I’m right at the beginning of the learning curve here. I’m not a musician, I’m a technical person with a skull full of sounds and ideas and riffs and things I’ve been living with for most of my life. Finally, form and fortune can enable me to free them in some fashion, for others to hear what I’ve been hearing myself. I am at a place where I will have to deal with multiple learning curves- from composition to creating sounds, to actually playing an instrument- on top of the technical things I need to learn about the hard- and software itself.

It’s a daunting thing. I’m just glad there are outlets for folks like me- people who for whatever reason have not had a chance to make music. Mine might end up being awful, but at least I will be able to say I tried!

You can’t compare Mozart to Nirvana, and this is an infuriating comparison. Not because of technical ability, not because of musicianmanship, and not even because of your haircut, but because there simply was no access to instruments! Had not cheap guitars and music-making equipment been churned out in the sixties, it’s likely we’d never have had the Who, the Doors, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix or any of the big names, and musicians might have resorted to ten-minute solo accapellas or banging their brains out on their drummers’ kick drum to get the point across. Give Mozart a bag of weed and a left-handed $40 guitar and he’d probably start composing some rather interesting music too.

It’s not technical ability, but the chance to be technically able (let alone good) and this is something extremely new in music. ONE – you don’t have to be good-looking or a virtuoso. TWO – you don’t have to know extremely influential political or artistic figures. THREE – you now have the power to put Mozart to shame. The only reason these classics were so celebrated, perhaps, is that they had all the bacon, when we had only the pasta. No wonder they were making better carbonaras!

And as we’ve given instruments to more people, we haven’t made things easier – we’ve only made things more difficult. There are more types of music than there are notes on my guitar. More time and effort goes into categorising these genres than you may think; particularly the eventual fisticuffs when I disagree that Today Is The Day is simply Noise Rock. Music is powerful, but music production is an extremely powerful weapon that can suck anyone in just the same, and we’ve given it to everybody.

It’s not to say that “In The Olden Days” everyone was stupid because they didn’t have access to a stack of compressors, amps, equalisers, gates, mixers, and limiters. We’re just on different levels. In those days, a new instrument was introduced once a century. In these days we’re introducing new instruments every DAY. Not only that but we get the tutorials too! Has anyone else pictured Tchaikovsky spinning in his grave to the point he shoots out and decapitates the entire Pirate Bay administration?

My final point is that, cursed yee oh olde cretin, this argument is far from new; no doubt many a previous scholar (or anyone with access to writing equipment) has been up in the darke composing fierce statements while his lantern burns late into the night, haphazardly setting fire to the curtains behind him and consuming his living area. Some would notice and put out the flame. Some would carry on forever on this argument, not realising that it is destroying them. I think I’m going for a cigarette now.