http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4A3ALOSAew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lrwYPhHThc
Animals as leaders-->genious guitar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ73Hy7ob-A
NiT GriT-->taking dubstep in the right direction
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OobUV9q0aDA
Nujabes-->beautiful music

America's greatest : Les Claypool is a living legend to me. He doesn't even try that hard when comes to playing music, his creativity is pouring out of him.

Very much aware of the sea of mediocre pablum and downright horrible music out there.

I think many fans of the various electronica genres have taken my statements out of context and feel compelled to defend the music they love. I have, from the beginning, stated that I absolutely love electronic music. I wouldn't have minored in the subject if I didn't love it.

Of course, there are many takes on what electronic music really means. It could mean nearly all music that isn't completely acoustic in nature... but even microphones are an electronic instrument, so who can say. When I started out making electronic music, there were no sequencers and the synthesizers were mostly analog. Music that had the title of electronic music was very different than what the term refers to today. Pink Floyd, for example was considered an electronic music act in that time... now they are obviously a rock band.

My opinion (as I stated before) is that some of the music people dig is quite clearly made by taking loops from well known producer packs, and pasting them in long rows with a very minimal amount of layering or modification. Having many of those producer packs in my possession, it is rather easy to recognize them when they are used in this manner. Thus, I am not impressed when I know that I could fire up my laptop and recreate the track in a handful of minutes.

This is not to say that such tracks are not interesting to dance to, or have no place in music. I never said that electronic music isn't music. There is simply a difference between music that was composed and performed by actual musicians and music that was sequenced completely by mouse. Much of the best electronica on display here (think Squarepusher) is clearly not sequenced from any loops I know of. It is mostly FM synthesis and analog synthesis played on actual keyboards for the most part.

Anyhooo... in case anyone is interested, this is my favorite little electronic instrument from the past few years. Endless fun. I present the DRAWDIO.

Be well all...
HF

Hey HF,

I have had discussions on this subject many many times with my colleague's. Its a touchy subject for me too, cause i am also very involved in music since my early age. It has driven and influenced my life very deeply, and i have great respect for music as a form of art, and a physical medium to even heal, help your self (an overlooked field) .



Of course in early days it was hard to define what an electronic music really is because it was not solely created by synth's. Still much of the instruments used were acoustical instruments. So i think anyone who experimented (like Pink Floyd), or at least implemented one of these electronic instruments in their gig, was electronic music pioneer.
As far as the microphone goes, even the electric guitar...its still manipulation of acoustical signal. The source is acoustical, so is considered as such also...even if the output of the guitar is electrically distorted...the first signal outputted is completely analog and acoustic.

But as years were passing and new technology was born( DAW sequencing and synth's), i think it was pretty much defined what electronic music means.There is no doubt that today, all of the electronic music is completely made in the digital realm of bytes and bit's. Even the synth's are hybrid of digital and analog, there is hardly a complete analog device on the market that doesn't belong to one of the vintage brands that remained like Moog, and is sold as such :vintage.

Now about the copying of ideas that we today see. I think its the same in every f.in genre of music. U see dub step which is very boring and already heard, but you also hear the same riff's in rock and metal. I mean the level of experimentation and creativity in general fell a bit.. Maybe its a bit pronounced in electronic music genre's cause its easier to come by the cracked software so really everyone can try, but no one can buy a fake Gibson with the same sound. I think you get what i mean.

As long as there is music that touches your heart and mind, you shouldn't worry much about how or why it was done.At least i stopped bothering...and its really brighter on that side
As technology paces up, music was always following with a change. Music as we know today is completely dependent and connected with the technological development.So we will definitely see more change in what we today perceive as music.

I must side with Hyperspace Fool here.. While there are certainly 'fake' pop music bands out there, I think its much harder to make crap acoustic/instrument-based music sound good, then it is for a talent-less kid to make some electronic music that sounds good to most people's ears, because of the producer packs HF was talking about.

Physical instruments take real dedication to master and sound good, while electronic music producing also can take real dedication to master but from the get-go you can fake it and have it sound generally good with just a few packs and samples. You cant fake playing good violin or sitar.

But of course, there are certainly talented electronic music producers out there, some with extended training with instruments and so on, and that use the potential of electronics to create some really beautiful complex sounds.

In the end, just listen to what feels right to you

i think you are wrong
analog modeling synth are a quantum physics science if you don't have any idea about electronic device's and basic theory of sound.
kids today are using preset, pre made sounds and thats why it sounds crappy. To master instrument of any kind much dedication is needed and that is fact.


edit : i agree with the end line completely, and that is what it matters most !

In what way am I wrong?

Dont you think that you, being a person who knows a lot about electronic music, can tell the difference between premade sounds and good music, but that most people really cant? On the other hand, I think 'acoustic' or live instrument-based music, for it to sound good enough, it either needs to be someone that plays good enough, or it needs many thousands of dollars in production costs to make them sound good for the masses, but you dont need to be an expert to know its crap when its unproduced...

A person that doesnt know at all how to sing or play the guitar cannot go in front of thousands of people and fake it while everybody enjoys. Maybe they can get produced in the studio in a way that fakes it but that will take a lot of work behind it. With electronic music someone with 0 talent could go on stage and dj while most people enjoy and think its 'good'.. Do you not agree?

Note this is not a value judgement, I love both electronic music and acoustic music when they are good

We were pretty much on the same thought actually. The only part which i can't agree with, is this :



We can't compare a musician who is creating the music, with the dj who is only presenting the music that is created by given artist. Its two different fields of work. But again, dj with zero experience will give you only that much
his mixing skills will suck, choice of music will suck etc.. so yea i think you are missing something here.

Ok but if you were a DJ in a psytrance party, you could easily slip a track from a talentless producer in your mix and most non-experts would probably not notice, but if you're playing some acoustic guitar songs mix (or have a concert/talent-show where each band or person plays one song), as soon as the no-talent guitar playing person plays the first notes, everybody will notice straight away how its crap, there's no faking it... Agreed?

Yea, i completely agree with the circumstances of the given example. However to compare a Dj who is only presenting the music, not playing it...and artist who is doing it from scratch..its just not right.

edit : I think its really more suitable to compare dj with another dj, simply because its another field of work.There is no music creation in dj ing. All the notes are already played. There is totally different skills involved here.

Omar Rodriguez Group - Live in LA: Pure beauty, the smiles of rapture in the musician's faces says it all and some amazing cosmic sounds in the 2nd half of the song. Omar somehow manages to sound like an absolute master of his instrument but still retains the beauty of someone who has just picked it up for the first time. His outro solo grabs my heart and throws it out into the cosmos everytime



Animals as Leaders - Following up from Ayalove's post, these guys have some wonderful psychedelic voyages in their music. Not a fan of the heavier stuff but all the ethereal ambient songs are amazing and I had a great spice journey to the song I linked, the music had such a playful mischievous character, showing off in little flurries then coiling back again. These guys also piqued my interest in a more ambient/psybient direction which brings me to this track...



True architects of sonic manipulation, the way they represent the psychedelic experience in sound and texture is uncanny. They are only the start of my journey into more electronic directions but I don't miss the traditional instrumentation (besides Raja Rams Flute, etc) at all when I listen to these guys.

Peace and happy traveling

Many producers are also DJs, and many DJ's put out albums of original material. This is especially so in some genres of electronic music like Ibiza or Goa. (both of which I generally enjoy).

I am a big fan of psy-trance artists. So I don't want to get into the "is electronic music good" debate as I think most of us agree on this.

The talentless part of what endlessness & I have said arises primarily in music producers who use (almost exclusively) loops and samples that they didn't compose, and which they don't even bother to alter in any way. They take the basic loops and plug them into their songs without changing the pitch, the tempo, the sound or anything at all. They don't even really layer loops to create dynamics.

