That’s a great example. Initially people thought distorted guitars sounded broken. It was what happened when one didn’t set the levels right and was to be avoided. It sounded bad.
Until people started incorporating it in songs because it was new and not overdone. And some of those were good and got a lot of repetition. Repetition legitimized. And now people say it sounds good and spend ridiculous money chasing that distortion sound.
But chances are, had we been born in the 1800s, distorted guitar sound would be abhorrent to us. Had we been born in the 2000s it’s so accepted it might already be sounding stale. It’s the same sound. Nothing was inherently good or bad about it. The only thing that changed was our exposure to it.
Turns out good sound is subjective. Keeping that firmly in mind can prevent us from wasting time chasing an idea of purity that is, at beast, a moving target.
Thank you! The S-1 mentioned in the original post wasn’t a good example as it’s a compelling sound source in it’s own right, but this video illustrates what I was trying to say perfectly.
Yea I’ve had an eye on this thread when it came up (really only one eye though), and I know that video for quite some time. Yesterday it accidently popped up again and I thought “yup, this pretty much tells a big part of the story”.
I think for certain styles and usecases the actual voice really isn’t that important. I mean if you’d blindtest this nice little piece of music from the video (without any dry parts), who would tell you all of this is coming from a toy piano?
And more importantly to me, why should it even matter? Who cares if it’s a toy piano for 20 bucks, or a 20k Steinway, a 20k modular system or whatever. It sounds great, and in my opinion that’s pretty much the only thing that matters.
By the way, he provided quite detailed infos about the toy piano and the setup, also shared the patches used on the three MS-70s. For anyone who’s interested, I’ll paste it below:
*taken from the YT video description*
So… My wife gave me a toy piano for Christmas. The kind with cute animals on. My second thought was that it must be possible to create some kind of listen-worthy music with this.
The piano sound is sample-based, with three different samples spaced over a two octave keyboard. For some reason, the sample is looped for the last half of the sound duration, and the loop length is slightly off, so the second half of the sound is slightly detuned. The keyboard itself is monophonic, only one key press is detected at a time. But a sample will keep playing to the end, even when a new key is pressed, so it’s possible to “strum” a chord, sort of. Closer inspection also revealed that this marvelous instrument has a built-in sequencer.
It’s battery powered with one speaker, but no line out. So I did a small mod and mounted a volume control, a minijack output, and an on-off switch for the built-in speaker.
I decided to go for the ambient genre, and to get some help from three Zoom MS-70CDR effect pedals, and a Electro Harmonix 720 looper.
The internal sequencer is used in the second half of the jam, and I throw in some subtle animal noises for good measure.
Enjoy :-).
Patches:
The three Zoom MS-70CDR patches are included below. To load a patch into the MS-70, connect your MS-70 to your computer using a USB cable, go to https://g200kg.github.io/zoom-ms-util…, right-click an available patch slot, select “Import Patch from text”, and paste in this text.
Piano with delays and reverb:
f0520061284a6003006c043c0000194026030000000000000000110000086c01600035500100000000000000000400610000302a2840011670004006000000000000002100080070385c001440004006000000000001000011000050750869001020104006000000000000001106000052040c012440102305000000000000000000180f4300697263426e742000205400f7
