I get where you're coming from but I think you're comparing two different kinds of musicians. Electronic artists are just that...electronic, it says so on the tin and it all seems pretty logical to me. What do you want them to do come out with acoustic guitars? I don't get it. They don't generally play those kinds of instruments. A lot do play on stage but again they're doing it through electronic equipment. To me musicianship is making great music and knowing how utilize tools and technology to do so, no matter what kind. Samples are there because you can't always synthesize every type of sound and most artists don't make overwhelming use of premade loops. If they do they creatively process them so that they sound nothing like the original which takes skill and in genres like Industrial I would say an overwhelming majority of artists sequence their own loops. 4/4 is the most common time signature not only in electronic music by the way. I think it's important to respect all artists and all forms of music no matter how they are made or how they are played. For the linking musical notes together and calling it a song I will leave you with the definition of music and musician:

Music
noun (Concise Encyclopedia)

Art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody, and, in most Western music, harmony. Music most often implies sounds with distinct pitches that are arranged into melodies and organized into patterns of rhythm and metre. The melody will usually be in a certain key or mode, and in Western music it will often suggest harmony that may be made explicit as accompanying chords or counterpoint. Music is an art that, in one guise or another, permeates every human society. It is used for such varied social purposes as ritual, worship, coordination of movement, communication, and entertainment.

Musician
1. a person who makes music a profession, especially as a performer of music.
2. any person, whether professional or not, skilled in music.

 

i usually dont do this, but i just had a horrible day and im ready to destroy an arguement debate style using something the vulcans call "logic"

(and yes i do understand your trying to get people riled up for a laugh, so this is pointless, but fuck it im doing it)

by this line of reasoning, if you play guitar, then you are not the one making the sound, it is the guitar. so YOU are not a musician, by your reasoning. The only pure musician then is a sound made directly with a human body- so "singers" and "vocalists" are the only true musicians. According to your flawed logic, using a Bass or a drum set or a guitar is cheating, since the instrument is making the sound, not you, all you are doing is hitting strings (ala hitting buttons) You strum the guitar, and you hear a sound come out of the speakers. I play a melody on my keyboard and a sound comes out of the speakers.

obviuosly then a computer is just another tool like a guitar or saxophone. Made to harness and release audio vibrations.


everything else is just your opinion coloring your argument.

again, by what you say, you are not a musician then, the guitar is doing all the work.

recycling and mulching food and yard waste, that makes you a composter.


see what i did there?





btw, why not agree electronic music and metal are made for each other?!? Nailbomb, Gut, Ministry, BILE, Cock and Ball Totrure, Hymen Holocaust, Wumpscut, Excessive force, FLA, Cubante, Die Krupps, PIG, h3llb3nt, Hanzel Und Gretyl, Genitorturers, Diatribe, SKOLD, Skinlab, LARD, Atari Teenage Riot etc etc

 

I think other members and I have shot down every argument that people have leveled against us and honestly we should have earned your respect or at the very least your understanding. Music is a mosaic of sound, technologies and people. As a music producer I think it's important to keep an open mind, even if it's a genre, production or performance method that you might not resonate with. Nothing but the utmost respect for all musicians and all music, they enrich the world and give us a diversity of sound and human experience without which life would be as lame as if everybody looked the same.

 

see, that is wrong logic frito.

I am saying that guitar will not make a sound without me, I am producing that sound by conjuring technique and dexterity to produce a vibration out of the instrument. that guitar will not make a noise without my skilled dexterity to produce the vibrations from my fingertips. Anyone simply pushing a button is not using skill or dexterity to produce the end result. that is not performing music, that is just arranging it, and i already gave credit for any genre requiring skill in arrangement, but not all genres have skilled musicians. all i am saying they should not be called electronic musicians, electronic artist is fine with me, but even clearer would be electronic composers.


Just like Mozart was a composer and used paper to arrange the music. Today electronic composers use computers and gadgets to arrange it instead of paper. All I am saying is it should be further clarified, just cuz you arrange music doesn't make you a musician, that is a composer and even an artist or entertainer, but not a musician.

 

I conjure up skill and dexterity when I record my melodic line into a piano roll during composition. I can't speak for everyone but I know that PLENTY of electronic musicians work this way. Musicians are all different so to discount the technical prowess of a ton of different genres under the umbrella term EDM is close-minded unless you happen to know for a fact that most don't actually play which you couldn't possibly have any way of knowing. Also I don't know many Metal bands that would be coming out with acoustic guitars when the electricity goes out as power is a vital component to the metal sound. Finally you're trying to redefine the word musician but I've pulled the meaning from a dictionary and it allots for contemporary electronic artists whether they play an instrument or not.

