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Brian Eno about the dangers of digital dependence in modern music
An interesting, philosophical read.
While I've bought into the DAW world myself, I end up using it most often in tape recorder style: Turn it on to record. I do use a metronome, I sometimes use loops, but I remain most at home just recording on the fly.
Comments
Article made a good point about how limitations can focus creativity. After messing about with piano roll daws for a while I now like to just grab a synth and record live over a drum beat to audio. Still getting used to that workflow, but I'd rather do a few takes than nudge notes around a grid all day. So for me the ability to keep perfecting like He mentions is a real time suck and probably does affect the human feel of a groove negatively. Synths are still awesome though, I dont hear many complaints that there are too many unique timbres to explore, unless that's just not your cup of tea. I think it's more of a rhythm/groove issue. But aesthetics change. Keep making music.
Interesting read. It's a question that gets grappled with quite a bit in terms of the finished product, but this article looks at the impact the technology actually has about the creative process in the first place.
From an iOS/mobile context, I think there's even another layer to this - quantization and piano roll editing almost become necessary to capture adequate sketch ideas (let alone final compositions) because of the limitations of the input method. If you're playing a keyboard part on a glass touchscreen, you could be the best musician in the world, but you're still apt to have missed notes, inconsistent velocity, etc. that maybe you wouldn't have if you had an 88-key piano in a studio. I have three inexpensive MIDI controllers - the one that gets used the most is my Korg nanoKey2, since it's in my work bag and always with me. It's also the least accurate of the three (keys are more like laptop keys than piano keys), but it's still more satisfying and instrument-like to play on that versus a touchscreen.
Here's where I think the whole anti-digital debate gets a bit hokey: either you're recording a live performance, or you're recording a studio performance. Once you go in the latter direction, it just seems dumb to me to complain about how far in that direction you go. A lead singer in a band doesn't play guitar while he/she lays down a vocal track (usually), so that performance already is not "live". Even analog multi-tracking is a tool of the studio to create a "better than live" result.
Also, when it comes to MIDI, sequencing, and the world of EDM music, the digital technology IS the instrument. The whole purpose of MIDI note direction was that there were things you could do with computers that would be difficult/impossible to input on a keyboard. I think it was The Edge I read was asked about EDM music and the "death" of rock and roll, and he said that he felt that EDM music had shown more creativity and complexity than rock in the past 10-20 years. You don't have to like EDM, but listening to the complexity of the arrangements, I think it's tough to argue with that.
I agree with many things on this but i also see all the modern digital tools as new way to design sound.
Don't be scared for future
Playing a part and then arranging and adding automations and stuff is a kind of composing.
Of course it would be boring if one day we just have a giant "insert mood and press random" button!
Very interesting- as always with Eno.
I think his comments about limitation and needing a deep understanding of specific technologies are totally on the ball. In fact that analysis is pretty much structurally orthogonal to the digital/analog divide.
Limitations matter enormously and they often drive creativity - the key difference is that "analog" systems tend to impose hard limits on a performer (or producer) where as "digital" tends to require self-limitation (which is fundamentally harder to do). That's one of the reasons people value analog systems, but if you can find a way to successfully impose self-generated limits then digital environments can be as creativity dynamic too.
A lot of Eno's own strategies (like the Oblique Strategies cards) deal with exactly those kind of problems.
Chess.
Final Fantasy Tactics.
Only one will be around in 1,000 years, and still wear the crown of perfect strategy game. And it won't be the one w/ 500 possible moves per unit.
The limitations of movement on the chess board are what force limitless creative tactical solutions, to a creative player.
Same w/ the OP-1. It's working within the pre-defined constraints of the device that really bring out magic.
The limitless sonic scope of sampling, however, certainly broadens the palette.
Just another (genial) nostalgic guy.
The beauty of music is not how you make it, it's if you enjoy making it. Whether you shower yourself in a digital cascade of sounds, or you stick to the guitar and microphone you better enjoy it while you can. Life is to short to judge others on their approach to music. How anyone can say that it is "dangerous" to partake in the beautiful samples we are blessed to be working with is beyond me. I can't play a real instrument other than a little dulcimer that I had when I was a kid. I'm 25 and a self taught keyboard player. I write my own music and was trained in sound engineering. I am blessed to be able to arrange a full orchestra at my finger tips, and be able to call one of my friends to come record some real guitar, drums, bass whatever. Music has been a life saver for me. I admire anyone who can play any instrument.
Could just be a case of old guy moaning about new tech
This. But not some random old guy: I'm a huge fan of Brian Eno. I see the BS nonetheless...
