Here is an interview with BT a.k.a. Brian Transeau, he is probably my favourite producer. This interview just scratches the surface of his talent. Ok i'm crap at these intro parts to threads. Basically i thoroughly recommend you read it 
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Q&A With Brian “BT” Transeau
We Get Creative With The Electronica Virtuoso Mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell was famous for encouraging people to “follow your bliss.” In our years of doing “Back Door” interviews, few, if any, people have followed Campbell’s maxim to the extent of Brian Transeau, better known as BT. Transeau’s 1996 album, Ima, and 1997’s ESCM, were instrumental in defining the progressive trance genre and remolding trance as a whole. Brilliant, unpredictable, intense, and now embarking on a side career as a music software designer, Transeau exemplifies the ways in which computing and art can perfectly meld. His zeal for music and love for bringing technology to the world is as infectious as it is amusing.
CPU: Tell us about your roots as a musician and a technophile.
BT: I started playing classical piano Suzuki method when I was four, and I expressed a really early interest in electronics. One of the first things I ever built--my parents gave me a Waterpik. Some of your readers, if they’re hip to overclocking, they’ll to be hip to circuit bending. I literally circuit bent a Water-pik. I took a kitchen timer, and it was the most ghetto thing you’ve ever seen. I put a wire on the dial and a wire outside the dial to connect the circuit to turn the water pick on. And I made a thing that was like an irrigation system for some weeds in the backyard. It was completely ridiculous, but at the time, it had a lot of emotional significance to me. So I had this little project, and I nearly burnt the house down. The socket in the kitchen caught on fire, so I wasn’t allowed to play with things that plugged in. I must have been seven or eight.
My dad worked for the FBI, and they used to give them these little microcassette recorders. I would take these things and cut the tape and make tape loops out of them when I was eight or nine years old. I was studying Bach and Brahms, and I was experimenting with this stuff. So then around the age of 10 or 11, I started getting interested in computing. I had a lawn mowing monopoly around my neighborhood I used to buy my first PC with 16K of RAM, and I learned how to program in BASIC, BASIC A, quite a bit of Cobalt, and a ton of Fortran. I started creating my first what I would characterize as instruments on a computer, rudimentary things for generating sequences of notes. I was still very interested in electronics. I was building synthesizers. I had project kits, building my first oscillators. At this point, I had pretty much abandoned classical music. When I turned 11 or 12, I started getting really interested in the use of electronics in modern music making and bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, and then some industrial stuff, too. It was a huge epiphany for me, like, ‘Wow, my interests of music and technology actually meet somewhere that I really dig.’ And all the guys that were my heroes from being a kid, the avant-garde types of the 20th century, like Stravinsky, even guys like Pendereki and Bartok, my heroes, that’s exactly what they would be doing if they were alive and doing their important work now. They’d be using technology, trying to get an infinite sonic palette. And therein grew my interest in marrying both evocative emotional music and cutting-edge technology, and I’ve stuck with that ever since.
CPU: Modern music takes a lot of knocks for being too heavily computer- and sample-based, somewhat devoid of traditional instruments. There don’t seem to be any Led Zeppelins or Jimi Hendrixes. Music from artists such as Tangerine Dream, Tiësto, and yourself seem to involve a different type of musical expertise and expression. Is that making an unfair or inapplicable comparison between genres?
BT: I would actually argue for you and argue a different perspective simultaneously. I actually agree with your statement in many ways. OK, look, the laptop is the folk instrument of the 21st century. It is, right? The thing that gets lost in that leap is a knowledge of the past. If you’re 14 now and rocking some crazy in Reaktor, you think you’re doing something new that actually was happening 30 years ago. So in having these incredibly sophisticated tools, I think we’re losing perspective historically on what’s already happened. Secondly, so many systems are in place now for instantaneous satisfaction of generation of musical ideas--and not like cool aleatoric things where it’s randomization, but just like, ‘Hey, here’s a cool breakbeat track.’ That is taking the tools and having them impose their will on your creative works. That’s why I prefer to create a lot of my own tools. I’ve been prototyping a lot of my own instruments, and I have four guys that are building stuff in C++ for me because I can’t work out the syntax of that . And I don’t have the time to mess with it. But the third and most important thing is that nobody can play an instrument anymore. Until you have had the feeling of your hand on a string of a guitar or on the keys of a piano or the bow of a cello or on two drumsticks, and you’ve dug in and locked into this frictive space, and there’s a connection between your neurology and your physiology, to me, it’s not music. Ironically enough for someone who works so much with synthesis and computers and programming, I’m a musician, man. I like to play with musicians. I just like using weird to shape those sounds that I create. I mean, I’m scoring a film right now called “Surveillance,” and the other day I invited this amazing avant-garde cellist down from Canada. And there’s a guy in the circuit bending community named Tim Kaiser who built me a couple instruments that are phenomenal. I’m sitting on the floor covered in a bunch of keyboard and drum machines and kids’ toys that I circuit bent myself and wired all kinds of stuff into and playing some of these instruments along with this thing Tim built me. We took a lap dulcimer, put cello strings on it, and then circuit bent a kids’ megaphone and built the circuitry inside this instrument, so you play it over your shoulder with a bow. It’s the craziest sound you’ve ever heard. I thought, ‘This is something I’ve wanted to do all my life. I’m playing instruments that other people don’t have, and I’m having to discover what to do with them.’ That to me is what’s engaging and engrossing and makes me want to not just keep making music but get out of bed in the morning. That’s what inspires me to be alive, you know?
