Racism and Electronics

Like many, I suspect I have sat out the last week in disbelief. I am not American and so, unlike those who are, I will not be directly affected by the recent election. However, it is true to say that its effects ripple around the world. This is literally true on a subject like climate change, a thing Trump and many of his closest allies have disavowed as a scam or made up. My Twitter feed since last Tuesday night has resembled some fictional dystopia. I read that people generally follow those who mirror their own views, the so-called echo chamber, and so people who more or less represent views I would go along with have related with varying degrees of explanatory power and personal involvement just what the American electoral choice means for them. And then there is the nexus of media interests and journalists reporting to their taste. The New York Daily News's Shaun King has been detailing racist incident after racist incident since last Wednesday AM, a sickening and terrifying list of bigotry, hatred and stupidity. I'm sure many would tell me this is their reality, one that as a white European I'm privileged to be able to avoid. They are right, of course, but its no more my fault I was born white than someone else's that they were born something else. But it may be my responsibility to see past my whiteness. If I can.

This whole area of race and nationality annoys, confuses and frustrates me. There are obviously people prepared to use it their advantage, people who see in skin tones or in passports differences, fundamental, unbridgeable differences. I don't see that and I certainly don't WANT to see that. But this is where it gets confusing because there are certainly people of many nationalities, races or creeds who DO want to view themselves as different or set apart based on these things and these are not just malignant, racist people. So it becomes hard to think clearly about such issues and not step on someone else's toes. I'm quite aware that by even writing about this particular hot potato of a subject I may be inadvertently offending someone. And offending anyone is not my aim here. If anything this blog is being written just to address my own person frustrations about and problems with the subject. This is a personal blog not an authoritative article.

As it became clear that racists had captured the White House, something brought home even more now since Trump appointed Steve Bannon of Breitbart infamy as his senior counselor and policy advisor, I wondered what I could do to signal, in my own puny way, some measure of dissent. I am not a political animal. I am not even a social animal. I live my life withdrawn from society. Occasionally, however, I look out of the window from behind my curtains (which are always closed) and am assaulted by the things that for many others are normal, everyday events. Seeing all the hatred, unfairness and egotism of society often makes me feel ill. I have felt ill this past few days too. Its one reason I've deliberately withdrawn from it. Maybe you want to blame me for that. Its true that I can imagine many who are politically engaged who might want to. For such people its a person's duty to fight injustice. And yet, as I see it, so many people's lives are torn up and thrown away as they are totally consumed by politics. I'm aware that if everyone just shut themselves away then opposing forces would win without so much as a fight and that certainly is a concern. But is the alternative that every person opposed must lay down their life on the altar of political differences? That sounds like a recipe for constant conflict and war.

I was about to write that clearly no one wants that but that wouldn't be true, would it? Some do want war. Some do want conflict. Some do want to provoke trouble. The world is full of such damaged humans. And these damaged people damage even more, a repeating tragedy. But must I spend my life fighting them? I ask this question of myself openly like I hope others do too. But I don't think I can tell others what they should do or how they should react. Some people do think they can do that. In my mind this all seems very reminiscent of how it must have felt to be a German in the 1930s. Although Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, his NSDAP party never won an outright majority at an election. The best they got was 43.91% of the vote in the March 1933 election during which their thugs had engaged in much voter intimidation. But even with this intimidation they'd failed to achieve a majority. Hitler had to manipulate the German head of state and outlaw other parties after this win to finally achieve an effective one party state so he could push through laws which made him Germany's dictator. I've been reading about this in the last few days, spurred on to do it having once lived in Germany for a number of years and looking for parallels to other things. I've also always wondered how Nazism could ever have happened. I ask myself what an "ordinary German" must have been thinking. I ask myself what an "ordinary German" was to do about it. I ask that because I've been fortunate to know many good "ordinary Germans".

These aren't simple questions to ask because we know that even at this early stage of the official Nazi regime the first concentration camps were being built and people, especially the communists Hitler despised along with other political opponents, were being disappeared, some never to be seen again. If you were just an ordinary citizen could you afford to show dissent? Would you be prepared to potentially end your life for a point of view? Now for all the modern parallels we may see or want to make (Steve Bannon seems very much like Trump's Goebbels to me) we have to acknowledge that the USA is not (yet) Nazi Germany. But we also need to be aware that there is a very specific racial history to the country we now call America. And this is not just about slavery or black and white as the the recent Dakota Pipeline protests show us. Although no American white racist is apparently aware of this fact, America was not originally white. If this land ever was or is a "white land" then it is only because it was forcibly stolen from indigenous peoples, peoples that were neither black nor white. In many ways these are the forgotten people of what is now known as America. And these people are not "Native Americans" either for they are pre-Americans! America is, as I have heard some of them say, nothing to do with them. America is what came and destroyed and stole where they once lived.

I already feel like I'm getting into deep waters and it would be easy to drown myself in them. Racial difference and racial divides run deep and their currents can easily drag us under. And its not just about the Nazis or American history either. My own country of the UK has experienced racial problems too and racial incidents rose after the Brexit vote much as they have seemingly done in the USA in the last few days. This was inevitable as political victories embolden those who formerly judged the public mood as intolerant of their antediluvian views. But in other countries, too, race and nationality divide. The whole of Europe has been rocked in the last 18 months as Arab and African refugees struggle across a body of water in ramshackle boats or across land from one country to another seeking better conditions to live their lives. Thousands die in the attempt and many make it only to find that the press and media of the countries they land in are hostile to the foreigner or outsider, whipping up resentment and hatred quite openly. Politically, many European countries have parties dedicated to a politics of race. One need only think of Marine Le Pen's Front Nationale in France, Geert Wilders' PVV in the Netherlands or Frauke Petry and the AfD in Germany. And that is before we get to Trump's best British friend, the utterly opportunistic Nigel Farage, a man who once said in public that he would not like Romanians living next door to him.

