Sparks from the Fire

The tools available to make good music have never been more prevalent.  Each month I read cover-to-cover 4-5 industry magazines like Electronic Musician, Mix, Keyboard and EQ.  I’ve done so for many years and find that it’s a good way to keep up with not only the trends in music, but also the incredible advancement of technology.

I’ll have to admit to being a bit of a technology freak myself and often take advantage of some of the latest and greatest gear out there.  More and more in these magazines I find myself skipping the articles and just perusing the ads looking for the new technology to make my musical way easier and more professional.

More and more I find that the advancement of technology is pointed to the amateur musician who doesn’t really have the skills to make good music and needs a little help.  This is a good thing and perhaps a not so good thing.

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I have a student.  In real life he’s a dentist.  In his heart he’s a composer.
He first came to me to study Apple Logic, a computer software program that is essentially a digital recording studio in a box.  With it, you can do just about anything you choose in the world of music – record a song, score a movie, write and record a symphony without hiring an expensive orchestra, take it with you on a gig and expand your band from 3 pieces to an 12 piece horn band, and the list goes on and on.

Apple's Logic Software

It’s a truly amazing technological wonder, but the trouble is, you have to learn it to use it.  And it ain’t easy.  In fact, they say that the learning curve with Logic is the steepest of all the software DAW (digital audio workstation) systems.  I’ve been working with it daily now for about 15 years and I still don’t fully understand it, though I’m what you might call ‘an expert’.  I can fly on it and I can teach it, but I’m still learning it.

Anyway my student was a music hobbyist who would go home at night from his drills and macabre instruments and write music.  Rather, he would go home at night and fight Logic – and Logic most often won.  He was deeply disorganized in his approach to the technology, but his love for music and the act of creativity was so great that it drove him to this nightly struggle.

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