Q: Hey Bill, love your music. I wanted to ask, do you generally prefer to retain a midi/synth-centric sound or is it a matter of necessity at the moment? If you had the resources to use more real instruments would you?
Thanks!
A: music can be made out of anything. i firmly believe this. i was raised with access to midi, and my mom actually showed me how it works when i was about 10. i didn't pick up any kind of guitar until i was at least 15. i did try recording audio (non-midi) somewhere around that time, but there was no more freedom. i couldn't change and adjust parts with anywhere near the same freedom that i could with midi. Sure, you can make great and crazy sounds with audio, but i am not a soundsmith. my strength is in the notes, chords, and thankfully i have now found a way to put words into the mix as well. Recording using audio would be an entirely different animal. an entirely different world. a great world, but completely, completely different. it's about as likely for me to suddenly switch to that as it is for me to suddenly become a professional golfer.  also, i think this midi approach has a lot of advantages if you have to work alone. i can fly around between different instruments and make adjustments very quickly, which cushions the damage of the 'alone problem' -- the problem where the first instrument can't hear the later instruments being played and can't react to them. Sure, in audio you can do 'punches' but it still seems limited, and it's just a whole diffent game, plus you probably also need more processing power and i have zero life experience working that way, or thinking that way. i've been doing midi since i was 10. for my situation, the advantages of using midi are insane. The only instrument i use audio for is the vocal, because you have to. and that's more than enough to manage. also with recording audio, you have to actually worry about sound quality, mic quality, all kinds of stuff. and these are things that i have Never worried about. I have been made to feel guilty on multiple occasions for using MIDI, and i used to feel guilty about it then, but then i realized that i have heard plenty of artists use MIDI in amazing ways, so at a certain point i really started to embrace it and never looked back. the thing that i probably envy most in the audio world is stuff like strumming guitars, etc. I do think it is eventually worth it to try to conquer the audio mountain in order to include some of those things, but it would be a huge huge change, and require me to learn to think and function in entirely new ways. also you would now have to worry about guitar quality!! worry about the strings, worry about intonation, worry about amps maybe, worry about miking, on and on, more and more issues that i have never even touched. not to mention another even bigger issue: working with other people.  using audio would require me to go back to the stone age in many, many, many ways. and i would do it immediately if i could live forever. perhaps i would also become a molecular biologist