Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
> Subject: Guitar good, DJ's bad, etc (was LOOPING PHILOSOPHY) > Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 20:20:19 +0100 (BST) > From: Michael Hughes <pycraft@elec.gla.ac.uk> > To: Loopers-Delight@annihilist.com > > > Why is it that in rock music, there's an acute shortage of "keyboard > > > heroes", in the same sense that say, Jeff Beck is a guitar hero? > How > > many breathtaking solos can you recall that were generated by > something > > with a piano-keyboard interface? Well, gee, doesn't anyone here listen to jazz? Art Tatum? Bill Evans? Fats Waller? Keith Jarrett? Herbie Hancock? Oscar Peterson? There's plenty of breathtaking stuff there. This does beg the question of why there's such a paucity of great *rock* keyboard as compared to great jazz keyboard. Oh, maybe you mean, "why aren't there any great *synthesizer* solos?" That's easy. Synthesizers suck. (just kidding - they don't suck totally. but there are many, many ways in which they truly suck.) > >------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Travis said: > > I'm not entirely sure. I was hoping that you, Warren, would have some > > insight, since I think you've written for two of the three mentioned. Thanks for noticing. :-) > My off the cuff theory would be that the focus in GP and BP is on > players, and in KB, the machinery. The advent of MIDI made things so > much more complicated that I could see a sizable market for a magazine > > that did nothing other than evaluate gear in an intelligent manner. I > > used to read KB regularly, and my recollection was that there was much > > more discussion of programming and sequencing software, and keeping > the > trainset running than appeared in GP at the time. Given the > complexity > of say, getting Cakewalk to sync to tape and controll three modules > and a > drum machine versus getting a crunchy rhythm tone on a Super Plexi, > this > makes sense to me. > Right, and this function devolved to KB because almost all synthesizers had and have kbd interfaces. But Electronic Musician also sprang up to fill this void, and it was started by a guitarist (Craig Anderton).-- Yours truly, Warren Sirota musician, programmer, writer http://wsdesigns.com/wsirota