Its all a terrible, life-affecting mess and I appreciate only too well that many people's lives are materially affected by this reality in a way that mine is not. I wrestle with my conscience over this daily because I cannot help but care about it. I fundamentally do not see differences between people based on nationality or even race (albeit that I leave people to define for themselves who or what they are) and despair that others do. It bothers me that a person's status in this world is based on a passport, something that was really only invented in the recent past anyway. I have spoken before in these blogs about some of my intellectual influences and one of them was the great pragmatist, liberal philosopher, Richard Rorty. Rorty saw justice, racial as well as any other kind, as a matter of an ever increasing "larger loyalty". He saw the task of the human being as to increase the number of people to whom it felt allegiance so that, ultimately, you would feel the same loyalty to one person as you would to any other. You can see that this is a program that is the opposite of difference and division based on something like race or nationality. Such differences, so Rorty thought, had to be negotiated away so that, eventually, the words foreigner or stranger would completely lose their meaning and emotional force. Now clearly this is a white, liberal, American philosophy professor's way of expressing these ideals but such was the way they came to me. I heartily agree with this idea.

And so it was in this spirit that, as I was looking back over my podcast series, The Electronic Oddities Podcast, it struck me that the people in it were almost totally white. I have often tried to focus on "pure electronics" within the series and maybe that just is a white domain. I even wrote an article about this for this blog and, in the writing of it, managed not to notice that the famous electronic musician, Richard Devine, is apparently of Asian origin even though he was born in the USA. I had always considered him to be white and it never occurred to me to think anything else. I was embarrassed to have this pointed out to me in various Facebook comments where I had posted the article. However, rather fewer (one, in fact) pointed out that the female synthesist, Bana Haffar, wasn't white either. It may be that she is not as well known, of course, but I admit I had mis-identified her knowingly to see if anyone picked up on it. As I say, just one pointed out to me she is of Lebanese heritage. However, as I now look back on my podcast series it does look like a catalog of white guys in the main and, yes, this does bother me. In the article I had previously written I had asked for examples of non-white synthesists and whilst I got some names back it wasn't lots and lots. So it must either be that they don't exist or, more likely, that the white clubs that are the electronic music discussion groups online are all white people talking about other white people.

This bothers me because in the abstract electronic music I have come to favour I do not see difference and division. I see in the swirling, noisy movements of an oscillator a lack of definition, a refusal to be anything other than a continual becoming. I see the politics of difference and division as, once again, human hubris, a knowing too much which is, in reality, the mere assertion of ignorance. My vision of electronic music, a music of electronics, does not square with a racist worldview but with Rorty's "larger loyalty" instead. And so I do not want to present a podcast which is a "white man's music". It should not matter who did it, where they are from or what gender they are. Whilst recognizing that people do come from differing cultures and inform their identities by such things, in some sense I think electronic music should be colour blind. I look back on my own music history and how I came to be aware of music itself and it is often dominated by black musicians. My mother played The Supremes when I was a child on an old radiogram. I lived next door to a Jamaican family growing up and they played reggae and ska music. The latter was the first kind of music I took as "my own" when I started to like music for myself. In my teenage years, as I discovered the synthesizer which was played by white men, I simultaneously learnt about black disco, soul and funk and this has always been a musical grounding for my appreciation of sound. I would be missing a huge musical education without it.

I have yet to find huge hidden reserves of non-white electronic music for my podcast. (Of a "pure electronics" kind, at least. If we open out the definition then "electronic music of colour" is everywhere.) I have begun to search. I am intrigued to find if there are some hidden forms somewhere that can broaden and enrich the music that I have heard so far. And this is what it would be: an enrichment. I know, for example, that there is a large, and to me largely unknown, Japanese electronic culture. I think it needs to be remembered that there is no loss involved in finding something different. It only adds more variety to the whole. This week's podcast will be music entirely from non-Caucasian artists and, yes, this is a deliberate choice. I've been listening to the music chosen for it as I wrote this blog and it is a beautiful edition full of diverse styles and moods. Apart from the few known artists I've included, the music itself, which is largely instrumental, gives no clues as to its origin and that is how it should be. It is just music made by humans that anyone should be able to enjoy. I unashamedly say, as I've said before in these blogs, that I strive not to see artificial differences but just people of one race, the human race. To some that will make me a "globalist", something in opposition to their narrow nationalism. They are right because it is. No nation is going to survive that sees itself in isolation from the rest of the planet it is but a tiny part of. All of humanity's problems will be solved together. OR NOT AT ALL. It is my tiny and probably unnoticed gesture to try and curate a podcast series that includes electronic music made by all kinds of people as an expression of this. To be honest, it troubles me how white so much of a more electronic kind of music seems to be. One thing I can do is give a little light to that which isn't.

The Electronic Oddities Podcast is at https://www.mixcloud.com/DrExistenz/

What Kind of Electronic Musician Are You?

