August 1sts

8/1/1968            

(Beatles Studio Diary)            

Hey Jude quickly completed, 5-8P    

8/1/1997

A friend said that he thought someone just pushing buttons on a sequencer takes no talent. It does take talent to put thought into it, program the buttons and consider in detail how the buttons will be pushed vis-a-vis the actions of other players.

[8/1/2025: Once MIDI was introduced in synths in the early 80s many musicians went into a different head space where technology was in the loop. Speaking of the Beatles, George Harrison, who bought one of the first synths, was ultimately critical of using MIDI. But most musicians embraced it. I loved MIDI and used it extensively. I’ve always been an early adopter of technology. AI music is the new button-pushing, but it's the music in the lyrics that makes all the difference].

8/1/1998

Film: Pi. Aronofsky who said he makes films like tapestries, that he’s not an “original” writer, weaving lots of different experiences together. He also said that many of his creative decisions evolved organically rather than being set in stone from the outset: Originally the film’s orthodox Jews were Pythagorean monks, but they eventually evolved into Hasidic Jews because the Kabbalah is based on numbers. Aronofsky says it was like a jigsaw piece that finally found its way back into the puzzle. (This is like finding a lyric that makes the whole piece work.)    

[One line, or even one word in a lyric can make or break it. This is interesting now with LLMs because they work on parts of words].

8/1/2007

Warhol had it right; He made all the Copies before everyone else.       

  8/1/2010   

The album format continues to endure. The digital format is useful in terms of archiving the data, or for accessing the work in the cloud—but music needs a tangible cultural artifact to be truly archival. 

8/1/2022

Standards of any kind always have a deep history yet don’t necessarily need explanations. In music, standard tunings, standard music notation, and Equal Temperament facilitate the composition and performance of music. But music is “open source” in that you can tweak standards to fit your creative objectives. Most people just go with the standards because it’s “plug and play”. But with guitars, sometimes you need a specific voicing or sound and alternate tunings are useful. I use them to generate ideas, but the songs can still be played on instruments in standard tuning and be reduced to notation.

8/1/2024

Apparently August is Charlie Parker month at the Jazz Showcase.

Book: The Idea Is The Easy Part. It sure is…

8/1/2025

Now more than ever it requires musical artists to just be Artists and do things in a interdisciplinary way. I like using AI, but it isn’t always the tool to use. I see it as a prototyping tool, but the prototypes can also be finished pieces with aesthetic value. Maquettes can be pieces of art in themselves, and can gain in value over time. 

One of the first AI artists Imoliver is releasing a single this month. “He’s a music designer who stands at the intersection of craftwork and taste." That's a good term: "Music Designer".  

What typically happens in the first years of any new medium is that there's a general push-back on it, then becomes gradually normalized. I think if you look back in history you'll find the same trajectory. I'm not intimidated by it at all because I still like to score music, and others can't, so I consider myself to be actually more talented in music. but I would say that I'm also a good designer and that's a good metaphor to use.

On the other hand, there is a dark side to normalization, which happens by thousands of tiny cuts. If this continues, and it probably will, within 5 or 10 years there will be no one that either will know how to write music manually, nor will they have any interest. So I think postmodernism is probably never going to die, but there will be artists who will push back on it, as much as I love postmodernist art. I don't think anything goes all the time. It's fun to play with ideas and see what you can get away with, but when your whole life and career is based on getting away with things, it should not sit well with you.