Sign of the times

One of our merry band of sample-heads teaches music tech to 17-19 year olds at a local college During the induction week the new intake of students were asked to identify a midi lead and the vast majority had no idea what it was.

Now we’re not going to harp on about the youth of today/falling standards in production and engineering skills/rose-tinted glances back on ‘the good old days’. Basically because we think that’s all a crock of sh*t, and also there’s plenty of magazines/forums that bore for Britain about that sort of thing all the time.

We think this shows is how things in the bedroom-production market have changed in a relatively short space of time. Most newcomers to production or making tunes will be using software rather than hardware. Fruity Loops/Reason/Garageband all live inside a computer and the majority of controller keyboards released at the moment are either USB or Firewire, without a midi cable in sight. Hardly surprising then those newcomers to music production don’t desire a 30u rack stuffed full of modules etc like we did when we first started out.

We like midi, it was developed specifically for musical instruments, unlike Firewire and USB, but we certainly won’t be getting on our high-horse about it either – it’s what you make, not how you make it that counts in the end.