I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. - David Lynch

Today's blog will not be for everyone since it is to be my own ruminations on a couple of interviews I've done recently with Marc Doty, synth educator, demonstrator and archivist, and Tony Rolando, founder and main inspiration behind Make Noise, the synthesizer manufacturer. To be straight with you, I'm going to discuss below my own thoughts on something that everyone fundamentally has and needs: a context for setting their understanding of electronic music within. To be clear: we all have this and we all need this. If you had no context to set your understanding of electronic music within or no way to relate the electronic sounds you hear or make to one another, or to lots of others you've heard or made before, then all the music you make would be both equal and meaningless, equally meaningless. It is having this framework, what I'm here calling a philosophy, that enables you to decide good or bad, desirable or undesirable, music or noise (where these are seen as opposites - and they need not be). That's why I think you should keep reading if you make or listen to electronic music. Because this concerns you. But I understand if you want all this baggage left undisturbed and undiscussed. Many do. Thanks for reading this far and I hope you'll stop by to read another blog soon.

                               The Lyra 8 Organismic Synthesizer

For those of you still here I want to start by addressing a number of things that Marc Doty brought up in his interview with me recently. Although I've never met Marc personally, I like him quite a lot. A lot of the reason for that is that he has opinions on electronic music and electronic music making and he is prepared to explain them and, if necessary, defend them too. It probably helps that, instinctively, I want to disagree with Marc's views as well. Wise people realize that they learn as much, if not more, from those they disagree with as those who share similar views. When differing views can be discussed, or contrasted and compared, in a spirit of mutual respect this is even better. Marc is certainly a person who can do this and I value that greatly.

But on to matters more electronic. Marc starts his interview with me by stating that he is happy to see reissues of old classic synths because, in a number of cases, they don't have any memories or way to save patches. This forces the necessity of something that may or may not be quite rare on some synthesizers: synthesis! Marc states that he is happy if people are shepherded by these classic instruments into needing to learn something about synthesis. It can certainly be argued that as technology progressed and memories and presets got added to synths that synthesis was de-emphasized. Marc says that this happened to him too. It certainly did to me. Its all too easy to just take the sounds that are there and do nothing more than a perfunctory tweak. Some softsynths today even have several hundred sounds so why would you ever need to learn how to make your own? But on an MS-20 or an Arp Odyssey or, if you have the money, a Minimoog none of this exists. If you want a sound then you have to make it. And then you have to learn how to make others too. And how to get back to the first one if you forgot to take notes on how you made it. Synthesizers are for synthesis is what Marc seems to say. I couldn't agree more. This is one reason I have veered into interest in modular synthesis because there memories and saving things are much more difficult if not impossible. And that is very good.

Right from the start here I am revealing something about my own philosophy of electronic music and, at this point at least, it seems that Marc and myself are of one mind. But it becomes pretty clear as Marc gives his answers to my questions in his interview that we diverge quite soon afterwards. I asked Marc specifically about Eurorack synthesis in my interview with him because I had a sense from snippets of things he'd said before that it didn't seem to sit right with him. I was delighted when he went into detail in his replies to me about what the problems with it were from his perspective. One problem seems to be, in the wider Eurorack culture as whole at least, that Eurorack synths aren't played with a musical keyboard. Marc likes the keyboard in a way that many within Eurorack (and Buchla and Serge and other types of) doing synthesis seem not to. In this respect Marc Doty and Morton Subotnick, the earliest of adopters of the Buchla way of doing synthesis, are complete opposites. Marc describes how he has tailored his whole appreciation of doing synthesis to using the musical keyboard as his input device. Subotnick, should you ever ask him about using a black and white keyboard, will pull a face as if you've just asked him to eat food that disgusts him. He sees it as a way to make what he calls "old music", music he doesn't want to make. For future reference, I'm with Morton here. 

And I'm not the only one. Alessandro Cortini explains in an interview with Nick Batt of Sonicstate from 2015 that one reason he plays Buchla gear is that this paradigm is not based on ability to play a musical keyboard. He says he is "not a player". And this is relevant because, since roughly the 1980s, new electronic music technology has meant that the traditional music making skill required before then to make music, playing ability, was needed less and less. Computers have meant that you can literally build patterns, melodies and harmonies step by step as opposed to in real time based on ability to play. You no longer need to play to make electronic music because you can program instead. Cortini even goes so far as to say in the same interview with Nick Batt that he doesn't need to know what is in front of him in a Buchla system. "I just need to stand in front of it and weird stuff usually comes out" is his comment on the process. Most would say, listening to his work, that it is profoundly musical but also significantly melodic. These qualities carry over in his music if the instrument is a VCS3 or an MC-202 or a Make Noise Shared System as well.

       A Buchla 200e system with one of Don Buchla's touchplate keyboards

The notable thing about all this is that Cortini did not need a musical keyboard or playing chops to achieve this. Instead he just needed an instrument through which musical instincts could be suitably expressed. What's more, it seems to me that it is simply a fact that since the 1980s, and certainly since the rise of the computer, most people making electronic music aren't players of a musical keyboard in a traditional sense at all either. Many may not know a thing about musical theory or chord shapes, for example. Even in the 1980s there was already the trope of the synth player playing a one finger synth line on a synth with a traditional keyboard to the ridicule of his cultural contemporaries. But the fact is that technology changed who could even make music electronically. It was also in the 1980s that the TB-303 was invented, an instrument that had a representation of the keyboard on its faceplate but that wasn't there to be played. It was there so you could program pitches. This instrument by itself invented a whole genre of new music in acid house. So electronic music technology became a democratizing leveling of the playing field that took away the need to learn how to play a keyboard, often a difficult and time consuming process, to make electronic music. Making specifically electronic music became an easier thing to do and more about mashing buttons than learning a centuries old playing technique. Incidentally, to me this also makes the regular arguments about minikeys on instruments rather moot too since I imagine the vast majority of synth buyers today can barely play a note either. Because, today, you need that ability even less.