CPU: That’s amazing. . . . OK, let’s circle back to the idea of using a laptop as a musical instrument, especially live on stage. Maybe describe a bit about how your styles of music are created and where computing fits into that picture.
BT: Sure, that’s awesome. I love talking about this. With the exception of the people involved in the academic music community, the laptop is really frowned upon. It’s not seen as an instrument. I think the problem with that is the form that it takes. It’s so not a musical object--it’s a flat thing that you flip open, and you’re lucky if it has decent speakers and a keypad. The thing that excites me is people building interfaces to make it a musical instrument. You can build the most powerful tools in the world to function on a laptop. So when I’m using a laptop to perform, I’m doing a plethora of different things. It could start with using Ableton Live and Reaktor and a bunch of plug-ins that I and the guys who work with me have coded from scratch, then playing, say, a techy kind of breakthrough track, then taking a snippet of a vocal by Jay-Z and pitching it into the same key, running it through my Stutter Edit plug-in live with a motion-sensitive controller a friend of mine built for me. It’s a very visual thing because the audience can see the proximity of your hand to the sound directly. Then dropping a guitar riff--the opening riff for “Back In Black” by AC/DC--program my own base line, write a couple acidy, synthy opening parts, and I have eight plates spinning. I play that for seven or eight minutes and gradually wipe the deck and come up with a whole other recipe for the next thing that the audience is going to listen to. It’s incredibly difficult to do. The stigma of the laptop is that the laptop somehow magically does all the work for you. Again, this goes back to it being a tool that people don’t understand because they can’t see what you’re doing. But my God, I’ve been beat mixing and playing records for so long, and it’s boring. When you have two tables, you’re playing one track and then you have a beer and then you play the next track. I’m not saying that there’s not a skill there in that. I do see it, especially in things like beat juggling and fractioning and all that, but it just bores the crap out of me. I’m constantly challenged in the same way I’m challenged when I play with my band on stage. I love it.
CPU: How much of that process do you have to premeditate, and how much is improvised like a guitar solo?
BT: One of the things I love about Ableton Live is it allows you to just whip it out like a guitar solo because a) touch wood, it doesn’t crash and b) you can improvise effects. You can grab partial clips of audio. You can create a beat, a bass line, a keyboard part. You can capture a guitar thing--I’ve done this before--capture a loop of it live and then layer up another one. So I have 15 of my own guitar parts. You can do such punk rock crazy live with that program that I should prepare more than I do, I feel like, because it’s always by the seat of my pants. I’m a blank slate when I’m walking out on stage; no idea what I’m about to do. You go and start dropping some stuff, and you’re like, ‘Cool, they’re reacting to this.’ That’s the beautiful thing about the DJ-ing aesthetic that I love applying to performing live electronically. All that gauging and feeling the audience in the room is so much cooler than playing with a rock band. When you play with a rock band--and I was in tons of bands when I was a kid--you get up there, you bang through your little 10-song set, you try to say something witty in between songs, and ‘thank you, good night.’ Electronic music is about gauging the audience and gaining the audience’s trust and creating a rapport. It’s a synergistic thing. It’s awesome because you get to be so sensitive to what people are reacting to, what they’re vibing off of, and then your performance takes shape dependent on where everyone wants to go. It’s an awesome time to have these tools and be able to get to do this. I don’t know if the tools are occurring because the consciousness is there to accept it or vice versa, but I’m enjoying it, man.
