apparently, the discussion has headed into a place that wasnt what i was getting at. while the sound of a totally digital track done in a computer is often times not what i want to hear, if done right it can be just fine.
the real problem i have isnt with the quality of the sound, but with the ability to edit the life out of the track. kent said it best here: "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. 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. And they had to be willing to roll tape and do it over and over until they got it right. And they were doing it before there was anyone telling them how to do it. They had to master an unwieldy, complicated instrument, and make it sing. And there was always that moments of excitement in the track that would be irretrievable if the DA30 ate the DAT." what begins to happen with computers is that all the mistakes and slipups and whatever else start to go away. you have "noiseless" analogue synth models, 24 bit 192k drum samples from a pro sample CD, the ability to compress the dynamics out of each individual sound and then compress any dynamics out of each frequency band on the master two track, the ability to go back and "fix" anything in the track at a later date with all samples and sequences and synth patches saved on the computer, etc. pretty much all the things that give a recording of electronic music LIFE are taken away. songs start to all sound like theyre clinical trials of sounds, like you should have to wear masks so as not to contaminate the ultra perfect ultra arranged track that the "artist" spent so much time decontaminating. and to me, that doesnt reflect on the experience of being in a club going to bananas. in fact, its the complete opposite! a club or a warehouse or pretty much any venue for dance music is a sweatbox with people rubbing up against each other, getting intoxicated (by chemicals or by the music) and acting in a very uncontrolled manner. like herbert said "let's all make mistakes"! but i do disagree with kent here: "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." some of the things that made hardy's edits sound so insane were their inaccuracies. theo parrish understood this and thats what he shoots for in his edits. and you can see from many peoples' reactions that in today's precise digital world, many people hate that. same with those early metroplex and transmat and KMS jams. those tape edits are never precise! it means you cant just throw those records on like a robot and line them up and have them play together forever (unless of course you want to add your warp markers in your laptop and do an ableton live "deejay" set which is as precise as the new tracks!) in unerring symphony. im just not interested in that kind of clinical perfection. i like to hear the mistakes, the screwups, the stuff that reminds you that this music is indeed made by PEOPLE who are trying to harness machines and not machines trying to sound "human" which is what all those silly plugins and whatnot are all about. its amusing to me that people make this computer music and then go back through it trying to make it not sound so flawless. its ridiculous. in honesty i do think that the use of computer is the problem way moreso than the people using it because i dont think that the people who want their music to sound alive would ever choose to use a computer in the first place. i know when im listening to a record, i dont care what it is made with. not only do i not care, but most likely i have absolutely no idea! i only look for that human part, the evidence that a soul poured its problems and elation and whatever else into that song. and i dont think its a coincidence that 99 times out of 100 those tracks just happen to not be made entirely on a computer. tom