It will be clear to all reading this with an interest in the subject that if you want to play with synthesizers then there are a number of ways you can go about your interest. One basic choice you will have to make, and Marc saw this just as clearly as I did when posing him a rather playful question about it, is if you will have a keyboard attached to your synth or not. I think both Marc and I realize that this will fundamentally affect the type of music you can or will want to make. So its not a trivial decision. Morton Subotnick, Alessandro Cortini and Tony Rolando, too, all realise that adding a keyboard, or leaving it off, makes a difference in where you can, or will want, to go musically. So no one should regard this as a rather pointless question. It isn't at all. A Buchla synth or a Make Noise system are things ideologically conceived to make certain things possible and certain things not possible or, at the very least, much more difficult. It was the same with Moog's modular as Marc Doty could talk about at great length I'm sure. I respect Marc for pointing out that Bob Moog's original keyboard controller for the Moog Modular allowed significantly more leeway for user calibration of its possibilities than many keyboards since. But I end up falling in line with Morton Subotnick who conceives that the musical keyboard simply has too much traditional baggage to be used to find new kinds of music. To just sit in front of such a keyboard, even attached to the most modern of synths, is to hear a thousand music teachers telling you how it SHOULD be played.

And so it comes down to a keyboard paradigm or a machine paradigm, a playing paradigm or a sequencing paradigm. Buchla was the second and Moog was the first (in general terms. All of computer and much modular music is the second too.) This was even more so in terms of how these paradigms have been taken up by their users and adherents. Its in this sense, I think, that Marc Doty regards Eurorack as a Buchla-influenced "machine music". With Eurorack most users use the machine to organise the music. They are programmers or conductors (not negative terms as I use them) rather than players. If you have a keyboard synth, a synth that is a descendant of Moog's fateful decision to add a keyboard to his first modular, then the suggestion at the very least is that you are supposed to play it. The keyboard sits there and begs you to play notes and chords. This then becomes a fateful moment of decision too because keys on a keyboard are primarily on/off switches for pitch information. Keyboards play pitched music. And pitched music, contrary to the unprobed assumptions of some people, is not the same as music as a whole. For we also have unpitched music. We also have sound collage. We also have noise. And pitched keyboards aren't very good for that for they were designed exactly to be able to make pitched music that was the intention of musicians. "Intention" is another problem with musical keyboards too because we can imagine a music that is not intentional. We can imagine randomness. We can imagine soundscape. We can imagine chaos. 

Now some imagine only harmony but others can imagine disharmony, what John Cage called "the co-existence of dissimilars". Cage, in his book Silence, referred to this disharmony as "simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed". This suggests the thought that notions of musical correctness or incorrectness, of validity or invalidity, of harmony or disharmony, are not much more than ingrained habits. And habits can be changed. Or educated. Or got rid of. I imagine that this is what Tony Rolando of Make Noise means when he quotes the ethos of his company as making instruments that cause their users "to change our trajectories and thereby impact the way we understand and imagine sound". Indeed, Rolando said explicitly in his answers to my questions that, for him, "music is noise, noise is music". And I take this very much on board in my own philosophy. We have a choice, it seems to me. We can look back to our forebears and regard them, technological or theoretical, as our limitations or we can see them as nothing more than a history of what has been done so far, something to which we hope to add but without necessarily repeating. Tony Rolando nails this by saying "Art does not have to be organized by the parameters set by those people from our past. We should look to those people for our inspiration, not restriction". The suggestion, then, is that Rolando looks forward with a knowledge of what's behind rather than looking behind and hoping to make more of it in the future. The enemy here is always conforming to some past sacred notion and the ideal is a "wild west" of ideas and electronic musical practice.

A Roland System 8. Would the music made with this sound like that from a Buchla 200e?

But back to Marc Doty and his thoughts about Eurorack for I found this to be the heart of the musical differences, inclinations and instincts between us. Eurorack is, perhaps, a contentious thing within the synthesizer community as a whole because it can easily be caricatured as the latest cool, hipster craze. As is the nature of these things in a social context, it seems to some like the next big thing people feel pressured to get involved in if they want to be seen to be in with the right people or part of the right group. I don't see it like this. I just see it as a very interesting set of electronic tools for creating and manipulating sounds. Marc agrees with me here I'm sure but thereafter we go our different ways. This is because Marc sees Eurorack as basically being under the Buchla paradigm, machine music as opposed to played/performed sound. In my interview with Tony Rolando of Make Noise he put forward the view that as far as he was concerned the format was agnostic mainly, or so I got the impression, because it was just a format and within it you could have modules or synthesis methods snatched from any form of synthesis you could imagine. And you absolutely could strap a keyboard to this if you wanted to as well (although I doubt Tony encourages it!).

Now the Buchla paradigm that Marc sees as influencing the culture and practice of Eurorack is notable because both Don Buchla, its inventor and also a musician himself (unlike Bob Moog), and its first users, Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, certainly wanted to make what they saw as a new kind of music. And they all thought that to make new music you needed a new process to do it. They thought that if you used old tools you'd always be tempted to fall back into old ways and make what Subotnick calls to this day "new old music". So this explains their dislike of the musical keyboard as opposed to Marc Doty's dogged arguments in favour of using the keyboard in as many ways as are imaginable. This is relevant to us here now because with the modular synths we have today, seemingly dominated by the popularity of Eurorack (which may turn out to be Don Buchla's lasting legacy within synthesis as opposed to his own format machines which are much more expensive and very rare), we have completely different forms of music being made than are being made with fixed architecture synths of all kinds. These synths, of course, have keyboards attached. Or maybe they are hooked up to computers and used as sound modules. Or maybe a desktop version of such a synth is used in which case it can be attached to a sequencer or, perhaps more likely, a computer for playing purposes. From many angles, "traditional" electronic music is under attack. 

