From David Hodgson Sent Thu, Mar 26th 1998, 06:37
if by programming you mean just the notes - then i can't agree with you - one of the most interesting things about electronic music for me is the sound design - finding and using sounds that you haven't been heard before ( or at least not very often :-) Quite often you can't get to those sounds that you can hear in your head without certain pieces of gear. The way something sounds is as important as the notes that are playing for me. Preset sounds are the killer. But at the same time I used to think that i just needed that one bit of gear that i hadn't got before i could make good tracks. It's a good excuse for avoiding the issue This is really true, imo, as I've seen some amazing programming and eq'ing around the crappiest gear that sounds great in the end and doesn't have noise that mastering couldn't fix anyway. It is all in the programming, like what soundmaking potential a peice of gear is designed to do is really only 10% of the music-making issue compared to the potential for programming it in an interesting way (90% of the potential of the gear) Programming & Composition is really the thing that is neglected, whereas it should be 90% of what a electronic musician is doing. Most people I know are gear-shopping half of the time, basically procrastinating the time that they should spend staring at the little LCD's and pushing