Rotwang

Not just in the psytrance genre - I know a guy who had a no.1 album and single in the UK last year, apparently he makes surprisingly little from CD sales and it's gigging that he lives on.

But this has less to do with EDM as a genre than with the perform/compose distinction I mentioned above - it's also the case that someone composing music for an orchestra has to understand and put together every instrument in the track.

Welcome.

There's a lot more to music theory than pitches, it has plenty to say about rhythm and timbre and dynamics and so on.

I can't write decent music to save my life, but my guess is that music theory is not essential but is helpful - learning it certainly won't do any harm.

Well I think that depends a lot on the genre of music, and IMO that comes down to how precisely a given language is able to specify what the end result will sound like. At one extreme you have something like folk or rock where what gets put on the record depends at least as much on the performers' creative input as the composers'. That's why someone like Elvis or is often more famous than whoever wrote the songs he sang - because if someone else had sung them they wouldn't have been the same. In the middle you have classical music, where any two recordings of a single piece of music probably sound very similar to the untrained ear, but having a world-class performer can make all the difference to fans; hence classical performers can be famous, but composers can be more famous. At the other extreme you have music that's made by telling a computer to output a WAV file created according to a precise algorithm. Any two computers would have produced the exact same sequence of bytes, and all the creative input came from the producer.

On reflection, there's this: the first post of this thread seems to compare playing an instrument to making electronic music with software, but I don't think that's a meaningful comparison. Making music with a sequencer or programming language or whatever is more akin to composing a piece of music for an orchestra than playing one of the orchestra's instruments; whether you're composing classical music or sequencing electronic music, in both cases what you're really doing is writing an algorithm using a music-centric language (which may be stave notation, or a sequencer's GUI, or a visual programming language like Max) which will eventually be executed by something (which may be an orchestra, or a bunch of synths with MIDI connections, or a computer) that outputs music.

^ Both excellent.

Of course it is. I don't know what more there is to be said.

Done, though the questions were a lot more open-ended and difficult to answer this time round. But why is this in Off Topic? It would probably get more replies in General and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be there. Would you like me to move it for you?

Fantastic work!

I bet GagaISM would know. Why isn't he ITT?

Phobium made both these albums available for free (or name your own price) the other day. They're great, check them out: link link

No idea, they both sound good though.

Only admins can do that. Insejn is away at the moment and I don't know whether RTP is around, but I'll ask them anyway.

C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER

Kindzadza, obviously.

I like it, especially the second and third tracks - good speaker-breaking stuff.

Woo! Thanks.

Love it. Would make a great soundtrack for an 80's horror movie, and I mean that in a good way.

I have made a mix. It starts out as Goa trance and rapidly degenerates into noisy darkpsy, so if that sounds like your bag then please check it out: LOOK It was mixed in slower-than-real-time using home-made software written in Python. Constructive or deconstructive criticism is welcome, as is fawning sycophancy. Tracklist follows: 0m0s Infected Mushroom - Release Me 142bpm (buy it here) 8m21s OOOD - Sandoz 142bpm (buy it here) 16m10s MFG - Alternate Dimension 150bpm (buy it here) 22m21s Koxbox - Life Is... 146bpm (buy it here) 30m46s Talpa - Mandragor 148bpm (buy it here) 38m12s Kindzadza - Furiya Kruchiya 145bpm (buy it here) 44m35s Dark Nebula - Death Star 146bpm (buy it here) 52m28s The Nommos - Iboga 151bpm (buy it here) 1h00m16s Overdream - Daisy Lemonade 150bpm (buy it here) 1h07m20s Kraft - Syncopath 154bpm (buy it here) 1h14m08s Enichkin - Beyond the Shadow of Doubt 159bpm (buy it here) 1h20m44s Kindzadza - Xunami 164bpm (buy it here) 1h27m20s Total - Mr Fingers 160bpm (buy it here) 1h34m49s Psykovsky - Tanetsveta 174bpm (buy it here)

Apparently the guy who directed it is Welsh. That's kinda weird.