CPU: With a guitar, you have six strings able to make, say, a few dozen chords. But you’re talking about having thousands and thousands of tools--maybe we can call them analogs to chords, although that’s a bad example--available through this interface. How can you manage that huge musical palette in real time?
BT: Yes! These are the questions people need to be asking, talking about the tools and what it means to be a high-functioning musician and a creative person who isn't just a flake. You have to limit your tool set. Because it's crazy what's available now. I get everything from the craziest, most hacker freeware applications that some Cal State student wrote to the thing that this kid in Japan wrote for his doctoral thesis and thousands of applications in between. Seriously, that’s not an exaggeration. And VST plug-ins and AU plug-ins. If you miss three days, you miss 10 plug-ins, and a lot of them are amazing. But when I’m performing on stage or when I’m working in the studio, the only way I can finish something is to limit my tool set. I like sitting with a guitar and coming up with a really interesting tune, write a song, and then I turn to the technology. And I’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ve got these four new plug-ins. I have this application I’ve really been interested in checking out. For this composition, I’m going to limit my tool set to these five things.’ And that’s actually a lot for me. It’s usually like three. And then not only do I learn the strengths of my new tools, but I’m able to finish things. Oftentimes if I have too much crap, I find I can’t do anything with that. It’s too many possibilities, too many choices, and I think that’s kind of counterproductive.
CPU: Do you ever worry about system crashes on stage?
BT: Oh, dude. The thing to avoid is a new operating system before you go on stage or a handful of new plug-ins. But so many tools are so freakin’ stable now. All the stuff that I use on my AMD computers is solid, man. The problems you encounter are the drunk promoter’s girlfriend spilling her drink on your laptop. I’ve lived that, dude. That blows. Aside from that, you’re pretty much good.
CPU: You’ve never had a computer glitch on stage?
BT: Well, I once played in Australia at their big sports arena. One of the guys that was doing the backline for the next artist that was coming on kicked the power supply from my audio interface, and it killed my computer. I’m there with 25,000 people, so I played the piano. I started playing through a bunch of my songs, doing some of my music right on the piano, and doing some crazy things with the back pedals and stuff while I’m rebooting my computer. It took me seven minutes to get my computer back up, and I played the whole time. People thought it was a part of the show. And by the time I dropped a beat, it was like insanity when they heard a kick drum. So it ended up working out cool, but it’s usually the BS stuff like something physical happening because a lot of the tools are really stable now.
CPU: You have the first two titles from your new company coming soon, right?
BT: Well, like I said, I know a tremendous number of the tools that are out there, but there are all these holes in what is getting made. I’m one guy that has a bunch of cool ideas that I don’t see being done in any commercially available software, so that’s how and why I decided to start Sonic Architect.
We have three applications that are going to come out this year, and I’m doing two lines of software. One line is for the performing electronic musician, which has an application coming Stutter Edit. It’s fairly self-explanatory, but it goes completely off the deep end of this technique that I spent 10 years developing into a realm of possibility that I didn’t even know existed until I started playing around with the math, applying things like exponential and logarithmic and hamming curves to these micronote gestures. I’m dying to rock this thing on stage. But it’s the first in what will be a line of tools specifically geared toward performers. And then I’m making studio tools for sound design and creation that, again, I really believe fill this void in what’s available in commercially available software. The first in line for that is Break Tweaker. Both of those things will be out over this year. They’re pretty much punk rock and crazy with the coolest GUIs. They’re bananas, dude. It’s so exciting, I can’t even tell you. When you’re making a tool that you put in other people’s hands and you know they’re going to do something totally different with it, that’s rad, man.
CPU: What is the level of proficiency required for someone to harness computing to create music of any real depth and merit?
BT: I could sit my mom or a 14-year-old kid down with a garage band, and they can do something that’s not only dope but encourages them to go, ‘Hey, I like this a lot.’ From that point, you start experimenting and discovering other tools. I actually think the level of proficiency to create interesting music is zero, seriously. If you can send email, you can make music with a computer now. There’s this incredible supersaturation of people making electronic music. That’s good because what’s really interesting and engaging and bleeding edge and important rises to the top. But the thing that I like to encourage people to do is, if you think this is something you actually like, go study music, not computers. The way you’re going to make really meaningful music and be an actualized musician is to play something. Music is about interfacing with an instrument and musicians, and the computer as a tool for sound design and manipulation. But you need that joy of sitting down with your instrument and another musician and pulling something out of the air. You’re not getting what music is until you have that experience.
by Chris Angelini
--
a very interesting read!
taken from http://www.computerpoweruser.com/ed...0D8F52479534984
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Q&A With Brian “BT” Transeau
We Get Creative With The Electronica Virtuoso Mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell was famous for encouraging people to “follow your bliss.” In our years of doing “Back Door” interviews, few, if any, people have followed Campbell’s maxim to the extent of Brian Transeau, better known as BT. Transeau’s 1996 album, Ima, and 1997’s ESCM, were instrumental in defining the progressive trance genre and remolding trance as a whole. Brilliant, unpredictable, intense, and now embarking on a side career as a music software designer, Transeau exemplifies the ways in which computing and art can perfectly meld. His zeal for music and love for bringing technology to the world is as infectious as it is amusing.
CPU: Tell us about your roots as a musician and a technophile.
BT: I started playing classical piano Suzuki method when I was four, and I expressed a really early interest in electronics. One of the first things I ever built--my parents gave me a Waterpik. Some of your readers, if they’re hip to overclocking, they’ll to be hip to circuit bending. I literally circuit bent a Water-pik. I took a kitchen timer, and it was the most ghetto thing you’ve ever seen. I put a wire on the dial and a wire outside the dial to connect the circuit to turn the water pick on. And I made a thing that was like an irrigation system for some weeds in the backyard. It was completely ridiculous, but at the time, it had a lot of emotional significance to me. So I had this little project, and I nearly burnt the house down. The socket in the kitchen caught on fire, so I wasn’t allowed to play with things that plugged in. I must have been seven or eight.
My dad worked for the FBI, and they used to give them these little microcassette recorders. I would take these things and cut the tape and make tape loops out of them when I was eight or nine years old. I was studying Bach and Brahms, and I was experimenting with this stuff. So then around the age of 10 or 11, I started getting interested in computing. I had a lawn mowing monopoly around my neighborhood I used to buy my first PC with 16K of RAM, and I learned how to program in BASIC, BASIC A, quite a bit of Cobalt, and a ton of Fortran. I started creating my first what I would characterize as instruments on a computer, rudimentary things for generating sequences of notes. I was still very interested in electronics. I was building synthesizers. I had project kits, building my first oscillators. At this point, I had pretty much abandoned classical music. When I turned 11 or 12, I started getting really interested in the use of electronics in modern music making and bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, and then some industrial stuff, too. It was a huge epiphany for me, like, ‘Wow, my interests of music and technology actually meet somewhere that I really dig.’ And all the guys that were my heroes from being a kid, the avant-garde types of the 20th century, like Stravinsky, even guys like Pendereki and Bartok, my heroes, that’s exactly what they would be doing if they were alive and doing their important work now. They’d be using technology, trying to get an infinite sonic palette. And therein grew my interest in marrying both evocative emotional music and cutting-edge technology, and I’ve stuck with that ever since.
CPU: Modern music takes a lot of knocks for being too heavily computer- and sample-based, somewhat devoid of traditional instruments. There don’t seem to be any Led Zeppelins or Jimi Hendrixes. Music from artists such as Tangerine Dream, Tiësto, and yourself seem to involve a different type of musical expertise and expression. Is that making an unfair or inapplicable comparison between genres?
BT: I would actually argue for you and argue a different perspective simultaneously. I actually agree with your statement in many ways. OK, look, the laptop is the folk instrument of the 21st century. It is, right? The thing that gets lost in that leap is a knowledge of the past. If you’re 14 now and rocking some crazy in Reaktor, you think you’re doing something new that actually was happening 30 years ago. So in having these incredibly sophisticated tools, I think we’re losing perspective historically on what’s already happened. Secondly, so many systems are in place now for instantaneous satisfaction of generation of musical ideas--and not like cool aleatoric things where it’s randomization, but just like, ‘Hey, here’s a cool breakbeat track.’ That is taking the tools and having them impose their will on your creative works. That’s why I prefer to create a lot of my own tools. I’ve been prototyping a lot of my own instruments, and I have four guys that are building stuff in C++ for me because I can’t work out the syntax of that . And I don’t have the time to mess with it. But the third and most important thing is that nobody can play an instrument anymore. Until you have had the feeling of your hand on a string of a guitar or on the keys of a piano or the bow of a cello or on two drumsticks, and you’ve dug in and locked into this frictive space, and there’s a connection between your neurology and your physiology, to me, it’s not music. Ironically enough for someone who works so much with synthesis and computers and programming, I’m a musician, man. I like to play with musicians. I just like using weird to shape those sounds that I create. I mean, I’m scoring a film right now called “Surveillance,” and the other day I invited this amazing avant-garde cellist down from Canada. And there’s a guy in the circuit bending community named Tim Kaiser who built me a couple instruments that are phenomenal. I’m sitting on the floor covered in a bunch of keyboard and drum machines and kids’ toys that I circuit bent myself and wired all kinds of stuff into and playing some of these instruments along with this thing Tim built me. We took a lap dulcimer, put cello strings on it, and then circuit bent a kids’ megaphone and built the circuitry inside this instrument, so you play it over your shoulder with a bow. It’s the craziest sound you’ve ever heard. I thought, ‘This is something I’ve wanted to do all my life. I’m playing instruments that other people don’t have, and I’m having to discover what to do with them.’ That to me is what’s engaging and engrossing and makes me want to not just keep making music but get out of bed in the morning. That’s what inspires me to be alive, you know?