 

Funny but at least The Prodigy song was original.
The video was put up there to illustrate where the samples and song came from.. Old vinyl records!
Originality to the song and it still holds its own almost 20 years later.
I haven't heard other bands sound like that.. Oh yeah they used to be a live band combining instruments and computers.. i forgot about that.

On the other hand..
This guy may be your hero but to me he sounds like everyone else doing electronic dance music.
Will this song become a "classic" because it is unique or is it just here to be the next "in" thing on the dance club for a few months?

I thought it was a good example. To each there own..

 

I've been doing quite a lot of different kind of music : classical, punk rock, heavy metal, progressive, post-rock, jazz, house, dubstep. So I start to know my way into musics (note the 's').
All I can conclude : musicians play music, and say a lot of insecure bullshit.
Everybody tends to rant about everybody else.

Many classical are very butthurt and tends not to see how well other music can be composed and written. Spend their time hating on Haydn*.
Punk rockers are drunk and often unable to keep a steady tempo (but actually they're far from being the worst. Spend their time hating on Blink 182.
Heavy metal player have no dynamics. Spend their time hating on Metallica.
Progressive musician often have no souls. Spend their time hating on Dream Theater and/or Genesis.
post-rockers are sad and have often a bad sense of time. And lacks a sense of "get to the point". Spend their time hating on Sigur Ros.
jazz peoples are insanely butthurt and justify playing very badly their music on improvisation and feeling. Drummers being the very worst usually. They're terribly cold, and lacks a lot of dynamic. Spend their time hating basically everything and Victor Wooten.
house producers are cool. But most of the time they DJ very badly. House DJ don't produce or suck hard at remixing. Spend their time hating on Avicii
Dubstep producer seems to spend more time hating on Skrillex than producing (And I heavily suspect them of liking him in the closet).

And all the band mentionned are actually very good.
Really good, despite some of them can seem simplist, or "commercial"...

Quit hatin, play music.

 

@ tater01

..may I say you are just only a guitarist, not a musician.
agreed?

 

you guys are missing the point, acoustic instruments only produce the sound of me amplified, that is the difference. And the only skill and dexterity you are using in piano roll are the same skills everyone that knows how to use a computer has (mouse click, drags). And you just admitted my point right there Catatlyst, in your own words, during "composition"

You guys are COMPOSERS, not musicians. That is all i am trying to prove.

 

Can't resist jumping in this bullshit topic.....


It is my opinion that music is an essential part of life. Vibrations resonate with each person and being somewhat unique (if you dig deep enough) individuals are drawn to the music that resonates with them.

Some people are focused on emotions, some people on politics, some on visceral experiences. There is plenty of music that reinforces and elevates all aspects of the human experience.

Some people are wide open and resonate easily to everything around them, for example an airplane going by or the waves crashing on a beach can sound like music to them. Others are more dense and focused inward and require very specific vibrations to have a "musical" experience. I think when people are hearing what they resonate with it is a similar experience for everyone.

I think I read in an interview with guitarist Jeff Beck a while back about his observations that the sounds around us have always influenced music. He gave an example of the clomping of horse's feet giving way to the sound of a train giving way to the sound of cars and so on. I think we can accept that in his example that at this point in time we would be extremely influenced as a breed of musicians by computers and electronic devices. The air is filled with chirping and chiming, beeping and squawking. I would bet on an average day most people making music today hear more electronic sounds than sounds originating in nature (such as birds or bugs or wind). I think musicians would have a hard time isolating themselves from such influences.

Another important aspect that would factor into this discussion would be how much computers have influenced the creation of music in a very broad and universal way. Without labeling these effects as good or bad, it would be hard to argue that music making hasn't changed drastically in the new millennium. The functionality of high fidelity recording has been offered to the masses, available virtually everyone that is interested in it. Entire new genres of music have been created and the life cycle of a definable genre has been shortened significantly. The ability of a musician to make his art available to an audience has never been more tilted in the artist favor than it is today.

Other ways that computer based music creation has influenced music production and consumption is that in the past due to the limited number of recording venues and their relative high cost more planning and preparation went into music creation. Only those that had achieved some preliminary success or were judged viable were given the opportunity to make their music at the professional level of quality. Music was created in a group setting most often, not in isolation primarily by an individual (as in a band + producer + engineers). The music was created in the past primarily to be performed in a public setting for an audience, then in the 1970s and 80s listened to in your car and then in the new century primarily on iPod earbuds (in isolation).

