Yeah, I know that I am rather radical at this, but thats my point that grew over the years.
there are a few things that make me seperate between “real” music and “fake” music and that is directly connected to the programs.
(now the next part might be a little bit cluttered but I dont care).
I think when the effort and creativity someone puts into his music reaches a certain point he becomes “real” for me.
now, musicmaker and acid and also ableton live if used with acid loops or the like are not real musicprograms. There you have those gigantic blocks of prerecorded wav-files and you put them together without ever doing anything than the musical equivalent of “painting by numbers”. All you do is puzzling a 35-piece puzzle together, and thats not making music, thats something below. all those blocks fit neatly together, and you cant make much wrong. And thats the point, there is no work required there and you simply can’t fail if you have two intact braincells and know how to operate a mouse.
I want to see people putting effort in their music, and I dont care if its an intense 2 hour flight for a new track or a slow 3-month crawl. I want music that is more than the simple sum of its ingredients, I want to see something happening with the samples and the notes and the small parts, and I dont think you can achieve this with musicmaker, acid, fruity loops, because those programs simply force you on a nice and easy path and do not allow experiments, you simply cant do anything wrong there. I want to hear that people took their time to find those right chords, to dig in their vinyl-collection for that particular sample, to chop up and rearrange a loop so it fits the music and not just plays along.
I cant take music and musicprograms seriously which either do not require some creative effort or do have some huge safety-nets. I dont take programs seriously which wont allow the user to leave the brightly lit path or who push him in some direction. I dont like programs which produce some generic output and I really dont like people who use these programs to create such generic stuff and then call themselves “musicians”.
actually there are so much pictures for what I mean. like, whats “cooking” ? Is someone who goes to a take-away, buys some chinese food and then at home spices it up with some ketchup and pepper cooking ? I think not. Is someone who does buy some instant-food which requires hot water and something like “cook this for 5 minutes, then pour that one in and cook for another 3 minutes” cooking ? Nope. Is someone who buys a frozen pizza and drops some salami and extra cheese on it before he puts it in the oven cooking ? Think not. Someone who buys several ingredients and puts them together to a meal after working in the kitchen for some time does cook.
or something else : are you impressed by someone who is balancing on a 1 meter high rope which a safetynet under it ? I am not. I am impressed by
someone who does either balance at 1meter without a safety net if he is not long in the balancing business or if he does balance at 10 meters with a safety net. And what do you call someone who does balance at 1 meter with a safety net, records it on video and then goes home and edits the video so it looks like he is balancing at 10 meters without a safety net ?
To clear things up : I am not against safety nets in programs, and I am not one of those who think that ft2 is cooler because it was harder to do music with. I love renoise because its easy to work with, or to say it in a different way, because it supports my creativity. It does not make my creativity obsolete or fakes it, it just supports it. Its like those nifty little chord-helper tools, I like them, because they help you to add chords to your song, but you still have to find those chords first. You cant simply click two buttons and have a great chord-progression, and if you can you have some generic output that either needs to be contradicted with the rest of the song by putting work in it or you should be ashamed of yourself. Thats the opposite to Acid or musicmaker, where every combinable sample is in the same chord, where you simply cant do anything wrong.
well, I stop here with my rant of the month, if you wish please discuss this further with me.