Quote Originally Posted by clubsynthetic View Post
nae point in being able to use them all if your shite at all of them.. I would rather see someone able to juggle/turntablism on decks incorporated into techno etc rather than someone sounding mediocre on ableton live. its not a prerequisite to play all forms but helps.

one may also be restricting themselves with what they can do within a particular format (music output wise/skills etc) by jumping at the chance of getting something newer quickly.

I don't think records are deed and buried. but i like to watch the artist i'm looking at do some amazing things visually (controlling the music) as well as musically. I'm scared that newer formats will give artist the option of how much they "feel like" playing live and how much is just automated. with old instruments like guitars artists were forced to play completely manually, i.e Hendrix with the guitar etc - looks and sounds amazing to me - nowadays artists have so many layers not all can be controlled at the same time manually - which kinda removes some o the magic away for me..

Isn't that any why your average uneducated joe blogs likes hardware better than software, cos you can see how much shit your doing on it (or more of it anyways) and it looks like more fun to play than software based stuff?
Interesting way of looking at things.
And yes, the new formats can, if the "artist" in unscrupulous, be very automated.
But then it`s up to those in the know to keep these people in check really.
Both the promoters and the Punters should keep aware of what is happening.
I`ve seen many hardware live acts miming liive. Most of the psytrance lot play from dat and mime.
The infamous Lab 4, famed for their live act (and very nice guys) totally fake it, play a CD and just mime behind mountains of keyboards.
So the technology is almost irrelevent, people will get away with faking it, if we let them.
Lets not lose too much perspective though, how hard is it really to play 2 records together? It`s not that much of a physical task either.
However, the whole point of a DJ is to play music that gets people moving by playing great music. Why do we expect them to perform now?
Is the music so droll we are bored of dancing and now need to stare at the DJ and wait for them to entertain us like a dancing monkey?
The dance music scene has always been driven by the music, and when it becomes driven by the cult of personality, it becomes wrong in my opinion, and we get people like Tiesto and that whole crock of shit that comes with it.
It slowly becomes another form of pop music then.
Dancing monkeys and organ grinders.