This happens to me every once in a while. I’ll have a whole lot of things running through my mind and none of them by themselves are enough to write about in one article. So I’ll gather them all up and just ramble on for a bit. So if random thoughts isn’t exactly your bag, you might want to skip this one. However, if you like surprises, you might want to check out what’s coming next.
Random Thought #1 – People stealing your stuff. Well, your stuff, my stuff, our stuff. Let’s face it, there are a lot of crooks in this world. You’ll put out a piece of music and the next thing you know, somebody has it posted on their site and their own music.
What do you do?
Well, first thing you can do is send them a DMCA cease and desist. If that doesn’t get you anywhere, let it go.
That’s right. Let it go. In short, you are fighting a losing battle with this stuff. Somebody looking to steal your stuff and pass it off as their own will do it. If they take it down, they’ll just pop up again under a new name and a new site and do it all over again. Send the DMCA and then, after that, let it go. These people are not worth anymore of your time.
Random Thought #2 – Diminishing Returns. It’s great to put a lot of work into a piece of music. We get a sense of pride when our efforts are recognized. But eventually, we reach a point of diminishing returns where any more work we put into the piece just doesn’t justify the effort as far as what we’ll get out of it.
For example, let’s say we’re working on a lead for a heavy metal tune. We’ve got our guitar sound and now we just have to figure out what kind of distortion we’re going to run. We also decide on reverb, delay and a little EQ.
We’ve got everything down and it sounds really good. But for whatever reason, we think we can make it sound better. So we start tweaking the distortion level and maybe the color. We start playing with the EQ, making minute little adjustments at the high end which only covers a few notes. We shorten and or lengthen the reverb time by a few milliseconds. Same with the delay. And we keep tweaking and tweaking, not even sure what it is exactly that we’re looking for. And through all this, the sound, especially when mixed in with the drums, bass, rhythm guitar and organ, doesn’t sound any different than the sound we started with. In fact, we don’t even remember what those settings were.
When this happens, it’s time to stop. We’ve reached a point of diminishing returns for all the effort we’ve put in. That’s something I’ve learned over the years. If it sounds good enough, it’s good enough. No amount of tweaking is going to make that big a difference if the initial sounds is essentially what we want.
Random Thought #3 – Will We Ever Have Enough Stuff? You know, I’ve been at this music thing since the late 70s. My first professional tape recorder was a Teac A3440 4 channel reel to reel. My first keyboards were a Hohner Stringvox and a Moog Sonic Six, pictured below.
At the time, this was great stuff. Not so much anymore. And over the years, I’ve “upgraded” from this to a Yamaha DX-7 to something else better than that and on and on and on.
Today, I have no hardware gear except for my M-Audio Axiom Air 49 keyboard which controls all my “software” synths and sample players. I have the best sounding stuff on the planet all packed in the space of my PC. I never imagined this day coming back in 1979. The Teach A3440, which eventually gave way to a Boss 8 channel digital recorder is gone, along with the Boss. Studio monitors now occupy the space that my hard wired studio used to occupy.
So is this finally it? Have I seen the end of the rat race? If history is any indicator, then the answer is no.
But what’s next? I can’t even imagine where we’re going from here.
Random Thought #4 – Have we finally exhausted musical genres? I guess this is kind of along the same train of thought as the gear issue. Years ago, we didn’t have all these different genres. Heck, at one time we didn’t have any electronic music genres at all. Everything was acoustic. And even with early electronics we didn’t have the staggering number that we have today.
So my question is this. Have we finally run out of ideas that are radical enough to warrant its own genre? Can’t we classify just about anything that we do from hereon out as an existing genre or sub genre? And if we do manage to create something radically different, will it catch on? I mean what haven’t we done?
I’m curious to see where music is headed the next 20 years or so.
Random Thought #5 – How cheap is this stuff gonna get? Think about this. When synths first came out back in the 70s, they were a fortune. Do you know what some synths went for?
For example, the Yamaha CS 80, which came out in 1976, was FIVE GRAND. Do you know what that kind of money can buy you today? It’s mind boggling what early synths cost. The software equivalents, which blow these dinosaurs away in terms of sound, are hundreds of dollars, not thousands.
So I gotta wonder. How low are prices going to go? Or are we going to go in the direction of giving more stuff for a higher price tag? I mean the stuff that some companies give away blows the doors off of old synths.
Anyway, this is the kind of stuff that randomly goes through my head and I just wanted to share some of it with you today. Perhaps I’ve given you something to think about as well.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim