What is wrong with not having pro material ?

Sure its gonna sound a bit muddy and weak but you can accomplish the most innovative works just by doodling on your own with a crap daw as you like to call them.
There is no PROFESSIONAL daw in my sense, it's just a canvas you draw on, i bet most hip hop artists you like to listen to made their stuff on one of the daws you seem to despise. And they made great music, then they got an engineer polishing the work.

Why would young people NEED to be able to make top quality music ? Isnt this the point of having matering engineers with years of experience and equipment most people couldnt afford ?
What's essential is being able to put your music out there in decent quality, you seem to have crazy high standards but being realistic i know that any hip hop producer who changes the game can do it with ableton if he knows his daw and has decen tbedroom mixing and mastering skills, then this guy gets backed up by a label and his tracks get royal treatment. Period.

We are flooded with amateur producers writing two major chords melodies and a basic 808 then calling it bomb, but these are not the guys we care about. The majority actually waste their soul on the fatness and polishing of the beat and completely disregard the composition and innovation.

 

With all due respect, sir, but you didn't get it. This one of these old bastards who is just jealous because all these young and awfully creative kids get rich and famous without moving their tiny asses at all.

 

Man when I came up if you wanted the sound of a sax you got someone who could play the sax.

There is nothing stopping anyone today from doing it the way that we did it back then.

You make some friends, get out of the cave, and usually get to smoke some weed / cigarettes / drink some beer and sometime get laid while you out as well. If you think DAWS are complex you've never dealt with the esoteric world of menu diving a workstation sequencer or MPC. Of course things get easier the more you know how to play an instrument (not just a little bit) and the more you are willing to work as a team with others.

What you are lamenting is not the complexity of DAW or the quality of stock plugins.... you are lamenting the loss of value of work which has come about in the last 20 years. There was a time when one could expect to make a living experimenting with music (not a great living, but you could cover some food expenses and most of your share of a room somewhere not especially nice.)

Since that time is gone, people are trying more and more to do it solo, and do everything themselves because even contemplating of affording a professional or working with others is almost impossible when you've got to work two jobs and prostitute yourself on the street corner for some extra cash during your spare time. Whatever time is left between 2:30AM and 4:30AM is used to try to make overly complex arrangements on a DAW or 3 or 4 DAW without ever having read the manual and chasing stock presets in a collection of over 200 instruments in order to emulate the final product from <track of the week> which took a team of 8-10 people six months to make.... but hey if it can't be done in 2 hours, something is wrong with the world.

4:30 rolls around it's time to sleep, but since the brain wont shutdown it is time to take 4 oxycodone and force the sleep to come - 8:30 wake up but the oxys are still kicking so now its time to break out the meth to wake up and get to work on time or at least less than 10mins late as to not get written up... job1, job2, sex-work, daw, drugs,sleep,drugs - rinse repeat - no money...

I know I got a bit into a Dickiensian dystopia there.... but man, it really isn't that bad... and nobody ever said you need to put out a finished product. Back in the day you could make a little money on the side as musician and eventually you could even be a local musician and make decent money (enough so you wouldn't have to have a second job to cover your costs) local radio, local shows, and so on... now with radio pretty much dead and shit, local venues replaced by a MP3BOT STREAM 5000 things kind of suck... the wheel turns... it is what it is.

 

Yes, the studio has been reduced to fit inside a laptop in the same way that a computer--which used to occupy an entire room in the 60's--now fits inside a knapsack. (That's a good thing, right?)

I'm saying that these DAWs are badly designed! You need to essentially "hack" them to get a good kick drum out of them...stack 10 kicks on top of each other; compress them; put them through a drum buss; have an aux track with all sorts of processing going on... THESE ARE NOT MUSICAL PROBLEMS! They should not be part of the user interface! We've done away with big studios where this sort of thing made sense...

I used Embertone Sensual Sax as an example of a third-party plugin that gets it! The musician is not presented with these phantom, engineering problems that belong in a large studio...

I'm not denigrating anyone's elite technical skills here...

Let me simplify: DAWs are badly designed (what's the point of all those hollow drums and thin synths that you need to spend years before you can get them to sound decent? That's not a musical problem)

I hope you understand.

 

Classic! Hahahahaha

 

I knew you would enjoy that

 

hey nicca, you gotstsah hit the books fool.

it seems like yesterday , she started to learn how to make beats..........

