The following is not a headline from The Onion or wundergroundmusic.com:
“MSU student uses ‘Groovebox’ to create live, electronic music”
It’s surprising this hasn’t already gone viral, because it goes on from there.
Apparently the Michigan State University newspaper, The State News, is really new to this whole electronic music thing, opening, “when Cameron McGuffie took the stage Tuesday night at MSU University Activity Board’s Open Mic Night, he took not a guitar or sheet of poetry, but a peculiar gray box.”
Now, to be fair, we can easily get lost in a bubble of music tech heads and forget that a lot of people just don’t know a lot of what we know.
On the other hand, that’s Michigan State. You know, the state that has Detroit in it – a city that was doing a little something with “peculiar gray” drum machines back in the mid 80s when they sort of invented techno.
This next bit, I’m — well, not really sure what it means, actually:
McGuffie said he’s noticed a resurgence in producers rejecting “DAWs,” or digital audio workstations, in favor of mechanically-produced music, a trend he calls the “beat scene.”
“When I’m looking for gigs on Craigslist, I’ve definitely seen people asking for specifically ‘no DAWs,’” McGuffie said.
My favorite line, though, I think is this: “A lot of McGuffie’s life is currently undecided.” Yeah, Cameron, we feel you there.
Then there are other peculiarities, like the insistence on capitalizing the Groovebox, and spelling out “extended play” instead of EP.
Oh, well, it’s a college paper. And a reminder that sometimes that writing can be funnier than the parody sites.
Anyway, it is nice enough that Cameron is using the new KORG ElecTribe. And I think playing hardware and getting away from the computer (any which way, whether through standalone gear or controllers) is always fun.
And Cameron – well, we’d all like to travel with music. Best of luck.
MSU student uses ‘Groovebox’ to create live, electronic music
Thanks to @Tarekith on Twitter for the tip.
Now, I’ve made my share of embarrassing errors in my time… that time partially being this week. So I really shouldn’t criticize. But… well, let’s laugh, um, with it.
Meanwhile, significantly – the music is pretty cool! And the guy has almost no followers (so maybe we’re the only ones who read this MSU story). We can fix that by following him.
Also, of course, there is value to finding simple language. The challenge is working out what the balance is. This comic from xkcd nicely sums up why the article above might read as funny to anyone familiar with the subject matter. (Now, xkcd is even funnier as they still get information accurate – the article above is misleading in that is suggests something is novel and unique that is actually common practice in music for some decades. And it’s okay to question accuracy. Readers of this site did earlier this week when I overstated how recent the use of laptops could be.)
