Skyline_UK
Back to your salient comment on how some youngsters think they're making music with loops. Let's just get this out there. They're not making music. We mustn't fall into the trap of thinking we need to defy our knowledge and wisdom and think the opposite of what we know is true for fear of being labelled 'Luddite', 'old', etc. We must feel free NOT to be persuaded that "That's how they're doing it now. It's modern and equally valid as learning an instrument was in your day. And by definition, as it's modern it must be good and therefore it's YOU that doesn't understand its validity". Utter bollocks. Stringing together snippets ('loops') of music made by musicians on instruments is not making music. End of. Anyway, I like to think that for every bedroom beats copy and paster there is at least one other youngster learning the joy of connecting with a musical instrument and actually expressing what's in their heart and head by making music with it.
This is a little narrow minded but not an infrequent view expressed in the Sonar community. People who rant about kids "making music with loops" are usually coming from a position of ignorance, in that they don't really know what goes into the kind of music the kids are creating and how they're using loops. The idea that they're just dragging 16 bar loops into the DAW and extending them across the timeline and saying they wrote a song is just not true. At least, for the vast majority of people making modern music which utilizes loops.
In fact there is a LOT of musical creativity going on, arguably more so than someone who's been banging out 3 chord songs on a guitar their whole lives. Loops are usually only part of the story, and even when they're used they're being edited and spliced and rearranged and mangled in all kinds of creative ways in order to create something new. It's no less creative than an artist creating sculptures from junk found in a scrapyard (and some of that stuff is amazing). The idea that there is no musical talent or ability behind it is ridiculous. You have to have a keen musical ear to arrange samples into something new, just as you have to have a keen artistic eye to arrange old engine parts into a sculpture of an animal (or whatever).
You don't have to perform with an instrument to compose music. Clicking notes in a piano roll is no different to writing notation down on paper - the computer is just a tool to facilitate the evolution of musical ideas. Whereas the traditional orchestral composer might well be an accomplished piano player, at the end of the day they're just using that piano as an exploratory tool to work out parts and how they go together. This is no different to someone using sample libraries and soft synths to compose in the piano roll. If you don't have a musical ear, you're not going to have to come up with anything decent.
The notion that using samples is "cheating" is as outdated as the notion that banging out three chords on a guitar is "not real music" (and when rock and roll took off, the older generation held precisely this view of it). There are kids out there making electronic music without instruments who are being far more musically creative than a lot of "real" musicians, particularly those who have been knocking out the same old chords and riffs their entire lives. I'm not knocking people who are accomplished at an instrument (I'm quite accomplished on guitar - classical, jazz, folk and a lot of other styles), but I've never seen the use of samples and loops as "unmusical" or "uninventive." Perhaps that's because I've had a good crack at it myself. The level of detail in some electronic productions is immense, and there is a lot of extraordinary creativity going on with samples and loops. I always invite people who pooh-pooh it to set a day aside and try and come up with something good in these genres yourself, just by copying and pasting loops. They never do, and I suspect they'd be lost almost immediately.