Music that was created as a group and performed together during the recording process feels much different than music that was recorded one element at a time. Everyone has a preference.

Music that was recorded to tape vs a computer is inherently different if only because of the quiet moments of contemplation as the tape rewound. The pace of production was much slower and the pressure to deliver the performance was greater knowing that editing was time consuming and not always possible.

Music from the period prior to the last 15 years contained human elements, room noise, imperfection, drift, warble, "mistakes" and compromises. Today's music can be completely created within the software and quantized perfectly leaving a product that exactly represents the creators ideas. Humanity has to be conspicuously baked in.

If I have a point here it is.....

Music has the potential to bring people together, to unite them under a certain philosophy or ideal. If you meet someone and you have very little in common, you may discover that you both enjoy something obscure and that will be enough to build on.
The music of the past was generally created with this extroverted perspective and delivered to the public in simultaneous doses such as a national radio/video hit and in a large concert performance. Many birds of a feather flocking together having a unifying experience.

Today's musical consumption seems more geared towards a personal introspective experience. This has allowed an almost unimaginable diversity in available music for the audience. I think this is great for the individual and the ability to find music that perfectly resonates with them, but the trade off is that music is no longer a unifying force capable of carrying a definable complex message or philosophy.

A few days ago on the "news" they were discussing how much the Beatles influenced the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is a very foreign concept to todays musical landscape.


I think that is a much more important issue than debating how much Skrillex sucks.

Ultimately people just like what they like. You can't argue with that.

 

Well that may be thrue but HOW MANY dance "musicians" use those midi "banging" buttons gadgets?

I guess very few..

I also almost NEVER see those gadgets in "live" footage that is in magazines like electronic musician future music computer music etc etc so it is hard to tell if they have use it or not in the songs they may have plyed with it but not used it in the finihsed production we never know as they will not use it live..

I also saw a TV live show last summer David Guerra ( I think hes nam is) was "playing" and a bunch of other dance DJ:s and after the show i went to a forums in a newspaper where this discussion came up..


The first post was something like it is music made on a computer


Many fans responded to that and said that ALL artists who played in that "live" show was very good musicians as every one could play mozart beethoven and bach even chpin someone even claim he had seen they do it.

My question to him was

If they so bloody good that they could do that why didn´t they played those intruments when they played "live"?
Instead they stood in front of those DJ scratching machines an danced the whole show.


Anyone who play an instruments no matter what instruments are willing to play it LIVE and they LOVE to do it so what make those artist different from the rest of the ones who play instruments?.

Anyway i saw a movie on animal planet when they trained a monkey to push buttons "man was that monkey quick" he beat all humans even hardtrained ones..

My point is with good training you can teach anyone to push/bang buttons or whatever you do.
But that dont give you a musical EAR.

And most people can make descent music with three or four chord with little or even no training at all..

As my girlfriend always say to me OHH thats sounds good when i play something really common and simple.

That is beacuse she is used to hear ONLY that kind of music.

On the other hand she also say when she hear my own music that it is music for people who need help from a professional psychiatrist!! )

 

Claude Balls
That was an interesting take on the debate and I appreciate you sharing it with us. In fact thank you all for sharing your insights into this topic.

Now I am going to make a counter-argument that music today can still have a unifying message. I've pulled this information straight from Wikipedia:
The birth of industrial music was a response to "an age [in which] the access and control of information were becoming the primary tools of power." At its birth, the genre of industrial music was different from any other music, and its use of technology and disturbing lyrics and themes to tear apart preconceptions about the necessary rules of musical form supports the suggestion that industrial music is modernist music. The artists themselves made these goals explicit, even drawing connections to social changes they wished to argue for through their music.
Empirion live in London, April 7th 2011

The Industrial Records website explains that the musicians wanted to re-invent rock music, and that their uncensored records were about their relationship with the world. They go on to say that they wanted their music to be an awakening for listeners so that they would begin to think for themselves and question the world around them. Industrial Records intended the term industrial to evoke the idea of music created for a new generation, with previous music being more agricultural: P-Orridge stated that "there's an irony in the word 'industrial' because there's the music industry. And then there's the joke we often used to make in interviews about churning out our records like motorcars —that sense of industrial. And ... up till then the music had been kind of based on the blues and slavery, and we thought it was time to update it to at least Victorian times—you know, the Industrial Revolution".
William S. Burroughs, a conceptual inspiration for the industrial musicians.

