Not to stir the pot,
stir please, what else are email discussion lists for?
That being a lot of my favorite Detroit and Chicago tracks were made
in a certain way that I think made them more exciting. Specifically,
it's setting up a bunch of gear and recording it live to two track,
with one or more people working the gear. Drexciya did it that way,
as did all the early Chicago house heads. A lot of the classic UR
tracks were recorded mostly live.
that's inspiring and exciting. not even to multitrack huh? well i
guess they didn't have the money to "record twice" as it were
(recording and then mixing) and they came from a different head (DJ
culture, mix it live). kinda reminds me about when old timers talk
about benny goodman and his orchestra all standing around one
microphone. you can still make great recordings like that too.
In order to work that way, those artists had to be as good at running
a drum machine, synths, effects and a mixing board. They had to have
a definite idea of the sound they wanted. They had to know how to
play, and to embrace and roll with happy accidents.
there are a lot of skills one has to have to make *good* laptop-based
music as well. people on lists like this forget or never heard all
the musical travesties made with the same gear.
with the glow of hindsight, 80s gear and its results have been
romanticized out of proportion. there were loads of analog synths,
drum machines, tube amps, and recorders that were just awful. true,
there was some excellent gear made, but mostly it was gear that was
made famous by someone who took what they had and went with it.
their creativity, and subsequent success, is what people *really*
want - the gear is just an over-fetishized substitution. having said
that i do share some of the same fetish but won't be blinded by it.
I honestly think the same thing is possible with Laptops, but maybe we
haven't seen the Ron Hardy or Derrick May of the laptop yet. But it's
silly to argue that computers, in and of themselves, are the problem.
agreed. a big problem when switching over to computer, just like
from analog to digital, is that the rules change.
the issue is similar to what gareth jones said in an interview about
recording with daniel miller and depeche mode: new music goes
through a formica stage. some the first analog synths were used to
put out things like "switched on bach" where synths tried to mimic
and replace each instrument in a classical orchestra. cute, but why
bother? it's not an orchestra so don't try because it will fail
misreably and sound cheesy (unless that's what you're going for). a
convincing trompe l'oeil (or l'oreille in this case) is hard to do
and only works in a controlled environment, which music is not often
experienced in.
moving from analog to digital we had the same issue, and now again
from hardware/sequencer/recorder-based technology to the laptop
environment. the tendency is to mimic what's gone before. there is
a good deal of laptop music that does not try to be other than what
it is, or explores those boundaries rather than trying to make the
laptop be a replacement for something else.
analog modelers are pretty amazing, but i'm sorry they're not the
same. even the ones that are "exactly the same except without the
unpredicatability and the noise" - well, hell, unpredictability and
noise are HUGE factors in music.
certain plugins go a long way toward warming and fattening up music -
but if whatever it's affecting just isn't there in the first place,
it's not going to be the same. in recorded sound, the most important
element is the source, followed by the initial capturing of that
source, and then by whatever you do to it afterward, and finally in
the playback. there are some people who turn this on its ear,
warping the most incredible things out of something very mundane.
but they still started with the original characteristics, which in
turn affected the building blocks of their sound.
again, having said this, i enjoy some music made on laptops very
much, some of it even doing a decent replicating job i sort of spoke
against. whatever works.
every tool you use has its own characteristics, strengths and
weaknesses. do and use whatever makes sense to you.
d.
