Are we circling the drain?

[dubkitty]

there's maybe five pedal reviewers i more or less trust. i loved Knobs but nowadays he seems to only do bespoke stuff for Chase Bliss. i find Megan the shoegaze girl and collector/emitter most useful for the kind of sounds i use. there are several "Ambient Guys" who i sometimes watch, but they seem kind of stunted idea-wise.

[Kacey Y]

Yeah, there are some people that I think a worth watching, but the issue even then is that they have to either be so small they rarely post and may have a few relevant videos occasionally. That or they become popular enough that they need to pay their bills by making videos, so a decent review or useful demo is one video out of every few dozen at best. There's also people who I respect and think make cool and interest gear videos, but are completely irrelevant to me musically. I do sometime watch the "content" ones that are just like "8 Pedal Blind Shootout - Can You Guess Which Is The Vintage Tubescreamer??" if I'm bored and just want something on while eating dinner. Or like a roundup of every spring reverb pedal to see which can actually do the Fender tank drip sound or something, but I'm almost never buying anything based on those.

I kinda enjoy the way Five Watt World moved with his channel, where he stated pretty directly he's a minimalist and doesn't want to be chasing tone all the time, so most of his videos now are just mini documentaries on pieces of gear or companies. It's entertaining, even if it's something I already know about, and he has that soothing public radio voice lol

[le lambin]

I agree with the Youtuber thing- it’s more mindless entertainment than actual useful information. Anyone actually good, like Hainbach or Knobs or whatever, is going to make whatever piece of gear you’re interested in sound amazing. When you get the gear yourself, you’ll quickly realize you cannot make the thing sound the same. That’s my experience, at least. A few rounds of this reality has definitely sobered my enthusiasm for their videos. Everything else is just overt advertising, right? Can’t be critical or companies won’t keep sending you shit.

I do like Bad Gear though- listening to Florian being silly is always pretty funny. And I like his little jams.

[Gone Fission]

Some rando thoughts after a too-intense round of shoveling:

God, what was that in-house video for the Akai beatbox thing that their own people grimaced through how bad it was? Amazing in retrospect.

The “that sounds amazing but not in my hands” effect for me is perfectly illustrated by the Mike Hermans video for the TWA Minimorph. He makes it sound amazing and flexible and easy and I do not. (But all envelope trigger stuff seems to be my enemy, so go figure.)

[dubkitty]

the only time i assume i'll get close to the sounds in demos is when they show all the settings for each example in detail. even then though, i still sound like me. in fact, if something makes me sound not-like-me i chuck it, viz. the Rickenbacker 360. lovely guitar, but not for me. i could hear what it needed to sound good, but wasn't willing to change my approach that much.

if something's popular in the Demo Community (fuck, i spend too much time on Twitter) i'll watch as many demos as i can stand, assuming they play in tune and don't run everything through a distorted amp. modulation on an out-of-tune guitar is particularly unbearable, but with fuzz it sounds like a really bad ring modulator with the battery run down. the Ambient Guys drive me up the wall, but i need to hear a lot of options for a particular pedal because hardly anyone plays like me.

[Seance]

The problem is they pretty much never actually review anything, unless it's 20+ years old. Any new pedal or piece of gear that comes out, everything is a demo, an overview, and introduction. Even if the title of the video/thumbnail is something like "Is it any good?" or "Is it better than the original version?" it's just the person/people showing all the features and playing around a bit, then under the conclusions/thoughts section going "well, that was the ____, what did you think?".

Gear demos demonstrate. That's it. Basically pedal companies have outsourced the kind of stuff that Boss repeatedly tortured Johnny Demarco with. Demarco is the Prometheus of gear demo videos (his liver, perhaps pickled in alcohol in the "hair metal dayz" perpetually picked at by being forced to make solO-faces in response to every piece of Boss gear).


A review would have some evaluation, and perhaps a bit of historical info, technical details about circuits, sound, manufacturing processes, etc.

A critique would discuss a particular piece of gear in historical terms, perhaps delve into sociological and psychological implications of the usage of sound-generators in certain types of music and how they impact our emotional responses to sound. This can range from Manny Farber style to Pauline Kael to Joan Acocella to Hunter S. Thompson to Lester Bangs (is this a music review or an advertisement for the effectiveness of the psychoactive compounds in previous iterations of cough medicine?).

A mono-themed critique can trace a singular item through time/culture in an engaging way, like The Cod Book or Salt by Mark Kurlansky.

A pedal-critique under the influence of Walter Benjamin and Charles Panati might be interesting.

[crochambeau]

God, what was that in-house video for the Akai beatbox thing that their own people grimaced through how bad it was? Amazing in retrospect.

That would be the Akai Rhythm Wolf, or maybe the Akai Timbre Wolf - the latter introduced the world at large to Akai Dan. I've yet to experience the Rhythm Wolf first hand, but can attest to the fact that the Timbre Wolf has... limitations. Limitations force creativity though, yeah?

Consuming content kinda stifles my brain a bit, I prefer watching design or repair channels and completely non-musical content (or flat out streaming albums, there are a few exceptions of course, but even then half the time it's something tangential to actual composition like stuff Benn Jordan or MEC/DJPain1 puts out.

[Seance]

Are we disrupting the drain?

"Drain disruptions" — The modern way of describing a clog—a psychic offshoring of dissatisfaction whereby our
own internal checks-and-balances and gut-reactions are short-circuited by "chill" music and literal or figurative
opioids and micro-dosing so we can just keep our nasal bone to the grindstone churning out wealth for the 0.0001%.