CPU: That’s amazing. . . . OK, let’s circle back to the idea of using a laptop as a musical instrument, especially live on stage. Maybe describe a bit about how your styles of music are created and where computing fits into that picture.
BT: Sure, that’s awesome. I love talking about this. With the exception of the people involved in the academic music community, the laptop is really frowned upon. It’s not seen as an instrument. I think the problem with that is the form that it takes. It’s so not a musical object--it’s a flat thing that you flip open, and you’re lucky if it has decent speakers and a keypad. The thing that excites me is people building interfaces to make it a musical instrument. You can build the most powerful tools in the world to function on a laptop. So when I’m using a laptop to perform, I’m doing a plethora of different things. It could start with using Ableton Live and Reaktor and a bunch of plug-ins that I and the guys who work with me have coded from scratch, then playing, say, a techy kind of breakthrough track, then taking a snippet of a vocal by Jay-Z and pitching it into the same key, running it through my Stutter Edit plug-in live with a motion-sensitive controller a friend of mine built for me. It’s a very visual thing because the audience can see the proximity of your hand to the sound directly. Then dropping a guitar riff--the opening riff for “Back In Black” by AC/DC--program my own base line, write a couple acidy, synthy opening parts, and I have eight plates spinning. I play that for seven or eight minutes and gradually wipe the deck and come up with a whole other recipe for the next thing that the audience is going to listen to. It’s incredibly difficult to do. The stigma of the laptop is that the laptop somehow magically does all the work for you. Again, this goes back to it being a tool that people don’t understand because they can’t see what you’re doing. But my God, I’ve been beat mixing and playing records for so long, and it’s boring. When you have two tables, you’re playing one track and then you have a beer and then you play the next track. I’m not saying that there’s not a skill there in that. I do see it, especially in things like beat juggling and fractioning and all that, but it just bores the crap out of me. I’m constantly challenged in the same way I’m challenged when I play with my band on stage. I love it.
CPU: How much of that process do you have to premeditate, and how much is improvised like a guitar solo?
BT: One of the things I love about Ableton Live is it allows you to just whip it out like a guitar solo because a) touch wood, it doesn’t crash and b) you can improvise effects. You can grab partial clips of audio. You can create a beat, a bass line, a keyboard part. You can capture a guitar thing--I’ve done this before--capture a loop of it live and then layer up another one. So I have 15 of my own guitar parts. You can do such punk rock crazy live with that program that I should prepare more than I do, I feel like, because it’s always by the seat of my pants. I’m a blank slate when I’m walking out on stage; no idea what I’m about to do. You go and start dropping some stuff, and you’re like, ‘Cool, they’re reacting to this.’ That’s the beautiful thing about the DJ-ing aesthetic that I love applying to performing live electronically. All that gauging and feeling the audience in the room is so much cooler than playing with a rock band. When you play with a rock band--and I was in tons of bands when I was a kid--you get up there, you bang through your little 10-song set, you try to say something witty in between songs, and ‘thank you, good night.’ Electronic music is about gauging the audience and gaining the audience’s trust and creating a rapport. It’s a synergistic thing. It’s awesome because you get to be so sensitive to what people are reacting to, what they’re vibing off of, and then your performance takes shape dependent on where everyone wants to go. It’s an awesome time to have these tools and be able to get to do this. I don’t know if the tools are occurring because the consciousness is there to accept it or vice versa, but I’m enjoying it, man.
CPU: With a guitar, you have six strings able to make, say, a few dozen chords. But you’re talking about having thousands and thousands of tools--maybe we can call them analogs to chords, although that’s a bad example--available through this interface. How can you manage that huge musical palette in real time?
