Ancient Surgical Instruments

Two things I wish my DAW had:

1. A “cutting floor” space for storing ideas that I want to keep around but aren’t going in the current mix. Back when Joe Musician couldn’t afford a home studio, the DAW was a tool for collecting ideas you’d already written down. Now that the tech is cheap enough, people often use their studio gear as a replacement for pencil and staff paper – especially since the advent of electronic pop music, much of which is well-outside the capabilities of traditional western notation.

Bit of a tangent there, but in any case, it sure would be nice to have a place to put ideas that I may or may not want to use.

2. Grouping for tracks, the way Photoshop has folders for layers. For some compositional forms this isn’t an issue, but as soon as you start layering a lot of tracks (three guitars for the chorus, one for the verse, five vocal harmonies, eight drum tracks, etc.), things start to get pretty messy. I almost never need to see all those friggin’ tracks at the same time, and having them there makes the creative process that much more difficult.

edit: I guess ProTools has track grouping, although the copy of ProTools that I bought became incompatible with my OS maybe a year after I bought it. Sensitive instrument, I guess.

Programmer Writes Software to Replace Tonal Composers, Hurts Everyone’s Feelings

There are a few dramatic oversimplifications in this article (it’s probably not written by a musician) and I’m not gonna make the time to read more into it today (it’s 1:30am and I got two writing sessions and a show to catch tomorrow), but it’s a really interesting read. I like the moral of: Tonal music is some clever math, not magic happy-sauce from God. Doesn’t mean it’s not awesome, it’s just not magic.

I also like how people criticize him for his work by calling him the “tin man” – saying basically that it is a heartless act to make an attempt at better understanding the materials we’re working with, and implying that tonal music is sacred and shouldn’t be explained. Lol yr feelings, keep them quartets comin’ FOO!

Apparently he’s been working on a sequel which is supposed to write “modern, original” music. There are a couple pieces posted within that article, although both of them are tonal, solo piano pieces. They do sound pretty, but judging by these his strat is still to write using staves and notes, which isn’t really where it’s been at. Is it really hard to go to the conservatory and pick up some scores?

Anyway I’m rootin’ for him, and I’m hoping he’s digging deeper than notes. But if he manages to come up with AI that writes original, modern music, well, that’s some pretty intense learning goin’ on there. We got bigger problems than ego damage in that case, ha!