Limits || limitless

I was almost tempted to put "scare quotes" around this oft-abused term. Big-L Limits-one of the most frustrating topics of discussion among musicians and non-musicians alike. Because you know that your favorite album X by artist Y was made with Z gear. There's this idea that artists are supposed to be Macgyvers and squeeze an entire album out of a broken drum machine from the 80's, a rubber band, and a tape machine. I think this more has to do with what you grew up doing, what you got used to. If you grew up with hardware samplers, chances are you'll think that they're the shit-and you can't really make music without them. Mutatis mutandis for digital multi-track software.

For myself, I grew up playing instruments like guitar, bass, and drums. I never touched a keyboard or synthesizer until I got a MIDI controller. I've never used a hardware sampler, and tape machines were before my time. The first piece of electronic music kit I got was a program called Renoise, a kind of sequencer and sampler software called a tracker. This was mainly due to this video:


(Apparently, this was the first track this guy made with the software. But that's after many years of using trackers, and undoubtedly the combination of genetics with powerful stimulants.)

This was before I fully realized that what I had been listening to for years, was an amen break sliced up, resampled, processed to hell and back. I just thought that the tracker was the easiest way to get those very fast drum sounds. After my second "musical awakening"-I started taking a closer look at how my favorite artists made their tracks. I found some correlations in the equipment they used: sampler, sequencer, and DSP(effects)-also mixing down on outboard gear as opposed to in a DAW was very common. Aside from vintage or expensive outboard gear and mixing desks, all of this is totally within reach for the average Joe.

So I wondered, with all this accessible, great gear &software, where's all the great music? I encountered some major cognitive dissonance when I realized my own setup is probably more limitless than the ones used by my favorite artists, to make my favorite albums. But my tracks are still non-existent or shit. Why?

Well, good music is still out there, but it's also mixed in with all the not-so-great music. Not-so-great not necessarily meaning bad, but maybe just too generic, content-less, or lacking something undefinable. Rather than rehash the old cliche about the internet and downloading ruining music, I'd rather make a parallel point. The internet undoubtedly democratized both music making and music consumption, but what people saw of themselves wasn't what they expected. In the past record labels had more control over what the artist put out, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes to ill. But they knew that to make money, they would have to give people what they want-even if their customer base is a minority. So labels would make sure people got what they want.

In the past a record label was a filter between artists and the public. The label could be expected to bring the public artists with a certain sound, and this was an institution that listeners depended on. Unfortunately for the artists, there are simply more music listeners than music producers. So pure democratization does not necessarily value the artist's raw expression. These days there is less incentive to starve yourself and hole yourself up in a studio with a shoelace and a tape deck, trying to come up with the next sub-sub genre. This is now seen for what it really is: playing a mental game with yourself.

In conclusion, in a modern world, musical limitations are harder to come by. The average computer can replace tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of 1960's-80's era recording gear-convenience at the cost of a certain amount of charm. The new landscape of the internet also makes imposing limitations on oneself, to be transcended creatively, an unattractive proposition. So what we're left with, is a very spread out and divided musical landscape. Good for some, not so good for others.