On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 10:16 AM, <fons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What we see today is a lot of people 1) unable to play any instrument > or sing and 2) unable to create any music except by trial and error > aided by technology. Yet they'd call themselves a musician. By that > measure, they could call themselves painters, sculptors, writers, > dancers, and whatever they want. They certainly could, and rightfully so! Art is not in technical skill, it's in conception and execution. I would have absolutely no disdain for a composer who did all their composition by humming into a 4-track, then hired a transcriptionist to put it on paper, then hired musicians to record it. In fact, this is not far from the method used by Irving Berlin, one of the most celebrated American songwriters in history. He never learned to read or write music, and never learned the piano properly -- in fact he did most of his writing in F# so he could stay primarily on the black keys! He hired arrangers to turn his tunes into real compositions, and hired musicians to play everything. I think your complaint is not about technology, it's about laziness. No technology will turn a lazy person into a composer, but it can allow a good composer to spend their energy composing instead of learning something tangential. Berlin spent his early years writing songs for many hours every day -- songs that may never have existed had he spent those hours learning to sight-read for piano instead! micromoog _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user