 Technology and music, that is the topic for the day because I think in a lot of ways technology has improved human lives. It's done a lot to make the human experience a lot more enjoyable, especially with things advancements in medicine, advancements in food, agriculture, and a lot of ways technology. We've kind of become dependent on it in some ways. We try to insert technology into places where I don't think it belongs because I think technology has really ruined popular music. I kind of quit listening to music as far as popular music. I just turned the radio off completely around 1995, 1996. I had enough because music had become something I no longer recognize because it lost its soul. It lost its feeling. It lost that human element to it. And a lot of that had to do with the introduction of computers, technology into this music where now you had synthesized instruments rather than an actual human being playing an instrument. You had these synthesized sounds like these drum tracks and synthesized strings, synthesized violins and guitars and synthesized pianos. You didn't need a real musician anymore. A computer is just as good and no, they never sounded the same. And then you introduced autotune and autotuned completely ruins the human voice. It no longer has any kind of depth of feeling. And then you add all these computer filters where people try to modify their voice to sound a certain way. And now you have this weird situation where, in my opinion, popular music is just not enjoyable. It's not even something I can listen to. For one thing, there is no variation, no differentiation between all of these various musical artists. When I turn on pop radio now, especially with the female artists, can you actually tell the artist from their voice? I can't. They all sound exactly the same because they're all using the same autotune, all the same computer filters to the point where everyone's voice sounds exactly the same. And that's not what you want with music. And one of the things with musicians, whether it be with vocalist or instrumentalist, everybody has their own unique style, their own unique timbre to their voice or to their sound. And that's what makes musicians great is that variety that makes it special. So when everybody is exactly the same, that is not where we want to be, right? Music really is mostly about the individual, even though many times we play as part of a group or a band or an orchestra. In many ways, what makes the individual musician so special is their uniqueness. And I get asked musical questions sometimes on the channel, because for those of you especially that have been following the channel since the early days, many of you guys know that I actually have some degrees in music. I have a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in music performance. I worked a little bit on a PhD, but never finished it. And in some ways, I think because I was more into music performance rather than going to school, mainly for something like music technology or composition, you know, trying to go that route where I would be much more involved in some of the tech stuff and maybe because I wasn't introduced to all of this auto tune and computer filtering voice filters and synthesized sounds and stuff at a very early age or, you know, in my college career and my training, maybe I have a different perspective than many of the professionals in the industry. And when I'm talking about the industry, especially the music recording industry, but I think introducing computers into music is never going to work because a machine can't be musical. You really, there is a separation between humans and machines. There's naturally that separation. There's a separation between humans as part of our soul, our being, our feelings, right, our emotions and then what a machine can do as far as it just crunches numbers, right? There's a very clear dividing line and music is very much into that human soul feeling being kind of a realm. It's not about number crunching. That's not what music is. Music, while there is some science and some physics behind it, as far as the sound waves and there's reasons why certain sounds sound good to the human ear and certain sounds sound bad. There's a reason why something that is in tune sounds good. There's physics behind it and something that's out of tune is just in it. And, you know, it's really grating to your ears. There's certainly some science behind that, but there's also some emotions behind that as well. There is some of that is conveyed through the musician who is conveying this emotion to you. He's he's purposely trying to make you feel away. And sometimes that's why he will occasionally purposely play out of tune. That's something that, you know, you probably wouldn't program a computer to do, right? The whole point of these auto tune programs, of course, to be perfectly in tune, magically, perfectly in tune and many people don't realize, especially pro musicians, when you see pro jazz players, pro rock musicians, you know, sometimes that jazz trumpeter, you know, that jazz saxophone player will purposely play a note that doesn't fit with that chord. He knows it's going to sound dissonant and it's going to be out of place. And sometimes they do that for effect just to get your attention. And that rock guitar player, you know, sometimes he might fudge on the tuning a little bit, sometimes purposely play a little under the pitch or above the pitch. And again, for effect. And sometimes that effect, it actually engages the audience, right? It's one of those things a machine can't have a conversation, right? A machine, you can program a machine to speak, to just say some words, but kind of a machine actually listen to you, think about a response, have a conversation with you, probably not. And in many ways, that's kind of what music is. Music is a conversation between me, the performer and you, the audience. You see this in real life when you're talking to other human beings in a conversation, there's a difference between being in a conversation with somebody and then somebody just talking to you, right? Somebody just talking to you. They really don't care about your emotions or reactions. They're really not interested in what you have to say, right? They're just kind of in their own little program, right? And they're programmed to say something, you know, they're kind of mechanical in what they're doing compared to having a genuine conversation with somebody where you kind of let the conversation go where it needs to go based on the words the person's saying or sometimes the expressions that that person is using, whether it be their facial expressions, body language, a vocal intonation, whatever it happens to be. That's kind of that's kind of how music is. Music is not just notes on a page. A lot of especially non-musicians thinks that, you know, music is just the notes on the page. If you play the right notes, you'll be great. That's actually not true at all. Just playing the correct notes that are on your sheet music and that will only get you so far. And actually, it won't get you very far at all because just playing the right notes in many ways isn't musical at all. There's a lot more to making a piece of music musical. And