But this brings up an interesting dilemma, touching not only the issue of piracy but going into the workings of your computer and the digital audio workstation itself. It's all about the code, baby. When you start your computer and the operating system boots up, millions of lines of code are ran. Same as when you fire up your DAW, and those millions of lines of code need to inter-mesh with the hardware of your computer and audio equipment seamlessly for everything to make a sound. This takes alot of time, and it's very tedious.
So... Do you want to do this? You can if you like, you can make your own software from scratch, but you probably won't be getting any music done for months or years. The easiest possible option is to pirate something, which takes minimal effort, and has no cost aside from your bandwidth (and an entire installation DVD, or a few, can start to eat it up quickly...) OR you can use free software, which can occasionally prove the old adage "you get what you pay for"-as in, it's definitely not as slick as commercial software. It's like eating home cooking versus something made at a restaurant. It has more charm, because it's more imperfect, and who could turn down a free meal?
One free meal I couldn't turn down recently was OpenMPT, which is also an open source program, meaning you can view the source code if you're nerdly enough to do so. It's pretty basic but if you're into early 90's computer culture or video game music you'll recognize some of sounds in the demo song that it comes with. I felt it was inspiring that people were into this oldschool style of sequencing program enough to spend this much time on a project of this scale. It made me think of how much time and effort went into making electronic music before the days of Ableton Live and Logic. On this topic, it's also inspiring in a way that a song originally posted as a demo on the internet made it onto a charting pop song, even though how it got there was somewhat dubious:
The limitations that electronic musicians have put up with in the past lead to some great sounds being developed. At the same time as I now have this new program, with gigabytes of content, I also feel this sense of creative paralysis. Like a modern DAW overwhelms you with so many choices that when you open it up for the first time you start drooling out of the corner of your mouth while croaking "DAAAAWW..."-this is the epitome of the modern electronic music making experience. Breaking it down to a graph listing MIDI events & samples being played, like older programs did, is a great brain rinse. Especially when you realize you've spent hundreds on programs and plugins that you rarely use. The idea of free tools is appealing in that not only is it not costly, it is free of other restrictions such as copyright, and also guilt-free if they sit on your computer unused for a while.
So yeah, sorry about the rambling post. I would also like to apologize for my absence from this blog for the past week or two, I had a nasty cold on top of being hellishly busy at work. The combination meant I had to resort to all sorts of pharmaceutical garbage just to keep me online physically and mentally. I'm still recovering from it, and as you might guess I haven't got a chance to fire up Live 9 in a week or so. But now I'm back, installing the 6 DVD's of extra content, and I promise a review within the next few weeks.
Have a nice day, and keep your headphones on.
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