I know, I was kinda of channelling Douglas Adams who once wrote
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1) Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2) Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3) Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things"
I think what Eno is talking about is how the process affects creativity and he has a point but there's nothing to say you can't simply self impose limitations in a digital environment. I've been trying to move away from midi more and more for that very reason, and towards more live performance, but I think the idea of completely boycotting a technology on principle is kind of silly. I still record midi data of the live performances, and if editing a single note will save me from having to spend an extra hour re-recording it live, I'm willing to make that compromise.
At the end of the day all that matters is that the music expresses what you want it to express, it doesn't matter how you get there and 99% of the people consuming a product will never consider how the product was produced because that isn't their relationship to the product.
Technology is only recently allowing me to produce the kind of music I've been dreaming about making for almost 20 years, and much of that is thanks to iOS.
The one thing I liked about the article was his suggestion to try not using undo for a day.
Dave grohls documentary about his mixing board from sound city, and that style of recording was a pretty good look at that old debate. Trent Reznor's contribution was interesting. He brings up the question, with the rise of digital tech and home recording revolution, has the quality of recorded music gone through the roof?
If you agree that no, it hasn't, but believe the technology has improved, than the issue must be how artists are using it.
I've gone to town with melodyne on vocals, and realized after hours of tweazing, that it was making it into elevator music. It gets so weird when you get into micro-editing and micro-comping to try to make a performance sound better. It can be surprising how it takes artistic decisions rather than logical ones, at the editing level, to get good results. it can be heartbreaking, to spend hour and hours on editing, and realize at the end that you lost cohesion, by frankensteining things together. It's like Michael jackson's face. He was regular, good looking dude before plastic surgery. After his first plastic surgery he looked great. After that he started looking weirder and weirder.
Personally I think anything is OK, what works works. My only concern is that if you only ever work to a grid the only syncopation you will ever know is the swing dial. Syncopation is everywhere in analog and older music, almost all melodic parts for example, but especially vocals, lead the beat a little, which is why non-syncopated music is instantly recognisable as being machine-made. Which is why having some element of performance in the act of music creation, even if you fix it a bit later, lends more life to it.
@richardyot that is a very valid point. Which is why I tend to route the audio of my Korg Krome into the interface with direct monitor enabled. No latency which allows me to "perform" If I can't pull it off in a song then I call up a friend to come record guitar parts, drums, vocals ect... Now a days everything is very syncopated, and with protools having the quantize audio function why wouldn't you want it to sound perfectly timed? Audio can be manipulated in ways to trick the listener into believing whatever you'd like them to believe if you know what your doing.
I think that performing and recording for distribution are 2 different worlds entirely. I am certainly less hihat tuner and more a musician having gone full circle. I have respect for the very skilled hihat tuners but have absolutely no time for that anymore.
Performance is more often than not a real time interaction between artists and that can't be easily replicated on a computer screen.
I think Eno makes good points about how digital creates a different instrument to play. One can be seduced by any technology into doing something they regret or feel some sort of unpleasant ambiguity about. That technology may be a distraction from another way of doing things that also has value.
I didn't have digital in my youth, and we made different music. In the end, though, nobody is forced to do anything, including quantizing. Nothing says you can't sit down old-fashioned with a guitar or whatever and have your digital too. It's still all about decision-making. We now have more options. I take advantage of them because they're an advantage to me.
Sincopation is attained everytime you avoid the strong beats of a given mesure. Swing is not the same as sincopation. You can easily make sincopated music with a piano roll by setting the resolution to 1/4 of a beat and place your accents at the second or fourth subdivision of the beat, be it by programming, be it by playing live and then quantizing.
It's a known trick for making very funk beats, but most people are lazy or/and lack musical knowledge to do just that, and it's even worse if they program the beat by a fixed amount of measures (such as done in Gadget by default). But it's perfectly possible to program sincopated beats and syncopation across instruments.
The main telling feature of music done with "machines" is it always sound metronomic. Yes, a music can be heavily sincopated and still sound metronomic.
And here Eno has a point: modern timeline/metronome based DAWs make it very difficult to work with rubattos, for example: you can always automate the tempo slow down on a given point but that will never sound natural as a live performance where the rubatto occurs naturally. Or situations where the tempo vary inside a song for a chorus etc. They sound like metronomic rubatos.
The solution, which mostly won't follow because, well, it's to much work and requires a degree of musical proficiency is to turn off the metronome while recording and, when mixing, swtch to min/sec grid instead of bar/beat, or turn off the grid. It's not a limitation of digital, really: like all tech, it simply allowed for the less skilled to almost pass as if they have skills. And worth noting that these less skilled people sometimes have great ideas the otherwise wouldn't be able to develop without the tech.
