Are Todays Daw's Making People Lazy Producers ?

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Slightly OT.. Bitwig 8Track does indeed need a serial_no... which CM provide. Although limited in it's modulation devices in this version I look forward to seeing how it interacts with VCV_Rack...

Other thoughts... oh yeah, with just 8 tracks to deal with>>
This DAW can really make me lazy..
Or I could go "old_skool" and bounce 8_to_2 ,
Reload.. 6tracks to work... repeat>>so cool
Decision made on the fly, ain't no turning back...
whatDaYa mean, you want another kick take>> get outta here!

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Long thread and I am still trying to catch up. Maybe I am late to the game but there is my take on it. (And I have been kicking around making music since the late 80s).

I think it's important separate personal tastes in music from technology and innovation. You own personal tastes in music are a mixture of your cultural, societal, geographic, psychological and generational makeup. Statements such as "today's music is garbage" is a pointless statement because it's a statement that pertains to only your own outlook on music and what you hear. If you are the same generation as me, always keep in mind, modern music is made by people of a different generation than you *for* a different generation than you. The fact you may happen to like or dislike to listen to it is irrelevant. But if you are a musician and inclined to make and understand *all* forms of music, then it's always useful to keep an open mind and listen to different types and styles of music -- even if its' not the stuff you would normally listen to in your spare time --- and not dismiss music not meant for you as garbage.

But back to DAW's and modernity. I think DAW's, and various music software and VST synths progress along with other software innovation and progress at the same rate. They are tools than improve over time and allow you to do tasks faster and more efficiently. It's sort of like your mobile phone vs phone booths and phone books. Sure, you could pull out your mobile and search up a restaurant and call in which would take you less than 2 minutes to do with a modern tool like a mobile phone, or you could chose to drive around and look for a phone booth and find a phone book and try to find a restaurant you are looking for and call it which might take you anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes (note: lets just use fantasy and imagine that phone booths and phone books still exist in your city and are readily available). Give the choice of the two, which one would you chose? They both achieve the same end result -- allow you to call a restaurant you are looking for.

Modern DAW's and making music on them can be viewed as a similar process. They allow you to put together music parts and pieces and complete songs faster and more efficiently. It's just a normal progress of modernity and innovation. You are able to achieve faster and more efficient (maybe better sounding?) results in a modern DAW compared to Logic 6.x on an old Mac PPC. So why not use them? What really matters is what the ideas are behind what you are doing and how you chose to use the tools and DAWs, meaning the tools at your disposal to create your own "creative piece of artwork" aka, your music.

The discussion about "lazy producers" is rooted in the fact that modernity and innovation have also resulted in the tools and software , aka DAW's being more readily available to more people than ever before, so you are basically seeing a lot more people (who may or may not actually have very creative ideas) making and releasing all forms of music in various states of completion. What I do notice is that the access to the tools is making more people try to make music, and what is happening is, they may not be particularly good or creative ideas when they start, but as they use the tools more and get familiar with them, the creative ideas start to get better and better. So you are actually seeing more interesting and more creative music as a result of modernity and access to DAWs. (More competition in the marketplace as well!)

Back in the early 90s when I first started using computers in music, access to a computer and ProTools was hard to come by if you didn't own or go into a studio so the people using them were the engineers, people in bands and composers trying to break out in local music scenes. It does not mean all the people using them back then made great music. Many made crappy uninventive unoriginal music, hence why they didn't break out of local scenes. The ones that did make original and inventive music did. These same rules apply in the modern music landscape and those people do exist, its just going to be harder to hear them because there is just more music to sift through. But it does not mean modern tools make people lazy. It just makes them more efficient with their time.

I would pick a modern DAW like FL Studio or Abelton over an old copy of Logic 6.x any day of the week.

