When I first started making music, I had an Amiga 600, a copy of 
OctaMED, and a pile of samples. I didn't even have a real musical 
keyboard; I had to make do with the computer's QWERTY keyboard. And 
yeah, I produced quite a lot of music. Much of it isn't worth much, but 
there was quite a bit of it.

Today I have *thousands* of pounds worth of hardware and software for 
making music. And with it, I've produced a grand total of about 5 
minutes of music.

Now, partly that's because I'm no longer a bored teenager with a 6-week 
summer holiday where I can stay up until 2am every day making music 
around the clock. (Seriously, I used to forget to EAT!) I have a job 
now, and sometimes I come home and I just don't have the energy to do 
much other than sit and play Tetris.

But I think it's also partly the tools. I noticed the same thing when I 
went from building a website in HTML to using a blog. When I was writing 
HTML, I tried to make everything I wrote "perfect". When I switched to 
using Wordpress, it was so buggy and useless, and the output so ugly, 
that I spent less time trying to "perfect" my output, and more time on 
actually writing.

Paradoxically, using an inferior tool made me more productive.

I think that may be what happened with music. OctaMED was 
ground-breaking for it's day, but it's really quite limited in what you 
can actually do with it. Simplifying grossly, it basically plays 
samples. So you have, say, a sample of a note from a piano. You can play 
that back at different speeds to create grainy, distorted piano notes. 
(Just don't try to play chords! You've only got a handful of tracks to 
play with...)

Cubase is, in principle, far more sophisticated. You can set up effects 
processors and automate level changes. And of course, I'm using it to 
drive a bank of samplers and synthesizers. I've got a library of 120 GB 
of sample data covering drum kits, grand pianos, choir, pipe organs, 
just about every orchestral instrument you can think of a name for, all 
with multiple velocity layers, different articulations, and so on. I've 
got dozens of synthesizers, each with hundreds of presets, and a 
bazillion macro parameters to tweak on each one, not even mentioning the 
possibilities for editing the underlying data.

It's actually possible to just spend 2 hours trying to find / construct 
the right sound, and ever actually record anything!

But more than that, it's possible to be too much of a perfectionist. To 
spend so much time tweaking that you don't produce very much. My latest 
piece, Distant Lands (which, I notice, is now well over a year old) saw 
me spending about 2 days tweaking the volume controls trying to get the 
level as near to maximum as possible without clipping, and trying to get 
the sound balance right.

It's a fact of sound editing that after a while you've listened to the 
thing so many times over that you're not really "hearing" it any more. 
Coming back to it over a year later, the mix still doesn't sound very 
good. What can I say? I am not a professional sound engineer!

But maybe that's it. With OctaMED, there is no *possibility* of being a 
sound engineer. No matter what you do, it's never going to sound as good 
as a studio-cut track, so there's no point trying. Better to just focus 
on throwing some fun sounds together. Perhaps Cubase is making me take 
things too seriously.



But then, overall there seems to be some weird inverse correlation 
between the quality of the tools and the quality of the end result. The 
original Doctor Who theme tune was built using nothing more than tape 
loops and test oscillators, yet it sounds organic and alive. The latest 
incarnation was produced by a team with access to 40+ years of 
synthesizer design, not to mention an entire symphony orchestra. The 
result sounds... dull. It's completely unmemorable.

Similar comments could be made about the title sequence. The originals 
used weird tricks with camera feedback and colour-masking. Today we have 
the latest in computer graphics, and we get... dull. (Or maybe that's 
just me taste in graphics.) Perhaps it's just a reflection of the budget 
allocation though.

I can site numerous other examples. The original Star Wars trilogy had 
comparatively little budget thrown at it, but remains wildly popular. 
The new ones have sensational graphics (Episode I is literally the first 
time I saw CGI characters who look "real"), yet the story is almost 
non-existent. (This one isn't entirely technology-related.)

Portal was a fabulous game, even though it had few resources. Portal 2 
was just boring, despite massively more effort being applied. It all 
seems to have been applied in the wrong places.

In the early days of home computing, we had games with ground-breaking 
graphical richness; games like Xenon 2, Disposable Hero, Flashback, 
Shadow of the Beast, Abe's Odyssey, and so on. Today it would be "easy" 
to make games like these; we've all got high-colour, high-resolution 
displays and terabyte harddisks. And yet... nobody makes games like 
these any more. They only make brown FPS games. (Again, maybe this one 
is about fashion rather than technology.)

I really enjoyed HalfLife. But when HalfLife 2 came out, my eyes nearly 
popped out of my head at the graphics, but the gameplay was pretty dull.

Having just said that, advances in technology don't always equal dull 
mediocrity. Black Mesa, the Source remake of HalfLife, is graphically 
far superior, yet still manages to retail all of the best parts of the 
original. (Although I still don't think the aliens look quite "alien" 
enough. Maybe it's just that bad graphics look weirder?)



In summary, it appears that advances in technology have a *tendency* - 
it's not an unbreakable rule, just a tendency - to make people produce 
less impressive results. The shining star of an exception seems to be 
Pixar; they publish papers like my mum whines about her job, yet their 
films continue to be a study in excellence. At least, until Disney 
bought them; they seem to have gone sharply downhill since then...

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