General Music Chat

Old argument - no longer anything to worry about. Ppl have done it, & will continue to do so.

Who cares?

If you use it & like it, I say go for it. I've done some of it, myself, & I feel no shame.

Huh?

However I do agree in essence but why do composers know so much about music?

Yea ... a real composer knows a lot about music, it's like math in it basic form, but couldn't play an instrument in a live setting if his/her life depended on it, 2 different skill sets.

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Craig Maxim is right.

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Thanks Sans. LIVE looping is when everything is played live, repeated, and overdubbed. In my mind that is where credibility lies. If you are hitting triggers to play back what you recorded at home it is not credible. Again that is in my mind. Everybody has their own ideas on it.

Midi is just an interface. There's no such thing as 'midi music".

What there is: sounds created with some really poor samples.

It doesn't matter if you, or a computer program, are triggering the samples through midi. The end result is that someone hears the sample. They don't "hear" the midi. They can't. No one can hear an electron.

I honestly couldn't have said it any better, so I'm just quoting CF!

(I will add that I've exploited MIDI tecnology in the early 90's to my advantage and made some honest money and decent live music with it. It definitely didn't diminish my desire on ability to jam with other flesh and blood musicians.)

Thanks RhythmMan!

And when I was mentioning "looping", hopefully everyone knows I was referring to people who use tracks by OTHERS but did not play themselves, like is available in various software, which often include hundreds if not thousands of loops made by other musicians. Live looping is a different matter of course, because the musician (Like Neanderpaul) is actually playing his guitar, bass, etc... into the hardware, which then merely repeats what the musician played.

But composers, musicians, arrangers, etc... all these require certain skill sets and help to create "music". But it does a disservice to a musician, who has worked at his craft, to be compared with someone who drops other people's tracks into a timeline on a computer screen with a few mouse clicks. To call the latter, a musician, is an insult to real musicians.

He is a composer, or arranger of MUSIC, but not a musician, if that is all he does.

And so what have we learned?

Language is a precision tool.

Thanks RhythmMan!

And when I was mentioning "looping", hopefully everyone knows I was referring to people who use tracks by OTHERS but did not play themselves, like is available in various software, which often include hundreds if not thousands of loops made by other musicians. Live looping is a different matter of course, because the musician (Like Neanderpaul) is actually playing his guitar, bass, etc... into the hardware, which then merely repeats what the musician played.

But composers, musicians, arrangers, etc... all these require certain skill sets and help to create "music". But it does a disservice to a musician, who has worked at his craft, to be compared with someone who drops other people's tracks into a timeline on a computer screen with a few mouse clicks. To call the latter, a musician, is an insult to real musicians.

He is a composer, or arranger of MUSIC, but not a musician, if that is all he does.

as long as you take it past where you found it... I don't care what you did to get there.

if you literally toss down two pre-made tracks -that's one thing... and it's easy for folks to see right thru that.

IM humble O it's just that the instrument has changed. now the instrument has become something that allows folks to compose w/o having to spend time mastering an instrument... or even learning about music. perhaps one can now compose w only the ability to tap their fingers and listen to that voice in their head.

after all - is it really the physical jumping jacks that make the music music... or is it the sound that comes out? the language of music is something that's man made - it only exists for the purpose of getting the music out of the mind.

perhaps these new abilities to record allow folks to commute that inner voice w/o the physical dimension getting in the way.

the instrument is now accessible to everyone... eventually we will be able to record what we think in our minds.. and folks will complain that 'they had to actually hit the buttons'... and the mind composers aren't real musicians...

in the end... you will hear the difference in a 'mind recording' that took effort vs someone who recorded the first thing that popped into their head.

That use of the premade tracks, SKH, panders to the average Joe & inflates his mindset until he thinks that he, to is an artist. There is work to be done to create. If you're gonna be a wood-carver, you learn how to carve wood. Same goes for music, I don't care how much ppl would like to dumb it down. The artist learns his craft. The hack throws sh*t together & calls it art.

Like I've said before - if you're gonna write a novel, would it okay to just swipe sentences out of other ppl's books, string them together & call it a "new work?" This just shows that the "new author" cannot turn a phrase on his own, or create what he is trying to create.

That use of the premade tracks, SKH, panders to the average Joe & inflates his mindset until he thinks that he, to is an artist. There is work to be done to create. If you're gonna be a wood-carver, you learn how to carve wood. Same goes for music, I don't care how much ppl would like to dumb it down. The artist learns his craft. The hack throws sh*t together & calls it art.

Like I've said before - if you're gonna write a novel, would it okay to just swipe sentences out of other ppl's books, string them together & call it a "new work?" This just shows that the "new author" cannot turn a phrase on his own, or create what he is trying to create.

THERE ARE NO NEW STORIES... ONLY NEW WAYS TO TELL THEM. perhaps a bad analogy.

How much practice did bethoven have when he wrote his first work - keeping in mind that he was 8 years old? I believe it was his ability to tap into the divine that made him great... not his wood-shedding.

I think the core thing here is "original creativity".

Creativity takes different forms. But the way I see it, and I think the way many of you see it as well, is that there is a difference between "original creativity" and the other types of creativity.

A person (or group of people) who writes something from scratch are performing an act of original creativity. They are painting on a blank canvass.

But a person who samples the works of others and blends it into a different representation of those collective works, they may be doing something creative, yet it lacks the originality of the first authors. And I think many of us see that as a lesser act of creativity.

In our culture we value originality. And I think part of that is because those of us who are doing or have done original creative work - we know how difficult it is and how personal it can be and how much work and heart and soul we put into it. And people who aren't doing that, some of them have attempted it, and they know how difficult it is as well. And people know that there's a lesser effort required to simply grab the works of others and smash 'em up into something else.

We are a society that values effort. And original creative work takes more effort.

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Remember when you were elemenary school, & you got to cut & paste pictures out of magazines to make a collage? Did that make you a photographer? An Artist? I think not. Perhaps a sort of "graphics artist," at best, but what you did there, while it used a minimal amount of creativity, the result could not be considered an original work of art. It's merely a compilation of the leg work of others.

Creating something that's influenced by others is one thing, but compiling recorded samples is a form of plagiarism, if you should dare to call it your own work. It's certainly nothing to be proud of.

Beethoven may very well have written new stuff at age 8, Mike. I did, too, though it was rather derivative. He did NOT swipe bars of other ppl's music, paste them together & call them his own work. That's what these new upstarts would do, but they take it even one step farther in that they don't even play the stolen material...they simply cut & paste sampled recordings. Rather low, imho, & in no way can it either be considered "art" or "original." You may as well call the kid doing the Guitar Hero game a guitarist, or even a musician, even though he's never held a real instrument in his life.RIDICULOUS!