People // Jay Alexander // Blog

What happened along the way? As all this software and technology came out, my creations seemed to have lost their "musical" feeling. Now, this has nothing to do with "groove" quantization either..lol..but I can remember recording raw audio from a Yamaha P-200 keyboard into cool edit pro; with no idea of what a quantization grid was all about. Man, I just played along to the metronome, recorded, and that was it. Now that i listen to them, though the production & audio quality aren't that great, I think they are some of my best creations simply based on dynamics! (in comparison to today's loopy feeling stuff I've been doing) could the convenience of all these plugins and loops be flattening music as we know it? Trent Reznor said that after producing some of his newer stuff i.e The Fragile, it was time to revisit music after taking a long hiatus, commenting that he would return to the "mistakes" that made music what it was. When do we return to this? when comes the point in which we are so caught up in the way a DAW sounds algorithmically that it affects our art instead? In this confusing time of technology when do we return to the basics? What was it about switching from Cool Edit Pro where you had to literally calculate reflections based on millisecond values or delays that would be permanently rendered onto files just to have like 20 backups of the same file in a pool of audio that became a nightmare? Though it was a mess, it allowed for flexibility. To right-click on an audio file in the arrange window and instantly reverse it without affecting every single of it's kind...left for instant creative thinking on a musical & twisted (radiohead-ish) level. 

Why wouldn't I return to my old 366 Emachines running Cool Edit Pro, Rebirth and the HammerHead drum machine and replace it with a more powerful machine? One could say that I would be left open to viruses, corrupted files and other headaches caused by the windows. I remember when I would sit there for HOURS, fixing issues only to recover a piano part that was corrupted or a lost file and remembering how gratifying it was to completely WASTE much of my teenage life FIXING things and feeling like I was accomplishing something. I was then introduced to the Mac and suddenly...the whole virus thing and pretty much every issue that dealt with software became a non-issue. The only thing that could possibly go wrong was if #1 - I was stupid enough to create the problem (like installing a hacked version of waves plugs) or #2 - it was a hardware issue i.e failed hardrive and such. No more viruses or corrupted files, blue screens or pop ups. Just Me, Logic, Reason, Ableton Live and and some other choice plugins.

Immeadiately I discovered first what a grid was and then compressors! wow! this thing could pump up my tracks and make my ears bleed! what I thought was leading to new and amazing creations was actually....technology breaking down my entire mindset. I believe that any compressor or plugin is only as good as the person's knowledge of how to use it. All these plugins are meant to help, or to be used by professionals...when in fact, must you have a compressor and EQ on EVERY channel? does this make your music great? NO NO NO! The inspiration is getting lost in all the hoop-la. 

At this point the question I have raised is; where do I go from here? How do I return to music without the annoying and non-intuitive operating system but still not be totally reliant on technology. There are many windows users out there that this will probably annoy, but then again how much time do they spend "fixing" their computer issues. I have a friend that is an incredible musician and self taught audio engineer, I heard his stuff and was amazed. Totally mixed in Ableton Live....I was like WTF? Live? on a PC? After picking up my jaw, I asked him more about his setup only to find that he made such a big deal over the built in compressor in Live in the sense that a compressor...was simply that....just a compressor. He was talking to me as if I hadn't been doing this for 10 years already and replied, bro....you have to put a compressor/limiter  on the master out and THAT'S IT. Here I am at this point thinking of the MASSIVE channel strips with every possible brand of compressor/limiter on the market, every new gadget out there HAD to be used.  Were they magical? i.e iZotope Ozone? One preset and it's radio ready? NO.

My friend had broken his music down fundamentally and without all these tasty and cleverly marketed tools at his disposal. It came down to using what he had and to making the most of his music from that alone. This relates to the theory of having little resources and squeezing every bit of creativity out of them as humanly possible. Only the greats have clearly demonstrated this, such as BT in such cases of creating his own instruments or just plain wanting to switch back to Logic 7 after finding out that Logic Pro 8 felt like Garageband Pro. In some instances I'll agree