@theconnactic syncopation and swing are often used interchangeably - for example in the TV show "How Music Works" Howard Goddall describes syncopation as beats that are unevenly spaced or that come in early or late. (Let's not derail the thread with semantics though).
No, not semantics, please: you can use swing to achieve a syncopation effect, but they are definitely not the same thing. And yes, it wasn't even my point: fact is, you can perfectly achieve syncopation with a grid, but the whole thing would still sound metronomical and "mechanical" (even more if MIDI-only).
Making good music takes skill no matter what tool you use. "Good" as perceived by listeners. There's no way to fake it.
A DAW shouldn't make it difficult to work with rubato if you can ignore the grid. Beat-mapping can be used if you need the grid.
Exact my points, @lovadamusic.
I didn't actually read the article but have a strong desire to comment on it as though I did.
Good conversation brethren.
This was a great read nonetheless. First article I have enjoyed reading in a while.
@miguelmarcos I do the same with all of my work. I have it armed and I improvise then I take what I like and edit the shit out of those parts, or I build on it. I never do something the same twice when I write songs.
@TheMaestro, that's the best of digital and analog in my world.
Regarding rubato, automated rubato in a DAW feels fake. The slight timing discrepancies of a bunch of analog tracks are really hard to replicate.
No doubt, someone will make a rubato AU!
That already exist (at least things in this direction). There are midi FX like "sloppy" playing", "velocity humanize" etc. and of course "randomize" a certain parameter is always a kind of good way to add a more human touch as long as it doesn´t repeat the same algorithm after 2 bars and become itself like a longer qantized sequence.
Sorry!
Most of my iOS only tracks were recorded as audio tracks with BM2. I played mostly longer parts about 3-10 minutes and recorded one over one with up to 50 parts. I hit also here and there a wrong note and don´t hit the timing but that was kind of the charme. But there were also some really bad notes, timings which really fails.
In this case i have to cut the Audio and use a bridge for the parts i cut out (i just faded it out and put in an huge FX or so).
The main problem was that i had to save all the wav, stems and mixes and so a track could had sometimes a GB of data. With midi i don´t have that problem.
Then you can do really some creative things which are never possible without these little big helpers. An arp is such a thing. I can also do things where i would need a whole band or orchestra to do it but i couldn´t pay them proper
Setting limitations is for sure a great thing but having limits when yoou could imagine much more is the opposite and can kill crativity too.
These days i always record without quantization and do also all my automation in live performances (like i also did mostly with my iOS tracks) and just edit here and there a few things i don´t like or think which doesn´t fit well.
Handling all this proper tools and helpers is a kind of "instrument" for me too.
I have much respect what these "old" famous gyus did but when i listened to their music i found a lot modern (even unknown) music more interesting. But i come from another generation and in 10-20 years no one knows what will be there and it might be just not my flavour!
I´m happy that there is iOS and the apps because i never had started to create my own music. It was a starter into this wonderful world because it was easy (and still is) with apps like ThumbJam to create music as a beginner, learn how to program a synth and a lot more.
Then there was the time where i wanted it to be more and just bought me a macbook pro just for creating music. It tooks a lot more time to learn how a big DAW like Logic and huge hybrid synths works but thank´s to all this little helpers and the iOS starter it was not too hard that i would give up. Now i love the workflow and combining all this things is really great.
The next step was that i wanted to go away from using scales and virtual keyboard where it is not possible to hit a wrong note. Now i think that hardware as controller, master keyboard and great software integration is the best way i could imagine.
Another great thing is that today all these things are affordable. Apps are cheap, you get a huge DAW desktop DAW for a few hundread bucks and also there are a million of affordable master keyboards and controllers out there.
In general it is a great time to create music....BUT at the same time it is going to die because of the feeling that music is just a thing which most people can get for free or think it has to be free.
Soundcloud is a good example too..... it was great some years ago and independent musicians makes it big but now it´s a "facebooked" crap. Full of spam, bad servers, a kind of "give me a like and i give you a like" thingie with bad support. It´s only usable for more famous artists and consumers. The iOS app was so great in the beginning because you was able to write comments within the app and a lot more..... then they changed it into a music player with overloaded servers...... money money money..... that old game!........
Uupps, maybe i missed the theme a bit again!
Me too
At least the more modern tools could have save the world from things like this....
I'll take the Shaggs over some bland 'beats' music any day. The Shaggs have the 'it' thing which is missing from most modern music. They're quirky and original...there was a lot of that in '60s and '70s. It's so much easier now to go out and recreate 'genre' music with all the cheap tools available that no one is forced to make do with less or different tools and talents than your influences ... which is often where all the innovation came from in the past.