From: de@helios.ucsc.edu (De Clarke)
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers
Subject: Re: Fender Pro Reverb Amp
Summary: Engineers, Music, Toys (Was:  Usenet Tape Depression)
Date: 12 Apr 92 05:29:05 GMT
Organization: UCO/Lick Observatory

I have been out of this group for a while but was interested to follow
the thread on some folks' disappointment with the usenet tape (and 
envy of others' megabuck studios!).  I have a few random thoughts on
the subject.

One is that both engineering and programming are, our *should be*,
tremendously creative endeavours.  People who excel in them do so by
feats of *imagination*, being able to conceive solutions to problems
by the creative manipulation of knowledge into new and -- for lack
of a better word -- beautiful -- patterns.  Analogies between music
and programming, in particular, abound.  (I was a linguist -- natural
language linguist -- and musician already when I first discovered
computers.  Even RSTS-11 on 300-baud ttys had the same magic for me
as the Cyrillic alphabet which I puzzled out in childhood and used
as a secret code, the same magic as my first experience of a piano
keyboard at an even earlier age:  the mystery and wonder of infinite
pattern in limited space, if you will forgive a little obscurity).

Or to put it simply, really good programmers and engineers dream about
their work, come up with answers in their sleep at 0300 and dimly
remember them the next day, just as musicians dream those perfect
tunes that we rarely get to write down before they fade.  Really
good code has a kind of economy and style that are aesthetic.

So I don't find any inherent contradiction between my life as
a techno-mercenary and my other life as a musician (and sometimes
writer).  It's all pattern recognition and recombination, and it's
all fun (except personnel management!).

AND I know about the battle for our souls that goes on forever, with
Consumerism whispering in one ear that with this box and that axe
we can sound just like our personal guitar-saint, that this multitimbral
module will lead us by the hand to that Sound that's always just around
the corner.  But hey, that's just life in Western capitalism:  someone
is always out there to sell us poor suckers our dreams.  In the other
ear whispers the uncomfortable awareness that our personal guitar saint
practices more than four hours a day, probably more waking hours than
we have to spend outside of working, eating, and sleeping.  Is the quest
for the Great Gear one way we escape from the unwelcome facts:  from
knowing that as long as we keep that day job, we will *never* have the
time to get as good as we dream of being?

On people who compulsively edit patches, sample their kitchen taps,
etc. -- I know a guy who does industrial music (band called dresden)
and once he was leaning against the doorframe in my office and giving
me a long strange rap about sound.  He said something like, "I figure
by now all the possible melodies in the world have been written,
I mean all the ones that can sound like music.  You have to get so
far out to be original in melodic composition that you stop being
musical.  But the audio spectrum is so large, and there are so many
sounds that conventional instruments just can't make, have never made,
will never make.  There's a huge space there to work in.  I'm going
to make sounds that have never been heard before, and out of the
millions of sounds that are just noise I want to pick the ones that
sound *like music* -- like no sound you ever heard before, quite, but
*like music*."  So I don't think we can smugly say that the sample-
maniacs and patch-wrights are "less creative" or "wasting their time",
perhaps they are deeply thoughtful composers working in a different
space from the rest of us.

And one last thought, about the impact of new devices on the studio and
the musician.  I never upgraded my old Mac after 1987.  I spend my days
wrestling with OS and apps.  At home I just wanted to learn one system,
get it stable, and make music.  Every time I've brought in a shiny new
box, my productivity (in the sense of learning and making music) has
inevitably suffered during the honeymoon with the new crate.  Sometimes
you can forget that the point is to record some decent music, or compose,
or whatever -- not to become a field engineer for E-mu or Yamaha...
Toys are cool, and new toys are especially cool, and the initial,
steep but easy learning curve on a new toy is so much more fun than
the long, hard slog that leads to real musicianship...

... on the other hand, there's such a thing as "appropriate technology".
"Music Minus One" software like MiBac or Band in a Box may be just
what you need to get you all excited about practising.  A good sequencer
can be so transparent and natural to use that it doesn't get in between
you and the idea.  A really *good* bowed viola patch may make all the
difference in the final product.  A bigger hard disk could save you
precious hours shuffling through boxes of floppies, and time is more
than money, folks:  it's your life.  The trick is to figure out what you
really want, and how any given purchase or re-design of your studio
leads directly to what you want -- so you don't end up endlessly
redesigning your setup as a hobby in itself...  as with the rest of
the world, figuring out the difference between inappropriate and 
appropriate tech is a major philosophical and moral challenge.  Excuse
me for getting heavy but I have been thinking a lot about these things
lately, and it's late and I tend to run on.

So I will quit here.

de
..............................................................................
: De Clarke, Computing Resources Mgr.	           UCO/Lick Observatory, UCSC :
: de@helios.ucsc.edu |                                                        :
: de@portal.bitnet   |  CHANGE FOR THE MACHINES.        -- Pat Cadigan        :
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers