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SunkLo wrote:

Simulant wrote:I just don't like you because of the crap you write on this forum.

Great, why don't you add me to your foes list then like I already said? I don't know if I'm supposed to be crushed that you don't like me or keep on with this inane argument or...? I've already made my point, defended my point, and outlined where you misinterpreted my point. Nothing left for me to do really. If you want to keep on selectively acknowledging bits of my posts taken out of context and try to squabble over them, I'm not interested. You can have the last word if you want to feel like you won. I'll even give you another biggups.

To be honest I've lost interest too. You made a statement about the type of people who watch Skrillex tutorials which I pointed out was wrong. Lots of people watch tutorials for lots of reasons, end of story. How is watching a tutorial to make a specific sound any different from using a preset? Or are you saying that you can't make good music with presets?

I really dislike the way your little team of followers heckles and jeers you on. I've decided to just ignore them, rather than reply and add fuel to the fire. There seems to be a lot of small mindedness on this forum.

all hail sunk fuk skrilex

Simulant wrote:Or are you saying that you can't make good music with presets?

You can make good music with presets but by nature it's going to be derivative music. You can't really think of yourself as a badman producer if all your sounds are made by someone else and you copy your arrangements off some video you watched. This is why there's so much absolute shit in the scene, everyone wants to be a cool producer but nobody wants to actually make music of their own. It's like going to a chili contest where everyone followed the same recipe, or an art gallery where everyone's paintings are the same vase from the same Introduction to Painting book.

Imitation can teach you some things to launch off of in your own experimentation, but if you're just looking to be spoon fed a recipe so you can get on with being cool already, you're a bumba and always will be. You can say you've "proved that statement wrong" or whatever and call me judgemental, but I'm always going to stand by that and I know a lot of other producers feel the same.

Simulant wrote:There seems to be a lot of small mindedness on this forum.

No shit, what do you think I was criticizing in the first place?

SunkLo wrote:You can make good music with presets but by nature it's going to be derivative music. You can't really think of yourself as a badman producer if all your sounds are made by someone else and you copy your arrangements off some video you watched. This is why there's so much absolute shit in the scene, everyone wants to be a cool producer but nobody wants to actually make music of their own. It's like going to a chili contest where everyone followed the same recipe, or an art gallery where everyone's paintings are the same vase from the same Introduction to Painting book.

Sounds are one thing, arrangement is another. You can use basic sounds and make amazing music. Just the same as you can make great chilli without growing your own chilli peppers.

What would someone have to do to not be considered a noob copycat producer? Make their own sounds? Build their own synths? Write their own VSTs? Deadmau5 uses sampled piano's in his music, is he a copycat? The Prodigy made their career from sampling other people's music, perhaps you consider them copycats?

All music is derivative in one way or another.

An individual that uses a sound resemblant of another's is not necessarily a copycat or a bad producer, even if the similarity is intentional. It is those that take similar sounds and implement them similarly, attempting to come up with a product intentionally more than similar to another product who are detrimental to musical society. The point SunkLo is trying to make (and if you don't mind me saying so, you have continuously misinterpreted his point throughout this entire thread) is that diversity is a good thing. It is much more beneficial to the progression of a musical culture/community if that culture/community is diverse, rather than every participant closely resembling one another.

Simulant wrote:What would someone have to do to not be considered a noob copycat producer? Make their own sounds? Build their own synths? Write their own VSTs? Deadmau5 uses sampled piano's in his music, is he a copycat? The Prodigy made their career from sampling other people's music, perhaps you consider them copycats?

All music is derivative in one way or another.

Yeah any of the above. Just having creative input on the majority of your track. The thing about "well this guy used a piano, he didn't invent the piano, that's guys a copycat right?" is that when someone plays a piano on a track, they're usually playing some chords and melody they composed. In a genre where the 1 note bassline is king and sound design has replaced composition to a large degree, you can't then go and copy someone's sound design. If the junction where your creative input comes into play is sound design instead of composition, then design your own fucking sounds! You can't be like "nah my music eschews in-depth composition in favor of textural and timbral experimentation" and then be using a preset some guy gave you! That's just ridiculous. I have no clue how someone could do that and not feel like a phoney.

Yes all music is derivative in one way or another. And a certain percentage of the air you breathe is other people's farts. You don't want it ALL to be other people's farts though, right?

WHAT? I'm breathing dead people's farts?

I'mma stop this breathing shit right now.

There's some dinosaur farts in there too.

FAAAAAAAAAAACK

SunkLo wrote:

Simulant wrote:What would someone have to do to not be considered a noob copycat producer? Make their own sounds? Build their own synths? Write their own VSTs? Deadmau5 uses sampled piano's in his music, is he a copycat? The Prodigy made their career from sampling other people's music, perhaps you consider them copycats?

All music is derivative in one way or another.

Yeah any of the above. Just having creative input on the majority of your track. The thing about "well this guy used a piano, he didn't invent the piano, that's guys a copycat right?" is that when someone plays a piano on a track, they're usually playing some chords and melody they composed. In a genre where the 1 note bassline is king and sound design has replaced composition to a large degree, you can't then go and copy someone's sound design. If the junction where your creative input comes into play is sound design instead of composition, then design your own fucking sounds! You can't be like "nah my music eschews in-depth composition in favor of textural and timbral experimentation" and then be using a preset some guy gave you! That's just ridiculous. I have no clue how someone could do that and not feel like a phoney.

Yes all music is derivative in one way or another. And a certain percentage of the air you breathe is other people's farts. You don't want it ALL to be other people's farts though, right?

I hardly think that one note basses come into it when we're talking about Skrillex presets!

At the end of the day, a good song is a good song. I don't care how they made it, how much of someone else's work influenced it etc. The end product is all that counts to me, as a listener. Sound design isn't everything, although I prefer to make my own sounds. But I know for a fact that plenty of successful producers use presets all over their tunes, and still make good music. After all, where does it end?

I made this tune using presets - noob!

I made my own sounds, but used a popular synth - noob!

I made my own synth, but used a high level programming language - noob!

I wrote my synth in assembly language from the ground up but used Intel CPUs - noob!

I designed and fabricated my own CPU using a state of the art manufacturing process, but I didn't source my own silicon - noob!

Using industry standard tools, I found my own supply of silicon - noob!

Seriously just make good music with any tools available, presets, samples, whatever. If the end product is awesome, well done.

Yes I can agree with that on some level, you're always standing on someone's shoulders. But you have to do something of your own. Lot of dudes out there just doing the 1 note bassline thing with a preset, adding some dotted 8th note chord stabs that they lifted from a tutorial video, vengeance kick on one, snare on three, white noise risers every 16 bars, "scary" movie sample at the intro and breakdown, throw er through a multi-maximizer, boom look how great of a producer I am! Where does the creativity come from? What's individuating your music from everyone else's? Are you really a producer if I could code a program that does that same process?

This approach contributes nothing to music, tons of other people are doing the exact same thing. There's so little human input that if this guy dies, someone else will probably make an identical track next week. So it's solely about trying to be cool/famous and making money by copycatting the flavour of the month. Which means you get no respect as a producer or artist, at least from me. Even from a strictly output-based perspective, it shows in the final product. I can tell when someone's a noob right away when I listen to their track because it's just a clone. So yeah, if the end product is awesome, well done. But it's rarely well done.

The copycat knewb who completes a song has accomplished more than you, though Sunk, unless our metric is half baked excuses.

Nah I disagree. I mean I could knock up a formulaic track in 20 minutes and call it done but why would I do that? That's not really an accomplishment at all. I'd rather take a bit longer to get closer to perfection than have a catalogue of 'good enough's. I've gotten plenty of tracks to the same stage that other producers would call done, but if it doesn't meet my standards why release it out of laziness? Too many dudes trying to circumvent the artist's struggle by convincing themselves they're happy with lackluster results.

Perfection is the best/worst excuse.

First off, it doesn't even exist, so just forget about it. Secondly, the thing that does resemble what we call perfection is asymptotic and is approachable but never reachable. Waiting until you arrive at perfection will leave you (and me) waiting forever.

We are very different people with different tastes, but some of my favorite work is flawed, unfinished, imperfect. Once you reach a certain level of competency, the decision to allow something to remain imperfect is an artistic decision in of itself, and is equally, or in this fucked entropic universe, more laudable/valuable/expressive.

If I really had to suck this Freudian cigar I'd guess some authority, maybe someone who isn't a doer but a teacher, got a hold of you at an impressionable age and impressed this recipe for failure (waiting for perfection) on you. Fuck that homie. Fail a little, die a little, so you can live a little.



Typed on an iPhone 4S - respect!

By perfection I mean perfectly imperfect. Yes it's asymptotic but why not wait till a larger value of t so f(t) is closer to P? There's a threshold of diminishing returns but I guess mine's just higher than everyone else's. Not like I have a really strong reason to be impatient.


Ableton's non-linearity is helping, as is my MPK (and hopefully the imminent fatpads) Can't believe I went so long without a fuckin control surface. Just spent a while playing some jazzy trumpet lines into various clips, something that would have taken forever with my previous workflow. Got some piano to record, as well as guitar harmonics played with a pencil to sample, then I gotta automate my horns section, resample into kontakt, synth some more textures, then arrangement, sound treatment, and mixing. And then... THEN you will have your tune, my sweet NWJ. I'll submit it to TUNA when the theme is "That time Coltrane and Miles ate some peyote"

SunkLo wrote:By perfection I mean perfectly imperfect. Yes it's asymptotic but why not wait till a larger value of t so f(t) is closer to P? There's a threshold of diminishing returns but I guess mine's just higher than everyone else's. Not like I have a really strong reason to be impatient.

How about your going to fucking die soon? Does that work?

SunkLo wrote: Ableton's non-linearity is helping, as is my MPK (and hopefully the imminent fatpads) Can't believe I went so long without a fuckin control surface. Just spent a while playing some jazzy trumpet lines into various clips, something that would have taken forever with my previous workflow. Got some piano to record, as well as guitar harmonics played with a pencil to sample, then I gotta automate my horns section, resample into kontakt, synth some more textures, then arrangement, sound treatment, and mixing. And then... THEN you will have your tune, my sweet NWJ. I'll submit it to TUNA when the theme is "That time Coltrane and Miles ate some peyote"

Glad you are getting along with live. Are you on 9? It really is a performance daw, perfect for virtuoso musicians like yourself.

Just so happens that is the theme next week, like turning in on this Saturday... See you there.

nowaysj wrote:How about your going to fucking die soon? Does that work?

Nah I'm not into that whole death scene. Too played out. I RSVP'd 'Maybe next time'.


Oh what serendipity. Hopefully Centaur gets back from his ketamine and whore binge in time to officiate the thread.

The performance aspect of Live is motivating. Turns composition into more of a performance and less like writing an essay.

SunkLo wrote:

nowaysj wrote:How about your going to fucking die soon? Does that work?

Nah I'm not into that whole death scene. Too played out. I RSVP'd 'Maybe next time'.


Oh what serendipity. Hopefully Centaur gets back from his ketamine and whore binge in time to officiate the thread.

The performance aspect of Live is motivating. Turns composition into more of a performance and less like writing an essay.

Exactly! Sound design too! Totally into performance sound design! Truthfully I loved ableton, the mixer sucks though, and every time I tried too do something I'd be along the path and hit a roadblock, and the answer was always you could do that in max. Fuck that, I'm not that big of a nerd, actually I am, but i don't have the time.

Other night, like 3 am, was writhing in agony in this chair for a few hours, away from my family so I didn't disturb them, and I looked outside my window and crouched in the tree branch was death with dead leaves for laurels, and that fucking grin. I was immobile, but somehow shot up, I half expected him to dissolve into a mix of grey sodium lit tree branches, but he didn't. I said you can have me, but you can't touch my girls. He just sat still and smiled.

Nwj true story #223

SunkLo wrote: the theme is "That time Coltrane and Miles ate some peyote"

fantastic

Only thing that can explain this jacket: