This will probably serve as my first post equally suited to both the “bigger picture” and “creative” categories. It’s just that sometimes, mundane interests can make you think of the more important things in life, especially when those mundane things fail to satisfy.
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve actually bought a music production magazine, despite still being just as active in the field as I was ten years ago. When I do, it’s usually something on the cover or contents page that holds a fibre of promise in my mind to lend some inspiration I sorely need at the time. It used to work to a degree, but because of the way my ideas about making music have changed, it doesn’t hold quite the same magic when I leaf through such a magazine today. Been there, seen that.
Today I bought the latest Sound on Sound out of a need mainly for some new bathroom reading. I read their review of the new “Studio One v2″ DAW. “Could be ok, but whatever” I found myself thinking, happily having settled with REAPER finally a couple of years back after an entire decade of hopping from one app to another searching for “the one”. There was just no need to start thinking about bloating my hard drive with yet another. When you have something that works, I feel – Stick with it!
So next were some plugin reviews. Woo. Plugins! I’d always been on the prowl for those. I mean… you can never have too many good plugins right? And maybe, just maybe, the next one will be the one which helps you find THE. SOUND.
As I read each one, extolling the softwares’ abilities to emulate classic hardware and such, again I thought “Well… good for them but… big deal. What’s changed?” This has been the holy grail of digital audio for probably 15-20 years: Emulation. Aren’t all the “classics” emulated sufficiently yet? Apparently not. And it makes you think, if it’s that hard to perfectly emulate such gear digitally that after 20 years you’re still only just marginally succeeding… why bother?
I put down the magazine and checked myself in the mirror. I had my Unreal shirt on. Technology is supposed to be about improvement, is it not? It’s ironic then that so much of it goes toward recreating what we already have. I think we all have this innate knowledge that the real thing is practically impossible to replicate, let alone improve upon.. But we keep trying anyway.
Don’t get me wrong though. I appreciate being able to load up a synth virtually, and get the same sound, if only practically the same, or the same to an untrained ear, as a big fat power sucking box cluttering up my floor could produce. Sometimes, we’ll make that tradeoff of convenience gladly over quality.
What’s disturbing is when we let that mindset become default. And that can be really easy. I think most people eventually come back around and realize that certain things just can’t be replaced… but it is a little sad seeing others caught up in such a mind numbing endeavor as downloading program after program, testing, making demos, and never really producing anything out of frustration. It’s sad cause I’ve been there, and I know that place intimately.
In how many other areas in our lives do we waste time trying to capture a magic that is far more easily found through its original counterpart? And how many things do we consume or use that we take for granted as being just as good as those, because we are told that it is so?
Food additives and flavorings try to capture the essence of nature – things that provided us nutrition for thousands of years. The reality with the additives is that they are of course made in a lab, and once the formula is there, extremely cheap to mass produce and attempt to satisfy the same requirements, usually at the expense of the nutrititional aspect (or worse, health altogether). Meanwhile, the success of their original goal itself, replicating the flavor, is questionable.
Games and films give generations that never learned any better, or simply forgot, the illusion that they are living because they produce such epic audiovisual representations of various activities and scenarios. Posting Facebook status updates or participating in forum banter does its best to replace honest social interaction with a diverse range of other human beings. Regardless, all of these fall short, and in my opinion all of them become boring quick.
It’s a good thing that as much as some might prefer us to forget it, the real world ain’t going away just yet. 2011 has felt like a year of rediscovery of the person I was during childhood, and reintegrating it with who I had turned into, which in some ways was just a digital facsimile. Someone who since his teens had fallen more and more for that allure of the web undergrounds and hidden frontiers, and the seemingly limitless possibilities within.
It is there we hear the most, the cries of nature being in peril and God not being real and every manner of second guessing and scare tactics. Every time I turn off the noise and seek or experience independently, and more importantly, just quiet myself and listen, I feel rather differently. It’s almost as if, just as within the pages of those music mags I read, nothing has really changed around me no matter how much time passes and no matter how much the hype insists otherwise.
And if that’s the case, rather than overcomplicating life with screwball theories and/or new-and-improved products alike, just to make believe that we’re somehow better off than we once were, perhaps its wise to, whenever possible, gravitate back toward the original, simplest and best.
Yes, no doubt to others our ways seem quaint.. but today of all days, it is brought home to me: It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life. -Bilbo Baggins (Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring)
