Tedious Play

 

I watched an interview a while back with Todd Rundgren in which they were asking about his process for the A Capella album where he was using a very early sampler, or perhaps the Fairlight, to record and elaborately orchestrate vocal samples mapped to individual keys. One of the interviewers was nonplussed: "What drove you to do something that was so tedious?" But that's the way it was then and lots of people were doing it, and was quite enjoyable. I had an old brick of a sequencer, the Yamaha QX7 on which I step-recorded note-by-note the entirety of one of my favorite pieces at the time (and still) Ravel's Sonatine in F# Major. It didn't even have a hard drive and data was saved on a cassette tape. I didn't think it was tedious because when it was finished it felt kind of like a magic to listen to the playback, and play with different synth patches. Composers were just starting to use computers at the time and Digital Performer had just come out for the Mac II with its teeny-tiny screen.

Sometimes I see videos on YouTube that look very labor intensive, like 30-minute documentaries with lots of graphics, and I wonder why they do it. There is probably a joy in doing them, even if they seem tedious.

Another example, which I still think is amazingly creative, but seems tedious, is the layered vocal sounds on 10 CC's I'm Not in Love. Now you can press one key or drag a sample into a DAW to get what would have been a labor-intensive sound. Where's the joy?