I remember back in the day when the world discovered MIDI. I was in the studio working with a Columbia Records artist/producer and we were playing around with triggering some sounds through midi. Sometime into the session I turned to him and said, paraphrasing here, “You know what’s happened? All of the idiots have just been invited to the party!!” What I meant was….with the advent of MIDI recording, people who didn’t have real music “chops” like…being competent at playing guitar, bass, drums, horns, etc. were now going to be able to compete with us idiots who spent the 10,000 hours getting proficient at playing an instrument or two at a high level. What would that mean for me? It meant I would just have to be better.
Fast forward to the here and now I had an interesting conversation with a person in the commercial production biz who I really respect a lot. Somewhere along the way we started discussing jingles and he said something along the lines of…and I’m paraphrasing ‘…well jingles are really easy money now. I mean with Garageband and all the loops out there, a guy sitting in his underwear can slap something together in a half an hour…’. That really hit me. HARD. ‘Cause we don’t use pre-fab music loops much. We write and perform drums, piano, guitar, bass, horns, strings, vocals, you name it. Occasionally we’ll use something for percussion or effect but that’s about it. It takes longer to write music this way, but the end result is always something with feeling and heart. And it’s original. It’s one of our main selling points to our jingle clients. Garageband and music loops have made it possible for people with little or no experience at writing and producing music to “assemble songs”. Some have become pretty good at it. But because the process isn’t organic…built from the ground up and based on years and years of practice and performance…the finished product lacks emotion. And heart. So I guess we’ll keep doing that thing we do. We may take longer and on the whole make less money per hour, but we rest easy knowing the music comes from the heart. And you can’t loop heart. You just can’t.