Not to stir the pot, but I've been practicing making tracks with a computer for 12 years. In that time I've come up with 3 tracks I felt confident about putting on vinyl, and I've had 3 or 4 tracks on Internet comps. Terrence Parker took one of my tracks for his 'Maximum Ice' CD, for which I really feel blessed, because I respect him unconditionally as a musician.
The point being, if I had more really great tracks, I'd be putting them out. I work all the time on music, and mostly I don't think it's good enough to share beyond my circule of friends. Making good tracks -- no matter how you do it -- is pretty difficult. And bad tracks don't matter. How you make them doesn't matter -- the end result matters. Tom seems to have an animus against people doing tracks on their laptops, but I think it's a specious argument. I'd be willing to bet there are tracks he likes that were all-laptop joints, and it's a certainty that he hates a whole universe of tracks made the old school way. That being a lot of my favorite Detroit and Chicago tracks were made in a certain way that I think made them more exciting. Specifically, it's setting up a bunch of gear and recording it live to two track, with one or more people working the gear. Drexciya did it that way, as did all the early Chicago house heads. A lot of the classic UR tracks were recorded mostly live. In order to work that way, those artists had to be as good at running a drum machine, synths, effects and a mixing board. They had to have a definite idea of the sound they wanted. They had to know how to play, and to embrace and roll with happy accidents. And they had to be willing to roll tape and do it over and over until they got it right. And they were doing it before there was anyone telling them how to do it. They had to master an unwieldy, complicated instrument, and make it sing. And there was always that moments of excitement in the track that would be irretrievable if the DA30 ate the DAT. I honestly think the same thing is possible with Laptops, but maybe we haven't seen the Ron Hardy or Derrick May of the laptop yet. But it's silly to argue that computers, in and of themselves, are the problem.
