"kent williams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Honestly, what matters besides the actual compositions?
maybe i'm taking this one line too much out of context, but that
sounds like a frighteningly traditionalist rhetorical question.
in one sense i do agree, hence my bringing up that there's something
lacking in "the actual compositions". it should be about the "song".
it's true, there are too many bad songs out there with no
compositional ability or it's all basically cribbed from radio
formula...badly.
but there are plenty of forms of music, such as ambient and
experimental, where the composition is very, even entirely, dependent
on the sound. things that involve subtleties of tone and texture.
if those aren't accurately captured and reproduced, the piece just
sounds like a drone. even more traditional recorded music in which i
believe "that special something" is partially contained in the way it
was captured. does everybody care about this? probably not.
does this always mean "analog is better"? no. i've heard some mp3s
on myspace, that were recorded with a simple little mic straight into
the computer, and that type of lo-fi fits the songs. it's not the
same as if it were done to cassette, but it's the digital equivalent
in a sense, noisy but clear. in other cases, i've heard realaudio
samples of music and then been disappointed with the official release
because the awful bitrate actually make the tracks sound raw in a
good way. a good example of this was massive attack's "100th window".
I'm enough of
a studio rat to care about things are produced, but the actual method
that someone uses is irrelevant, except as it facilitates the result.
It's not like you can't make sh*t tracks with analog gear.
yeah agreed, i said this in a different part of what was originally a
longer post. so the bit below is out of context where i talked about
how bad some 80s analog stuff was (both gear and music).
I program computers for a living, and do the people who use my
software to outline the anatomical features of the brain and measure
their volume care whether I used a stack, a queue, or a linked list?
i think what you're saying is they basically want the result they
asked for, which you give them, and the means don't matter. in your
example it sounds like you're saying the resulting software is the
same no matter what, but what i'm saying is in the case of audio, it
isn't. it may seem pretty much the same to most listeners though.
this goes back into my other rant about "people can't hear anymore
because they're used to everything sounding not so good".
maybe it's only musicians and an_l retentive audiophiles who care about this?
It's easy to play a piano. You just sit down and bang away at the
keys. Doesn't make you Glenn Gould innit?
too right.
On 9/3/06, chthonic streams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
it is much easier to get a track up and going and sounding like something
close to what they expect to hear (based on the sound coming out of
computers and mp3 players) with software like acid. and so tracks can
be completed in a short amount of time without learning much about how
to make them sound good (and let's not even get started on the
actual composition
of the pieces).