Early industrial music often featured tape editing, stark percussion and loops distorted to the point where they had degraded to harsh noise, such as the work of early industrial group Cabaret Voltaire, which Journalist Simon Reynolds described as characterized by "hissing high hats and squelchy snares of rhythm-generator." Carter of Throbbing Gristle invented a device named the "Gristle-izer", played by Christopherson, which comprised a one-octave keyboard and a number of cassette machines triggering various pre-recorded sounds.

Traditional instruments were often played in nontraditional or highly modified ways. Reynolds described the Cabaret Voltaire members' individual contributions as "[Chris] Watson's smears of synth slime; [Stephen] Mallinder's dankly pulsing bass; and [Richard H.] Kirk's spikes of shattered-glass guitar." Watson custom-built a fuzzbox for Kirk's guitar, producing a unique timbre. Carter built speakers, effects units, and synthesizer modules, as well as modifying more conventional rock instrumentation, for Throbbing Gristle. Tutti played guitar with a slide in order to produce glissandi, or pounded the strings as if it were a percussion instrument. Throbbing Gristle also played at very high volume and produced ultra-high and sub-bass frequencies in an attempt to produce physical effects, naming this approach as "metabolic music."

Vocals were sporadic, and were as likely to be bubblegum pop as they were to be abrasive polemics. Cabaret Voltaire's Stephen Mallinder's vocals were electronically treated.

The purpose of industrial music initially was to serve as a commentary on modern society by eschewing what artists saw as trite connections to the past. Throbbing Gristle opposed the elements of traditional rock music remaining in the punk rock scene, declaring industrial to be "anti-music." Early industrial performances often involved taboo-breaking, provocative elements, such as mutilation, sado-masochistic elements and totalitarian imagery or symbolism, as well as forms of audience abuse, such as Throbbing Gristle's aiming high powered lights at the audience.

Industrial groups typically focus on transgressive subject matter. In his introduction for the Industrial Culture Handbook (1983), Jon Savage considered some hallmarks of industrial music to be organizational autonomy, shock tactics, and the use of synthesizers and "anti-music." Furthermore, an interest in the investigation of "cults, wars, psychological techniques of persuasion, unusual murders (especially by children and psychopaths), forensic pathology, venereology, concentration camp behavior, the history of uniforms and insignia" and Aleister Crowley's magick was present in Throbbing Gristle's work, as well as in other industrial pioneers. Burroughs's recordings and writings were particularly influential on the scene, particularly his interest in the cut-up technique and noise as a method of disrupting societal control. Many of the first industrial musicians were interested in, though not necessarily sympathetic with, fascism. Throbbing Gristle's logo was based on the lightning symbol of the British Union of Fascists, while the Industrial Records logo was a photo of Auschwitz.

To this day the spirit of Industrial carries an important message that unifies people. I am proud to have shared that with you whether you appreciated it or not and I am proud to be involved in a genre whose message today is more important than ever. Wake up and get active or prepare to tell your children the story of where you were when freedom died!

I have no problems with people liking what they like because who am I to judge their taste but I still think that we can respect each other as musicians. We can focus on the fact that every song and every genre is a form of self-expression and catharsis and people have a right to engage in that pursuit without unnecessary and baseless criticism particularly in a community devoted to professional audio lovers. Anything less than that is just human hubris.

 

Actually the cartoon is very shallow. Even if a musician thinks they just have to press a button, they won't think that for very long.

Then again largely author-less mess music can be nice. Both Kraftwerk and Eno have come out with little audio tools that auto-create music

Kraftwerk Kling Klang Machine No1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO3TY_QFrEg

Bloom - iPhone App - By Brian Eno
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-swFqAT8yaA

Music is what music does.

You can use a couple of spoons to make music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY3q6-tebnM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcAa6mOT6Lg

You can use other assorted household items
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXvpqSEm70Q

There is no wrong or right music as such. If you want to make a value judgement you have to look at the wider social and political context of the uses & abuses of music. Then you can say OK _some_ music is wrong, because e.g. it is abused to fuel certain industries (such as the BPI) that are damaging to society and which should be destroyed not pampered. Music can be a weapon, it can also turn into an illness, or a cure. It all depends (again). Context, context.

 

@ Feridan, Great examples as ever

 

The next it would be myself --- laptop performer in the major square of my city : )
What a temporary relief for my neighbours!

 

lol!!!!


finally some peace and quiet!!