OT music, is using automatic drums and chords cheating or just tasteles
WendyLuvsCatz
Posts: 38,204
I learnt to play the piano and am a church organist (not a good one, they take what they can get!)
have owned many and currently several electronic keyboards 5 at moment to be exact.
most come with inbuilt drums and arpeggio playing chords.
I until recenly never used those function or the many voices
just piano, organ and sometimes strings
I did have a seperate Roland drum machine to help me practice in time I occasionally used.
but
once I started uploading animations using Daz figures to youtube
I needed music
non-copyrighted music
so started with public domain music scores I set to midi and fiddled with on my computer
mostly using melody assistant
then started to play along to them on my synth and other keyboards
when it belatedly occurred to me, one could just simply use the inbuilt drums and chords to lay down tracks using audacity then overdub them with more complex stuff.
So obvious but totally alien to my music score reading both hands playing all the notes mindset!!
I have since cut loose
thrown all my morals to the wind
and sometimes now just play an automatic drum and chord with one finger whilst twiddling on my other keyboards in that chord (the 1,3 and 5th notes) and pass it off as "music"!!!!!!
oh how the once in her own mind creative artist writing notes on manuscript and working out how to avoid parallel octaves and fiths using passing notes, when using choral format to harmonise has sold out!!!
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I have come very close but so far resisted recording and mixing my many android music apps and the mp3's they create!
Someone posted an Audio list on the old forum. I got permission to copy to my site and though I haven't checked the links recently, they should all still work. The section of my site is for video and audio so check what you need to. You do not need to register to access anything on the site, only if you want to post.
http://caliescorner.forumotion.ca/f36-freebies
It's not cheating or tasteless. If you passed yourself off as a drummer, maybe. But you're not, are you? You're a composer who also plays keyboard instruments. Creating the percussion track using synths is absolutely no less legitimate than having a musician come in and do it.
Nope its not cheating...
here is another useful tool for creating music and sounds
http://www.synthedit.com/
it get really sad when you realize you are adding lots on tiny descending notes to a score with ties to get a wob wob wob dubstep effect.
(yes, I actually did that in melody assistant until I discovered the low frequency modulator timeline curve editor!
As an ex-session drummer, my instant reaction is "what sacrilege is this?" ...but of course, it isn't really. ;)
If we could afford to hire a philharmonic orchestra, awesome... but failing that, we use the string sounds on the synth because that's what is available to us. Drums are no different - use what is available to you, and if you can be inventive, most folk won't notice unless it's really bad, hehehe.
Doing it "right" takes years to learn, but the alternative is to fake it and have fun... that's what i do when doing instruments I can't actually play - I just do it by ear, don't have a clue if it's "right" or "wrong" from a purist point-of-view, but if it works for what i want, then it's good enough. It's the same as any other art, folk can think it great or rubbish, but it's still art. If your music turns out the way you want it to sound, the rest is a matter of taste.
The ultimate skill is to mix royalty-free samples so listeners don't realise they're listening to a loop pattern, but you'd really need to be a drummer to be able to make convincing beat loops in the first place (the internal dynamics of the different components of the kit and how they sound when recorded etc etc)... but as mentioned above, that all takes years to learn, so might as well just do what feels right instead and enjoy yourself.
Wow, thanks! I always thought it would be great to create my own synth. Are you using SynthEdit yourself, and if, how good is it?
Nice to see a music related thread here btw.
It's the same question as "is using premade 3D models, art?" Which has been a long abused necrotic equine on this forum.
Myself being a frustrated classical pianist who has successfully avoided ever being paid or otherwise "forced" to play in public I don't have those internal dialogue dilemmas of "art vs technology". I play for myself, good or bad, it is what it is and only the best of the best of what I tinker at ever makes it to a recording.
However, even though I once had a nice multi-voiced electronic piano with self-recording, multi-track capabilities, I used those features perhaps only twice as simple experiments. My thing is to use it as a simple piano and make all the music with my ten little fingers in real-time, and congratulate myself when after months of neighbor maddening practice I finally am able to breeze through 10 or 15 minutes of Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff or Saint-Saens with only a few disguisable errors.