(Note: i am actually a Cubase user because I can't be arsed to switch and learn a new DAW, but I can appreciated the quality and efficiency of the DJ type DAWs like FL and Able)
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Statements such as "today's music is garbage" is a pointless statement because it's a statement that pertains to only your own outlook on music

By that logic, your statement is pointless because it's just a statement that pertains to "only your" outlook on... statements.

As a whole, the whole culture is in decline from where I'm situated. I'm not abashed to say so in the least. That kind of assessment happened as one of the outcomes of bringing the past in. It ought to be a different discussion but hey, it's KVR, shit happens.

My position, the logical position, is that a 'Todays Daw's'/sic can't make anyone anything. Are today's slinky strings making people lazy guitarists? Are today's microphones making people lazy singers? Did today's word processors make the OP ungrammatical? ;)

Also, open-minded there is a type of fallacy. Your mind can become a sieve unless you can make distinctions. I dismiss things. I can dismiss this or the other thing pretty much objectively. Your "and not dismiss music not meant for you as garbage" is a straw man. (You could reply to something which was said, an indication of someone's actual thoughts on it, instead.)

Personally I don't expect I have a lot to learn from a pop song at all. I've had a C&W band, I learned how to subvert that, but what I didn't learn was new instrumental or vocal techniques or a radical reconsideration of musical form or harmonic language or like that, you know.

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"The discussion about "lazy producers" is..."

Well, there is a certain sort who in all probability wouldn't have been arsed to produce before the current paradigm became available. And between that and lifetime musicians is where a lot of people locate, with varying goals, varying results... one of them we saw here was a pining for the fjords, of an earlier tech [eg., 1990s], a transitional area, in preference to what we have now. Which just underwent a bit of evolution [MPE], and suggests there will be a state of the art rather past what we have now in the near future.

So this kind of outcome (Producers reliant on the machine in the first place) is an historic inevitability, confer HG Wells' The Time Machine.

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jancivil wrote: Sat Jan 19, 2019 8:19 pm "The discussion about "lazy producers" is..."

Well, there is a certain sort who in all probability wouldn't have been arsed to produce before the current paradigm became available. And between that and lifetime musicians is where a lot of people locate, with varying goals, varying results... one of them we saw here was a pining for the fjords, of an earlier tech [eg., 1990s], a transitional area, in preference to what we have now. Which just underwent a bit of evolution [MPE], and suggests there will be a state of the art rather past what we have now in the near future.

So this kind of outcome (Producers reliant on the machine in the first place) is an historic inevitability, confer HG Wells' The Time Machine.
The entire idea of being a "lifetime musician" hinges upon a individual being able to afford the luxury of entertaining the idea of becoming a life time musician. In order to be able to entertain that idea, you need access to a tool or tools (instruments, time to learn, time to develop a talent) and you need the economic freedom to be able to entertain that idea. If you were a young teenager from a lower class family living in the mid 1800s in England, society would have relegated you to working in a coal mine 12 hours a day and you would never have had a chance to become any sort of musician. It is only because the advent and advancement of technology, modern society, government and social services that you are able to now entertain the idea of saying "fark it, i really like making music in my life, I think I will go on welfare for a few years and live in a basement apartment and try to become a musician". (the old beatnick Kerouac mentality) or the more modernized version of it, "i think i will continue to live with my parents and try to break it in music". (You note how no young people ever go the Leadbelly mentality, "I think I want to work on a plantation 18 hours a day, kill people, go to jail, and play and sing blues guitar for the rest of my life" ) :)