a lot of that has to do with, you know, just the little style and inflections, whether I want to grow louder here, softer here, where I want to push the tempo a little bit in this part of the music and drag it back, you know, pull back a little bit in this part of the music. And a lot of that stuff is not necessarily on the page. It's not written in the music itself. A lot of that depends on my feelings when I get to that part of the music. Right? If I this feels right to me, I'll do it. And in some cases, if I'm playing in front of a live audience and I see I've really captivated the audience's attention and I see they're being moved by what I'm trying to do, then that might affect what I do going forward as well. And this is the kind of things where you can't just program this stuff into a machine, right? You can feed a machine some sheet music and it will play the right notes. But it's going to be like that sixth grade band member that's just learning to play, right? He might be able to play the right notes. That computer can play the right notes. But can it be musical? I would argue a machine can never actually be musical. We're never going to have artificial intelligence musicians because until you can actually have a machine that can have human feeling and emotion, have the human spirit. It can't be musical, right? Because music is not about math. It's not about science. It's not about crunching numbers. It's never been what music is. And I think that is the reason why modern music now has become just complete and total garbage. I think modern music is a dumpster fire. A lot of this started, like I said, in the mid 90s, kind of when I turned it off because I could see kind of where this was going. More and more artists were using computer filters to change their voice. I remember sometime in the mid to late 90s, Cher came out with that song. Do you believe in life after love? Whatever that, you know, she used auto tune in that song. And I mentioned that song in particular because that was really jarring at the time. That song was a huge hit for Cher back in the 90s. That song was, I believe, the first instance of an artist actually using auto tune. And because that song was so big and that shared tune, I admit, it's kind of catchy. Now, everybody wanted to use auto tune. Well, we want to add these really neat effects, just like Cher did, except instead of using it kind of sparingly, which is kind of what Cher did in that song. They used auto tune from start to finish in every song right now. You've got artists that all they do is auto tune everything and it just makes their voice just dead and lifeless. And it's just crazy when you listen to a modern singer and you listen to their voice with all these computer filters and auto tune and you go back and listen to, you know, some of the classic musicians pop and rock musicians from say like the 1950s, 1960s when they had absolutely no computers. They went to a recording studio. They had a microphone and they ran through many times they would run through a song, just the singer and his band one time. And however it turned out, they would put that sucker on some vinyl and put it out there. And you know what? To this day, those are still some of the best songs. And to this day, still some of the best artists when I listen to some old school 60s Motown records, you know, those things sound great. I remember, you know, some of the late 50s and 60s, one of my favorite singers, Sam Cook, just the voice of an angel. This was way before computers. And when you listen to Sam Cook sing, it's just the pure singer. It's just exactly how he would have sounded in real life because that's all there was back then real life. He went to a music studio, recorded many times. He did one take. And that's actually how the man sounded. And nobody does that now. And I think a lot of that is because we've got so many people that want to be stars. They want to be rock stars and pop stars. And some of these people don't have the kind of talent that true musicians had to have back before the days of all these computers and auto tune and everything. And because of that, you've got these people that go into the music industry relying on auto tune because they can't sing. And you see this sometimes, especially when you go see some of your favorite artists, modern day artists live and they can't perform live because they can't perform at all what you're hearing on those records, on those albums that you go by the digital downloads or whatever, you know, that's all made up stuff. You know, that's the recording studio doing their magic with all their computers, you know, producing that song. That artist actually can't sing a lick and it's sad. And a lot of this is not just the convenience of the musician that can't actually sing or play. Some of this is convenience for these music studios too because all they want to do, they don't care if you can sing, they don't care if you can play the guitar, play the drum, whatever it happens to be. They're just trying to make a record as quickly as possible and then move on and record the next artist or the next group. So they're going to use auto tune all the time even if you didn't want to use it. They're pushing auto tune on everybody because that means we don't have to spend days or weeks recording an album trying to get everything, right? Everything in tune, everything sounding just right. It doesn't matter. Sing it however badly you want to sing it, we'll fix it. You know, we'll just run it through a computer filter and fix everything for you and it'll just be just like that and then we can push you out the door and your record out the door and then we can get the next person in here and we can record them. And it's just sad. It's a sad state that the music industry is in and I long for the day where we go back to just human beings with absolutely no computer technology, right? Old school analog technology is fine. I don't mind people plugging in an electric guitar to an amplifier or something like that but we've got to get the computers out of modern day music. And I know that's a little bit of a random rant but coming from a musician again, I've done some music videos here on the channel in the past. Matter of fact, the song that served as the intro to this video was me playing on the trombone. That was a piece of music for trombone and piano. Of course I was the trombonist playing with a pianist and we were actually performing that live in front of a few hundred people. And again, because it was in front of a live audience it really affected the way that piece was performed. You know, it's different. When I'm just practicing alone at my house, you know in a bedroom somewhere where it happens to be and I'll perform something differently than I'm performing in front of an intimate group of people and especially if it's an intimate group of people that actually know some of these people in real life. And on that point, I think I'm just gonna close the video off with a little more of me playing live with no computers, no auto-tune, just me and an audience and raw human emotion. And of course I wanna thank the patrons. I'll flash their names on the screen as the song plays on our way out. Peace guys.