Yeah, skilled accordionists say the same about this “downscaled - watered - fue dummies - instant gratification - always in harmony” instrument… Go figure, it helped to create a complete new music genre that changed music forever.
Because it’s never about the “device”, it’s about the user.
some very skilled and well established musicians make comments about samplers that overlap heavily with the criticism expressed here.
So I have a slightly different opinion about the “instant gratification” and it’s usefulness in the path to mastery. When I first started playing with music and synths my timing was horrible and I didn’t know scales. I used a scale locked arpeggiator a lot. This was very much instant gratification. But that instant gratification is what made me come back and stick with it. I have a hard time with discipline, so I try to make my music “practice” as fun as possible, and I think an instrument that lowers the barrier for people to make music they consider enjoyable will cause them to be more likely to want to continue learning more about music. But I agree that once you are experienced that these kind of tools can feel quite limiting.
Music from that promo video is on par with what i create, yet i have that big boy advanced “no shortcut” instruments 
I feel like in this case the hate is unwarranted. I dont remember anyone complaining about Orba, which is more or less the same concept. How does rebuilding that concept with an interface that is more familiar to a wider audience = bad + shortcut.
Info that i got from this promotional video is “hey spend 200 bucks and make sounds that wont sound immidiately bad”, not “you will be able to play like a professional in just 3 hours”. The latter is indeed bad, waste of money and a scam.
Wish them the best of luck with this one, hope they can sell a lot of these to people who were previously not into making music. And perhaps later they will come up with a midi controller thats going to appeal to me, with all that tech.
I was speaking with another musical friend the other day about the current state of music, about how radical accessibility shouldn’t always be seen as 100% great thing. Ideally, I DO think that people should have access to begin whatever creative endeavor they wish, but I also think that there should be more vetting processes in place.
People love to compare modern music with music from the 90s and later, and for good reason; but I think the reason why music from that time is so timeless is because there was a tremendous vetting process in place, with all of its faults and benefits. Like, you HAD to be good, you had to have something fairly unique or good to offer. I just think we haven’t found a happy medium yet to balance things out.
Accessibility skyrocketed, as did hobbyists. There’s probably more hobbyists than folks that are actually serious about working professionally in the art. Hobbyists don’t have the time nor the interest to make the same sacrifices that someone who is trying to do it professionally is. Instant gratification instruments allow them to cover the most ground in the least amount of time. It makes since, I totally get it. Companies have capitalized on this radical accessibility and are making bank.
I began my musical journey in a very traditional way, the grueling summers of practicing scales and modes in every key (there’s 30, fight me!) and then doing boring ass hand curdling Hanon exercises. Hated every fkn minute of it, still hate it, but I’m thankful everyday that I did and still do it. I think whats missing is just the general respect for the art and craft of music. To respect the art enough that you understand; that to be better with it, you’ll need to make the necessary sacrifices required.
Like the instant gratification has killed apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is critical for any craft or art to maintain a certain level of understanding of its principles and fundamentals. Its a ritual passing of knowledge and understanding, each OG adding to it, furthering the next generation; to further advance the art and craft. People have the ability to completely bypass that phase now, so companies just appeal to the neo-musicians of our times.
There’s lots of information out there, but there’s actually very little knowledge. And it takes hard work and dedication to transform information into knowledge, but why bother when a chord midi pack can solve all of your chord progression problems?
I think your point about apprenticeship is well made and I agree with that. But I think lowering the barrier of entry for music is only a benefit to humans. I feel like your above opinion is informed by a desire to make the best possible music, and to have the music you are culturally surrounded by also be the best possible. But my goal is to have the most happy people, rather than the best music. If people are happy making crap music, then having to listen to crap music is an acceptable tradeoff to me.
Also I feel like this desire towards more “good” or “high quality” music is informed by the recording industry of the 60s to early 2000s and their massive cultural dominance, and ability to throw money at marketing and production. Human’s musical experience was majority amateur for millennia.
I see your point, but don’t misread my words. I’m all for lowering the barrier entry, but like anything it comes with some costs. My message was more about the need for balance, not a ban or anything goofy and extreme like that lol. I do want the best music possible, but I also don’t think that is has to come from the expense of people not being happy either. I also don’t see happiness as a virtue, there’s many things that would make me happy but would also be an overall detriment to my wellbeing.
I disagree about the human musical experience being majority amateur. Humans HAD to be able to play their instrument to be able to deliver and derive musical joy from it. There was no other way to play it, but to learn it.
not sure, I agree with this…
I think there is a real danger here of gatekeeping.
more people making music, imho, is only a good thing.
doesn’t matter if they make good music or not, just that they enjoy the process.
and different tools will appeal and be enjoyed by different people, of different skills.
(and with different goals/aspirations too)
of course, gadgets like these won’t appeal to those that need or want more, but perhaps some will enjoy them, and it might even inspire them to move on to something more elaborate later.
and, then not all gadgets/tech is ‘good’…
but who gets to choose what is good? vs just not their cup of tea?
look in the cookery market…
thousands of gadgets, some useful some not…
should we ban food processors because you should learn to cut with a knife?
I mean the every day experience of music for normal people. Normal people weren’t going to concert halls to hear professional musicians play. Most people would be experiencing music in more informal and community based interactions.
I guess I derive so much joy from even amateurish attempts at making music, I want to make that joy available for as many people as possible, and for me, making good music is not a prerequisite for experiencing musical joy. And I guess your distinction between wellness and happiness is completely foreign to me, like sure there are some things I want that don’t make me happy in the long run, but I see that as more animalistic desires for resources, like sugar.
But I totally agree that we need to work to build the systems for the people who do really want to take it seriously. I just have a lot of criticism of the way that has been done traditionally, and who those structures value.
Music theory is always far behind music practice, so that’s why it can be frustrating for ambitious musicians to confront an instrument that is heavily biased towards an existing theoretical framework (like any finite set of “accepted” chord structures, no matter how extensive)
Having gone to GearFest and been utterly baffled by the menus and user interfaces on 80% of the synths I tried so much that they didn’t even feel like musical instruments, I’d say anything that helps simplify user interfaces and make them more user friendly is a win for the whole industry.
But totally on board with the attack on anything that forces cultural quanitisation of pitch, harmony and rhythm.
I think most devices steer users this way though, don’t they? People often talk about how a device led them to create certain types of music or dissuaded them from it. I don’t think that’s an inherently bad thing but I do suspect that it’s more noticeable with “quick fix” melodic/harmonic stuff.
In my personal experience, shortcuts to things such as chords, progressions, melody and harmony don’t work out well - NDLR, Keystep 37’s chord mode, max4Live devices, my attempt at generative eurorack - all led me to very unsatisfying results. It turns out that my creative impulses are often more nuanced than these can usually create (without spending even more effort to wrangle them than it would have been to just learn what I wanted to do), and they also surpass my personal skills (which is the whole reason I tried those in the first place).
with chorda, you can make music you never imagined
That’s what I’m afraid of 
I think we’re both after the same things, just different way of going about it. So, I also mean everyday experience of music for “normal people”. As a child it was very normal for my parents to play Prince, Hall and Oates, Bill Evans, Kool and The Gang, Coltrane, etc. I remember hearing those harmonies and melodies on Saturday mornings, roadtrips, on the way to and back from school, relatives house, etc.
I don’t see how any of those world class musicians required concert halls (never even been to a concert hall). In most cases they were all enjoyed in communal settings with neighbors, family, friends of the family, etc. at social gatherings. So I don’t get that one too much.
I recently started learning the Kora, its an ancient instrument that is fundamentally social. In fact the players are seen as story tellers, their art is communal to its core, but yet you’re still expected to take it seriously enough to not be fumbling about with it during communal expressions of it.
You deriving joy from your attempts to make music is your joy and there’s nothing I or anyone else can say to diminish that. There’s no need for it to even be up to a debate.
Are all these devices in the same category?
I am thinking of the old arguments against Guitar Hero. “Why waste time playing Guitar Hero when you could learn real guitar?” The answer is that’s not the point. It’s guitar karaoke, a fun thing to do that doesn’t demand too much effort
Fear not. Soon everyone will be able to press a button with AI and generate a song, just like it is with drawings and images. Then we’ll all sound like ancient fossils trying to explain to kids that we actually had to manually write our own tracks “Back in the day”
Worth noting in response to this that possibly the greatest guitarist on the planet at the moment, Yasmin Williams, got started as a kid playing Guitar Hero 2 and being very good at it and it probably influenced her style a lot.
One could also say guitar hero 2005 opened the door for rocksmith 2008 to receive development support as it demonstrated there was a potential interest/market for more serious learning of an instrument on a game system platform… I still remember miracle piano following mario piano or whatever it was, probably a similar progression of development. sometimes it just takes an open door.
I think to me the real issue is that we as musicians and creatives (amateur and professional alike) invest too much emotional energy into the prospects of what a piece of gear can do for them vs investing that energy into creating.
The trap is propagated by the mass influx of media and hype that often is associated with new product release.
The mind becomes distracted by the prospect of a short cut or solution that you begin to believe will advance your process somehow. In my experience this is never the case. Every time I have put my faith in gear instead of myself I am left with regret.
My most prized instrument is my yamaha baby grand. Its been a lifetime learning to play it, but never has such an endeavor yielded greater results. Putting in the time to discover an instrument that offers no short cuts is a lot, but I attribute 100% of my progress in other musical areas to my solid base in piano/keyboard.
However these devices if viewed through a objective lens, and accepeted for what they are there are plenty of examples on YouTube of talent people that I have honed their skills and done some absolutely stunning things with these things.
I guess its just really a matter of perception and expectation. I am cynic so whenever one of these things hit the market, I pretty much roll my eyes and wait till someone more talented than me does something cool with it and puts it on youtube where i can watch it.