| >If Csound is ever to be
>more than an academic curiosity, intended to study sound theory, but rather
>to be a useful production tool, GM, or perhaps some other format which is
>more powerful, and widely accepted as a studio standard, is the future.
Csound IS currently a useful production tool...I am using it constantly
tp produce music that IS being published / performed around the world. I
think that the point of Csound is being lost here. The Csound environment
and Csound users that I know never intended to use it to make pop music.
In other words, it's strength is not in re-creating kick drums and
realistic sounding bass guitars, etc... It's strength is in creating
sounds that we have never heard and new ways of organizing those sounds.
To use it in one of those big studios to produce "normal music" is not
only missing the point, but by far the hard way to do it. I am pretty
fluent in Csound but if I wanted to make pop music I would use a
sequencer...its easier.
I feel that I should mention here that I even see a problem using GM to
make pop music. I would not want to make music with the same sounds as
everybody else out there owning the same GM module, even if the sounds
were great! This makes the music very generic and uninteresting. A
specific piece of music has its own specific character and when
choosing/recording your parts this should be considered. Usually I find
that I am not able to get the sound that the music calls for in a factory
patch or GM module. This sort of concern for what the music needs should
override any concern for convenience on the part of the artist. After
all, the audience only hears the music; how it was created is (or should
be) totally unimportant. *This is my opinion of course.*
GM IS good for one thing...PORTABILITY. If I am making something like a
computer game or demo for some product and want to do the soundtrack
using midi then GM is an excellent choice. In this situation, however, I
realize that the sound is not the most important aspect of my project and
because of that I am willing to make sacrifices in quality in order to
gain the ability to take this thing anywhere and get the same results.
This is totally different then making "high quality music...for music's
sake."
Mike Frengel
mfrengel@apple.com |