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.

It’s a good thing because it involves thousands more into the music making process that otherwise would not know how.  It’s educational, it’s stimulating interest in the wonderful world of music creation and it’s enabling the talented amateur to skip over years of training and create sometimes-good music with unprecedented ease.

It’s perhaps not such a good thing because it’s enabling talent to skip the long laborious process of education and putting talented people in the position of making decent music easily.  Unfortunately, because of this leaping over the road of hard knocks, we’re starting to see the results in a kind of mediocrity of music that is the result of this new technology.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know that I am an advocate of the new and incredible sampling technology.  I take advantage of the tools every day and it has saved me small fortunes on every record I produce and, though not necessarily a time saver if done right, it certainly has enabled the increase of my professional production over the years.

In the beginning of this sampling adventure our industry produced tremendous virtual libraries of sounds, which are the real orchestras, played by real musicians, note-by-note, instrument-by-instrument.  Expensive orchestras no longer had to be hired to create good music.  A one-time purchase of an often-expensive library would set the composer/producer up royally.

As the technology advanced, the replication of the sounds of real orchestras just got better and better until now it’s very difficult for most people to tell the difference and in some cases, when it’s done right, impossible for anyone to tell the difference.

I grew up a drummer, and the one area that was always obviously lacking to me was midi-sampled drums.  A great drummer just has a feel, call it a human feel, that us unmatchable with midi drums.  Midi drums were often put together too perfectly and consequently lost the ‘human feel’ and came off somewhat robotic.  It made for good solid dance music, but little else.

Then, with the advancement of computer processing power and enhanced memory, loop drumming was born.  Instead of recording drums hit-by-hit, stroke-by-stroke, great drummers were brought into the studio and asked to play 4-8 bar grooves – the kind of groove that they might play on a recording.  The entire performance would be recorded in minute detail and then broken down later into construction kits that enabled the eventual user to change the tempo, isolate say the high hat cymbal from the kick drum and increase the volume of the snare drum without bringing up the rest.

This I loved!  I’ve always said that when you budget a song in the studio, if you want to triple or quadruple your budget, just add drums.  In pop music the drums are the hardest things to record and get right, and in the old days even in the mixing process, the engineers spent far more time getting the drums right than any other instrument.

So the ability to work with the best drummers in the world, with a huge selection of sounds, grooves and excellently processed drum kits, turned out to be a huge time-saver and gave songs a totally professional quality which only enhanced the production.

Then producers of sampling technology, seeing the success of loop drumming, began creating loop bass playing (8-16 bar bass patterns played in various styles, keys and tempos), then loop guitar, loop piano patterns, loop percussion, etc.

Great studio musicians who used to actually go to sessions every day and create tracks for people now, of course, were out of work and so they succumbed to recording loop grooves and samples and putting them out as libraries for people to buy.  Though the libraries were at first somewhat expensive, competition drove the price down such that now the market is flooded with more sounds, loops, samples and grooves than one can possibly keep track of or even imagine.

Then sample producers started to actually put together entire tracks for songs with multi musicians and then breaking them down into construction kits for the amateur to rebuild later into their own music.  This has been a very popular item in the marketplace and I have watched my industry advertise these construction kits and their various styles of Rock, Hip-hop, R&B, etc. more and more.

These song tracks – think Karaoke – could be creatively reorganized into new and varied song tracks, they could be used partially and added to, or they could provide the user with ideas on which to base creation.  Unfortunately, one simply hears too often, the track just put back together in its original form.  Why is this unfortunate?  Because it’s creating often a world of re-hashed music.  Music that we’ve just simply heard before.

I listen to the radio today and what do I hear all too often?  Re-hashed Rolling Stones, rehashed Beatles, re-hashed Stevie Wonder.  What about the new directions of music built upon the history of Rock, but bringing new life to the genre?  Far too often, I just don’t hear it.

I spin through my radio dial and hear Pop music that bores me again and again because I’ve heard it before.  It’s either canned or stolen.  I’m all for reacting to something great.  As musicians, we’ve always done that.  We’ve reacted to the greatness of our predecessors and consequently new trends are created.

But, again, too much of what I hear today is not built upon that historical significance, but instead, built upon doing it the easy way by amateurs who have leapt over the process of education and circumvented the ‘coming up through the mail room’ process only to produce retreads of music already created.

