The EDM vs 'Acoustical/Real World' Instrument Thread

[the4thImpulse]

This is to continue the discussion from this thread.

I will share my view once I have caught up with it all.

[Raddons]

Music is music, regardless of the medium used to produce it. No one genre is easier than another.

[itroitnyah]

Nuff said. But yeah, all genres are equally difficult to make, they just all have very different skill sets required to make them, quoted from Dave in the video.

[SticktheFigure]

Off the bat, I'm tempted to say that electronic composition and all that comes with that is harder. However, I have seven years in piano playing in juxtaposition to having almost a year of only dicking around with FL Studio. Therefore, I feel my opinion is a bit....tilted.

[colortwelve]

Disclaimer: The following is the opinion of someone who used to listen only to 'real' music and now produces electronic music, along with enjoying varying styles of EDM and the like.

Different things come easier to different people, and no form of art is inherently superior. This argument could be transposed into the field of writing and you'd get people arguing over whether it's better to handwrite or type, and in that case it'd probably look just as ridiculous as this discussion really is.

I'm not going to get deep into reasons, because it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, so I'll just leave it at this: Appreciate everything, and you'll find it much harder to develop a philosophical argument as to why one medium is inherently superior to another.

Both Feed Me and Dream Theater are insanely talented at what they respectively do, but since they do different things, they have different talents. So take each for what it is.

[colortwelve]

one is much more difficult to produce.

Mind your word choice

[Raddons]

It's absurd to say that people who play acoustic instruments in bands have to know how to engineer as well. That's probably the dumbest claim I've read from either side, because more than 80% of the time that's not true by any means.

[itroitnyah]

Not to mention the idea that the argument is not in the direction of "Electronic musicians are talentless". It's just that acoustic musicians actually have to play the music that they write. whereas the electronic musician just has to... write it.

I think you just completely forgot that producers also have to design the synths themselves. That evens it out, imo.

While the midi vs acoustic war is always being raged, both sides can agree that you can't "undo" a mistake made on an acoustic instrument. You've only got the choice to redo it or stick with the cards you've dealt yourself.

My biggest deal here is that he's making a typical fallacy of ignorance as to WHY acoustic music is typically more difficult to produce and perform and that's because of the "live pressure" that comes from having to actually have the skill (skill =/= talent, btw) to play the piece. The difficulty that is spent learning how to play the instrument is accountable as to why it's so damned hard to play it in the first place.

While I completely agree with this, the thing about performing electronic music live is that you also have to entertain the audience with your actions. So if you want to be a good dj, you would have to dance around and interact with the audience otherwise you get booed and you suck, blah blah blah. Guitarists and acousticists sorta dance around too, but they spend a lot of time focusing on the notes they're playing. And as stupid as it may sound, dancing around and getting the crowd riled up while performing electronic music isn't exactly peaches and cream. I'm sure that 4thImpulse could attest to this.

His argument regarding the piano being a sequence of buttons is also, while accurate, misrepresentative to the point that many acoustic musicians make.

You don't actually have to perform electronic music live to have it down and recorded. You can choose to if you want, but you don't HAVE to. You can make a piano line in midi. Just write it down and let the computer essentially play it for you.

You can't do that with a guitar or a trumpet or a clarinet or etc.etc.etc.

I guess in this sense, yes, preforming acoustically with a group of people can be hard, and it takes practice, but it's also much like dancing and riling up the crowd with performing electronic music. If you don't dance correctly, the music won't be messed up, but the crowd won't like you as much. I'll give acoustic playing live the win here because dancing to the music as the dj isn't as important as the music you're playing. But that does not mean that producing acoustic music in a studio is any more difficult than producing electronic music in a studio. Like I've said before, they're just different sets of talents.

Also, the VST's you used are typically sampled if you're using, for example, drum samplers.
This means someone actually played them, even if just one hit at a time.

This isn't true if you've synthesized your own drums, lol

So while he did make some points and leave some very important points out, he's not arguing about which is actually more difficult to produce.
I'm arguing to the point that acoustic music is in general more difficult to produce than EDM.

This is my opinion and I have evidence to support it that I have either brought up in this thread or in the last one (or if you've ever bothered to talk to me about this "issue")

If your opinion is that the genres are equally as difficult to make (generally) then you're going to miss out on the fact that it's not. If you record your electronic music live, then kudos to you. Good job taking the stand, but realize that every acoustic musician has to do that every time they record their songs.

Once again, back to the argument of "They have different talent sets" and "electronic producers have to design their own synths"

The video presented before is heavily biased and demonstrably inaccurate in it's presentation and hiding of certain facts which are further misrepresented by inaccurate analogies.

Hehe, Dave (the 'kid' in the video) actually plays a variety of instruments, including the guitar, and I'm sure he plays other real instruments. So his arguments do carry weight with them. But yeah, some of the facts may be misrepresented, but that does not necessarily mean that the video is as heavily biased or inaccurate as you claim it to be.


Sigh, can't we just leave it at, "All genres are equally hard to produce, they just have different skill sets required to make them" and "Performing all genres live well isn't easy, but acoustic performances are a bit harder given the fact that you can make mistakes while playing"?

[the4thImpulse]

Sigh, can't we just leave it at.

Not this time. This argument keeps coming up, not too often but often enough where I see having a thread to keep it contained in isn't a bad idea.

Now there is a lot being said and I can't address it all without my fingers falling off so I will talk about what I see are the major points in the argument.

When it comes to preforming electronic music I think deadmau5 said it best by saying "electronic music is about what you make in the studio as we all just push buttons live"(that is largely paraphrased) as, like it or hate it, Live EDM is just a play button in some form or another (I can argue this point all day if you want me too). The only real exception is when you have ten dudes with synths and electronic drum kits and all that stuff playing live electronic songs, but they never sound like any of the hard hitting 'club' music, its closer to kraftwerk imo, an 'electropop'.

Saying acoustic musicians have to worry about sound design, mixing, mastering, mic placement, room acoustics, signal processing from the engineering/control room side is just wrong. There are a select few who record/mix/master their own stuff but that's in the same way there are a select few EDM musicians who record themselves playing their synths into their DAW. The very large majority of acoustic musicians only worry about the performing/composition and the recording engineers worry about mic's/rooms/signal processing/mixing/mastering and to a large extent sound design. Most EDM producers do all of that while composing their songs.


This whole topic is apples and oranges. Two completely different types of music made though two completely different methods. Saying one is better/harder/cooler/more skillful/whatever than the other just doesn't work.

[itroitnyah]

I love you so much for that, 4th. Very well stated. And I'm not just sayin' that because his arguments are more on my side. You're a good person too Kyoga. Love ya both, no homo

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

Can we just leave this at "music is music and no one needs to hear long explanations about it."? I get the argument, but personally, I'm kinda sick of it. Not sure if I'm speaking for anyone else, but that's just my 2 cents.

[itroitnyah]

No

[Lemanic]

Well, I'm an EDM producer, but I tend to listen other stuff than EDM in the process of making tunes, which is an exception among my fellow producers. The problem today, is that EDM has little to no competition whatsoever, which leave the producers with little to no outside influences (due to lack of competition), which just leads to musical inbreeding that doesn't take the music an inch forward. Within that gated community that is the EDM world today, critique is almost nonexistent, and the critique that does slip through will mostly get a "hater" stamp on it (which is just dumb to say to your audience).

"If you want to produce the music I produce, then don't listen in to my music at all". Listen to other genres and styles to gain experience and perceptions, then go hard on your softwares.

[Applejinx]

Not to mention the idea that the argument is not in the direction of "Electronic musicians are talentless". It's just that acoustic musicians actually have to play the music that they write. whereas the electronic musician just has to... write it.

I think you just completely forgot that producers also have to design the synths themselves. That evens it out, imo.

This. More than a decade ago I got enlightened to this fact by an EDM track (very IDM it was) which had its synth bass drop out, and then a curious high percussion started up. It morphed downwards, for it was a highpass starting supersonic and sweeping down, and then I realized it was the bass again. Guy had completely fooled me into hearing that part a new way, and I didn't recognize it at all.

I used to try to balance a song like it was some classic rock thing where all the sounds were as rich as possible and totally static- not even moving in the mix. I fight that now, though I'm constantly reverting to it as much as you, Kyoga, revert to the same accompaniment picking pattern.

I sampled a fine Gretsch drumkit for my drums, with API pres and a room-oriented miking, so I could get myself the best possible 'drums' for my purposes- it's like my Amen break only a sample kit. There's a lot of classic rock guys who would find that very satisfying but in Toastbeards, it quickly got boring to other participants and almost every week there's some track where folks are like 'OMG those drums!' and at first I never 'get' what they're on about, because the sounds usually seem lame as hell to me when that happens. But they are also strikingly different when that happens, 'drums' that push the envelope of what a drum's supposed to be. I could go in FM8 and make a bunch of modulators fight each other to produce a nasty bzorp and it'd probably be more 'cool' than the fancy Gretsch kit or hotrodded keystone badge Ludwig Acrolite snare...

