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Hi y'all, There might very well be some very simple business reasons for labels to sign artists that only have 'soft' gear. My gut feeling says those labels that Jaybird mentioned merely try to avoid nasty copyright pitfalls - copyrights being their core assets, and lawyer's fees easily outweighing licensing revenues (especially for music for small markets). Their problem is this: how can you prove that you are the author of a musical piece, when all you have to show for it cannot be distinguished from a mere copy? We all know information can nowadays be copied with only a mouseclick. It's much harder to copy sequences between 303's or patches between synthesizers untill you have an exact copy of an original track. I would guess that if you really have made some stuff with 'soft gear' that is good enough (by whatever standards labels use), and 'even sounds the same, or better' than if you would have made it with 'real' gear, labels would sign you, as long as you can provide them with convincing proof of authorship. It might help to take snapshots and make backups of what you're doing periodically (at least for each important phase of development) and having them time-stamped by some trustworthy authority (some designers I know use the tax office for this since they're relatively cheap). By the way, I totally disagree with the 'digital sucks' position. I still heavily use my old 12 bit (!) Roland W-30 samplers for instance, because they have such nice filters and flexible envelopes. Try to make a breakbeat on your analogue drum box by the way - bet you can't make a couple of hits go into reverse! Having a CD-rom spit out raw data into a filter beats any kind of analogue oscillator when it comes to harshness, I made some great sounds starting from those 'random' bits. My humble opinion is that each technology has it's own distinct character, which can be good or bad depending on the context. Cheers, Sjoerd At 14:12 20/5/2002 -0400, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: oh.. BTW storm.. I have been talking to most of the major UK and US distro houses. They WILL NOT sign any artist that cannot prove that they have gear. They hate reason, Rebirth, all those softsynths, goove boxes, and all-in-one sampler units (which are pretty much hardware versions of trackers made in the early 90's). The distros want you to spend 35k on a studio so they know they got you for the long run. Any kid can borrow 399 form daddy to get reason and write some great tunes with it. This was a shock to me, b/c I use to think "If it kills writers block and excels creativty..then using new digital equipement along with old analgue stuff must be a good thing." I cannot think this way now. They feel if you spend 1500 on an access virus Digi KB, then its cool, but not if you spend 400 on the TDM plug-in of the same KB. Soft synths make it too easy for joe shmoe to become the Techno Rockstar of the World Over, and if this continues to keep getting more known, it will devalue the face of techno all over the world. Pretty much making my 35K studio worthless, b/c of over saturation of the market place. This will also raise the price of vinyl to try to close the door on the reason users fingers (ouch!), which, in turn, will kill of most underground small time indie labels (like mine). Records cost alot as it is and you do not make any money off them. I'm not trying to be negitive, and I'm not trying to discourage anybody. But to the people that run the show, there is a big difference between a 909 sample and a 909 even if it sounds the same, or better. It's all about the investment. This is why I would love to give people with reason or Rebirth and talent a chance to work in my studio and make records. I feel this is the best way to combat everything said above. But these are MY opinions and others may not view everything this way. If you don't believe me about the distros call alpha magic or intergroove , and let them tell yah. WoW.. I'm out of breath now.. www.thumpintunes.com -------[ http://www.tb-303.org ] ---------------------- Subscribe & unsubscribe there : http://www.tb-303.org/
