[LAU] Some thoughts on making electronic music

[Brent Busby]

On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Jostein Chr. Andersen wrote:

> I was much more productive in the late seventies and in the eighties: 
> I used to record guitars and vocals and bounce the tracks between two 
> stereo compact cassette recorders. When I had a little more money, I 
> got a 909, FB-01 , a JX8P (wonderful synth) and a KORG SQD-1 
> sequencer, but still into a compact cassette recorder or two. Not much 
> of equipment and the record quality was poor - but it was more than 
> enough for making demos and doing stuff. A local radio station in 
> Oslo, where I lived at the time, was even playing 6-7 of my songs in a 
> program in '88 or '89; still recorded with SQD-1 and cassette 
> recorders. Even back then, the local radio stations did compress the 
> music so hard that everything sounded like shit, so my equipment was 
> sufficient for that too.

I'm still catching up with old emails, so sorry about responding to a 
thread so late...but...this is so true!

I also was more productive with sequencing and recording in the 80's. 
I worked with tape.  It never sounded like what you put into it, but it 
also didn't sound bad when you did it right.  I got way more done.  To 
this day, I don't sequence on the computer, and I have lots of hardware 
synths, hardware drum machines, hardware rack effects, and I like to 
play keyboard, guitar, and drum parts with real keyboards, guitar, and 
drums.  When I do program drum machine parts, it greatly carries over 
that I can actually play drums, and don't have to go begging on the 
Internet for a library of "loops" or something.  I think that makes me 
some kind of fossil.  :)

But still the computer demands so much attention, and it gets it too, 
because it promises so much.  Computers are really diabolical that way.

> Today, I have everything (and much more) I dreamed of thanks to the 
> myriad of wonderful Linux audio apps and gizmos, but the productivity 
> is like shit. It's time to concentrate on #1 and #2 and just make 
> music.

I remember when Ardour wasn't at v1.0 yet, there was a disclaimer on the 
web site that said something to the effect that it wasn't ready yet to 
be equivalent to much more than a stack of ADAT's.  I was like, "Oh 
good!  I really don't *want* my recording platform to do much more than 
a stack of ADAT's!"  I don't expect my DAW to do much with effects, EQ, 
sequencing, sampling, or any of that.  It's a recorder!

And I still don't use most of Ardour's features...

(Of course it's nice when your audio card *sounds* better than a stack 
of ADAT's.  ADAT ADC's are so *cold*!)

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky