What if I can sing beautifully but only others' songs? What if I can play multiple instruments perfectly but cannot compose? What if I can build speakers, amps, you name it , very skillfully but cannot design? How many professionals fit in this category? Are they not singers, musicians, builders still? Talent has lots of definitions and degrees.
Irrespective of what I wrote earlier, what actually counts, is how people in general define a musician and a singer. Although a voice is used to enrich music like the various instruments in an orchestra or band, many people consider singers as a separate category of "musicians", which is essential in most music activities, although not all.
So, singers are not musicians but they contribute heavily to music with their voice, and a musician need not be a singer. Nevertheless, real life gives many instances of people who are both, and I dare also say, some are pretty good at BOTH fields of expertise.
So, singers are not musicians but they contribute heavily to music with their voice, and a musician need not be a singer. Nevertheless, real life gives many instances of people who are both, and I dare also say, some are pretty good at BOTH fields of expertise.
Birds can sing beautifully but are not musicians. Opera singers are musicians and will often need to tell a conductor 'how' it needs to be expressed.
So there are degrees of "musicianship" across all players, some much more identifiable than others perhaps.
So there are degrees of "musicianship" across all players, some much more identifiable than others perhaps.
Whether or not a person who makes music can be called a musician has been debated for ever. The answer depends greatly on the person's point of view, and the big picture has changed a lot in the last 20 years as technology provides the person or group "creating pleasing sound waves" with an ever increasing number of options.
A teacher in a college music appreciation class I took in the early 90's stated that a person playing an instrument that creates music in real time is a musician. One who merely assembles "pieces of pre-made sound with a computer is not." This debate occurred after I gave a brief demonstration of primitive computer music from one of those luggable Compaq computers that was about the size of a sewing machine. The teacher herself was a performer in an orchestra with no knowledge that MIDI existed or what it was. She had only a knowledge that "music sampling" existed and believed that it was a very bad thing. To her any performer that used sampling in a live performance was not a real musician. These debates continued throughout much of the 16 week long class.
I explained the Mellotron to her and she determined that the person playing it was not a musician. The mellotron is a 1960's vintage sampling keyboard that used magnetic tape strips, one for each key on a conventional organ type keyboard. The tapes could be loaded with recordings of typical musical instruments, or human voices. We listened to some music from the Moody Blues where Mike Pinder plays several different keyboards including a Mellotron. My unanswered question was if Mike has one hand on the Mellotron, and one hand on a Hammond Organ, is he only half a musician?
Ditto a guitar player or other musician who uses looping technology. Most believe that guitar looping is a relatively new phenomenon, but Jimi Hendrix used multiple Echoplex devices to create loops of himself back in the late 60's to which he played along, all done live. Seeing Jimi live in 1967 ended my dreams of being a "rock star." Does he remain a musician until he inserts a pre-recorded loop?
Fast forward 30 years and we have two new terms, which themselves have evolved in the last 10 years or so.
A musician, as stated has several definitions which depend on one's point of view.
Does the "musician" or "singer" cease to be when the sounds coming from their vocal cords are not coherent words?
A "music producer" is the term used today for most computer based music creators whether their music is played live or not. The debate about whether a "producer" who creates their own musical "clips" and "scenes" live at the time of performance and plays them live "time shifted" is a musician or not continues. Does he cease to be a musician when he inserts the first pre recorded clip, even if he created it in a studio the day before the performance. Watch this guy for a minute or so and tell me that he is not a musician, despite having more technology on tap than NASA used to fly people to the moon in the early 70's. All of the sounds heard were created during the performance, but they are not all in real time. There are thousands of other performers like him, but many believe that they are not musicians.
A "DJ" used to be the guy who spins records and adds commentary via a microphone at an event, like a party or wedding. Today the term often refers to the person spinning a plastic disk on a plastic box that often has the word "Pioneer" on it while he pushes buttons, turns knobs, and moves faders. The sounds coming out of the speakers are usually all "samples" of music or other content not created by the DJ himself. Huge sample libraries are available to a DJ or music producer for this purpose. Often seen in pairs in front of a huge crowd at a dance music festival, the DJ has a place in today's music industry, but are they "musicians?" Yes, this takes a certain skill level to pull off, and considerable effort up front to organize, but a modern DJ is not a musician in my point of view.
A teacher in a college music appreciation class I took in the early 90's stated that a person playing an instrument that creates music in real time is a musician. One who merely assembles "pieces of pre-made sound with a computer is not." This debate occurred after I gave a brief demonstration of primitive computer music from one of those luggable Compaq computers that was about the size of a sewing machine. The teacher herself was a performer in an orchestra with no knowledge that MIDI existed or what it was. She had only a knowledge that "music sampling" existed and believed that it was a very bad thing. To her any performer that used sampling in a live performance was not a real musician. These debates continued throughout much of the 16 week long class.
I explained the Mellotron to her and she determined that the person playing it was not a musician. The mellotron is a 1960's vintage sampling keyboard that used magnetic tape strips, one for each key on a conventional organ type keyboard. The tapes could be loaded with recordings of typical musical instruments, or human voices. We listened to some music from the Moody Blues where Mike Pinder plays several different keyboards including a Mellotron. My unanswered question was if Mike has one hand on the Mellotron, and one hand on a Hammond Organ, is he only half a musician?
Ditto a guitar player or other musician who uses looping technology. Most believe that guitar looping is a relatively new phenomenon, but Jimi Hendrix used multiple Echoplex devices to create loops of himself back in the late 60's to which he played along, all done live. Seeing Jimi live in 1967 ended my dreams of being a "rock star." Does he remain a musician until he inserts a pre-recorded loop?
