I built some step sequencers in Pure Data a few years ago and had them linked to synths I had running in FL. It was fun, but they weren't a patch (no pun intended) on the default one and I never really made any music with them. It felt completely separate to actually making music.
Max/MSP
- Thread starter version
- Start date
Yeah, that's the flipside. Whether the friction's necessary and it's the discrepancy and interplay between humans and technology which makes for the most interesting results.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
I miss Wood panelling on electronics
There's a great William Gaddis essay on the player piano where he claims failure is essential to art, both in an elitist sense of ensuring only the genuinely talented rise to the top and in the sense you're talking about, and that technology's removing it.
Agapē Agape // The Secret History of the Player Piano
PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE
PIANIST
HE IS DOING HIS BEST
Posted in a Leadville saloon, this appeal caught the passing eye of Art in its ripe procession of one through the new frontier of the eighties, where the frail human element still abounded even in the arts themselves. "The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous," Oscar Wilde observed: was it the 'doing his best' that rankled? redolent of chance and the very immanence of human failure that that century of progress was consecrated to wiping out once and for all; for if, as another mother-country throwback had it, all art does constantly aspire toward the condition of music, there in a Colorado mining-town saloon all art's essential predicament threatened to be laid bare with the clap of a pistol shot just as deliverance was at hand, born of the beast with two backs called Arts and Sciences whose rambunctious coupling came crashing the jealous enclosures of class, taste, and talent, to open the arts to Americans for democratic action and leave history to bunk.
[...]
Roused by the steam whistle, democracy's claims devoured technology's promise, banishing failure to inherent vice where in painting it remains today, and America sprang full in the face of that dead philosopher's reproach "to be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls." By the nineties the arts had already begun their retirement at Hull House, where they were introduced as therapy; while in the streets the discovery of Spencer's "immutable law" drove Jack London howling "Give me the fact, man! The irrefragable fact!"
Agapē Agape // The Secret History of the Player Piano
PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE
PIANIST
HE IS DOING HIS BEST
Posted in a Leadville saloon, this appeal caught the passing eye of Art in its ripe procession of one through the new frontier of the eighties, where the frail human element still abounded even in the arts themselves. "The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous," Oscar Wilde observed: was it the 'doing his best' that rankled? redolent of chance and the very immanence of human failure that that century of progress was consecrated to wiping out once and for all; for if, as another mother-country throwback had it, all art does constantly aspire toward the condition of music, there in a Colorado mining-town saloon all art's essential predicament threatened to be laid bare with the clap of a pistol shot just as deliverance was at hand, born of the beast with two backs called Arts and Sciences whose rambunctious coupling came crashing the jealous enclosures of class, taste, and talent, to open the arts to Americans for democratic action and leave history to bunk.
[...]
Roused by the steam whistle, democracy's claims devoured technology's promise, banishing failure to inherent vice where in painting it remains today, and America sprang full in the face of that dead philosopher's reproach "to be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls." By the nineties the arts had already begun their retirement at Hull House, where they were introduced as therapy; while in the streets the discovery of Spencer's "immutable law" drove Jack London howling "Give me the fact, man! The irrefragable fact!"
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
But yeah, there's stuff out there like Kyma, supposedly some of the most advanced standalone DSP you can get, but I've yet to hear it do anything that would make me want it
linebaugh
Well-known member
Ive always found the merit of the self generating stuff to be inspiration/bypassing the doubt that comes with making anything. Gives you that distance from self to properly judge something. Im more likely to find a bassline I like by playing a chord, turning the arp to random, rifling through rythmn settings and then editing out notes I dont like in my sampler rather traditionally 'writing' a bassline.
chava
Well-known member
The amount of promising techno careers destroyed by MAX/MSP and Modular Systems...
All the best stuff is done with presets anyway.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
In the 80s, the tech was already everything we needed it to be imo. Everything since then has been diminishing returns
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
But that raises the question: what now then?
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Have said this before that maybe it's time to let go of the need for something new.
Or are we so addicted to the new that we're stuck like this?
Or are we so addicted to the new that we're stuck like this?
Presets were something I used to really frown on before realising it's not much different to using an instrument. I didn't knock anyone for using the patches which came with old hardware, so why was I doing it for the patches bundled with software?
Something I struggle with is that capitalism has us fixated on the new, on constant stimulation, but also rewards conservatism, churning out the same product over and over.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Yeah exactly. Even the stuff made in the 90s was a follow on from what was invented in the 80s. The sampler for eg.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
And that kinda makes sense when you think it took a decade to really get a handle on what could be done with it and you end up at jungle and idm
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Having said that, so many industrial bands were pretty on it right from the get go. Keep discovering amazing stuff from the early days of samplers lately
chava
Well-known member
I never work with presets in fact, but I know it's a self-indulgent time-wasting effort.
Still, there's a bunch of "preset" music out there. My edgy take on a lot of UK dance music is sound-wise it is very "preset'y", while rhythmically less so. The Euro/continental stuff is the opposite.
linebaugh
Well-known member
Think the idea is that capital is only interested with new means generating old ends. Paired up with an end of history situation like were talking about with music, the problems even blurrier. If were out of places to go sonically, development in listener relationship to music -how/when/why- is the place to go, but were not equipped for that type of change.