In researching for today’s journal entry, I continue to be fascinated with the trends affecting the present music industry. Every day, another product comes out, making music production easier and easier, more affordable, even the ‘green novice’ can have a beat lab set up. Personally, I think it’s fabulous because it provides an activity center for someone interested in making music, like a blank notebook for ideas. If it’s in your blood, you start investing more into your own beat lab or you start going to better and better studios with the equipment and expertise you’re looking for. No one starts out as a Pro, we all have mentors, the mentors usually have neater gear.

In sifting through formerly posted blogs, I came across an interesting article highlighting the idea of software that could be used, similarly to Google, and one can just type in what they’re looking for. Sound recognition software that recognizes text and translates into a harmony, say. You could type in, ‘sounds like Madonna, sings ‘girls just wanna have fun’, pop star of the early eighties’. The ‘Brain’ of the system would go through and find you Cyndi Lauper. For producers like myself, ie. beginners, sometimes you use loops ( I have used loops before but prefer to make my own, just sayin’). Sometimes said loops are overused and you just need a little bit of spicy sauce on those 909s. Upload your loop into the software and ask that it find you similar loops. I guess it could be compared to using a Thesaurus and having it spit out synonyms.

So, yes, this makes the world of music a far more accessible realm to those talented and not. Again, the investment of money comes with the investment of time. But imagine this software they speak of, with an infinite library of sounds, chorus’ and stabs. Currently, we have software for music recognition that if you were to play 4 bars on a recorder, the program can covert it and have it display in midi format. Also, we have speech recognition programs. These two are all fueled by human input. Analog input. The program that looms in our future, if not out there already, is one that uses type and has an ‘ear’ for various ‘sounds’. Yes, likely another human may have had to program all these tags into the memory bank but the possibility of having your music library grow tenfold, in two hours, just from typing in the genre you like or other simple generic words, very efficient. Great for parties. Great for the masses. Masses bring in the money. Corporations love money.

This will be easy to market to every Tom, Dick and Harry. No, not you Tom, the ‘other’ Tom. Just for the simplicity it promises, it will a) appeal to music lovers (who don’t live on the computer like I do) b) interest aspiring producers who could use it to expand their loop library or sound roster as well as support their compositions c) it can be sold as an add-on or just another search engine with a different means of technological communication. I’m still wrapping my head around it, although it makes perfect sense. Our resources are ever expanding yet we haven’t the time to keep up in this fast lane, therefore we do what we always do as a society, create a product to make things easier and more efficient.

Is this CPR or strychnine to the imagination of today’s die-hard producers? I think that chances are, they’ll probably roll with the changes and make the most of them. You can fight technology all you want, it just means you’ll have more catching up in the end and if you want to be cutting edge material, you’ve got to be on top of your game, meaning, two steps ahead of the crowd.