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New Question -
Does all this gear, with the help of some drugs, (ANYTHING taking in to the body to make a change, except food and liquids other than alcohol or caffeinated stuff), make music making more musically makable?
I'm just musing.
I can't imagine carrying on with a discussion within a thread having blocked any opposition...that suggests a very insular state in search of an echo chamber and is very close to a definition of insanity I read in a well peer reviewed text in the late 70s.
Last edited by rayc; 03/11/22 06:31 PM.
Cheers
rayc
"What's so funny about peace, love & understanding?" - N.Lowe
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Eddie,
That may be where you are going terribly wrong.
I heard a really funny recording some years back of a Rolling Stones song writing session captured in the studio.
Billy Preston kept playing this clever riff over and over and over and all the while Mick Jagger was just babbling gibberish into the microphone...until..
"And I miss you...yeah...
"And I'm walking Central Park...singing after dark...yeah...and I miss you!"
Maybe you should try it. Just sayin' man.
Oh, I bought the 12" single of Miss You at the time. A tremendous bass line, riff & melody from their last decent album. The insanity of the credits for that song blow me away... Wiki tries to explain... ""Miss You" was written by Mick Jagger jamming with keyboardist Billy Preston during rehearsals for the March 1977 El Mocambo club gigs, recordings from which appeared on side three of double live album Love You Live (1977). Keith Richards is credited as co-writer as was the case for all Rolling Stones originals written by either partner or in tandem. For the bass part, Bill Wyman started from Preston's bass guitar on the song demo.[6] Chris Kimsey, who engineered the recording, said Wyman went "to quite a few clubs before he got that bass line sorted out", which Kimsey said "made that song".[7] Wyman recalled: "When I did the riff for 'Miss You' – which made the song, and every band in the world copied it for the next year: Rod Stewart, all of them – it still said Jagger/Richard. When I wrote the riff for 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', it became Jagger/Richard, and that's the way it was. It just became part and parcel of the way the band functioned."[8]" There was a little less shimmer from the Glimmer twins each time they ignored a band member's due.
Last edited by rayc; 03/11/22 06:27 PM.
Cheers
rayc
"What's so funny about peace, love & understanding?" - N.Lowe
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In this case, I would say that Joe is being rather aggressively UN-creative, and so gets zero creativity points, but presumably there are creative individuals in the hierarchy of contractors and subcontractors he commands. Some will be human, some will be automata; let's give credit where credit is due without ontological prejudice. Some of that creativity will be in the present production process, in the supervision of automata, and some of it will be in the past development of those tools. The most interesting question may be how much of this creativity isn't human any more.
Mark, I agree fully. Joe Novice wasn't musically creative in the least. I very much respect musically creative individuals but I can't say I respect Joe Novice for his musical creativity. To do so would cheapen what it means to be musically creative. "Musical creativity is therefore proposed as the process of combining existing musical knowledge in new ways, to produce original and fitting musical outcomes. These outcomes typically take the form of improvisations, compositions, arrangements, and performances." . . . Not my definition but I agree with it. A strong argument could be made for "Alexa" being musically creative but not Joe. Your question of how much creativity isn't human anymore is an important question to think about. Human strength and endurance has long been exceeded by our tools and systems. Likewise, computers far exceed our capabilities to compute. More recently, technology can now construct poems and music, a domain that for generations we thought was exclusively human. And the quality of such artificially creative art can only improve with time. The next step may be artificial systems that can actually think, ponder, wonder and apply (or choose to not apply) moral and ethical values to a situation. Just like fire or the stone axe, technology can be used to uplift the human condition or to degrade it.
