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Comment by panpanna | Hacker News Reader

This got me thinking. Maybe the reason everything sounds the same these days is because everyone is using the same setup to create music (MacBook + logic pro + the same plugins)?

Maybe this is the reason Avicii (windows+sonar) and daft punk (mostly analog +abelton) sound so different compared to the rest?

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There's probably more variety in music today than ever before in human history.

First off, Avicii used FL Studio. And music is diverse, I think you're either living in a bubble or somehow your exposure to music is very limited. Music production is also a lot cheaper and easier to pick up these days so you most likely also come across music made by beginners and/or people who just want to make music for other than artistic reasons.

Also a lot of music is loop/clip based (one or more bars of music is a sample by itself) which can be repetitive and exactly in time every time.

My favorite artists find ways to add a lot of variation, even to simple song structures. By including lots of detail, by playing parts by hand, blending electronic and acoustic instruments, etc.

I think music benefits from imperfections here and there.

Agreed - makes perfect sense, too. In more than one sense, music is about patterns, and part of the draw is the tension between being able to predict what's going to happen and being wrong in the best possible way.

Purely electronic, cleanly gridded music has its charms, but adding those imperfections often helps a lot!

i would say most use ableton nowadays. the reason why things sound the same is because people put 80% effort into recreating something that they love about another song

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