Empowering innovation
Sunday, April 29th, 2007
At a friend’s relocation, I yesterday met a couple of Cologne’s DnB scene key players, and while enjoying a beer in the sun after the exhausting work, we came to talk about innovation. What was remarkable is, that though the persons involved cover the whole range of styles, we all agreed that there is a lack of innovation in DnB nowadays.
We’ve reached such a high standard of production, that it shouldn’t worry anyone if a tune isn’t 100%, but 95% perfect in that technical sense, especially when thinking about the highly unperfect club environment a typical tune is meant to be played at.
Instead, we should take a certain high technical level as granted and focus on the content. We all agreed that Fanu and the Kryptic Minds and Leon Switch LP are very interesting bits of music. Music – this may be the important word here: A lot of nowaday’s DnB output is hardly more than a craftman’s work. Pretty standard, nothing new, no second thought. Built to work, not to last. And though I really enjoy some of those tracks in the club, they are tools and will be forgotten soon. One bad example mentioned was a video interview in which DBridge put together a “tune” from predefined elements, almost like lego. And though this may be exaggerated, it shows the problem we’re in.
I also just today stumbled upon an interview (published in German) with science fiction author Neal Stephenson, and he said that “Innovation takes place, when many normal people get access to the required tools and resources“. Obviously, the digital revolution has marked the basic path to that in terms of music production. More precisely, the “tools and resources” required to produce quality-level DnB are
- a modern sequencer environment
- superb mastering and other plugins
- high-level samples
- production knowledge (EQ settings, …)
Well, those are pretty easy to get. Besides, there now is a huge crowd of people to easily get you feedback. So there hardly is an excuse to build bad-sounding tunes now anymore.
But it seems there is a lot of open space to really utilize this effortless quality production level. Where are the new approaches, the mashups with other genres, a reasonable path to break out of the rigid DnB format? I’m really looking forward to it.
At a friend’s relocation, I yesterday met a couple of Cologne’s DnB scene key players, and while enjoying a beer in the sun after the exhausting work, we came to talk about innovation. What was remarkable is, that though the persons involved cover the whole range of styles, we all agreed that there is a lack of innovation in DnB nowadays.
We’ve reached such a high standard of production, that it shouldn’t worry anyone if a tune isn’t 100%, but 95% perfect in that technical sense, especially when thinking about the highly unperfect club environment a typical tune is meant to be played at.
Instead, we should take a certain high technical level as granted and focus on the content. We all agreed that Fanu and the Kryptic Minds and Leon Switch LP are very interesting bits of music. Music – this may be the important word here: A lot of nowaday’s DnB output is hardly more than a craftman’s work. Pretty standard, nothing new, no second thought. Built to work, not to last. And though I really enjoy some of those tracks in the club, they are tools and will be forgotten soon. One bad example mentioned was a video interview in which DBridge put together a “tune” from predefined elements, almost like lego. And though this may be exaggerated, it shows the problem we’re in.
I also just today stumbled upon an interview (published in German) with science fiction author Neal Stephenson, and he said that “Innovation takes place, when many normal people get access to the required tools and resources“. Obviously, the digital revolution has marked the basic path to that in terms of music production. More precisely, the “tools and resources” required to produce quality-level DnB are
- a modern sequencer environment
- superb mastering and other plugins
- high-level samples
- production knowledge (EQ settings, …)
Well, those are pretty easy to get. Besides, there now is a huge crowd of people to easily get you feedback. So there hardly is an excuse to build bad-sounding tunes now anymore.
But it seems there is a lot of open space to really utilize this effortless quality production level. Where are the new approaches, the mashups with other genres, a reasonable path to break out of the rigid DnB format? I’m really looking forward to it.
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