[randy909]

Totally with you up until the lost culture thing. More people know how to play the piano virtuostically than ever. Culture is expanding and being recorded permanently in the digital world. How are we losing it?

It reminds me of what the blue-man-group does. It's novel, a few people make a lot of money doing it, but it's not the next electric guitar by any stretch.

I think one of the core attributes of EDM is that it is performed by machines. The MPC-live thing seems like an effort to step backwards just to have something to do on stage. I'd rather listen to someone mix a 808/909/303 live. The subtle timing and tuning shifts they make are a thing of beauty (and laptops don't do this). But that's probably just my preference for techno over hip-hop/dubstep coming through.

Anyway, good article regardless.

[bane]

Yeah the 303 is a really interesting example, it offered several entirely interesting performance vectors, almost none of which were tied to actually playing the notes. Lots of people I know who used to do great 303 stuff barely even knew what the letter notes along the keyboard were. But the little knobs at the top gave them tons of ways to express the music that really aren't typical in traditional musical performance. (I'd have killed to have a freq cutoff and resonance cut off when I was studying classical violin).