My point is, the advancement of technology and tools for making music (such as DAW's and VSTs) directly influences young peoples decisions to tryout the idea of pursing music or being creative -- which is a good thing because the direction industrialization and AI and robotics are going -- the creative jobs will be much harder to automate in the future. Even people that might not have been technical geeks in high school and also people have have no background in the music or arts of any kind are offered the option. The availability of the tools sparks and nurtures creativity. (Note: Don't get me wrong, it helps to have a background in the arts and music and a technical bend to make modern music since it will give you a huge head start, but its' not an absolute requirement to making something creative and interesting and groundbreaking and different -- the only requirement for that is boredom and a curious human mind)
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telecode wrote: Sun Jan 20, 2019 2:12 pm The availability of the tools sparks and nurtures creativity.
,
In a society threatened by young hedonistic snowflakes,
whose educators studiously refused to engender in them any meaningful critical thinking skills, tools just get in the way
of the next few moments of pleasure. People willing to sacrifice personal hours in order to be creative, embrace the spark within,
it's not something that was included in a box or a download.
When ignited, you use whatever tools are available*

Tools before the advent of electricity made things
that withstand the passage of time. They were used
by people with cultural and personal work ethic,
who had no welfare state, no unemployment benefits,
no modern medicine, etc and who valued human life, from
conception to the grave.

*somewhere among the 90 or so stops on the
Joss Stone Total World Tour, (search youtube)
you'll notice some instruments
that are homemade, or primitive, or old tech, but the spark
is in the players. (she does simple but elegant duets
or small group songs, in the foreign tongues of her
participants, and in many primitive locales. With a raggedy
little note book helping guide her. She's
learned from her time in the spotlights.
Cheers

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^^ well said

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^I'd like to remind you that many people just want to make music, regardless of your opinion on that subject. They don't care at all about your philosophical investigations disguised as a poem :P
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Tricky-Loops wrote: (...)someone like Armin van Buuren who claims to make a track in half an hour and all his songs sound somewhat boring(...)

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telecode wrote: Sun Jan 20, 2019 2:12 pm
jancivil wrote: Sat Jan 19, 2019 8:19 pm "The discussion about "lazy producers" is..."

Well, there is a certain sort who in all probability wouldn't have been arsed to produce before the current paradigm became available. And between that and lifetime musicians is where a lot of people locate, with varying goals, varying results... one of them we saw here was a pining for the fjords, of an earlier tech [eg., 1990s], a transitional area, in preference to what we have now. Which just underwent a bit of evolution [MPE], and suggests there will be a state of the art rather past what we have now in the near future.

So this kind of outcome (Producers reliant on the machine in the first place) is an historic inevitability, confer HG Wells' The Time Machine.
The entire idea of being a "lifetime musician" hinges upon a individual being able to afford the luxury of entertaining the idea of becoming a life time musician. In order to be able to entertain that idea, ...
Bullshit. I grew up with very little money. I needed to do it, it's who I am so I did it.

"It is only because the advent and advancement of technology, modern society, government and social services that you are able to now entertain the idea of saying "fark it, i really like making music in my life, I think I will go on welfare for a few years and live in a basement apartment and try to become a musician". :lol:

Well, I had a Japanese copy of a Telecaster and later a cheap Japanese classical guitar. I didn't think I was going to make viable records in my bedroom when I began in 1970. I played the guitar. I got myself into school with an audition tape (It was a bit too much to travel to audition live, which lessened one's chances) and I got a basic grant and then supplemental grants and lived on campus. When I transferred to SFCM I worked in the library there for 4 dollars an hour. Eventually I didn't figure to keep borrowing money (albeit back then I was only borrowing $1250 a semester) so I ended up working for a living. Eventually I got hurt working and strung out on dope, then I 'got on welfare'. I quit working at 36 years of age.
I also quit high school at 16. I wasn't going to do anything else, period.

Your post is amazing, make excuses in the abstract as though to create this impossibility except for computers. No, sorry, people made do up until quite recently. The notion you have to be well off is a fiction you've created for some reason.
My point is, the advancement of technology and tools for making music (such as DAW's and VSTs) directly influences young peoples decisions to tryout the idea of pursing music or being creative -- which is a good thing because the direction industrialization and AI and robotics are going -- the creative jobs will be much harder to automate in the future.
Creativity in music segues into viability as a worker now? LMAO.