https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677BiaB 2026 Windows For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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The next step may be artificial systems that can actually think, ponder, wonder and apply (or choose to not apply) moral and ethical values to a situation. We're no doubt already there in the code that drives autonomous vehicles. For centuries, ethicists have earned their stipends by fantasizing about railroad tracks dividing and one way there's a baby on the tracks and the other way there's an old man on the tracks, what do you do and what are you responsible for doing having done it? Now we have Teslas, and you KNOW (although I'm sure the code is hyper-confidential) that within that programming must be oodles of moral reasoning, like whether to (A) hit pedestrian and driver lives or (B) swerve into brick wall and driver dies. Sure, you can say the car isn't applying moral reasoning, that was applied by the developers who coded it in. But then, you might say the same thing about most people and what they learn as children. Either way, it's Christine who's making up her mind where to direct the unavoidable damage. Likewise, I have an application that generates music using cellular automata. I take what it gives me and mess with it until I like it, then I call it music. Whose music? Well, I'll take full credit because I can, but honestly, it's more like a collaboration. And it would be straining to call it a collaboration with the developers. It's a collaboration with the application. I guess some people would choke on that and push the credit out in various directions so it only applies to humans, but that just seems doctrinaire. Bottom line: I think uncreative people can drive creative people to create creative software, and then we get the situation of uncreative people driving creative software, with no creative people left in the immediate picture. It can get weird.
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eddie1261
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More recently, technology can now construct poems and music.
I'll give you that much as far as the mechanical side of what "construct" means. Like a building company can "construct" a skyscraper, there was first an architect that conceived the idea, put pencil to paper to draw up the plans, and only then did the mechanical side of the transaction happen. That technology of music can only construct what is input into it, and that's where it comes back to YOU make music, not the technology. How you define "make" is key. For me the composer/musician MAKES the music. The technology only assembles it (generate) from the plans (the chord chart the musician creates and inputs). These products are fantastic to replace the number of people needed to perform the creations. For someone like me who essentially prefers to be and work alone this is perfect. If I only had access to it 30 years ago when I was young enough and healthy enough to be even somewhat relevant my music life would have been very different and much better. I may not have been any more successful because it would still be me at the same level writing the songs, but anyone who has lived with the frustration of having to cancel a recording session because the drummer's kid has a parent/teacher conference or the guitar player's kid has a cold will understand. (I once got a call 30 minutes after we were supposed to start from the drummer who said "Oh sorry man. I fell asleep.") From that perspective this stuff is the best thing since pop tabs on beer cans. But ultimately the human provides the creative element.
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All.
Interesting thread…just a few thoughts.
A fun little project is to see if one can set up a nice project studio capable of producing good songs under 2k
budget.
Imho a good usb interface low latency is important.
Other than that Refurb pc’s are dirt cheap as are ssd’s and good mics eg mxl 770 and others…
Plus good cheap speakers like eris and edifier.
Thus i feel one can set up a good rig under 2k.
Then of course there is a flood of freeware instruments and plug ins That are very good or nearly free like the 80 plug ins included with uk computer music mag i like…for 20 buks or quid.
There are also lots of samples one can build a sample lib from using household items, like water glasses, bashing things with cutlery…lol.., etc etc. its a lot of fun finding new sounds that are ones own.
In addition there is a slew of great used gear one can find at boot and yard sales. As well as lots of toys that produce sounds. Last year i saw a synth toy for 5 quid that had some oddball neat sounds in….etc etc.
In conclusion if i was setting up a rig today on a small budget i would prolly buy new the audio interface/speakers/couple of mics/phones. And of course bb/realband/reaper….and use the pg plug ins Plus freeware plug ins.
For everything else i would buy used…
overall its a fun challenge imho seeing how good a rig one can build with a tiny budget.
Best
om
my songs....mixed for good earbuds...(fyi..my vocs on all songs..) https://soundcloud.com/alfsongs(90 songs created useing bb/rb) (lots of tips of mine in pg tips forum.)
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eddie1261
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Just to follow up on OM's post, remember that a lot of this depends on whether you seriously think you will ever make money with your songs. Like I'd love to have a vintage Les Paul, but that would cost 5 figures and I will never again make a dime from music. So obviously it would be a waste of money I don't have. So maybe you live without that $3300 Neumann U87 Ai mic and get a used Shure 58 for 50 bucks to sing into. Between keyboards, guitars, racks, synth modules and such I probably have $10k tied up but a lot of that is stuff I gathered over years when I DID actually have an income from music.
And since it all gets sold when I die and the proceeds go to the 2 animal shelters I have named in my will, it's all good. I get to play with the toys now and they get money when I leave.
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