These attacks to the traditional player's paradigm, the one Moog used urged on by Herb Deutsch, have changed how electronic music sounds. The baton is passing, with desktop synths, synths connected to computers and modular synths of all kinds that use formats not reliant on musical keyboards as input devices, from people who are trained musicians, like Marc Doty, to untrained nerds like Alessandro Cortini and everyone who dreams of being like him. With phenomena like the Eurorack movement in synthesis what we see is the rise of the person who likes to tinker with things and see what they can come up with. The emphasis is on experiment and possibility rather than the use of musical training. Of course, in the experiment and possibility you will inevitably pick up some self-taught knowledge of your own. But it won't be official or kosher or canonical. On this new technological paradigm, which has enabled new individuals completely outside of the guild of what were formerly thought of as musicians to take part, a new musical culture has been created and new ways of doing old things (i.e. making electronic music) have been invented. This has sometimes caused conflicts as when, in early Eighties Great Britain, the actual Musician's Union tried to ban acts like Depeche Mode or The Human League or Gary Numan because it was perceived their ways of making music took away opportunities from what were then perceived to be "real musicians", i.e. ones who could play instruments. It shows how far we have come with technology and with technological ways of making music that this argument wouldn't even be imagined today. Electronic methods won as Jean-Michel Jarre rightly said recently.

Various Eurorack modules made by Make Noise. The synthesis power of such modules as against other fixed types of synthesis and synthesizers is unarguable.

But where does this leave my argument with Marc Doty? I think that it perhaps leaves Marc on the wrong side of history. But that is okay for I don't mean to suggest that there is anything wrong with playing or using a keyboard. Neither do I conceive of it dying out. In fact, its not even the case that I don't value music made with them because, of course, I do. Like anyone else reading this, most of the electronic music I will have ever heard was made using one. So how could I not like them? I see it a bit like John Cage sees dissonance in his book Silence. There he says that "dissonances and noises" are welcome in experimental music "but so is the dominant 7th chord if it happens to put in an appearance". So why do I see Marc on the wrong side of history? I think its because I'd like to think that the keyboard has had its day and that we need to find new ways, complimentary ways perhaps, to make electronic music. I think that Don Buchla invented one and that Eurorack manufacturers are inventing them too. I think that technology and innovation has unwittingly accelerated this process. And, yes, even Bob Moog helped this along as well. I think Marc is on the wrong side of history because he is seeking to carry on an old tradition rather than trying to invent or take part in new ones. Now there is nothing wrong with him doing that and I like much of the music that he has made. Some of his theme tunes for his demonstration videos are insanely good and I hum them repeatedly. But we've done that now. Let's do something else.

But there is a further component to this and its a matter of musical philosophy. Indeed, it comes to the very heart of making music at all. It starts off with the point that electronic music making paradigms are implicit instantiations of how we see the world. They are generalized ways of seeing things with everything that implies. For example, I regard so-called machine music that cannot be repeated, perhaps because it contains machine randomizations that are not recallable or desired as repeatable phenomena, as in tune with the flux of our reality. I see, perhaps like Kraftwerk with their talk of The Man Machine or like Daft Punk with their ruminations on the same issue through their Human After All album and the associated film, Daft Punk's Electroma, that "machine music" may be made by machines but, actually, its not lacking in humanity or reality at all. Indeed, it can even be perceived as thoroughly natural and in tune with the wider reality that we are a part of. For in a random, self-generating patch constructed on some modular synth that requires no creator, no God plinky-plonking out their intentions on a keyboard, do we not have a perfect model, a creative, artistic picture, of the constantly fluctuating reality that we inhabit?

This is perhaps a deeper thought than many contemplate as they switch on their synth, of whatever kind, and begin affecting its outcomes. And yet, for me, it is the machine music that is human and authentic and not the music coming from the player paradigm, music that is a repeatable freezing in time of a canonized linear collection of note values. I ask myself what could be more foreign to an experience of life than that? For real life is forever in flux, always moving, a river that never stops. Its not something to be frozen, notated and repeated. And that's what the old music was and its what old music made with synthesizers still is as I see it. To my mind, if electronic music is to be anything significant then it must throw off this old and once useful idea and become something else, a technological expression of an ever more technological race. The player paradigm, if you think about it, is actually just very artificial and machine music, in its ability to reflect and mimic a truer picture of reality, is more authentic. Silver Apples of The Moon trumps Switched on Bach.

This, anyhow, is how I explain my current preferences. But there is one more thing influencing my thinking that leads me to machine music and away from the player paradigm. And that's what John Cage has to say about intentionality in music. In Silence he critiques those who regard music as "sounds intentionally made". This notion, I believe, is crucial to the player paradigm of electronic music as I've discussed it in this blog. But it is anathema to Cage's understanding of any kind of music at all. Not only is this a deeply conservative and limiting idea of what music can be but it is, as a matter of fact, not even correct. Music can be sound unintentionally made or even sounds without intention. This is part of the reason why Cage's 4'33" exists. Now Cage is very aware that it will take some kind of psychological turn, a flicking of the switch, to see this so it seems implicit in his thought that not everyone will. But that turn, once taken, opens up a whole new understanding of music and its one that electronic music makers, as the musicians of both possibility and of the future, should be benefiting from the most. For Cage this turn leads to nature and to seeing that, in the giving up of the cherished notion of music as intention, a notion still very dominant even amongst electronic music makers today, that nothing has in fact been lost. For Cage, "sounds may occur in any combination and in any continuity". Cage sees music as not much more than, in some sense, organized sounds and silence. And that organization may be little more than preparing the conditions for some music's appearance. He thinks that taking music forwards involves finding ways and means by which musicians can "remove themselves from the activities of the sounds they make". That doesn't have to be modular synthesis but it certainly sounds a lot like it as practiced by people on Buchlas, Serges or many kinds of Eurorack system.

