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Originally Posted by henryrobinett  Having a ton of places to play, where you can hone your craft and communication/performance skills in front of audiences is virtually gone. You used to have to get a 4 set show together. Then you played two to four times a week, even as an original band. You rehearsed more than that. You had to have practice time to learn your parts and something else besides. And then write music with pencil and paper! |
A four-set show! Today, we have 125+ channels on TV and most people can't stick with one channel for more than a few minutes, we surf from channel to channel for hours on end. Our culture has now come to a point where there is no interest in seeing ONE BAND play for four hours. Nobody is good enough to hold people's attention that long, and I do mean NOBODY. Times have changed. When it comes to decision time, most people choose to stay at home vs. go to a venue and listen to live music. Musicians are no longer competing with SportsCenter on Jumbotrons, Karaoke and dance clubs. Musicians are competing with the Trading Spaces marathon and Shark Week and we're losing.
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Originally Posted by henryrobinett But if you want to sit down with toys, like drum machines, guitar modelers, softsynths, virtual samplers, drum machines, auto-tune and a ton of instruments, plug-ins -- BASICALLY PRODUCTION TOOLS, you can have a field day. Sure, for the first time in history you can play music and not learn to play an instrument. This I think is sad, and at the end of the day, destructive.
Before the 80s, if youwanted to play music; if you wanted to play in a band, you had to PLAY an instrument. And playing an instrument required a certain desciplne. I don't think most young musicians have enough attention to sit down day after day to learn an instrument well. |
This "lowering of the bar" contributes to the noise. The noise is part of what keeps "talented" musicians from reaching their audiences. If there's 1000 records for sale and 975 of them are crap, how can those 25 records rise above? Funny thing is, we can all agree that there's a lot of noise and very little substance, but we just can't seem to agree on what's what. Your 25 good records aren't going to be the same as my 25. We'll probably agree on the vast majority of the 975 crappy records, but the problem with the music industry isn't, in reality, the 975 crappy records. The problem is that nobody can agree on which 25 are good. There's going to be about 100 records that get multiple votes as being good. Now, if you break down the aforementioned ratios it means that for every record that I like, there are three other ones that I've heard and don't like very much, and another fourty or so that just plain suck.
The quantity of product is probably at an all-time high, but so are our collective skills as consumers of pop culture. I don't know about you, but I'm finding good, substantive music out there. It takes as much or more time than it used to, but it's there.