Or, have the tech-bros (as Nirvana sang about) completely drained us all and disrupted our ability to notice or care?

An interesting read on the Spotify/YouTube/Apple assault on musicians/music:
https://4columns.org/frere-jones-sasha/mood-machine

[dubkitty]

i guess i don't really feel like i'm "circling the drain" because i don't even feel like i'm part of the current. i put loops on Soundcloud; that's it. i think the most popular one had like 2000 plays. i was just happy folks in Japan, Russia, and other faraway places thought it was worth listening to. i don't know if i want anything more than that. i suppose the logical end point of all the stuff i'm doing would be a Bandcamp page, but i just don't feel like commodifying myself that much. i don't think i want to be "product." i sure don't want celebrity. whenever i look at social media and see the endless barrage of photos of the great and near-great i think how i'd absolutely hate that many people taking my picture with me having no control over the images. when i DJed i used to say that if i could i'd play from behind a curtain so all anyone would have to react to was the sounds. i'm afraid part of the interest in people playing ambient is "how do they do that?" so if i ever play out i guess they'll have to be able to watch. i like working at home best. no pressure, no deadlines, nobody to please but myself. i was never meant to be "successful" or it'd have happened before age 68. and i'm OK with that. I knew a guy on the Gretsch Pages who was a very serious home recordist who did albums' worth of stuff, asking plaintively "is this just a hobby?" i was like "is that really such a bad thing?" i mean, it beats fox hunting. or train spotting. or that shit they do on the Gulf Coast where people pull catfish out of their burrows with their bare hands.

[dub]

What did Homme once say... if you expect anything from music you expect too much?

[Warpsmasher]

I still swim against the current, even when circling the drain. I've had some pretty major ups and downs in the last few years that had nothing to do with creative pursuits, my life has been a rollercoaster since the pandemic really, but I still try to find motivation. I've apparently chosen to go through long dry spells of no inspiration rather than churning out mountains of crap on a schedule, or just because I haven't released anything in a long time. I always have lots of tracks that I'm slowly chipping away at for future release, I can leave unfinished tracks for years and years, until the the right sound or idea comes along to finish it. I do the same thing with artwork and photoshop, and now animation too.
Finding new things to mess with all the time doesn't really help productivity, and even feels like self-sabotage or procrastination at times. It's good to stay on your toes and expand your horizons, but learning things and exploring always seems to take time and focus away from more deliberate and practical enterprises. If I'm doomed to just fuck around forever I guess I'm ok with that, but I will still try to mine and share whatever gold I can find in it, when so motivated anyway.
I spent 500 points on nightcafe generating logos last week (and still have over 2k points to burn, just from collecting the free 5 every day)...they look great and all, but I don't really feel right about using any of them, like on album covers or video shots, even though they do look like some that I've drawn myself before, but obviously much better color and quality. I could process my own drawings and use them as starter images (aka clean tone lol), but don't really feel like explaining or debating the right/wrong ratio. I also have around a terabyte of animation and images I've generated in the last couple of years and have no fucking use for. Animation is one of my interests though, and someday the tech will be shit-hot enough to convert what I've made and saved already into the next level of quality, when it eventually arrives, so it's just another long term slow burner of a project in that regard, upgrading my animation as the tech presents itself. The AI animation generators and processing/rotoscoping are still not smooth enough for serious movie and TV projects, not without some pro editing anyway, but it's coming and I'm prepared, and not in a hurry. The hottest new thing drops like every two weeks in AI world now.

[John]

Gear demos demonstrate. That's it. Basically pedal companies have outsourced the kind of stuff that Boss repeatedly tortured Johnny Demarco with. Demarco is the Prometheus of gear demo videos (his liver, perhaps pickled in alcohol in the "hair metal dayz" perpetually picked at by being forced to make solO-faces in response to every piece of Boss gear).

I have been trying to find anything recent from J DM but he seems. to have vanished. johnnydemarco.com is still live but the last date on his Gigs page is 2008. The most recent thing on Youtube is an ad he did for GuitarNutbuster.com posted in 2019 by another gear demo guy named Freddy DeMarco who appears to be Johnny's brother.

Re: review videos, my pet peeve is when someone demos something I might want to use on guitar or bass, and they do it with a rack of modular bleep blops. Maybe I'm dumb but I can't tell what's going on. How much of "freep blizz zop zop" is the effect and which skeet skeet is the synth?

[alexsga]

r.i.p. J DM

[Seance]

[TheTransient]

Gear demos demonstrate. That's it. Basically pedal companies have outsourced the kind of stuff that Boss repeatedly tortured Johnny Demarco with. Demarco is the Prometheus of gear demo videos (his liver, perhaps pickled in alcohol in the "hair metal dayz" perpetually picked at by being forced to make solO-faces in response to every piece of Boss gear).

I have been trying to find anything recent from J DM but he seems. to have vanished. johnnydemarco.com is still live but the last date on his Gigs page is 2008. The most recent thing on Youtube is an ad he did for GuitarNutbuster.com posted in 2019 by another gear demo guy named Freddy DeMarco who appears to be Johnny's brother.

Re: review videos, my pet peeve is when someone demos something I might want to use on guitar or bass, and they do it with a rack of modular bleep blops. Maybe I'm dumb but I can't tell what's going on. How much of "freep blizz zop zop" is the effect and which skeet skeet is the synth?

I have a neglected Johnny Demarco meme page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/johnnydemarcomemes/), and a few years back now (probably 2019 also) a girl commented to say he was her guitar teacher. I assume that is still the case, but I haven't really looked into it since then though