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Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

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Re: Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

#31

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

swiley wrote: post #12
kristofferR wrote: post #6

I'll be honest - he seems to be a prime example of someone focusing too much on the tools rather than the creative process. All his best, legendary, stuff came way before he got this awesome setup, his recent stuff hasn't been very well received. You don't need a ton of expensive equipment to create excellent electronic music.

The modern musical instrument is a diaphragm controlled by a stream of real valued position samples. There's absolutely no need for anything complex to play it, you can write simple C programs to generate all kinds of bizarre and beautiful effects.

And all of visual arts is thousands of colored pixels which can be arranged at will with something as simple as MS Paint.

Your comment comes across as reductive grandstanding.

Re: Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

#32

Post by edkennedy »

swiley wrote: post #12
kristofferR wrote: post #6

I'll be honest - he seems to be a prime example of someone focusing too much on the tools rather than the creative process. All his best, legendary, stuff came way before he got this awesome setup, his recent stuff hasn't been very well received. You don't need a ton of expensive equipment to create excellent electronic music.

The modern musical instrument is a diaphragm controlled by a stream of real valued position samples. There's absolutely no need for anything complex to play it, you can write simple C programs to generate all kinds of bizarre and beautiful effects.

There are two discussions that have been beaten to death many a time on any forum discussing production of electronic music:

Hardware vs Software (which I would compare to the discussion of a data center in the cloud vs hardware on premise)

and Analog vs Digital

Everyone loves to think they are controversial...

Re: Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

#33

Post by dajohnson89 »

handedness wrote: post #15
noonespecial wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if the first creative acts that get artists like this their fame are acts of desperation, undertaken against impossible odds. Later when fame and money comes, the artist buys more and more tools in a fruitless chase to recapture the previous glory but he can't because the fame and money prevent him from ever again having the one thing that made his first works awesome... desperation.

The best art is often produced under great constraints, something that usually disappears after commercial success.

Necessity is the mother of invention?

Re: Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

#34

Post by okket »

kristofferR wrote: post #6

I'll be honest - he seems to be a prime example of someone focusing too much on the tools rather than the creative process. All his best, legendary, stuff came way before he got this awesome setup, his recent stuff hasn't been very well received. You don't need a ton of expensive equipment to create excellent electronic music.

IMHO the audio nerd version of a huge garage filled with sports cars and old timers.

Re: Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

#35

Post by [deleted] »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #18
swiley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern musical instrument is a diaphragm controlled by a stream of real valued position samples. There's absolutely no need for anything complex to play it, you can write simple C programs to generate all kinds of bizarre and beautiful effects.

Analog synths are a good way to differentiate though. It would be very difficult to replicate an analog synth patch even if you knew exactly how it was set up.

[deleted]

Re: Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

#36

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

raverbashing wrote: post #27
swiley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern musical instrument is a diaphragm controlled by a stream of real valued position samples. There's absolutely no need for anything complex to play it, you can write simple C programs to generate all kinds of bizarre and beautiful effects.

True, in theory Now create a C program that reproduces a person singing, with all the variables that a real singer can act upon

That is not a useful comparison.

Because if you try the same on a big analog modular you won't get very far at all - less far than you can get with code, given that very basic singing synthesis was already a solved problem back in the 1960s, and systems like Vocaloid have been commercial products for more than a decade now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDsJCJ02184

...Which is the core problem with analog synthesis, whether it's a modular or a box-of-knobs synth: it's the synthesis equivalent of writing code in BASIC.

You can do it, and it's good for certain kinds of jobs.

But even though a wall of knobs and wires looks like the last word in musical openness, it actually puts some very rigid limits on the complexity and sophistication of what you can do. And worse (IMO) it trains you to think inside those limits instead of encouraging you to explore beyond them.

Re: Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

#38

Post by raverbashing »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36
raverbashing wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, in theory Now create a C program that reproduces a person singing, with all the variables that a real singer can act upon

That is not a useful comparison. Because if you try the same on a big analog modular you won't get very far at all - less far than you can get with code, given that very basic singing synthesis was already a solved problem back in the 1960s, and systems like Vocaloid have been commercial products for more than a decade now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDsJCJ02184 ...Which is the core problem with analog synthesis…

Moving a knob with your hands as you mix it with other sounds gives better control than just configuring parameters in a program

Re: Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

#40

Post by anotheryou »

handedness wrote: post #14
kleer001 wrote: post #5

I'm pretty underwhelmed. It's a lot of fun toys, but IMHO that's borderline adolescent/masturbatory. Not even sour grapes, I swear, but I bet that massive modular analog synthesizer setup gets zero use. Conspicuous consumption plain and simple. Yuck. But that's me. I'm more impressed by some poor schlub in Echo Park with an old Roland sampler and a dozen crates of vinyl. There must be a pithy term in German for what…

Not German, but nouveau riche pretty well covers it.

german: neureich
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