Herein lies the danger of technology.  If technology makes it so easy for anyone with a little talent to make decent music and people get used to it – the way people have gotten used to the sad artistic so-called excellence of prime time television, then where are we headed?  Down a long road of mediocre music, I’m afraid.

I’m realizing that I’ve taken part in all this occasionally myself.  Where is the fine line between what’s borrowed or stolen or what’s used and changed slightly creatively?  It’s tricky.  So much of music is derivative of what went on before.  The tools are wondrous and oh so tempting.

Where do we stop?  It’s a fine line.

So to borrow the phrase, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”, let’s try to maintain the integrity of creation.  Let’s learn our craft so that we may have the tools to be original, to be truly creative and not re-hashers of other’s creativity.  Let’s demand more of ourselves and use the tools of technology in integral ways that support creativity, but do not create copycat music.

Let’s not steal from one another, but, instead, react off of one another.  Let’s not always look for the easy way, but the best way of doing things.

In this crazy world of file sharing, stolen music, re-hashed borrowings and construction kits, let us re-find our true originality.

Let us be truly creative, before we lose the impulse in technology’s ease of use.

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.

Even More Inspiration

• The Decline of Lyrical Craftsmanship – Part 1
• Spiritual Scientist
• I Stood In The Wings… Part 2
• I Stood In The Wings… Part 1
• Chanting/Enchanting
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn

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.

And he was talented.  He had the music in him, but he just could not seem to get it out with any degree of professionalism because in his excitement and consequent hurry to create, (and Logic is a vastly creative tool), he forgot to sit down, read the manual, and learn the essentials of the program.  So his music, though most promising, was just all over the place.  In essence, his creativity mind was way ahead of his technology brain.  So his music, though filled with potential, was in no way reaching that potential because he was being held back by his lack of technical skills.

On the other hand one of the big problems of the music world today is technology.  Essentially, software companies have made it real easy to create really average music.  They give you all the tools and even sometimes the basic elements of the music itself in a kit that you can put together quickly and professionally and create a kind of ‘insta-music’ that actually sounds pretty good.  I compare it to painting by numbers.  Another artist sets it up for you and then you fill in the blanks.  But is it truly creative?  Hardly.  At best, it’s a learning tool, but hardly a path to great works.  So average music has become much easier for the amateur to create today by just learning the technology, but average music is, after all, average music.  Today we got lots of it.  Just turn the radio on and give it a listen.

So on one hand we have my student who has great music in him, but can’t release it because of his technological limitations and on the other hand we have many so-called musicians out there who are somewhat on top of the technology, but are floating along on much more technology than inspiration and consequently coming up with already heard and pretty boring stuff.

What to do?  Unify the two.  In all art a balanced unity of technology and inspiration or creativity is imperative for great work.  The master sculptor has to be an expert at wielding his hammer and chisel.  The painter must be in complete control of his brush strokes.  If there is not a balance of the two, I do not believe that there can be true balance in the artful outcome.  As artists we must work to not let one aspect lag behind the other.  A singer who is an inspired actress, but whose voice is not in shape just isn’t gonna cut it in the long run.  On the other hand, no matter how beautiful the voice, how great the instrument, if there is not drama, real emotion, true connection to the material in the performance, the performance does not truly satisfy.

If we, as artists, are wondering what to do to make out work better, I suggest taking a real hard and honest look at the balance between the creative and the technological in our artful endeavors.  If they do not balance, if one lags behind the other, take some time out from production and work on the lagging part and make sure it catches up with the other.  Keep the two in balance.  It’s the surest way I know to reach potential.

BTW, my student has brought his technology quotient much closer to balance now.  He is learning the program and seeing that the technology pays great dividends in the expression of his music.  He’s not in balance yet, he still has far too much urge to rush ahead and leave the technology behind.  You might say that he gets ahead of himself.  He still gets stuck out on his musically weak limb and falls ingloriously out of his tree, but he’s learning and beginning to see the fruits of his technological concentration.  The end result?  His music is getting better.

It makes sense, the balance of the two.  You might even say it’s logical.

Perhaps that’s why it’s called Logic.

Even More Inspiration

• The Logic of Logic
• Phoenix Rising
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• Light At The End Of The Tunnel
• Hitting The Wall
• WFM Listening Room – Series II – Event 4