BT: Yes! These are the questions people need to be asking, talking about the tools and what it means to be a high-functioning musician and a creative person who isn't just a flake. You have to limit your tool set. Because it's crazy what's available now. I get everything from the craziest, most hacker freeware applications that some Cal State student wrote to the thing that this kid in Japan wrote for his doctoral thesis and thousands of applications in between. Seriously, that’s not an exaggeration. And VST plug-ins and AU plug-ins. If you miss three days, you miss 10 plug-ins, and a lot of them are amazing. But when I’m performing on stage or when I’m working in the studio, the only way I can finish something is to limit my tool set. I like sitting with a guitar and coming up with a really interesting tune, write a song, and then I turn to the technology. And I’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ve got these four new plug-ins. I have this application I’ve really been interested in checking out. For this composition, I’m going to limit my tool set to these five things.’ And that’s actually a lot for me. It’s usually like three. And then not only do I learn the strengths of my new tools, but I’m able to finish things. Oftentimes if I have too much crap, I find I can’t do anything with that. It’s too many possibilities, too many choices, and I think that’s kind of counterproductive.
CPU: Do you ever worry about system crashes on stage?
BT: Oh, dude. The thing to avoid is a new operating system before you go on stage or a handful of new plug-ins. But so many tools are so freakin’ stable now. All the stuff that I use on my AMD computers is solid, man. The problems you encounter are the drunk promoter’s girlfriend spilling her drink on your laptop. I’ve lived that, dude. That blows. Aside from that, you’re pretty much good.
CPU: You’ve never had a computer glitch on stage?
BT: Well, I once played in Australia at their big sports arena. One of the guys that was doing the backline for the next artist that was coming on kicked the power supply from my audio interface, and it killed my computer. I’m there with 25,000 people, so I played the piano. I started playing through a bunch of my songs, doing some of my music right on the piano, and doing some crazy things with the back pedals and stuff while I’m rebooting my computer. It took me seven minutes to get my computer back up, and I played the whole time. People thought it was a part of the show. And by the time I dropped a beat, it was like insanity when they heard a kick drum. So it ended up working out cool, but it’s usually the BS stuff like something physical happening because a lot of the tools are really stable now.
CPU: You have the first two titles from your new company coming soon, right?
BT: Well, like I said, I know a tremendous number of the tools that are out there, but there are all these holes in what is getting made. I’m one guy that has a bunch of cool ideas that I don’t see being done in any commercially available software, so that’s how and why I decided to start Sonic Architect.
We have three applications that are going to come out this year, and I’m doing two lines of software. One line is for the performing electronic musician, which has an application coming Stutter Edit. It’s fairly self-explanatory, but it goes completely off the deep end of this technique that I spent 10 years developing into a realm of possibility that I didn’t even know existed until I started playing around with the math, applying things like exponential and logarithmic and hamming curves to these micronote gestures. I’m dying to rock this thing on stage. But it’s the first in what will be a line of tools specifically geared toward performers. And then I’m making studio tools for sound design and creation that, again, I really believe fill this void in what’s available in commercially available software. The first in line for that is Break Tweaker. Both of those things will be out over this year. They’re pretty much punk rock and crazy with the coolest GUIs. They’re bananas, dude. It’s so exciting, I can’t even tell you. When you’re making a tool that you put in other people’s hands and you know they’re going to do something totally different with it, that’s rad, man.
CPU: What is the level of proficiency required for someone to harness computing to create music of any real depth and merit?
BT: I could sit my mom or a 14-year-old kid down with a garage band, and they can do something that’s not only dope but encourages them to go, ‘Hey, I like this a lot.’ From that point, you start experimenting and discovering other tools. I actually think the level of proficiency to create interesting music is zero, seriously. If you can send email, you can make music with a computer now. There’s this incredible supersaturation of people making electronic music. That’s good because what’s really interesting and engaging and bleeding edge and important rises to the top. But the thing that I like to encourage people to do is, if you think this is something you actually like, go study music, not computers. The way you’re going to make really meaningful music and be an actualized musician is to play something. Music is about interfacing with an instrument and musicians, and the computer as a tool for sound design and manipulation. But you need that joy of sitting down with your instrument and another musician and pulling something out of the air. You’re not getting what music is until you have that experience.
by Chris Angelini
--
a very interesting read!
taken from http://www.computerpoweruser.com/ed...0D8F52479534984