If you have learned how to use the technology available to you to your advantage and if the people who are your audience aren't complaining then don't worry about the "art vs technology" argument. However, if you feel that you can pour more of your spirit into totally manually produced music then go for it. But if you stop and think about it, almost any instrument is a piece of technology. You're only totally manual if you simply sing or snap your fingers or slap your thighs! 8-o
If you want automatic drums, but with variety rather than the same pattern over & over, you might want to have a look at Jamstix: http://www.rayzoon.com. It's a computer program, which might not be much use in church (unless you're running it on a laptop), but it's a lot better than a drum machine or the built-in drums a lot of keyboards have. Nothing can replace a good drummer, but I'd take this program over a bad or mediocre drummer; and believe me, I've played with all kinds of the years. You also can use it to simply generate midi drum patterns to drive your drum software of choice. I use it to 'play' BFD 2.
Wow, thanks! I always thought it would be great to create my own synth. Are you using SynthEdit yourself, and if, how good is it?
Nice to see a music related thread here btw.
I've played with it off an on using just the demo version, I tended to end up creating noises and sounds that annoyed the dog more than anything else.
it is a very good piece of software.
I think it is all very subjective. Traditionalist in anything, even artist in the 3D world, will probably make arguments on both sides. But to say that using automated tools to accomplish something is cheating or tasteless I think is a bit extreme point of view. For example, some musicians seem to hate synthesizers and will make claims that they somehow do not emulate real pianos or organs well. To me that is like the argument of CDs not sounding as good as records. I think it is a silly argument. The same applies to those that feel what most of us do with DAZ is not good art simply because we didn't create the models or textures entirely ourselves. And just like creating a picture with DAZ or Poser, even electronic music needs to be arranged and put together with some thought and care.
I am friends with several musicians and a couple of music producers that don't care how you make your music but rather that it communicates something and sounds good. Some people hate rap for this reason. The idea that what it communicates is somehow in poor taste. But for many people it communicates to them, so in the end that is really all that matters.
I do not consider myself a professional musician since my real profession is video and film editing. But I do dabble with music as a hobby and I occasionally play bass guitar with my friends band. Now one could say that our band is somehow not a real band, because like many bands in the electronic/industrial rock scene, we don't have a live drummer. But the reality is that my friend composes all the music and creates all the drums himself with his computer. So does this mean we are cheating by eliminating the need for a live drummer?
I use Logic Studio and have fun making music all the time as a hobby. My beat heavy electronic compositions may not be to everyone's taste, but I enjoy it so that is really all that matters to me and is all that should matter to anyone who uses the tools that technology has provided.
Feel free to check out some of my tracks at: https://soundcloud.com/bionic-distortion
As a professional musician I say whatever works works. If it sounds good then it is good.
When I created bg music for an online video about my card game, I used Garage Band to add key-shifted piano loops to back my melody on (synthesized) flute. I'm not advertising my skills as a musician, I'm trying to present my card game. I see no problem.
And as LeatherGryphon said, it's a lot like the silly "is it art?" debates about Poser/DS. The art is in how the pieces are arranged. Collage is a perfectly legitimate, recognized art form, for good reason.
Saying that what some do with Daz isn't great art because they didn't actually create the models is like saying Van Gogh wasn't a great artist because he didn't create the paint. Or Ansel Adams wasn't an artist because all he did was take pictures of what nature created.
Art is about evoking emotions. It doesn't matter if the tool used is a pencil and paper, a camera, a 3D application or a bunch of Lego bricks.
The same is true of music, it's not about the tool you used but about what you create with those tools.
Back on topic, someone posted a link to AudioTool in my G+ stream a few weeks ago. I have no clue how to use the synthesizers and such but for a browser based tool it looks pretty cool for laying down beat tracks and such.
I agree with Sisca, just because you didn't create the individual sounds, does not mean you didn't create the mixing, adding, delete and outcome a what you are working on.
Wow, thanks! I always thought it would be great to create my own synth. Are you using SynthEdit yourself, and if, how good is it?
Nice to see a music related thread here btw.
You can find a lot of free synths and effects made with Synthedit (some commercial ones, too) listed at http://www.kvraudio.com. I've heard that there can be some issues running multiple Synthedit creations on multi-core systems, but I've never had any trouble with the ones I've used. Some other good commercial synth-building programs are Reaktor (http://www.nativeinstruments.com) and Tassman (http://www.applied-acoustics.com). Not the cheapest things on the market, but they are extremely deep, and both have online libraries of user-created instruments.