Fast forward 30 years and we have two new terms, which themselves have evolved in the last 10 years or so.
A musician, as stated has several definitions which depend on one's point of view.
Does the "musician" or "singer" cease to be when the sounds coming from their vocal cords are not coherent words?
A "music producer" is the term used today for most computer based music creators whether their music is played live or not. The debate about whether a "producer" who creates their own musical "clips" and "scenes" live at the time of performance and plays them live "time shifted" is a musician or not continues. Does he cease to be a musician when he inserts the first pre recorded clip, even if he created it in a studio the day before the performance. Watch this guy for a minute or so and tell me that he is not a musician, despite having more technology on tap than NASA used to fly people to the moon in the early 70's. All of the sounds heard were created during the performance, but they are not all in real time. There are thousands of other performers like him, but many believe that they are not musicians.
A "DJ" used to be the guy who spins records and adds commentary via a microphone at an event, like a party or wedding. Today the term often refers to the person spinning a plastic disk on a plastic box that often has the word "Pioneer" on it while he pushes buttons, turns knobs, and moves faders. The sounds coming out of the speakers are usually all "samples" of music or other content not created by the DJ himself. Huge sample libraries are available to a DJ or music producer for this purpose. Often seen in pairs in front of a huge crowd at a dance music festival, the DJ has a place in today's music industry, but are they "musicians?" Yes, this takes a certain skill level to pull off, and considerable effort up front to organize, but a modern DJ is not a musician in my point of view.
Yeah, but there are singers who are most definitely complete musicians, as opposed to singers who don't know much about music but are good looking and have pleasant voices, so they get to front the band.
There are singers who are lyricist-poets more than 'musicians', often called singer/songwriters. Some are merely functional open-chord guitar players but they can carry an audience with their lyrics and stage delivery. "Musicians"?
And we haven't talked about rock drummers.
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George, if you’re not already familiar with it, you might enjoy the Apple TV+ documentary series Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson. I binged it earlier today and enjoyed all but the final episode “Distortion”
Some very interesting takes on Auto-tune - the origins of which I’d imagine few of us are aware- Sampling, Synthesizers and Drum Machines.
Some very interesting takes on Auto-tune - the origins of which I’d imagine few of us are aware- Sampling, Synthesizers and Drum Machines.
Even this has been fudged in commercial designs. Back in the day, power transistors typically had a maximum Vce of around 60 volts. However, you could take a batch of power transistors (think 2N3055) and "curve" them with an oscilloscope and find many devices with a higher Vce than 60 volts. Then you could build an amplifier that delivered more than 40 watts/channel into 8 ohms.
I did not know about this series, but I doubt that I will watch it because it requires a subscription to Apple TV+. We have several streaming service subscriptions already and adding another will give my wife more reasons to sit in front of the TV. I am also not fond of the way that Apple does business and had to remove all traces of their cloud service from my PC due to several issues. It does look like a cool series to watch though.
The DAW that I used to use, Cakewalk Sonar came with a reduced features version of Melodyne, an early auto tune program. It could not turn anything that came out of my mouth into anything that I would call music. I think it did a better job with the cat's meows. I did get some really unique stuff when trying to auto tune some of my guitar playing and intentionally drive the algorithm beyond its correction range. That noise is still on a hard drive around here somewhere, but it is best left there.
This morning YouTube stuck a new release by Reinhardt Buhr (Post #26) in front of me. It seems that his entire setup has evolved with the times in the 3 years since the performance in post #26 occurred. His setup of 3 years ago consisted of all hardware sequencing and looping. Now it's all "in the box" another term for computer music generation, recording and playback. The guitar, cello and microphone are the only sound producing equipment used here. I do see another keyboard instrument behind him that I could not identify, but it was not used in this performance. The keyboard he plays, and the APC 40-mk2 (multicolored buttons), and the Roland drum pad are MIDI controllers which send commands over MIDI or USB to a computer or other sound generation device. The APC-40 is designed specifically for Ableton Live which is a Digital Audio Workstation program that was originally intended for live performance but has grown to a complete recording studio in a box.
I noticed that one of the commenters referred to the cello as a "digital cello" it is not a digital controller but an electric cello that it is made from carbon fiber and uses a pickup like an electric guitar. The pickup is piezoelectric and fits into the bridge. An amplifier is used to boost the SPL instead of the wooden body. I have seen similar electrified violins with no body.
The few screen shots of the laptop show some sort of looping program that resembles the hardware looper he used to use. I'm guessing that it is a VST plug-in for Ableton Live. VST's are Virtual Studio Technology plug-in programs that run inside most of the popular DAWS. Of course, Apple has their own non compatible plug ins, but most popular DAWS support several popular plug in formats, so it is possible today to build a very competent recording studio inside a PC or laptop, and even an iPad. There are some for the PC and Linux that are free, but you still need a decent computer and an audio interface.
So, this gives rise to yet another kind of musician, the "Computer Musician."
Anyone can call themselves a Computer Musician since all you need is a book that explains the details, a computer, and some willingness to learn and experiment. These days talent and ability seems optional, but it wouldn't hurt. Of course, guitar lessons from age 7 to age 17 might help too, I still can't read conventional music notation, but today it REALLY isn't necessary.
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I had a roommate in college that studied music. His instrument was his voice.
I think you could argue that he was a musician.
I think you could argue that he was a musician.
Aristotle Onassis described Maria Callas' voice as "a throat whistle". (or words to that effect.).
Some whistle.
Some whistle.