and a Life Celebrated

The Food of Life—Italian Style

Poems of Praise from a “Baruch” Life

Lesbian & Gay Studies Center Enters 2nd Decade

NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein Speaks Out

Celebrating 500th Anniversary of Artist of the Erotic

I understand this issue in a coupla' ways. One, if it weren't for change none of us electrically charged guitar players would have foot switches, modelers, or computer enhanced sound that is record able. That said, sometimes,or even a lot of times these sounds are what they call Sterile. Too perfect. The human element is gone. If everyone thinks in their own element on this question,they may be able to draw their own conclusion on how much "digital Quality" they might want to use. The sexiest woman I have known have imperfections that I may think others may not be attracted. A scar, fat, abrasive attitude, wearing my he man sweatshirt when she's frisky. some of us I know, still have large hordes of vinyl because it is real, even with the cracks, pops and hisses. Those of us that grew through those times savor them. My son, a computer whiz, is wanting me to get off line so he can download free music...Sterile music. Any one out there ever heard of Percy Faith. The generation before me has.

No, I hear what your saying but your using musical theater in this case to prove your point. I'm saying as a whole it will not happen to music in general for the same reason people won't pay to go to the symphony and stare at a wall while listening to classical electronica in the background. The same people will buy real classical music CD's performed by real artists over the same music created through electronica by far. It's the reason people also pay extra to go to live shows as opposed to just listening to the artist on CD or watching a DVD. There is more to music than that.

My point is that everyone musically inclined needs to find their boundary. How much automation they're going to accept. Fate and the buying public will decide who's successful, and who's not!

My point is that everyone musically inclined needs to find their boundary. How much automation they're going to accept. Fate and the buying public will decide who's successful, and who's not!

Yep, I am really pissed about this, Bob Segar sold out! This would have been my last chance to see him I'm sure. damm Everything about this band is REAL!

I think you have to consider what different people consider success.

As for me Im just a part time weekend warrior that gets my yuck yuck rock star fantasy played out in some little club. I mean thats all I need, Im way past worrying about the industry as a whole. My band makes the money we have all four agreed too and at times a little more. Not enough to truelly make a living.

I remember in the late 70s when disco took over live music venues.

I remember Karaoke coming in and displacing live music.

The technology today is just awesome. I mean you can youtube yourself to millions of people. Occasionally someone from this gets a gig.

I think there will always be a crowd for live music, but yeah its changing. As someone said on this thread synths came in and took over for a while. But I feel that there will always be some guys in a garage bashing out 3 chord rock n roll who somehow some way cut thru it all and give people that live adrenaline rush that only comes from hearing it done live.

You mention success, we see bands getting 100-200 dollars far a ticket to a live event. Primus is coming to Memphis to a smaller venue and the ticket is $80.

Exposure is so high these days, just look at American Idol, I know a dirty word on this site, but when in history have people had the chance of touching millions of viewers on a weekly basis. In the 60s you had what a couple of shows that had live music, Ed Sullivan and maybe the Tonight Show, in the 70s we had Don Kirshners Rock Concert, and the Midnite Special, I remember staying up til 1 am to see Kiss, or Aerosmith, or Ted Nugent, then along comes MTV and the music world changed again.

You can cut and paste every article you can find about the demise of music, but it just really depends on what you call being successful. For some on here it may be jamming with thier buds on sat night and having a few beers, for others it may mean getting out like me and getting paid decent to play a few cover tunes, or there will still be full blown tours hitting the road for true working musicians.

The thing is any of us as musicians have to figure out how we fit in the pie. And use whatever tools we have available to sell our products, or our services. I mean this past weekend Im sure that 80% of the crowd that came to see my little band found out about our gig thru FB, just 2-3 yrs ago it was myspace. Who knows what it will be next month or year. You have to adapt to whatever is going on and compete with it, not whine and shy away from it. Its here, its now, you can either get on the bus or sit on bandmix and whine about it.

And crunchy I guess you think sending me some sort of pm is going to set me off, but hey man this aint my first rodeo or my last, So figure out WHATEVER works for you and pursue it.

Just get out there and do it, it aint gonna happen on here I can tell you that for a fact!

Good Luck

Yep, I am really pissed about this, Bob Segar sold out! This would have been my last chance to see him I'm sure. damm Everything about this band is REAL!

I saw Bob Seger on Belle Isle when I was 16. It was still the Bob Seger System back then. I also know one of his backup singers Shawn Murphy, I used to go watch her band back in the 80's.

These day usually comes with from the Valley girl with no answers any deeper than her eyes. Bob Seager, sorry you missed that one because from what I have heard, he is as great as he's ever been. Could be a great inspiration, if you need that sort of thing .I do. Nothin' but crickets out here. Success is measured only from those that have produced something and have tosee if their take makes them happy. peoples expectations should be different though. I didn't spend a lifetime crafting my musical prowess. I could be happy with a regular jam that exudes and oozes of fun like Arrowsmith in the early days doin' Mamma Kin.