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Comment by dapangzi | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping this would be more fleshed out as an article, but the sentiment is understandable.

Want to throw some of my knowledge of digital music, as you called it out specifically.

In the late 90s most digitally arranged music production was relegated to trackers (think Amiga trackers) and sequencing samples and loops, because the storage simply didn't exist.

Then that would be committed to tape, sometimes on a 4-track, sometimes on studio-quality tape, sometimes on ADAT.

Fully digital music production like we have now was out of reach for most people until roughly the early-to-mid 2000s, when you see an explosion of people, even in local music scenes, quantizing drum parts and using virtual instruments (usually VST) that would normally require tens or even hundreds of thousands in hardware.

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Tracker music was always a hobbyist thing, with a few exceptions. Not really relevant in the greater music scene.

But digitally produced music was of course a huge thing in the 90s. Countless genres of electronic music – techno, trance, house, whatever have you, all of that made on computers. And of course pop was almost all synth – digital synth – just like today.

> Tracker music was always a hobbyist thing

I was specifically talking about end-to-end digital music production being used to "clean up" recordings per the article. Not whatever "scene" you are conjuring.

> Computers helped you make things louder, cleaner, faster.

For people with limited resources (i.e. indie musicians without huge budgets), digital multi-track recording was not democratized until the introduction of low-cost hard disk storage at sufficient capacity to allow digital multi-track recording at home, roughly around 2002~2003.

Of course I'm aware of synthesizers, etc. I was an electronic musician myself during this period, and I lived it. I had the gear racks, ADAT machines, etc.

We did not have the resources as independent musicians to use non-linear digital editing software broadly until storage became cheaper.

Again, a lot of that music was typically done with looping and sample hits arranged on a midi sequencer, similar to trackers, but with distributed infrastructure.

Listen to older KMFDM, for example, the looping really stands out due to the limited storage they had when arranging, they would arrange sample hits and loops as I was talking about above.

Musicians with studio backing and infinite money could afford giant digital productions suites and were using crude versions of Pro Tools by the early '90s, am well aware.

They didn't mean digital music production, they meant digital downloads/streaming of finished music products. As in later in the early 2000s and beyond iPods and mp3 players and then streaming changed everything as far as accessibility.

That's the trouble isn't it? If we can't even agree on the meaning.

I didn't read it that way specifically because of the use of "you", which to me feels like an invocation of the audience or the royal "you" so to speak, to refer to musicians themselves, rather than the concept of digital streaming and distribution.

"Computers helped you make things louder, cleaner, faster...you still needed a band...or a mate that could actually play something..."

Does the streaming/digital industry no longer have a need for a mate that plays drums? I guess you can read it that way.

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I read it as almost like a lamenting of the emergence of the "one man band" and cheap throwaway music production by the ease of creating digital recordings at home, and even replacing musicians in the broader music industry with digital replacements, which I also kind of disagree with as being necessarily a negative thing. Toro y Moi, Washed Out, etc., would not be possible without such technology, but the metal music production industry itself has largely replaced drummers with drum machines, not streaming and digital distribution companies.

BTW those of us on the internet earlier were downloading mp3s as soon as 1997 or 1998.

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