The music can still sound great, but it is not impressive to a fellow producer or musician. As endlessness says, it takes years of dedication to master an instrument (synths included)... but cutting & pasting pre-made loops can be done with no practice whatsoever within a half hour of opening a DAW for the very first time.

btw: Primus fucking Sucks! (This is a complement in Primus fanboy dialect. Primus Sucks is something coined by Les himself, and is the height of irony... to the point their first album, a live one no less, was called Suck On This.) To harken back to those halcyon days I present a slice of Primus history that I have loved since before we had any stuidio albums to listen to and drool over.

Hey Hyperspace Fool! Primus is what lead my tastes into more trippy, not normal places I still count one of the most pivotal moments of my life as a musician is when I first listened to Primus really stoned ("Jerry was a race car driver" to be precise). I have never heard music with such depth and since that night many moons ago, I have never listened to music the same again. Even when sober, music has much more depth and detail (though still not as much as when I'm enjoying a nice cannabinoid high).

Peace and happy traveling.

Tnx, i am very aware of that. My point was that you can't go comparing skills of an musician and skills and knowledge of dj.It two different things, different kind of work, different approach, different everything...



That was not my goal at all. On the end, everyone has its on taste of music.



Im sorry but this kind of talentless music is never published officially, only self promoted...and that is all the credit they will get, ever...believe me !! And it is the case with any other genre...not only electronic music.



nice piece btw, tnx

here's one from my selection of music :

hmm..hard to name favorites..there similar to what many have posted..i'll just post some random goodies



This weird one made me burst out laughing while on a deep journey

I think another point that HF and endlessness are missing is the fact that it isn't just the music that is psychedelic, it's the ambience or atmosphere that is created by the writer/producer. He has to get the music and environment absolutely correct or neither will sound right. You can't get the good sound that is talked about by being a noob producer doing it in your bedroom with hi-fi speakers, trust me ive tried )

Getting your reverb and compression right is an artform in itself. There's just too many things that you whitewashed hyperspace fool and i think that's what slightly annoyed folk. Peace

Is this sarcasm? I am sure every music fan can name hundreds of examples of utter uncreative crap that is on major labels. In fact, when it comes to electronica, major labels tend to be clueless about what is good and who is hot. A majority of the really good stuff is on indie labels, IMO.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Doesn't change the fact that I can hear loops from producer packs I am very familiar with being used unaltered... not even compressed. Just looped.

Atmosphere is subjective, but it is often accomplished with some ambient samples and few sound effects.

As for speaker quality or equipment in general, I went to school with Fatboy Slim... he did his stuff on an old Atari computer and some Radio Shack headphones.

HF

When it comes to psychedelic music, electronic music rules for me because of how I define it as psychedelic.

When I was 20 I heard a track by an artist called "psypilot" I was a metal-head at the time and wasn't really into electronic music and ESPECIALLY not dance music. However once this tune kicked in it had this sound in it. I looked up at the speakers as if they were some authority, whereas recorded music had always been a live concept deliver'd on a transportation mechanism, this sound was an entity all to itself. The music was alive.

It's so funny though, as the sound was just an open saw-tooth, but the way it was place in the mix with this special reverb on it... blew my mind

I can't find that track on youtube (levitation), but I don't know whether it was the novelty of hearing this kind a music for the first time, but I don't think any trance artist has surpassed this guy yet. He was no where near as big as he should have been.

But yeah, this album changed my life

this... mushrooms.. loop play mode... 8 hours. Beautiful



Back when trance was actually hypnotic...

those were the days.

One time music plucked my heart-strings, now it does so by poking my ear

I'd never heard this track before until now but...

also awesome

I think we are de railing the topic for no reason this time, and you are putting my words out of context a bit. My attitude was addressed to your thoughts expressed little earlier :



I think music released on good labels is( if nothing else ) with high production standard. It is not music produced on the fly, with un-altered loops(like you explain).Maybe me and you will find it utterly uncreative, but hey..who are we to judge. If it hits some good label than it obviously has some quality and will make it in the clubs and cafe's.. People have very different taste's in music, and very different way of living to go with it.


Mystical ambient music




Psy from the good old days, great energy