Borg – He may not be a genius at your level, but I bet he can spell “definitely.”

I am not a great Brian Eno fan, but he has made some very smart comments about music and technology. One of them was (I’m paraphrasing here) that it’s the *limits* of our tools which make them useful.

A universal (in the Turing sense) music machine is not a dream come true, but a nightmare, because “no limits” also means “no direction”. A guitar, on the other hand, is a beautiful instrument because it has six strings – and that’s it. If your song doesn’t work on that instrument, it’s probably not good.

Sadly, I can’t play guitar due to a handicap, so I ended up in synth world. And while I still love all those bizarre, wonderful toys, I learned the hard way that the more possibilities they offer, the harder they make it to focus on your music.

In Jack’s videos, you can see him tweaking knobs on single-purpose machines, and it’s all very physical: one cable in, one cable out, make some noise, tape it, move on. This is a kind of innocence that “fat” DAWs such as Logic, Cubase and Reason do not encourage (this is also a very interesting field for UI designers).

Matthew Herbert, (early) Underworld, Radiohead: The people who are willing to make mistakes, who treat even the most expensive digital systems without respect come up with great stuff. A studio shouldn’t be an altar, but a playground.

Let’s make mistakes, and yeah; let’s celebrate simple, effective tools.

the digital multi-things will do a lot of things, but none of them very well, and not intuitively.

EH seems to get this..

I think the awesome thing about the “music industry” right now, is that when you write about it, you have to use quotation marks! It’s been turned upside down and been given one of the swiftest kicks in the pants that any industry has dealt with since Al Gore gifted us the internet. This interview is a perfect example: Crunch Gear is a huge blog, and I’m a small nobody. It used to be that media outlets only focused on the Britneys and Jessica Simpsons of the world, and things are changing. The internet has allowed niche markets to surface, diffusing some influence to the little guys who otherwise would have never gotten any exposure. It’s more than a musical phenomenon, it’s a complete uprooting of social focus and media.

Anyway, long live technology, limitation, and discretion! Hooray! And thanks again to Crunch Gear for showing some love to the little guys!

Jack

Well, back then, many of us believed that computers and digital synthesizers as recording tools would liberate both musicians and music itself. People would finally be able to turn the original, unheard music in their heads into reality. Virtual orchestras! Algorithmic composition! Multi-layered, polyrhythmic beauty! There would be a revolution, we would smash the Pop Establishment and live happily ever after.

What we got instead was the Cher effect and incredible amounts of generic dreck. Innovative technology was raped and used in the most trivial, foreseeable way. There was no new music (except for the Techno scene, which was rather a separate planet/dimension than a musical movement). Instead, digital music technology was used to mass-produce the old sh*t more effectively.

The CEO of said music software company (formerly a prog-rock dinosaur who believed in songs, not sounds) once said to me: “When we saw how our stuff was used in the early Nineties, it was a collective ‘Oh God, what have we done?’”

Fast forward into the here and now, where people like Jack Conte have stopped caring about technology on an ideological level. He takes his pure musical genius, his curiosity and energy, throws in instruments both old and new, virtual and real and publishes his stuff on Youtube just like an early, innocent, tape-overdubbing Mike Oldfield (before he became a pathetic sellout).

And what is so wonderfully refreshing here (at least for me as someone who has worked with and thought about music technology for almost three decades) is Jack’s pragmatic approach to this zoo of tools and possibilities. There’s no self-aggrandizing “I am holier than thou because I only play guitar / Hate the majors” nonsense. It’s just pure fun, talent and curiosity.

I am so glad to see how the technology is literally becoming invisible in front of our eyes, so that artists can be artists again.

He talks about production but he doesn’t mention the equipment he uses to record. Plus, he works with Mp3s, so, if he uses a PC to record, how much could he possibly appreciate about pro engineering. AND, what does that really say about his “ear”??

I think he’s probably wrong on the music industry thing. What he’s been able to do by himself is exactly why the industry used to exist. If artists can live and get paid without it, they will and more importantly should.

RouteNote is a digital music distribution service for unsigned and independent artists. Artists from anywhere in the world can signup for free and then upload their album and get their songs listed on iTunes, eMusic, Amazon Mp3 and more.