Pre-fab Music
It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that anyone I knew figured out how to do multitrack recording on a computer. Before then, we all played with broke-suburban-kid analog solutions: karaoke machines and dual-tape tape recorders attached to Radio Shack microphones, perhaps a church sound board or an ultra low-end four track if anyone could get their hands on one. We spent a lot of time — hours upon hours — building weird contraptions that combined pillows and cardboard boxes and odd amp configurations in order to get the sounds we were looking for, or at least to figure out what sounds were within our reach. Most of it was pretty primitive, but the results we got were, I think, far better than they had any right to be considering our total lack of professional equipment or training.
These days, though, making quasi-original music is as easy making a mix tape playlist. I put this together in about 90 minutes on my second ever attempt at GarageBand.
It’s not much — at very, very best, in fact, I’d say it’s thoroughly generic — but, unless my memory is mistaken, it sounds significantly better than projects that came out of a lot of decent home recording studios just a decade or so ago. The speed at which digital home recording technology has progressed is really impressive, and, just as Final Cut, Premiere, and iMovie have substantially reduced the barriers to entry for digital filmmaking, GarageBand and its more professional older siblings have made it almost effortless for reasonably computer-savvy folks to put together high-quality music very, very quickly. For a lot of youngsters, I suspect it’s going to end up second nature.
To me, that’s a potentially huge shift. And I frequently wonder if, perhaps even more than the social media revolution, it’s a shift that could produce huge changes in the way people communicate. We may end up seeing a generation as able and comfortable with audio production and video editing as my cohort is with web-browsing, blogging, email, and word processing.
UPDATE: Yes, yes, as Lasorda says in the comments, it’s terrible. The point isn’t Peter-makes-embarrassing-generic-technoish-song (I mean, sure, if that’s what you want to talk about, have at it — I agree!). It’s that, despite the crappiness of the composition, the recording quality is pretty good, and that I made it in an hour and a half using a piece of software I have virtually no experience with. Now imagine a generation of pop-savvy kids growing up with access to the rough equivalent of full-fledged recording studios and editing bays in their bedrooms, and then think about the way that’s going to change the way they approach creating media.
Dude. It’s pretty late at night. You can take that down right now and no one will notice. Remember when Friedersdorf made some observations in the style of A Movable Feast? This is worse than that. Seriously, man. Nothing good can come of this.
— Lasorda · Oct 4, 04:07 AM · #
Art and tech:
My first major was music, composition and guitar performance (well actually my first major was math, but for the sake of this let’s say it was music.)
I was an okay guitarist, but I was a way above average theory and composition student. Freshman year I was in the second year class. 80% of the students washed out. The next year was just the four of us who survived, so it was like mini masters class. Awesome.
Except I can’t play keyboard. This is a big problem for anyone who wants to have a profesional life in music, but especially a problem if you think you want to be a composure. I could get close with theory, plunking out lines one or two at a time. But I don’t have that “I can hear it all in my head thing” so I never really knew if I had written what I wanted until the teacher played it back. Sometimes it was pretty good, especially if I was staying inside well established rules of four-part harmony. Sometimes it was, well, experimental. Just writing this now I’m time traveling to a particular assignment that my professor was genuinely unsure if it was a piece of accidental avante gard genius or the worst music ever written. (the jury is still out.)
My guitar playing hit a wall, and I quit. But right about the time I was leaving I remember the school got a computer that was hooked up to a keyboard. You could play one line at a time and it would play back all the lines at once. Better yet, it would print out sheet music in parts. Awesome. If only they had had that machine two years earlier I might have stayed in music, there would have been no Tony Comstock, and think how much better the world would have been for that!
Flash forward about five years. I’ve been in and out of school “finding myself” and am now an art student in my BFA year. I’m working on a project that will make a giant image of my head out of 6400 little xeroxed images of Andy Warhol. I’m using a computer to help me do the values mapping. The computer is slooooooooow, so I while away the time drawing diagrams and layout of my “dream studio,” and all the nifty tools it will have. My imaginations seem, at the time, fantastic.
I still have the drawings. They’re in a sketchbook that’s on my shelf about 10 feet to my right. I have the dream studio too; and 95% of the dream tools, plus tools I never could have dreamed of are right here inside this laptop. It’s amazing.