Like most everything, technological advancements end up with good outcomes and bad outcomes for the individual, depending, and for society as a whole. I said something which appears to be simply true, there clearly are people who didn't have the interest, the interest through itself, the instinct, the drive, the talent (even if this is an upsetting concept), the wherewithal to become a musician. Yet here they are now, Producing.
You can tell yourself any story you like that vanishes that. It's no skin off my face, it's a 'just saying' proposition. So, I don't know who you're making this excuse for or why it needs to be made, but it is quite some sophistry.

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telecode wrote: Sun Jan 20, 2019 2:12 pm I think I will go on welfare for a few years and live in a basement apartment and try to become a musician". (the old beatnick Kerouac mentality) or the more modernized version of it, "i think i will continue to live with my parents and try to break it in music". (You note how no young people ever go the Leadbelly mentality, "I think I want to work on a plantation 18 hours a day, kill people, go to jail, and play and sing blues guitar for the rest of my life"
So evidently you've read no Kerouac in addition to what looks like the kind of narrow experience of this world where one would have to have read... On The Road. And it's beatnik. A pejorative or ridiculing term created by the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen back in the day. Portmanteau of 'beat' [google it ;)] and 'nik' from like "Sputnik", cf. 'peacenik'. Maybe your concept amounts basically to Maynard G Krebs and that's enough.

And using the term mentality again talking about a seriously hard life, Jesus. SO not funny. Yeah, the mentality to end up sold into slavery, oh, the mentality of having descended from African slaves. :idiot:

Frankly, I find that the many failures of your critical apparatus tell a story about the decline of culture.

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jancivil wrote: Mon Jan 21, 2019 4:35 pm
telecode wrote: Sun Jan 20, 2019 2:12 pm I think I will go on welfare for a few years and live in a basement apartment and try to become a musician". (the old beatnick Kerouac mentality) or the more modernized version of it, "i think i will continue to live with my parents and try to break it in music". (You note how no young people ever go the Leadbelly mentality, "I think I want to work on a plantation 18 hours a day, kill people, go to jail, and play and sing blues guitar for the rest of my life"
So evidently you've read no Kerouac in addition to what looks like the kind of narrow experience of this world where one would have to have read... On The Road. And it's beatnik. A pejorative or ridiculing term created by the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen back in the day. Portmanteau of 'beat' [google it ;)] and 'nik' from like "Sputnik", cf. 'peacenik'. Maybe your concept amounts basically to Maynard G Krebs and that's enough.

And using the term mentality again talking about a seriously hard life, Jesus. SO not funny. Yeah, the mentality to end up sold into slavery, oh, the mentality of having descended from African slaves. :idiot:

Frankly, I find that the many failures of your critical apparatus tell a story about the decline of culture.
Sorry if it sounded like I offended you or anyone. I am trying to add a little bit of humor in my posts, that's all it is. I find people are sometimes being too serious and taking everyone too seriously. I try to take the Robert Klein or Robin Williams approach, "in 1,000 years we'll all be dead anyways and no one will care!!" ... so try to have some fun while you are at it.

My post about Leadbelly was not really trying to make fun of back African Americans. I am more poking fun at the stereotypes associated with blues music. The Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson type stuff that music media created for middle class white people to enjoy American "roots" music. The music and the nostalgia of the times of whatever it was that happened when these people were alive making their music is somehow separated from the hardships that these people actually had to live through while they were supposedly living breathing ground breaking American iconic musicians making pure American music. FWIW: I am actually a huge Tampa Red fan just because I think he was ahead of his times and smarter entrepreneurial and virtuoso among his peers.
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jancivil wrote: Mon Jan 21, 2019 4:19 pm
telecode wrote: Sun Jan 20, 2019 2:12 pm
jancivil wrote: Sat Jan 19, 2019 8:19 pm "The discussion about "lazy producers" is..."

