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| quote: | Originally posted by thoughtlessjex
The connection from my laptop to my stereo makes a feedback hum
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Everything produces a feedback hum. But an analog feedback humm is warmer, louder, better, and more noticeable. And great for dancing.
| quote: | Originally posted by thoughtlessjex
, and warm, lo-fi muddiness can just as easily be acheived in the production stage as it is after a vinyl is aged.
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Yeah, but it's quantized and rigid. Not fluent and natural. It's like the difference between a live drummer and a drum machine. A machine is perfect; it makes no mistakes. And that takes the human element completely out of the music process....the little off-time beats and flaws and errors--they're gone. That doesn't make the drum machine better, especially when the argument is that music is supposed to evoke an emotion and appeal to humanity, so why would you willingly want to strip the music of this esthetic?
It's like the old Japanese parable about how an orange with an ugly brown spot on it is better than a perfect, spherical, unblemished orange...the reasoning being is because it is THE ONLY orange with that brown spot on it. That makes it unique; an individual, something that separates it from all the other oranges. But a perfect orange? ...there's a million of those. So what.
If perfection is what we desired out of music, than 90% of the music today would not exist, because it came about because of accidents and mistakes at the production and manufacturing level, not because they were planned and thought-out ahead of time. The 303 and the 808--two of the most heralded pieces of equipment in electronic music history--were fucking abominations to the music they were trying to make....abortions to all musicians everywhere. Didn't work, shitty sound, wavered off key....absolute crap. But someone somewhere took a look at those gross errors and saw them as features.
The point is: More accurate does not mean better. Not everyone wants a sharper, clearer image. Not everyone wants hi-fi. Not everyone wants a perfect, unblemished orange. Not everyone wanted Dillon to go electric. This doesn't stem from fear of technology or luddite fears, it's simply personal preference. Sometimes lo-fi is better. Sometimes the washy, muddy, dirty, gritty analog sample is preferred over the perfect, exact, polished, overproduced pristine one.
There's something to be said for analogue rawness in music that digital has never--and will never--be able to encapsulate.
| quote: | Originally posted by thoughtlessjex
Besides, the notion of a song that has been worn down and degraded being superior to the producer's intended degree of fidelity seems counter to the autonomy of artistic expression.
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Nope. Wholly and factually wrong. It's not the DJ's job to play records in accordance with the producer's concrete instructions. It is the job of the DJ to kick the producer's sensitive tracking to the curb, tear his tracks apart, and recontextualize them in new forms and modes of his own choosing.
Any DJ who doesn't do this--who doesn't show complete and total antipathy to the producers who make his music--is not being a good DJ. And any producer who doesn't want a DJ to fuck with his "art" obviously doesn't understand the quality of being a producer.
Your job as a producer is to make music, not tell other people what to do with it.
| quote: | Originally posted by thoughtlessjex
To be honest, the large scale move to digital will be good for the art of DJing. It will bring virtuosity back to the performance of the medium while people who DJ for the sole purpose of stringing music together are no longer diluting the talent. |
Actually, the exact opposite is happening: Because of the ease of use and shallow learning curve of digital decks versus vinyl, the scene as a whole is now being inundated with very very VERY bad DJs who aren't very creative or interesting and have particularly narrow tastes in music (due to them not being engrossed in the scene for very long). Vinyl at least created a bottleneck of sorts, that whoever wanted to get into the profession had to pay their dues--to at least $1000/month record shopping--and ply their trade to work up their skills before they played out. That weeded out most of the fly-by-nighters who would normally lose interest and give up before they ever worked themselves up to their first paying gig. Now, thanx to the internet and auto-beatmatching plugins, a DJ can conceivably settle on a DJ name this morning, obtain a playlist this afternoon and spin at his first gig tonight.
I don't know about you, but I don't trust the musical knowledge, expertise and skillset of someone who's never set set foot inside a record store before. And there's nothing romantic about that.
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