ALL SOUNDS ARE EQUAL VALUE NOW thanks to sampling. If I can mic a Stradivarius with a Neumann U87 in Abbey Road Studio A (which I can't- but if I could) then somepony could grab it and rap over it, using that texture because I'd put it out there. When that happens, it's no longer the slightest bit interesting THAT you can make the super-luxurious tone, once you've done it once for the novelty value. It becomes, WHY are you using THAT tone? Guys like Eno turned out to be on to something, asking why THAT tone, why that whole arrangement, why that motivation... perform? hard? Why not music that is completely egoless, what would that be like? Or if it's all egoless, then why not a big guitar solo dripping with technique? Into a long tape loop?

Don't get me wrong- I like being able to really nail certain boutique sounds. I've learned some good things about classic rock and metal mixing, and I think I have some of the best 70s and 80s hard rock guitar, bass and drum sounds in ponyfandom, sounds that have got me on EqD a couple-three times for my trouble. But nobody wants to keep hearing those sounds because it's the 2010s which is forty freaking years after the 70s...

I'm gonna consciously avoid sniping though it's super tempting (Kyoga, srsly, stop disrespecting). Instead I'll say this- what I'm proud of is that every week, I typically come up with some stupidly different silly notion for a musical thing to do for Toastbeard, usually hasty and with little consistency in method, yet people seem to find it recognizably 'Jinxie' anyway... a few of 'em even tend to like it. Yeah, there's signature sounds in there like the Jazz Bass with roundwounds and that clangy tone, or the drum samples and those snares, but half the time I'm totally leaving them out. I feel like I'm probably too old to 'get' this new EDM world where everything is imagined and has no intrinsic value beyond whether it works in the moment, and yet I'm still managing to participate in it. In a very real sense I'm taking my guitars and all the fancy gear and I'm ignoring it and just thinking up stuff with complete naivete, forgetting what is supposed to be 'good' according to my training and experience, and each week I can usually surprise, sometimes surprise a lot.

I'm proud of that.

[Icky]

mad 1nstrument recording pure skillz MLG n0-midiz

I doubt any of you have mastered all forms of electronic or acoustic music. It's kind of silly to think one takes more skill since both cover a very wide range of genres and styles. But man whatever makes you feel better about your own music I guess.

[PrincessAddictia]

Electronic music is obviously superiour in every way.

[Lemanic]

Electronic music is obviously superiour in every way.

Hi Napoleon, how you doin'?

[Matthew N.]

There's always some people that will claim that one > the other. /facepalm

Not even going to bother with this, but have some fun before this turns into another flame war.

[bartekko]

I play piano and produce music. There is no way to compare the two.

[Nine Volt]

I feel glad that I am almost directly responsible for this.

[NightmareSnake]

My stance is this, they're both great by themselves, but are far greater when combined.

My favorite music has always been music where electric guitars and synths live in harmony.

[itroitnyah]

My stance is this, they're both great by themselves, but are far greater when combined.

My favorite music has always been music where electric guitars and synths live in harmony.

[Foxtrot89]

I haven't really read much of the responses, but I feel it necessary to mention that learning to use an instrument is difficult, playing it once you've learned it really isn't that difficult. That said, I also feel the need to mention Pendulum, an almost strictly electronic band that play instruments live.

They both have areas that are difficult, and both have areas where it's easier. I personally find it easier to record live guitar tracks as opposed to clicking notes in sometimes. This is why, despite the fact that have a few really nice sounding guitar libraries, I choose to record instead. Even as a scratch track or a cover of a song that already exists. On top of the fact that, competent musicians, even in EDM, tend to learn piano, so actual instruments aren't strictly for "real" music so using it as a deciding factor is silly. Especially when a lot of the time guitars are used in EDM.

Edit: just read that Kyoga is going on how genres are generally produced. Metal, for instance, the guitarist either writes or reads what somebody else has written and performs that and that alone. Same for the drummer, bassist, keyboardist, trumpet player, clarinet guy and so on. Recording musicians typically have a myriad of other people who typically record, mix and master for them. If we're going by what musicians GENERALLY do, then "real musicians" are typically only responsible for a small fraction of the overall work. Sure, people like Kieth Merrow record mix and master their own shit, but generally in bands you don't. EDM is typically all done by one guy and then sent out via the label or whatever.

Edit edit: I just read everything I already said, just better. I really need to read threads before posting. I blame the fact that I'm at work using my phone.

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

I still don't get this...Electronic musicians work in different ways to Acoustic/traditional musicians and both have different skillsets. Can someone please tell me why that's a big deal?

[Raddons]

I still don't get this...Electronic musicians work in different ways to Acoustic/traditional musicians and both have different skillsets. Can someone please tell me why that's a big deal?

kyoga's mad that he's the only acoustic musician in the fandom or something i guess