The effect this has had on the business of art has been terrible. Digital crushes the craftsmanly middle of everything it touches. That’s what it’s doing to journalism right now. But the effect on creativity is amazing.
When I was a upperlevel undergrad and BFA student, we used to say the best place to crib ideas was from second term photo student. Enough craft and confindence, but not yet ruined by thinking they know “the right way” to do it. Most of the art I look at these days is made avocationally. It’s like being able to go to a second term crit any day of the week. Lots and lots to steal from. Making a living? Well that’s harder in some ways. It’s hard to make money doing something that anyone can do, so you have to find a way to do something that anyone can’t do. Same as it ever was, right?
So yeah, Peter’s song is nothing earthshattering (I do think it’s pretty catchy). But while it’s not earth shattering, it reminded me that I have a whole professional suite of composition and arrangement tools on this machine along with all the photo and video manipulation tools. A set of tools far beyond anything I could have imagined 25 years ago.
So the next time you’re watching the science channel and they’re putting miniturized gps enabled tracking and datatransmission devises on gypsy moths, and some biologist is going on an on about how his mind is completely blown by the tools he has now, take it from me it doesn’t feel any different as an artist. And I think it’s non-trivial for Peter to point that out, even if he posts a quickie garageband clip to make his point.
— Tony Comstock · Oct 4, 11:54 AM · #
N’uther thought:
These days, when I have had the occasion to commission a original score, I will always insist that the score be built around guitar or solo violin, or both. The reason why I do this has everything to do with Peter’s post.
— Tony Comstock · Oct 4, 12:09 PM · #
“Now imagine a generation of pop-savvy kids growing up with access to the rough equivalent of full-fledged recording studios and editing bays in their bedrooms, and then think about the way that’s going to change the way they approach creating media.”
They’ll make crap. A whole lot of crap. And they’ll make crap because they’ll be able to take whatever idea they have and turn it into something real without having to put in the time to develop any depth of skill or wisdom.
I’d echo Tony Comstock that modern media tech is great for creativity, but it’s awful for craftsmanship.
Mike
— MBunge · Oct 4, 02:57 PM · #
“They’ll make crap. A whole lot of crap. And they’ll make crap because they’ll be able to take whatever idea they have and turn it into something real without having to put in the time to develop any depth of skill or wisdom.”
See also: Blogs and Bloggers
— Tony Comstock · Oct 4, 03:23 PM · #
Okay, that was glib and doesn’t really get at what Peter is talking about.
Most blogs are not very interesting to most people (aka crap), but the technologies/tools that make blogs possible have had a notable effect on how people communicate.
Having transformed the production and distribution of text-based communication, that same democratization is coming/has come to music, photo, video.
Maybe that sounds like “do duh”, but maybe not. Here’s why:
The absences of technology saved you all from me as a composer, but end up inflicting me as a filmmaker upon the world. But not digital media technology — digital word processing.
After getting rejected for a loan, I got on my roommate’s Mac SE30 and pounded out an angry letter to the president of my credit union. If I had been on a typewriter it never would have gone furhter than that. But because i was on a word processor I was able to remove typos and misspellings, but also tune and refine my argument — the first time I had ever done that.
Long story short, within 6 months the declined $400 loan had become $15K in loans so I could buy cameras, lights, stands and a car to carry it all in. I was in business. The rest, as they say, is history.
So yeah, more crap. That’s not really the point, is it?
— Tony Comstock · Oct 4, 03:43 PM · #
I don’t think it’s terrible at all, I reckon it’s fun. And that’s the point isn’t it? Just like being back in the garage in high school – it’s a great pleasure to learn something new, to dabble, to not necessarily have to “master” before you’re allowed to make.
I love music, I love to sing and dance but I don’t play an instrument. The last time I sat down and made anything with Garage Band I came away assured of my genius – for being playful.
And I think you’re right on the making becoming second nature – I’ve seen my eleven year old sit down and craft a wonderfully clever story podcast with a buddy complete with sound great sounds effects.
Go play!
— ell · Oct 5, 01:21 AM · #
GarageBand allowed me to make more and better music in a few weeks, while spending most of my time reading complex works of political theory, than I was able to do in years before GarageBand came out. Funnily enough, it also made me hugely more shy with my music. Wow, that sounds horrendously indie. I’m going to scurry away now.