I began this blog, which I'm aware has gone on longer than usual, with the title "What kind of electronic musician are you?" When you began reading it may not have occurred to you that there were differing kinds of electronic musician but I hope that now, at least, you can see that all electronic musicians have choices to make, directions to look in and ideals to live up to for we all stand in relation to everyone else making electronic music and this very fact is how we define who we are and what we think we are doing. So I want to say at this point that each one in turn chooses what they are and its nobody's business but their own what they choose. However, the choices we make will reveal what we see electronic music as being about, where we root ourselves within its on-going culture and for what we are aiming. This is inevitable if we make any sounds and much more so if we share them with others. No choice we might make is wrong but each will reveal what we value.

If we imagine a Moog/Buchla divide, as I did when interviewing Marc Doty, then I am on the Buchla side. I want to make new music, music not involving keyboard skills or knowledge. I agree with Subotnick that to get a keyboard involved is to be inevitably tempted back into old ways. Its because I want to explore new ways that I make this choice and not because I think all keyboard music is rubbish. I don't and it isn't. This is to separate what I like to hear as a listener from what I want to make as a creator. Tony Rolando expressed this perfectly when he said that he can appreciate The Beatles but that doesn't mean he wants to make Beatles music. In a similar way I like lots of kinds of music but that doesn't mean I want to make them. I am different from all those people who want to sound like..... and then they append the name of their favourite group or music idol. I want to sound like a group of one, the people who are me. 

The Minimoog, a synthesizer known primarily for the sound it can make. 

John Cage wasn't big on the idea of music as expression or communication. He didn't think that sounds had a message. Far from it, he thought that we should just let sounds be what they are. Marc Doty, in his interview, when answering a question about making the most of our tools, made the distinction between music as personal endeavour and music made for the enjoyment of others. He seemed to suggest that the more you made the first the less likely it would also be in the second category. The problem is when making electronic music, which has the capacity to be as weird as it gets as forms of human musical creation go, I don't control anybody but myself. (Often I don't control that either but I digress.) I can form and shape myself as a person. I can educate myself about the music I am making and why. If I make harsh noise or abstract bleeps I can rationalize that in my mind or assign it a place in my understanding intellectually and emotionally. But I can't do that for anyone else. Everyone else hears what I do through the filter of their own context and understandings. For me it is part explanation of my understanding of who I am and being alive as a being in the world and also the soundtrack to that process. But its not that for anyone else. Its just more music in a world overflowing with the stuff. 

People complain a lot about electronic music. Its either too bland, too traditional or too mainstream or too abstract, too bleepy or too random. Really this is all just about how we as people understand what we have heard. When I hear bleeps and blips I often find this very amenable. Why? Because as I process this within my web of understanding I can make sense of it and assign it a musical place within my life. Many others may not be able to do that. They just hear meaningless noises. But when I hear the same "meaningless noises" they take on meaning. Music does not come with values attached. WE ATTACH THE VALUE. So electronic music like any music does not come to us with its meaning and importance inherent within it. We give it those things as we are able. And its exactly those values I've been trying to show up in this blog today. Even if it was only to make you aware that you had some. Because you do. As I said right at the start, thats how you decide if some piece of electronic music is worthwhile, good, desirable, nice, exciting or anything else at all. But its also how you decide what kind of music you want to make as a creator of electronic music.

The Arp 2600 which is a better synth than the Minimoog because its semi-modular and thus has much more variety and possibility inherent within it.

In the end, equipment doesn't matter. Its not about which synth you have, how big your setup up is, what it cost, or anything like that. Its about what it sounds like and what the end product is. Music is sound. Music is noise. Music is not stuff or pictures of your gear. Of course, what you use will determine your possibilities. This is why I favour electronic music options influenced by the machine music paradigm because I value what I think it can give me as a creator and I think it can give me more than other options. But I'm quite prepared to acknowledge that there are many "players" who make music I like too. Its just, as with Tony Rolando, that doesn't mean I want to repeat them. What I want to do is make electronic music that doesn't make sense. Because life doesn't make sense. Life is absurd (which is why my blog is Absurdwurld). And so art that aims to be true to life should be absurd too.

I totally get David Lynch's frustration.

An Interview with Tony Rolando (Make Noise)

• Anthony Rolando is the founder and head honcho of Make Noise, one of the big noises in the ever-growing Eurorack modular synthesizer scene. The company have quickly established themselves in the 8 years of their existence into one of the more widely known manufacturers in this modular format and besides manufacturing modules of varying kinds influenced by various past and current types of synthesis in which they seemingly mix and match their influences at will, they also market complete systems and, as of this year with their 0-Coast instrument, also stand alone devices. Make Noise gear first came to my attention shortly after they started making it and I sought it out and was personally impressed by what struck me as their fresh and positive approach to synthesis as demonstrated through their products. I then caught a few interviews and talks that Tony Rolando gave and were captured for posterity in places like You Tube and it became clear that there was a thought process and indeed, a man of ideas, behind the modules. So after my interview with Marc Doty that I published a few days ago the idea came to approach Tony and see if he too would share a little of his philosophy and thought process as it relates to synthesis, synthesizers and electronic music. I was happy when he agreed to do this. Below are the questions I asked him and the answers he gave back.

