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Yeah well Danny, at risk of offending a bunch of folk, I think of today as the slacker generation. It's a McDonalds world that pretends to have world class taste. But real great taste takes years of careful development.
I had a friend who's girlfriend was a complete snob. She worked in a bookstore and knew all the titles and could talk to you very learnedly about these various books and authors. It was funny because she comes from a very modest background. Not educated. My friend, her boyfriend, was English, so somewhere along the line this girl/woman developed a sort of english accent. But she was from the boonies, you know kind of trailer park. Seriously NOTHING AGAINST TRAILER PARKS! And she never read any of those books she'd talk to you about. She just heard other people talk about them. But she wanted to BE that learned, sophisticated, intellectual person. She just didn't want to do the work.
I know, that was kind of random.
With music, to play it well also takes years of careful study, development, skill and taste. We who love music and/or are in the production of music, all have varying levels and degrees of great taste in music -- we know what we like and don't like, and can be snobby about it.
But with music, to PLAY IT WELL, I think it's best to connect with it; the instrument, full bore. Not fix it in the mix. Not necessarily cut and paste.
I saw the writing on the wall actually way back in the mid 70s when I saw my first drum machine. And then word processors and Page Maker. It was all over.
And don't get me wrong. All this stuff is great. If you know how to play it's fantastic. Of course it's also great if you don't know how to play. I think it's different if you're an accomplished or semi accomplished trombonist, oboist, guitarist, pianist and need to piece together other parts. You UNDERSTAND -- you KNOW music. But when you have no clue and you sit and try to put sounds together-- well you can come up with some cool and interesting things that way, but ultimately I think you're limited by the lack of your own knowledge.
Today we seem to be cubicle musicians; parts musicians. Import sounds musicians. How many of us can play a sets worth of music on their instrument, alone? How many can back up a singer and change key, without the transpose button, on the spot? How many people can play almost any style convincingly and read the parts if called upon in an emergency to help another band out?
Music is a language. I think today most people are far more illiterate than they were 20 years ago and longer. Hell, more than half of all homes used to have a piano and the children were required to play it, or some instrument.
Today the programmers are more the real musicians than the operators of Logic, Cubase, DP, etc.. The programmers are the ones coming up with the sounds, the quantize algorithms, etc.. THEY'RE ones actually manipulating the sounds. We're just moving the parameters.
It's really a funny time to be a musician.
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