Re: Guitar good, DJ's bad, etc (was LOOPING PHILOSOPHY)

[Paolo Valladolid <pvallado@waynesworld.ucsd.edu>]

> Actually, I think there's a lot to be gained, because I think it's easy 
> to find consensus on the statement "Pat Metheny and Gary Burton are 
> equally expressive, despite the limitations of their respective 
> instruments", yet there's much criticism of various electronic 
> instruments and effects processors because of some niggling feature that 
> isn't present, be it 24-bit resolution, velocity sensitivity, only 8 
> seconds of sampling time, the inability to map all paramenters to CV 
> controllers, etc.  
> This list, and the MI in general, spend a great deal of time discussing 
> the technological aspects of instruments and music.  All variety of 
> equipment is criticized because of some perceived terminal flaw.  Look 
>at 
> the piano--no pitch bending, only one sound, doesn't stay in tune, no 
> aftertouch sensitivity, no doubling of pitches--it's full of limitations 
> which would sink a synth, particularly if it cost $8k and weighed 500 
> pounds.
> If we can agree that Gary Burton might be able to get some meaningful 
> work done with an instrument as woeful and feature-poor as the vibes, 
> perhaps the rest of us might be able to make some headway with whatever 
> we have, despite the inability to, say, have three concurrent loops of 
> different length playing back at the same time.  Even if we're playing a 
> synthesizer.

Even so there's not much we can say other than the truly great artists
always transcend whatever we perceive as limitations in the tools they
use.  That's why any attempt to say whether, for example, Pat Metheny
is a more expressive musician than Gary Burton because of their respective
choices ot tools is not likely to be fruitful.

Perhaps it would be more fruitful to talk about how we can get maximum
expression from the tools we have at our disposal; which is a constant
topic of discussion on both this list and Digital Guitar. ^_^


Paolo Valladolid
 ---------------------------------------------------------------
|Moderator of Digital Guitar Digest, an Internet mailing list   |\ 
|for Music Technology and Stringed Instruments                  | \
 ----------------------------------------------------------------  |
\ finger pvallado@waynesworld.ucsd.edu for more info             \ |
 \ http://waynesworld.ucsd.edu/DigitalGuitar/home.html            \| 
  -----------------------------------------------------------------