 

exactly the problem of this generation, they've been taught and brought up that anything is possible and everything is reachable which is the biggest bunk of bullshit around, it simply is not true. The other problem this generation is facing is that they've grown used to anything being instantly available on a 24hr base which is the next big lie. Talent comes from a gift for something that, if you spend enough time developing that gift into your talent, may or may not be noticed and appreciated by many. First of all, it is highly rewarding to sit down and learn to play an instrument which gives you the ability to lay down intention and emotion in each note you play rather than getting the instant, cold and emotionless prefab alternative to it from a box/plugin/whatever. Anyone who says that this difference is not noticeable, better learn how to live and make love (read 'have sex') with a computer/AI/robot coz that's shouldn't make any difference then either. Second of all, the talent to record those notes you play in such a way that the notes speak, mix the ensemble of notes together so they can actually make a difference is another ballgame. It's sheer craftsmanship.

 

Last edited: Nov 1, 2017

These are for beginners and people who just make music as a hobbie without much diving in.

 

I mean the stock instruments

 

I've read this thread and I'm still wondering why it's titled "Don't Blame Young People"? which is somewhat ironic assuming the OP was composed by a young person. His argument is naive and ignorant.

 

The thread is a light hearted masterpiece of solid gold classic trolling.

Just play along, it's fun and shouldn't be taken as a 'get angry about things' type discussion. Just some light banter and bouncing wild and crazy juxtapositions of an invisible wall to see where the rainbow ends

As an aside - Fidel Castro is a very striking man, no homo and all, even his picture projects quite a presence. All those most interesting man in world commercials seem to be based on that iconic persona of fk it, I am da man.

 

Would Kit Harrington even be famous if he wasn't a projection of a less scary - more effeminate version of Fidel, who along with all his other faults is a very scary and way to masculine for everyday consumption.

 

To the OP: Throwing some philosophical light on your query; if you think about how much work is invested in mastering a real instrument, do you agree that there is little difference between doing that and mastering a DAW? Mastering any skill takes time. A second language, driving, swimming. We can all pretty quickly achieve a passable aptitude for most things, and we're ok at most things, but only a few decide to master a skill.

 

FIDEL was a bad motherfucker. Tall, pretty nigga that don't give a fuck what The Man says!

 

Let me respond this way:

How do you feel about the simplicity of Embertone Sensual Sax? Is it cheating?

 

I blame young people for everything, it's one of the privileges of getting older.

 

can't believe reading this nonsense....

as if everyone forgot what music is about,
it always should be an expression of human feelings/mood/ideas and that is frankly all that matters!

guess what, in its very pure form it doesn't really matter how the sound is, if the tune is catchy, if listening to a piece of music makes something with you, or even if it just stays in your head after it ends, then it's a worthy music,
it doesn't matter if you play real instruments, or go full virtual synths, or maybe just do vocals and beatbox, or just arrange a score for orchestra or just some sound scapes without any rhythm can still be very cool,

mixing and mastering is in my opinion still less important than proper arrangement of the music once it's supposed to target pro area (because when vocals clash with guitars and bass, then even mixing wizard cannot make it supergood), quantized repetitive loops are so boring because human hearing is designed to start ignoring whatever repetitive sound set happens, on the other hand hearing something faimilar will always make you automatically like it a little more, hence why pop always tends to sound somewhat same...

nowadays everyone is so obsessed about technology and playing-faster-than-someone-else that people are skipping the importance of listening what's around them - that is what mastering purpose is about - make things sound good regardless of listening conditions/gear and competitive with others, not make it sound better than it sounded before mastering session started :P

do listen to some old stuff - does it sound good? honestly to me it does not, but hey I like the tunes, I like those lyrics, I like the way musicians played it, the way the songs were composed, and although the sound ain't often crispy, balanced or clear at all, I still somehow admire the way those were mixed&mastered - does it make me want to copycat them? of course not - nowadays music industry (aside from mainstream pop) is about making "own sound" (be it specific vocalist, way someone play sax, way someone layers synths, way someone plays drums inaccurately etc..) and that is what I appreciate most

uhh, enough blabber, here's some drum cover I played+recorded+mixed myself, because hey, I like to play along whatever catches my ears, especially if that's something I would have never played myself in a band haha :D

(btw, I'm young, so is it sh!t?)

EDIT: my opinion about DAWs is, old DAW = analog-console-based workflow = obsolete in nowadays modern world, I disrespect ProTools and really enjoy using for ex. Reaper because it makes so much more sense with performance nowadays computers offer,
about virtual instruments, I do own Seaboard RISE 49 which is an amazing controller - being able to play literally anything, I still prefer to record "rough" MIDI and then just squeeze it through regular audio plugins, as if it was recorded audio track of a real instrument

 

Last edited: Nov 1, 2017

YOU GET IT!!! YOU GET IT!!! YOU GET IT!!!

And it's no coincidence that you're young