— James · Oct 5, 02:51 AM · #
In the hopes of coaxing JP out. (Sounds more emo than indie, James.)
Ain’t It Funky Now
My first try on Sound Track Pro, Garage Band’s big borther. I build this ditty a few years ago Like Peter, I don’t claim it as any Great Work of Art, but put it on at a party where everyone is already feeling good and people will dance. That’s enough for me.
Stroke It
Built with considerably more nefarious intentions than Ain’t It Funky Now (ask ell), Stroke It built it in an hour Sound Track Pro masterpiece. I don’t think it’s going to chart, but I like enough that hearing it now has helped remind me to make sure STP is on the computer I’m taking on my hiatus.
—-
“ it’s a great pleasure to learn something new, to dabble, to not necessarily have to “master” before you’re allowed to make.”
This is more or less the reason I quit music and took up photography. So much of a classical music education is spend mastering mere technique or studying other peoples work. I never really got to the point where I could express myself through playing someone else’s music, partly because it was someone else’s but mostly because it was such a struggle just to get it under my fingers.
Once I picked up the camera, not only did the technique come more easily, but from day one we were sent out to make our own pictures. Yes, like my and Peter’s GB tracks, our “own pictures” were mostly naive retreads of ideas already expressed with both greater mastery and artistry, but that doesn’t mean they’re not our retreads.
And sometimes struggling with mastery really does get in the way of people doing something worthwhile (like my letter to the credit union president.) Overwhelmingly I hate what digital photography and distribution has done to not only erotic imagery itself, but to how we think about what erotic imagery can be. None the less, Comstock Films was (in large measure) born out of that same “cribbing from the second term photo class” that was so fruitful when I was student. That wouldn’t have been possible if people couldn’t take picture of themselves and put them out for the world to see without getting tangled up in technical mastery.
—
That same Summer I was making the Big Head out of Little Andy Warhols I also started playing music again. There was a bar a block from campus and Monday night was Blues night. You’d show up about 9PM to register and get organized into about 6 combos. Each combo would play a 3 or 4 song set. Each song was nothing more than agreeing on a key, a tempo, and whether it was going to be a shuffle or straight ahead blues. Neophyte or unknown players got the early sets or the last set. Strong players got the middle sets.A few people had no business being there, some were working pros, most fell somewhere in the middle.
I’m thinking of it now because this blog (and others like it) are a lot like blues night or jam session. Someone throws out a rife and we go. Sometimes a pretty uninteresting riff gives rise to a good jam. Sometimes a riff just lays there and no one can get it started.Similarly, here and there there’s a commentor who needs to spend more time in the wood shed. Sometimes a good player hits a bad note. But there are also working pros who stop by; to try out news ideas, to stay limber, or just to show off. Some people are enthusiastic amateurs who have ambitions to do more than jam, and are hoping to get noticed, hoping to make a reputation.
So throw it up, JP! Let us hear what you got! Trust that we’ll be able to distinguish play from ambition, and trust more so that whether your writing or making music, we won’t hold your ambition up for (more then good natured) ridicule.
— Tony Comstock · Oct 5, 11:38 AM · #
Truth be told, quite a few people, if they heard this circa 1981 or so, would have LOVED IT…would have thought it was very cool. And it ain’t so bad even now…serviceable…have a program (or do we really need a Peter Suderman or some such organism with a name?) whip it up for your party in case the DJ (or, increasingly less likely, the band) doesn’t show up.
But alas for the musicians, and all the better sorts of music only they will ever be able to make, which inevitably will become rarer.
A great book called Sonata for Jukebox, by Geoffrey O’Brien, gives you the nightmare version of the future trajectory of our musical collage-art, for those who can stomach it. Of course, some strummin’ and composin’ dudes will always abide, no matter how nightmarishly pervasive mass collage-art culture might become.
— Carl Scott · Oct 5, 09:24 PM · #
ell found this at the end of THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH Don’t know if it goes here, in Peter’s post about Public Enemy, or in Conor post about his awesome new project:
“Just knowing about a lot of things has never been easier. Never before have dabblers been so free to paddle along the shore and dip into the first rock pool that catches the eye. If you have an urge to take off your shoes and test the water, countless specialists are ready to hold your hand.”
— Tony Comstock · Oct 7, 01:19 PM · #