DIY: A Risk of Riches, a Risk of Embarrassment, or an Embarrassment of Riches?
Back to the American Scene again, where conservative cultural critic and Reason Magazine editor Peter Suderman muses on how the next generation might be as comfortable expressing themselves music and video has his generation is with blogs and other text-based forms:
To me, that’s a potentially huge shift. And I frequently wonder if, perhaps even more than the social media revolution, it’s a shift that could produce huge changes in the way people communicate. We may end up seeing a generation as able and comfortable with audio production and video editing as my cohort is with web-browsing, blogging, email, and word processing.
In service of his post, Peter posted a little Garage Band ditty to show that new cheap digital tools let folks express themselves musically with sufficient polish that you don’t get bogged down in whether or not they can play, or how well it’s recorded.
MakingMusicIsEasy - PETER SUDERMAN
Perhaps not surprisingly Peter got jumped on right out of the gate (because no one is so brave, cruel and wise as when they are leaving anonymous comments on the internet):
Dude. It’s pretty late at night. You can take that down right now and no one will notice. Remember when Friedersdorf made some observations in the style of A Movable Feast? This is worse than that. Seriously, man. Nothing good can come of this.
It’s an easy swipe isn’t it? Someone puts their music up for the world to see, complete with provisos that it’s not to be taken seriously. But deep down we know that no one does that if they don’t think the music they put up sounds okay. It’s an easy target, a pinata, take a swing. Break it open and we’ll all dive in for the candy.
Except Peter’s right. As I’ve banged on time and time again, new tools change how people do things, and even changes who does things, and you never know where that’s going to lead. Mashing up a couple of the comments I left on Peter’s post:
My first major was music, composition and guitar performance (well actually my first major was math, but for the sake of this let’s say it was music.)
I was an okay guitarist, but I was a way above average theory and composition student. Freshman year I was in the second year class. 80% of the students washed out. The next year was just the four of us who survived, so it was like mini masters class. Awesome.
Except I can’t play keyboard. This is a big problem for anyone who wants to have a professional life in music, but especially a problem if you think you want to be a composure. I could get close with theory, plunking out lines one or two at a time. But I don’t have that “I can hear it all in my head thing” so I never really knew if I had written what I wanted until the teacher played it back. Sometimes it was pretty good, especially if I was staying inside well established rules of four-part harmony. Sometimes it was, well, experimental. Just writing this now I’m time traveling to a particular assignment that my professor was genuinely unsure if it was a piece of accidental avante gard genius or the worst music ever written. (the jury is still out.)
My guitar playing hit a wall, and I quit. But right about the time I was leaving I remember the school got a computer that was hooked up to a keyboard. You could play one line at a time and it would play back all the lines at once. Better yet, it would print out sheet music in parts. Awesome. If only they had had that machine two years earlier I might have stayed in music, there would have been no Tony Comstock, and think how much better the world would have been for that…
The absences of technology saved you all from me as a composer, but end up inflicting me as a filmmaker upon the world. But not digital media technology — digital word processing.
After getting rejected for a loan, I got on my roommate’s Mac SE30 and pounded out an angry letter to the president of my credit union. If I had been on a typewriter it never would have gone further than that. But because i was on a word processor I was able to remove typos and misspellings, but also tune and refine my argument — the first time I had ever done that.
Long story short, within 6 months the declined $400 loan had become $15K in loans so I could buy cameras, lights, stands and a car to carry it all in. I was in business. The rest, as they say, is history.
That letter wasn’t the last time I’d use new technology to get around a roadblock in my career path.
Not long after I met Peggy, I bought a Radius Videovision card and the money that made me on my next project was enough to make a down payment on our apartment. Not long after we got our apartment, I got a Media100, and the money that made me on the next project was enough to make a down payment on our house.
But it’s not just about the entrepreneurial side of making art. New tools can be amazingly powerful in unleashing new ideas and new approaches.
I was one of the first people in New York to buy a Sony PD100a, in fact I bought two of them because in the process of doing the studies for what became Comstock Films I realized that cheap DV cameras could be used in a way that would bring cinematography in documentary filmmaking closer to a “one-camera” feel, without tipping over into the “three-camera”/sitcom feel usually associated with multi-camera video-camera productions. Those are the cameras we used to shoot Marie and Jack and Xana and Dax, as well as most of my NGO documentaries.
But Peter’s post isn’t really about all that, it’s about new technology changing the way that people communicate in their everyday lives, and that’s not without significance to a working artist either. Back to my comments:
When I was a upper-level undergrad and BFA student, we used to say the best place to crib ideas was from second term photo students. Enough craft and confidence, but not yet ruined by thinking they know “the right way” to do it. Most of the art I look at these days is made avocationally. It’s like being able to go to a second term crit any day of the week. Lots and lots to steal from. Making a living? Well that’s harder in some ways. It’s hard to make money doing something that anyone can do, so you have to find a way to do something that anyone can’t do. Same as it ever was, right?
And somehow this morning, this all seems tied back to the last post, about learning something new about how things work – boats, film, music – and then having the courage to seize the opportunities that new knowledge presents. The FinalCutPro suite comes with an amazing array of tools, including Garage Band’s big brother, Sound Track Pro and some other fairly powerful sound tools.
25 years ago, back when I was a struggling music student, I would have sold an eye for something like Sound Track Pro; and reading Peter’s post I remembered that after finishing Damon and Hunter meant to reward myself with a little playtime with the program. IIRC, I meant to give myself a month or six weeks to figure out how it works and just to enjoy making some music after so much time away.
Well you know how it is with intentions, good and otherwise, I made a couple of tracks and then got caught up with something else and haven’t had the program open since.
But I thought it was actually pretty brave of Peter to put his GB track up where all his TAS fellows could pounce on it (or maybe worse, ignore it completely.) Inspired by Peter, here are the couple of tracks I made:
I don’t know where these tracks fit into my own personal taxonomy of effort. Maybe they’re like that letter to the credit union I wrote that changed my life. Or maybe they’re like the studies that Peggy and I used to do, not really meant for public consumption, but not without value. Maybe they’re just embarrassing.
Or maybe they’re like those second term photo-student works that used to inspire me – just enough skill and confidence to be interesting or charming without being ruined by being self-conscious. Maybe I can start stealing from myself!
October 9th, 2009 at 8:28 am
I have a soft spot for “Stroke It”