The Black and Gold Shared System by Make Noise

ME: Tony, can you give readers the short version of your own electronic music history? What are your influences both musical and technological?

TONY: Earliest electronic music discoveries for me were the Tape Music, musique concrete, of Pierre Schaeffer and others and then Morton Subtonick’s Silver Apples of the Moon. That would have been about 1989. I searched for years for an Arp 2600 or some other modular synthesizer. I purchased reel to reel tape machines and made attempts at tape music. I programmed the Roland R8 drum machine and then the Akai MPC and also the Ensoniq Mirage sampler. I fell head over heels for the K2000 sampler and was thrilled to later discover that Bob Moog had worked on VAST development. 

I played music in bands and other ways for many years. I worked for 3 yrs at Moog Music. I founded Make Noise in 2008 to produce some small number of modules for the Eurorack format. Things changed dramatically over the past 3-4 years and now I am part owner of a company of 10 to 15 people that designs and builds electronic musical instruments.

ME: Its always struck me that your company is called Make Noise. I emphasize the NOISE part of this as opposed to sound or music. Am I right to do this? What's the musical philosophy behind the company, if Make Noise has such a thing, and how does this play out in the devices you produce?

TONY: The official statement (from the Make Noise website) reads:

“What started as a re-visioning of jettisoned music technology grew into a crew of folks—Make Noise—working together in Asheville, NC, to design and build some pretty strange, but thoughtful modular synthesizers. We see our instruments as a collaboration with musicians who create once in a lifetime performances that push boundaries and play the notes between the notes to discover the unfound sounds. We want our instruments to be an experience, one that will require us to change our trajectories and thereby impact the way we understand and imagine sound. Also, we think what we do is fun and we hope you like it, too.”

In short, noise is music, music is noise. Art does not have to be organized by the parameters set by those people from our past. We should look to those people for inspiration, not restriction.

ME: I'm a huge fan of the 0-Coast. I think its an extremely innovative instrument and a synthesis education all by itself. I think of something like the recent video you put up on your You Tube channel which showed how many of its circuits could be used as sound sources and not just the one labeled "oscillator", for example. Without giving away any future Make Noise product releases, do you see producing self-contained devices like this as something you'd like to pursue further and do you see further ground Make Noise could cover in this area?

TONY: We will likely develop more stand alone instruments and devices, but the core of our visions is the modular synthesizer system.

The Make Noise 0-Coast, so-called because it holds allegiance to no one form of synthesis. Its a self-contained synthesizer which, uniquely for Make Noise products, allows access via MIDI meaning that a standard MIDI keyboard can be attached directly to it for playing purposes.

ME: I recently interviewed Marc Doty and he described Eurorack as a whole as significantly influenced by Don Buchla's "machine music" paradigm of generating sounds from a synthesizer, a paradigm he said was focused on "the creation of automated electronic music with synthesizer sounds". Make Noise's Shared System is one of a few self-contained systems within the Eurorack world but it has no MIDI interface. As such, it seems to stand within this "machine music" paradigm of synthesis that Marc describes in that it discourages attaching a traditional musical keyboard to it and, therefore, it encourages other means of generating sounds such as your sequencer, Rene, and the Pressure Points module (for example). Is this Make Noise taking a side in the varying paradigms of generating sound from synthesizers and, if so, why have you chosen this side?

TONY: When I discovered the Control Voltage, I jettisoned MIDI. I find that MIDI is too hard to deviate from and often leads people to create the same music over and over again.

This idea that to create electronic music you must have a “bass drum, snare drum, hi-hat, bass synth, lead synth…” and so on is conforming far too much to the ideals of pop-rock music aka the Beatles. Like any breathing human I can appreciate the Beatles, but I have no interest in re-creating it.

So I no longer use MIDI. I did include it within the 0-COAST because I wanted to create an instrument that could be used by nearly any musician, and MIDI is a very common communication protocol that many musicians have access too and use. The hope though, is that these MIDI musicians will explore outside the MIDI control and use the CV I/O of the 0-COAST.

ME: Do you agree with Marc Doty when he describes Eurorack's "underlying focus" as a West Coast form of synthesis?

TONY: A great deal of the modules available in Eurorack format focus on East Coast techniques and then there are still more modules which are rooted in neither East nor West.

Eurorack is the very heart of No-Coast synthesis… where a system could include everything from a wave folder (west coast) to a ladder filter (east coast) and also a granular pitch shifter (cloud coast?).

We live in the midst of a synthesis revolution. Eurorack is unlike anything that has ever happened in synthesis technology. Only the software synthesis revolution of the late 90’s is even comparable. 

ME: If you had control of the entire Eurorack standard from a technical point of view what three things would you change about it?

TONY: I would change nothing. By changing anything about Eurorack you risk damaging its spirit, and the spirit of Eurorack is quite unique and amazing. No need to change it. Even the most poorly designed modules have their place in the history, if for no reason but to remind us how not to develop modules.

Sure there are flaws, but we work with those flaws daily and great things have happened in the last decade. Eurorack is the “wild west” and it should forever be so.

ME: A nice easy question to finish. Often I see threads across the Internet bemoaning the lack of "innovation" in synthesizers these days. So I want to ask you what is the future of synthesis in your view and what innovations should we be aiming for?

TONY: I disagree strongly. I feel that with the Eurorack community there is a great deal of innovation. So much that it is tough to follow all of it.

People who bemoan such things are merely bored and seeking human interaction via social media or forums where other people are also seeking human interaction. Just leave your home or office more often and enjoy the wonderful musical instruments and tools available to us today. Or take up the banjo.

