[LAU] Bitwig: what we can learn from it

Dave Phillips dlphillips at woh.rr.com
Mon Mar 31 11:55:27 UTC 2014


On 03/31/2014 07:26 AM, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 11:33:02AM +0100, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 12:23:15PM +0200, Robin Gareus wrote:
>>
>>> only for some kind of music.
>>>
>>> Bitwig is just a toy compared to for example Csound and Supercollider.
>>>
>> But Csound and Supercollider are not suitable for
>> making music. They're fine if you're some kind of
>> autistic savant computer genius, but utterly fucking
>> useless if you're a musician.
> Define musician.

I was going to respond with the simpler "Bullshit!" but since you've 
dilated my original notion...

>
> Your 'musician' seems to be one for whom everything
> has to be prepared before and easy, so the only thing
> that remains to be done is some clicking on a screen.
> And then think him/herself a musician just as the
> kids wasting their time with shoot-and-kill games
> imagine they are soldiers.

I'm not so sure it's that simple. Even well-trained classical and jazz 
musicians display evident prejudice towards certain kinds of music 
within their own genres. One "jazz" fan loves his Dixieland, another 
can't do without Sun Ra. The Beethoven freak down the street absolutely 
despises Schoenberg, while my modernist buddy can't stand to hear Mozart.

De gustibus and all that aside, it's a multi-format world. I get mine 
through YouTube channels such as pelodelperro, musicaignotus, and the 
Wellesz Company channels. No Vevo ads near those bad boys ! :)


> Your 'musician' is in fact just cannon fodder for
> an industry that is about making fast money and little
> else.

Again, I think it's a little more complicated. I respect skill and 
enthusiasm where-ever I can find it these days. I hear great efforts 
from pop/rock musicians, film score composers, game sound designers, and 
so forth. Musically it's not often my preferred listening choices but I 
can set aside prejudice long enough to try to get into the music per se. 
I'm always learning, and lessons can be found everywhere.

Recently a pop musician friend claimed it was impossible for anyone to 
know and sing 60 songs a night. I had to remind him that his experience 
was limited to a few performances a year, not club dates, and certainly 
nothing like the 6-night-a-week 6-sets-per-night gigs I played in 
Chicago, two to three weeks at a booking. We were doing ~15 songs per 
set then, the math puts his assertion to rest.

And about that "quick & efficient" thing : I read an interview with 
Philippe Leroux in which he mentioned working 20 months on 20 minutes of 
music. It reminded me of a statement by Morton Feldman where he said he 
wanted to get to the point where he put in the exact amount of time the 
music required, maybe only for 5 minutes one day and for 20 hours the 
next. Sometimes we can move so quickly we don't see the surround at all, 
and it can matter.

EP: "To the man with something to say no vers is libre enough."

> Ciao,
>

Always good to read your messages, Fons.

Ciao ciao,

dp


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