SamDBL wrote:But saying a musical instrument is anything you create music is too broad. You are not playing an instrument in any real sense of the term when you cut and paste stuff around on a computer. As stated, there is an artistic aspect to that. But it is not playing an instrument when you are using protools, or whatever.
Does your wide brush also paint Industrial genre bands this way?
I'm not terribly familiar in the type, but I think of Ministry, NIN, etc. using samples of factory machine sounds on loops. Those examples probably lend themselves to a spurious comeback, because there was some distorted guitar played over it, but I'm sure there's plenty of Industrial bands that were/are 100% sequenced/"fake" instruments.
SamDBL wrote:It's as morertophorical as saying a recording studio is a musical instrument. No it isn't.
I had to look up "moretophorical".
But, weird coincidence, I was just reading an article last night about Zepplin's "Houses of the Holy" where they used that phrase... that Page was expanding his experimental palett by
"using the recording studio as a musical instrument." The Beatles were certainly known for using the mixing board, tape loops, etc. as "instruments" in their own right. Sure, I'd counter that some analog traditional instrument signal was fed into the rotating Leslie speaker and backwards-tape looped through an echo machine, but... Shrug.
I must be bored to spar on this subject, because I truly detest rap music and would never argue it's GOOD. I just am open to allowing for use of whatever "instrument" happens to let out someone's artistic expression, whether or not it is plucked, strummed, hit with a stick, input on a keyboard, whistled, blown across a reed, tipped over like a rainstick, or not even touched at all like a theremin.