Do pop music groups today play instruments

[renard_ruse]

I really never even payed attention to music since rock became a minor genre. Do pop musicians even play instruments anymore? I know the "singers" use some sort of auto-tuning or something so they don't even have to have real talent. Is the music all just computer generated?

 

[CHNOPS]

Mike Yates Lite says wut?

 

[oggbashan]

That question was asked in the UK in the 1950s when Skiffle Groups were making more money than professional musicians. They played washboards, tea-chest basses, and one or two cheap acoustic guitars.

One musician was quoted as saying "Three Sodding Chords! And they can't get them right consistently!"

The degeneration of proper musical talent has been complained about since madrigals were popular...

 

[renard_ruse]

That question was asked in the UK in the 1950s when Skiffle Groups were making more money than professional musicians. They played washboards, tea-chest basses, and one or two cheap acoustic guitars.

One musician was quoted as saying "Three Sodding Chords! And they can't get them right consistently!"

The degeneration of proper musical talent has been complained about since madrigals were popular...

Just because complaints were made in the past, doesn't mean they aren't real concerns today.

Anyway, this was not meant to be a rhetorical question. This was in fact meant to be a serious thread.

 

[cjh]

Tea-chest bass?

*googles

 

[cjh]

A British gut bucket. How cool.

 

[oggbashan]

Tea-chest bass?

*googles

A wooden box in which loose tea was shipped, a wooden broomstick and a piece of string. It was played pizzicato.

Kicking the tea chest was musically acceptable.

YouTube Demo

 

[oggbashan]

To answer the OP - since popular music became commercial, someone has always tried to take short cuts instead of studying, practising and actually having a talent for music.

The Monkees were a manufactured group, not the first, but one of the first to be successful. The 'artists' had to learn to play the music that had originally been recorded by session artists.

Some modern genres of music are almost impossible to play to a live audience without computer generated effects.

How much is effect? How much is performance? Every artist will have a different mix.

When is the effect too much? I don't know.

 

[RoryN]

I really never even payed attention to music since rock became a minor genre.

 

[CHNOPS]

So the thread is unanimous, then, that computers are not instruments?

We're a hundred and how many years old, are we?

 

[renard_ruse]

To answer the OP - since popular music became commercial, someone has always tried to take short cuts instead of studying, practising and actually having a talent for music.

The Monkees were a manufactured group, not the first, but one of the first to be successful. The 'artists' had to learn to play the music that had originally been recorded by session artists.

Some modern genres of music are almost impossible to play to a live audience without computer generated effects.

How much is effect? How much is performance? Every artist will have a different mix.

When is the effect too much? I don't know.

I like electronica myself, but that's electronic on purpose. Regular music should at least have some instruments. Progressive rock and heavy metal were all about the musicianship.

 

[cjh]

I like electronica myself, but that's electronic on purpose. Regular music should at least have some instruments. Progressive rock and heavy metal were all about the musicianship.

A Capella is not music?

 

[renard_ruse]

So the thread is unanimous, then, that computers are not instruments?

We're a hundred and how many years old, are we?

Not in the same sense, if its auto-generating the sounds. In the broadest sense they can be, but are the groups the ones programming them? I admit this is not my area of knowledge, for once I could actually be completely off base here. I don't know much about how they make music these days. Yes, I'm a 20th century man, no apologies for that.

 

[oggbashan]

So the thread is unanimous, then, that computers are not instruments?

We're a hundred and how many years old, are we?

A computer can be an instrument.

A computer can be a music reproducing device like a player piano, a music box, a record player...

Whether the computer is an instrument or a reproducing device depends on the amount of artist input.

Even if I put a music roll into a player piano, turn it on and follow the settings printed on the music roll, it does not make me a pianist.

 

[RoryN]

A Capella is not music?

Neither is choir or gospel.

(Or, as renard calls it, "Whut dat stuff that has the colored folk singin'.")

 

[cjh]

So the thread is unanimous, then, that computers are not instruments?

We're a hundred and how many years old, are we?

Old enough that I prefer a player piano.

Isn't a synthesizer just a computer with a keyboard and knobs for a user interface?

 

[renard_ruse]

A Capella is not music?

Exceptions don't disprove general rules.

 

[CHNOPS]

I like electronica myself, but that's electronic on purpose. Regular music should at least have some instruments. Progressive rock and heavy metal were all about the musicianship.

Synthesizers are computers, not pianos.

You know that wall of Marshall amps that your favorite heavy metal bands played through? Fake. Empty cabinets or just the faces, like wild-west sets. Sound man mic'd the one working amp, and the rest were for show.

The amp is electronic, the signal distorted and manipulated, sometimes even retuned, through pedals and circuit-pathways.

The speakers you heard it all through are fed by electrical signal, not acoustic response to space.

You're just old, is all.

 

[cjh]

Exceptions don't disprove general rules.

Singing is an exception!?!

 

[renard_ruse]

Old enough that I prefer a player piano.

Isn't a synthesizer just a computer with a keyboard and knobs for a user interface?

I think the user is actually playing it in real time though.

 

[RoryN]

Exceptions don't disprove general rules.

You base your intellectual discourse on what you call "general rules".

Only problem is that most people don't see them as being general rules. They see them as being the warped worldview of an old, disgruntled loner.

 

[renard_ruse]

Synthesizers are computers, not pianos.

You know that wall of Marshall amps that your favorite heavy metal bands played through? Fake. Empty cabinets or just the faces, like wild-west sets. Sound man mic'd the one working amp, and the rest were for show.

The amp is electronic, the signal distorted and manipulated, sometimes even retuned, through pedals and circuit-pathways.

The speakers you heard it all through are fed by electrical signal, not acoustic response to space.

So, it was all as fake as Lance Armstrong's seven TDF victories?

 

[CHNOPS]

Old enough that I prefer a player piano.

Isn't a synthesizer just a computer with a keyboard and knobs for a user interface?

Yes, and often no keyboard. Moogs and other modular synths did not always have keyboards as cotrollers. (Sorry, I see you got here first, before my post.)

 

[renard_ruse]

You base your intellectual discourse on what you call "general rules".

Only problem is that most people don't see them as being general rules. They see them as being the warped worldview of an old, disgruntled loner.

Most people see you as a wackjob who spends your whole life playing with imaginary friends and enemies on an obscure pseudo-porn internet board.

You're less mainstream than I am, and you don't even realize it.

 

[renard_ruse]

Yes, and often no keyboard. Moogs and other modular synths did not always have keyboards as cotrollers. (Sorry, I see you got here first, before my post.)

Sure, but these things enhanced the music, they weren't the music itself.