Well, there is a certain sort who in all probability wouldn't have been arsed to produce before the current paradigm became available. And between that and lifetime musicians is where a lot of people locate, with varying goals, varying results... one of them we saw here was a pining for the fjords, of an earlier tech [eg., 1990s], a transitional area, in preference to what we have now. Which just underwent a bit of evolution [MPE], and suggests there will be a state of the art rather past what we have now in the near future.

So this kind of outcome (Producers reliant on the machine in the first place) is an historic inevitability, confer HG Wells' The Time Machine.
The entire idea of being a "lifetime musician" hinges upon a individual being able to afford the luxury of entertaining the idea of becoming a life time musician. In order to be able to entertain that idea, ...
Bullshit. I grew up with very little money. I needed to do it, it's who I am so I did it.

"It is only because the advent and advancement of technology, modern society, government and social services that you are able to now entertain the idea of saying "fark it, i really like making music in my life, I think I will go on welfare for a few years and live in a basement apartment and try to become a musician". :lol:

Well, I had a Japanese copy of a Telecaster and later a cheap Japanese classical guitar. I didn't think I was going to make viable records in my bedroom when I began in 1970. I played the guitar. I got myself into school with an audition tape (It was a bit too much to travel to audition live, which lessened one's chances) and I got a basic grant and then supplemental grants and lived on campus. When I transferred to SFCM I worked in the library there for 4 dollars an hour. Eventually I didn't figure to keep borrowing money (albeit back then I was only borrowing $1250 a semester) so I ended up working for a living. Eventually I got hurt working and strung out on dope, then I 'got on welfare'. I quit working at 36 years of age.
I also quit high school at 16. I wasn't going to do anything else, period.

Your post is amazing, make excuses in the abstract as though to create this impossibility except for computers. No, sorry, people made do up until quite recently. The notion you have to be well off is a fiction you've created for some reason.
My point is, the advancement of technology and tools for making music (such as DAW's and VSTs) directly influences young peoples decisions to tryout the idea of pursing music or being creative -- which is a good thing because the direction industrialization and AI and robotics are going -- the creative jobs will be much harder to automate in the future.
Creativity in music segues into viability as a worker now? LMAO.

Like most everything, technological advancements end up with good outcomes and bad outcomes for the individual, depending, and for society as a whole. I said something which appears to be simply true, there clearly are people who didn't have the interest, the interest through itself, the instinct, the drive, the talent (even if this is an upsetting concept), the wherewithal to become a musician. Yet here they are now, Producing.
You can tell yourself any story you like that vanishes that. It's no skin off my face, it's a 'just saying' proposition. So, I don't know who you're making this excuse for or why it needs to be made, but it is quite some sophistry.
I sense a certain level of hostility and I am sorry if I posted stuff that you find offensive. But, can I share an insight about producing and producers.

I also used to be at a point where I didn't quite get why everyone is calling themselves a "producer". They quite obviously aren't a producer in the traditional sense as George Martin or Bob Clearmountain or Todd Rundgren were producers. But those guys were producers in a different era of history of the music industry. That old music industry has collapsed and ended. Perhaps with the end of the old industry, the term "music producer" has also changed meaning and it does not mean the same thing that it used to back in the 60s thru 90s. The role of the link between musician and recording engineer and music management is not passed on to the artist marketer. The term "music producer" has now been stripped down to it's real bare meaning, meaning the person that "produces music" - be it in their bedroom, in their parents basement or their mothers kitchen. It does not have to mean the person that has 20+ experience and power in the music industry and is the link between artists, engineers and management.

If a guy like Rundgren (much smarter and more talented than me) is willing to come out and state publicly, the music industry is dead for him. He's not a producer or recording artist anymore. He is a performing artist. That's what he does for a living now. He performs live because that's where he makes him income from. He used to be a recording artist and a producer, but he changed with the times as the times required.

