Death of the guitar band

[Crackpot]

Bollocks, DJ's are as good musicians, if not better, than most guitar based musicians these days..

Yes I agree with you. They are far superior at masturbating with their instruments.

[darkblack]

Bollocks, DJ's are as good musicians, if not better, than most guitar based musicians these days..

A musician can be a DJ...A DJ can never be a musician.

(Yer young, Gob, and your heart will mend)



They are, however somewhat more sonically relevant to the generations that have come after hip hop and break beats than the fretboard wizards of yore. Yet, the crucial difference continues - a 'turntablist' is dependent upon the recorded work of others to perform their own.
With that said, one minor peeve that I hold against many younger guitar players is the lack of a unique tonal character, or apparent desire to develop same - a lot of mockingbirds out there!

Maybe a little less 'music education' needed

[Sean]

Well said that man!

[Gob]

Oh pish and tush you old farts.

The days when musicianship was only considered if you grew your own strings for you lute are long gone.

Samples have been around since the early 70's.

Frank Zappa made most of his orchestral stuff on a synclavier.

DJ's (who also use samplers and drum machines as well as other processing equipment) have just taken that further.

The skills of a good DJ, and the MUSICIANSHIP, are as highly regarded as bands these days, and are more profound than most three chord wonders.

Now back to your rocking chairs and light your meerschaums and chill a bit Daddy Oh!








No watch the musicianship here, talking fragments of music, mixing them up, controlling the beats, adding in samples, playing with the emotions of the crowd.

First rate stuff.

By buggery there's some tasty totty there too.

[darkblack]

Oh pish and tush you old farts.

'Now you done it'

The days when musicianship was only considered if you grew your own strings for you lute are long gone.

Not in Wales, land of striped pantalons, soiled codpieces and chin-bearded ladies of easy virtue.

Samples have been around since the early 70's.

1960's actually, and before that with some artistes - The best-known example being the Mellotron. However, those were taped signals triggered manually. The digital era of samples didn't come into its own until well into the 90's, unless you had Beastie Boy money to spend - everyone else had to wait for the sampling rate to go up and the storage to go cheap.

Frank Zappa made most of his orchestral stuff on a synclavier.

Vile slander, although he made most of his latter-period sample based work with one. 200 Motels and The Grand Wazoo are two examples predating its use. Zappa worked and wrote for with a lot of symphonies over his career and didn't like most of them for various reasons, mostly to do with correctness of interpretation. The Synclavier allowed for direct compositional input, always accurate to the artistic vision at a time when that frustration had reached its apex.

DJ's (who also use samplers and drum machines as well as other processing equipment) have just taken that further.

Further than Zappa? Pish, tosh and flounce. You don't need a mechanical contraption to go 'Boom Boom BAP' ad infinitum, but one does need imagination to do better than that.

The skills of a good DJ, and the MUSICIANSHIP, are as highly regarded as bands these days, and are more profound than most three chord wonders.

Oh horrors, accusations of musicianship. Is there no depth to which you will not stoop? Highly regarded, yes - as I wrote, they're far more culturally relevant than any 20 shoegazers with a Gibson but profound?
Methinks a monkey may gaze into a mirror, but Mozart will not look out.

Now back to your rocking chairs and light your meerschaums and chill a bit Daddy Oh!

'ang on, aren't you the Liberace of Llanelli then? Play oos ha swee' toon, pretty boyo.

[Sean]

What you describe as 'musicianship' Mr Gob those of us who hang on to a thread of sanity would call 'production'.

Musicians create the music. It doesn't matter whether they create it on a lute, a guitar, a synth or a bucket and hammer. The point is that there is now music where before there was none. DJs, regardless of their other skills in production techniques, cannot lay claim to this type of creation. They take music which has been created by musicians and faff about with it a bit.

[Daisy]

Oh pish and tush you old farts.

You're channeling Stephen Fry!

And yeah buggering about with other peoples music does not a musician make.

[loCAtek]

ThX Gob, that DJ Tiesto sounds magnificent!


What I don't think the foogies are getting is how complicated it is to use a whole audio track as an instrument. If this was just adding a drum machine to an existing song, that would be unoriginal; these are whole new works with tracks used in original ways. Depending on the audience response, no two trance performances are exactly alike.

[loCAtek]

What I've noticed about Trance is- it primarily uses the best of the best music to sample; while what passes for 'new & improved' sounds and vocals, can amount to just pop garbage.

[Gob]

Just popping in to add;

I've just read "Frank on Frank", by Frank Zappa Darkblack, I know of that which I speak.

As for the rest of your and Sean's posts, well I'm right and you're wrong.

You guys just aren't taking the right drugs..

Oh, check this out, the best new music around (you'll like this Lo)...



Check out the breakdown at 4.15, and the rebuild at 4.50 - 5.20!!

Guitars? Went out is a choke of vomit with Hendrix...

[darkblack]

What I don't think the foogies are getting is how complicated it is to use a whole audio track as an instrument.

Oh, really now? A whole audio track, you say? Well, that's different.



Let me clear things up from the professional musician point of view. For purposes of our discussion, I'll portray the wizened aforementioned. Gob will portray the mildly dim yet lovable rave kid full of life, spunk, and shit.

Semantically speaking, DJs are not musicians. Period. They can be composer/arrangers (via their recontextualization of performances of others), or recording artists (taking those recontextualizations and putting them into recorded form, with additional materials as needed).

