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Musical Machines Gain Recognition
vena writes "CNN has an insightful article on the increased role of computers in the production of music. While Musikmesse, the world's largest musical instrument show, rapidly increases their support of the computer as a musical instrument, there are still limitations to the power and ability of software synthesizers. However, the ability of a computer to make the everyman a musician could herald a coming age of increased play and experimentation in music. Software such as Reason by Propellerheads Software brings unprecidented power to the hobby musician, and the presence of laptops as part of a live band's performance is becoming commonplace. The days of playing to your sequences off a DAT tape may be numbered, as musicians gain more control of their digital music in a live setting with the aid of new, powerful software and portable computers."
I have used computer based composing and synthesizing quite a bit, I have also listened to quite a bit. Sure, some guy might have a $14000 setup, but that doesn't mean he has any talent. There are mountains of bad techno/trance out there. Perhaps we should concentrate on developing sources for talent, instead of synthisizers. I have a crappy 2000 dollar system with an iMac, and its all I need to do techno, classical, jazz, and even some alternative stuff.
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I've yet to hear a synthesis of that one brass instrument that sounded anything like the real thing.
Even the best of digital pianos doesn't sound/feel nearly as close to the Real Thing as I'd like. There will always be a place for real instruments.
But increasingly, the music you listen to includes more and more electronic elements. Being able to do this stuff on your laptop in Cubase means you don't have to cart around racks of synth equipment like you used to. The days of seeing a guy "jamming" on a synth are coming to a close. Instead you'll see more band members tweaking their laptops. You probably already have.
Why is this cool? It means the barriers to entry for making music are coming down. When the tools get good enough and easy enough, the potential pool of people making innovative music opens wide up.
I listen to a lot of IDM (experimental electronic music) so I'm pretty used to seeing "bands" consisting of a guy and his Kaos Pad, but it takes some getting used to at first.
- The days of playing sequences off a DAT are not numbered -- they're already long gone. Laptops have been used as sequencers to drive outboard MIDI gear for almost as long as there have been laptops (for me it started in 1992 with an Atari STacy). The new development, as mentioned in the CNN article, is using software synths (usually VSTi's) as live performance tools.
- I disagree that there are "limitations to the power and ability of software synthesizers". By example, I offer Absynth from Native Instruments. From the 68-stage envelopes(!) to the wave fractalization and spectral editing tools, this offers sound shaping tools that no hardware synth can compete with.
- Up until recently, you could argue that the latency problem with software synths kept them second-class citizens behind hardware boxes -- you'd hit a key and get your note a split-second later. This final limitation has been defeated with the advent of faster computers and cheap professional audio hardware. I use a 1.2 GHz computer and a $300 Emagic EMI audio interface, and my softsynth latency is about 2.5ms. Not perfect, but it actually beats some of my hardware synths. (Hit a fat chord with layered patches on an Emu Morpheus sometime and you'll see what I mean -- you get a flam, not a unison attack.) And when you play back sequenced software instruments, they're sample-accurate.
So the story is not laptops on stage, or computers making everyone a musician (if you can't write songs, the computer will not help you), but rather, software synths coming into their own as valid replacements for hardware on stage and in the studio.You can't forget the wonderful fruityloops program... http://www.fruityloops.com
Pretty fun vst and synth stuff.
If you think Reason isn't powerful, then you simply don't know how to use it very well.
Luckily for me, and plenty of other people who are actually working professionally as electronic music producers, Reason exists as a simple, highly configurable environment for sound design and composition. Furthermore, if you want to use it in conjunction with apps like Reaktor, just use the ReWire protocol to fly the audio and midi data into the sequencer of your choice (Cubase, Logic, Nuendo) and you can use the two side-by-side with sample accurate sync.
I love the "Reason is a toy" mentality. I really think that it's just GUI-prejudice - if an app or an environment looks to clean and is too easy to use, it must be junk.
No matter. My last 2 12"s and my upcoming full-length were all made primarily in Reason. The remixes that I've been doing with other people on my label have been greatly simplified by flying Reason files back and forth over the net, because plenty of them are using it as well.