I am a believer that things are now better than they used to be. Opportunities are greater. Quality of life is better. There has been progress. As far as music making is concerned, having the access to tools that allow you to put together a half decent 4 minute demo of an idea you have is an amazing advantage over yester years when the most you could hope to do is make a cassette demo of you and a guitar singing your little ditty. Everything else required you putting together some money and booking time in a studio.
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I spent a good part of my afternoon listening to singers. Real singers, real music.

Musicians became musicians because that's who they are. It's a very specious claim that only since there's computers - and it's as though a given somehow, computers and production software are automatically available to the poor or less fortunate in a way a cheap guitar somehow never was. Here is one of the most laughable parts of that nonsense, how can anyone but the truly advantaged get access or the time, particularly we should be able to notice that being a musician is internal, it's a matter of being. It's an existential matter. And how does one miss that people sing. You can be a musician having nothing but your own body and your own authentic agency.

The working class, if this is supposed to be a class distinction (smacks of a political argument) produces a lot of musicians, and artists, writers, you-name-it. People that need to do it make sacrifices. It's a bit perverse to see, particularly as this argument really posed the availability of production technology in front of being a musician. Cart pulls the horse fallacy.

It actually only underlines what I was saying, there is a certain sort of person that needs a lot handed to them. Seriously, when we have to do it ourselves we don't have this problem. It's such entitlement, people that think to capital P Produce before they've even begun to be musicians. Honestly, really, this is a recent development.

Eventually we lose the ability to discern. We already see it: "you can't dismiss music as garbage just because it wasn't meant for you" is a bad sign, it strikes me as a pretense to being critical but it's anything but.

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Interesting discussion. But to the OP’s question: yes, it is a fact, that the relation of available recording gear/produced music in the radio play is much worse on 2019 than it was in 1969.
And its a fact, that infinite availability of options tend to make us lazy.

On the other hand the global real-economy (including music business), and maybe the ”spiritual degrees of freedom” is lower in 2019 than it was on 1969.
Maybe that’s one important factor in the depression.

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Harry_HH wrote: Tue Jan 22, 2019 5:30 am Interesting discussion. But to the OP’s question: yes, it is a fact, that the relation of available recording gear/produced music in the radio play is much worse on 2019 than it was in 1969.
And its a fact, that infinite availability of options tend to make us lazy.

On the other hand the global real-economy (including music business), and maybe the ”spiritual degrees of freedom” is lower in 2019 than it was on 1969.
Maybe that’s one important factor in the depression.
My attitude is, there has been advancement and progress and the new tools and options are there and available to you -- so you would be a fool to not use them to make your art. It's your art made with your own creative voice. There is nothing out there that stated that you need to know to play drums to make proper beats on a drum machine. Or you need to have had piano lessons to use a keyboard or synth. If you want to make hip-hop beats on a Akai MPC, just go ahead and start making them. If you want to be a cinematic chill step electronic Fl Studio artist -- just go ahead and start making it. The way I see it all, it's going to be a lot like riding a bike. The more you do it, the better you will get at it as you become more familiar with it. Most probably somewhere along the way in your journey to try to better your art, you might find yourself needing to pickup some music theory as far as chordal progressions go, or structure and form of rhythms in music and you will go on from there. But this talk of you need to be musically inclined or have had some sort of musical exposure or rudimentary background to even consider getting a DAW and VSTs and start releasing your own art on soundcloud or bandcamp because without it the quality of your art is inferior is total bullshit. So you played a brass instrument in high school. Big whoopy doo. A lot of people did. You didn't do it because you wanted to be the next John Coltrane or had a hard on for the Tuba, you did it cause you wanted an easy grade so it was either that or an art class -- everyone did it and everyone knows it and understands that. What really matters is where are you *now* in your life and what are you doing *now* with your life. If you find yourself wanting to make music because you need a creative outlet, then get some tools that are easily available and go ahead and do it.

You will never *ever* know if you are good at anything unless you try it. And for all you know, when you try it, you might even discover that you are actually better at it than most people who are doing it.
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