Quote:
Originally Posted by TweakHead
^this. plus, it's all about making the music you want to listen to. if it's not there, all the better!
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And I would add spending your time on the music making aspects you enjoy most. I look at musical composition and music production as two different things. When I sit down to *write music*, one of my goals is that at the end of it all, if the song is any good, I should be able to walk over to pretty much any piano and play enough basic elements of it that someone else could identify it (or someone who plays guitar should be able to reproduce it there). In other words, the melody / sequence of notes should be able to clearly distinguish it from someone else's work. To me that's more important than the mix or what synths or technology I used in the process of composing music.
By that definition (which I freely admit is my own, and will not imply others should adopt it unless they want to), any organized collections of samples or sound effects that I paste together to form a song would have trouble qualifying as a unique composition. I consider creating Skrillex-like mosaics of sound to be more like a mosaic of samples than a musical composition. It doesn't mean the end result is not music, I think a lot of things can qualify as music, but the truth is that if you gave Skrillex a piano or any other instrument than the specific sound bytes he uses to create a track, and asked him to reproduce the song in a way it was identifiable, he wouldn't be able to... you've got a better chance of success asking an elephant to fart in the same sequence of notes on command. I personally think what Skrillex does is music production, not music composition. He is very good at what he does, and I'm not denying the amount of technical skill and practice it takes to do it well, but I still believe the lines between a musician and a DJ/producer are primarily defined by melody and how much control/understanding the creator has over that aspect of the track. If someone's music cannot be faithfully described in sheet music, then whether it's music at all would be completely debatable to some. I personally have a much more open definition of music than that.