Musicgroups, love 'em or loathe 'em

Written by Sagacity

Please note that all ramblings here do not apply to all composers. So, if you're a musician, let's say they do NOT apply to you. :) Also, I'm probably a bit biased because, although I have musical training, I am not a composer so I'm probably a little more critical.

Why the [beep] are there so many musicgroups out there? I can tell you why: You don't require a lot of talent. Yes, it takes talent to make a cool song, but it doesn't take any talent to rip a few samples, throw together a "song" and upload it to Hornet (well, not anymore, though). Don't say it isn't true, because it *IS*. Hornet decided to stop rating music because of the huge amount of music that was vented into the archive every week. Sure, some of the music was truly awesome, the rest was pure drivel.

The trouble with all this music, it seems, is that it's easy for a composer to say: "This is nice music." If, like me, you're a coder you tend to work on an effect for a while and go: "Ack! This sucks! I'd rather kill myself than release this", so you throw it away. And, if you're an artist you require even more talent to even draw something remotely cool (thus explaining the severe lack of decent artists).

A major reason that tons of music are released seems to be the fact that you can work with ready-made building blocks: the samples. A coder or artist does not have this luxury. You can work with libraries (coder) or redraw something from a picture (artist) but you always start from scratch. (Of course, this does not apply to code-rippers / gfx-scanners, but you get my point). To make good tracked music is to make the best use of the building blocks you have. Instead of taking ready-made samples, sample them yourself, carefully selecting which samples are useful for your song. They are your means, not your end.

Great composers know which samples they want and construct their tune with it. Creating melody out of a heap of sound. And it sounds cool! Occasionally I stumble on a piece of music that's not even in *TUNE* for crying out loud. Why has it been released? I have no idea.

Ofcourse, you can apply most of the arguments to other parts of the demoscene, but if you're honest to yourself you simply must acknowledge that something is wrong with the whole trackingscene at the moment. Great composers are ignored because people can't be bothered to wade through heaps of poo to find that one single marvellous tune.

Good music is still being made, though. Not just by the peeps at FM (www.fm.org) but also, for instance, by Theralite (www.theralite.ml.org) and Level-D (www.leveld.com).

My (dubious) advice to these great composers: Join a demogroup. This way your music will be heard by people who like demos. And those people, my friend, form the scene. [yoda mode off]

You may now flame me.

/Sagacity:Quad (sagacity@quad98.net)

"This *IS* a style of music. It's called terror gabba."