Day 89: making music with computers.

Today I went round to Ben’s for a jam. It wasn’t a jam in the traditional sense, because the person who was playing drums happened to be a computer. So what. Computers are taking over the world. Big deal. And apart from the drums being spookily regular (gee that puter can sure hold a beat!) everything was trad jam anyway. Whatever. There are two things that 1. interest me and 2. bother me about computer rock. 1. It is very easy to create other tracks from tiny bits of random material with a computer. We did that today by cutting a tiny slice from an existing track, looping it, then recording a new vocal track over top. It’s nowhere near being a finished song, but as a source for new things to fiddle around with, the technique presents mildly to powerfully head-freaking enormous possibilities. (Of course remixers have known this since the first cut and paste of recorded time, but just how many ways you can chop a piece of music up and what this means for song-writing is only slowly dawning on my tiny mind.) 2. Computer jamming will never be a substitute for bashing shit out live with other people. Live drums, live guitars, live vocals. Boom.