Now the young folks hereabouts may be going "But, but, but...". But me no buts. A turntable or a sampler are not musical instruments. Rather, they are playback devices - and whether they are being used by Grandma to play her Mantovani records or Grandmaster Flash rocking the house on the wheels of steel, playback devices they remain...incapable of generating their own tones.

Now as before, this has no bearing on the artistic validity of being a DJ whatsoever.
Contrary perhaps to popular perception, I'm of an age to have Hip Hop and related idioms as formative music experiences. I've also played on and engineered sessions for same (Yes children, rap crews used to have real live musos backing them up back in the day - Sugar Hill, baby!) and thus recognize the vitality and necessity of the expression...unlike one of my old Motown employers who (having had his heyday in the 1960's) opined on Rap, "N****s been doing that shit in the jailhouse for a 100 muthaf***in' years!"

In his defense, having spent eons on one chitlin' circuit or another honing his craft and waiting for the one chance that he might be lucky enough to get, only to see some young blood blow right past the line on their way up with little in the way of visible dues paid - and this is a common music industry phenomenon, of course - a tinge of bitterness might have been involved.



With that all said, from the subjectively lofty perch of my mind I don't consider most of the current producer-driven top-10 fodder 'music' - more of a 'personality advertisement' with a heavy beat, oh so sorry...And many of the purveyors of same would be better described by the sobriquet 'musical instrument owner'.

[Gob]

Can I correct you somewhat here?

A sampler is as much of a musical intrument as any other.

The two samplers I use, linked to a piano style keyboard, are any instrument I want them to be from a flute to a motorcycle engine, across 5 octaves.

I think you are confusing samplers and "sampling".

One is an electronic instrument for playing individual samples, the other is the use of portions of ready made music, normally looped.

The NN-XT is a highly advanced sampler with an impressive list of features and functions to it. Where the NN-19 is a "fast-track" sampler, this machine is for your more demanding sampling tasks. The NN-XT is bursting with detailed programming options, but comes with an intuitive user interface, making it the perfect tool for both sound design and life-like instrument emulation. Just load up one of the included orchestral library patches, and you'll know what we're talking about.
NN-XT Advanced Sampler



The NN-XT is packed with useful features to help you build your own stunningly realistic instrument patches: alternate sample playback, auto-pitch detection, zones with individual parameters and much more. But don't think for a minute that instrument emulation is all this thing is good for - the filters, the envelopes and the tempo syncable LFOs let you perform some crazy tricks on whatever material you put in there.

All in all, the NN-XT is probably one of the most flexible samplers around, and when we say probably, we mean definitely.

[darkblack]

linked to a piano style keyboard

Ah but dear heart, how would that 5-octave motorcycle engine sound without the (ahem) piano-style musical instrument interface to give it life?



Again, it's not that you can't 'make' music with such devices - but one needs the correct musical interface (a keyboard or suchlike) to do so. In and of themselves, they do not make music - instead acting as devices for storage, retrieval and sonic manipulation of sampled content. The individual brings the musical touch and sensibilities to the party and executes these ideas via the instrumental interface.

In my opinion one can make a form of music with anything, should they desire - needing merely the will and the focus to create the composition with the materials available.

However, when I exclude turntables as musical instruments in this context, it is because of the lack of inherent tonal creation within them - they play back content, but do not produce it, lacking the interface capacities to do so ...leaving turntablists a potentially broad rhythmic palette in the join between device and user, but a rather narrow harmonic/melodic palette by comparison. Such things are therefore rhythm instruments - like drums - and music is not just rhythm.

[Gob]

linked to a piano style keyboard

Ah but dear heart, how would that 5-octave motorcycle engine sound without the (ahem) piano-style musical instrument interface to give it life?



Again, it's not that you can't 'make' music with such devices - but one needs the correct musical interface (a keyboard or suchlike) to do so. In and of themselves, they do not make music - instead acting as devices for storage, retrieval and sonic manipulation of sampled content. The individual brings the musical touch and sensibilities to the party and executes these ideas via the instrumental interface.

Which was my point exactly, a sampler without a musical interface is a door stop, or a software glitch, old fruit. So samplers like instrument, rely on some internal source which the musician brings out music in, where it be from a string, a reed, a moog synthesizer, or a sampler.

Just because samplers do not themselves generate the noise which becomes music, relying on a sample of "recorded" note (s) that does not make it any less of an instrument that the mellotron, or the syth.

[Sean]

any less of an instrument that the mellotron, or the syth

Must... resist...







Oh fuck it!

[Gob]

Oh bugger, LOL!!

[Sean]

Anyway Strop... must you go with the tired knee-jerk reaction of describing anybody who doesn't like 'music' that sounds like 100 car alarms going off simultaneously as an 'old fart'?

I mean really...

I get that enough at home!

[Crackpot]

It's called projection Sean.

[Gob]

Anyway Strop... must you go with the tired knee-jerk reaction of describing anybody who doesn't like 'music' that sounds like 100 car alarms going off simultaneously as an 'old fart'?

But isn't the true definition of an old fart: "Anyone who thinks music produced after 1976 sounds like 100 car alarms going off simultaneously/ cats fighting in a sack/ dustbins being thrown downstairs. Or who make claims about the musicianship of long haired guitar wankers who should have died in a puddle of vomit in 1973, but instead turned to jazz..."

[rubato]

Ex-cruciating crap for boring people.

Go kill yourselves.

yrs,
rubato