Tony Rolando
I want to thank Tony for taking the time to do this interview and for sharing his thoughts. I find them to be both interesting and stimulating, especially when compared and contrasted with those expressed by Marc Doty on this blog just a few days ago. I shall have more to say about this in a future blog.

Which Synth Manufacturer is Getting It Right?

We're currently half way through the Autumn (or Fall as our American friends call it) and new synths have been released in the run up to Christmas. After the festive period all eyes will turn to NAMM a month later, the biggest music equipment trade fair, when music tech companies present their wares for the coming year. This is when secret projects (and sometimes unfinished ones!) get revealed to the public for the first time. Its then we get to see what new delights, damp squibs and more of the same but packaged differently the manufacturers have got up their sleeve. Its easy to get caught up in this kind of thing and you can turn into a person just surfing the wave of hype from one product announcement to the next. Needless to say, this is not really the point of being interested in synths or gear more generally. Not that Behringer have paid much attention to that this year with possibly the longest and most dragged out teaser campaign for a synth we've seen for many a long year. One has to hope that when the much discussed Deepmind 12 gets into real people's hands it delivers for it could surely be a disaster if for any reason it doesn't.

Thinking about all this set me thinking about the synth world in general and the various options that people interested in synthesizers have should they want to buy one. This, in turn, lead me to survey the various manufacturers and then a question came to mind. This question was to ask myself which manufacturers, over a period of time, seem to be getting things right and which seem to be producing duds or misses or just things that people don't seem to want. Now, of course, this all very much depends what people want from a synthesizer if they are going to judge if various companies are giving them what they want. But I tried to think broader than this. I was not asking myself which company is making the synth that I like. I was, instead, trying to ask myself which companies were and weren't providing a range of good quality instruments and I was thinking broader than myself in doing that. For example, lots of people seem to like Novation's groove box, Circuit. Personally, it doesn't impress me very much but I wouldn't necessarily hold that against Novation. Many others do seem to like it and that seems fair enough. So what I'm saying here is that in my deliberating I'm trying to see past the end of my own nose. Of course, I won't be able to cover every company so if I miss one its because I've made my own choices. And so with that I'll start my wander through synth world.

Let's start with Korg. Only today they have released a monophonic version of their Minilogue called the Monologue. This is yet another analog instrument and Korg have for a number of years now been fueling the analog fix people seem to have been requesting in their own way. This even extends to resurrecting analog classics like their own MS-20 or Arp's Odyssey. They've also not neglected those who want to make music but have limited budgets. Their Volca range is now well established with 6 models in the range so far and they also have an updated Electribe range. Via its analog modeling synth, the King Korg, we get to its workstation, the Korg Kronos, now in its second iteration. This is probably the best workstation out there right now if that is your thing. It contains models of some of their old synths too in the Polysix and MS-20, the latter of which can be played polyphonically here unlike the real thing.

                                                               The Korg Monologue

I'll be honest and say that Korg have for years seemed to me like a solid company if you are a synth fan. They always seem to have decent ideas that are well delivered. There aren't as many misses it seems to me. They are a bread and butter synth company in that they will always give you something you can work with. Granted, they may not always offer the flashiest products but they won't let you down either. A Korg instrument is always a decent bet. This is probably why in my time being interested in synths I've always had multiple Korg instruments to call upon. Sure, there are better things but Korg are a company who are a business and so they balance innovation with value. In doing so they supply solid workhorses at all levels of the marketplace. Perhaps, though, we could say that in recent years they have lacked an absolute killer instrument. Korg rarely make that one synth that just stands out from the crowd. But they do make best selling ones as their M1 and Microkorg are amongst the best selling synthesizers of all time.

And so we turn to their Japanese neighbours, Roland. Here my comments can only be controversial since Roland have chosen to take a very specific tack away from current popular consensus which is in favour of analog instruments and gone down the route of digitally modeling circuits from their old instruments (which were analog) in an attempt to present them new to the public. And so we have the Boutique series of digitally modeled polysynths and their Aira range which presents old classics like the TR-808 and TR-909 and the TB-303 in new guises. It is, I think, somewhat controversial that they have done this although they certainly seem to have found some following for these products. Others, however, are somewhat dubious about a company whose only idea seems to be to reissue things they had done before. These products came after the Jupiter 80, an expensive performance synth based on Roland's "Supernatural" synth technology which is also in their products such as the Integra 7, a rackmount synth presented in the somewhat older sound module format. The Jupiter 80 was widely panned, not least for pretending to wear the clothes of something it wasn't - the Jupiter 8. Thus, critics of Roland point out that they don't seem to have many new ideas. Roland themselves seem to say they don't want to just mimic everyone else and so they will happily go their own way.

                            The Roland JD-XA and System 8 together

My view on this is that Roland have seemed lost in the wilderness for 10-15 years now. Back in the 1980s they were at the top of their game with synths like the Jupiter 8, the drum machines mentioned above, the Juno series of the 6, 60 and 106 and even keyboards like the D-50 and JD-800 moving into the early 90s. In the 21st century Roland have seemed to have many fewer hits (the V-Synth being the most notable) and plenty of misses. There seems to have been an ideological vacuum at the top of the company and they haven't presented charismatic, must have instruments to the public. ACB, Active Circuit Behavior, which is their current analog modeling technology that the Boutiques and Airas are based on, seems to be their current answer to this ideological problem. This has allowed them to produce several instruments and devices at the cheaper end of the market and, to be fair, these products don't seem to have been too bad. Meanwhile, in a higher price bracket they have produced instruments like the JD-XA, an analog/digital hybrid instrument, and the System 8, a larger synth based on Aira technology which can host multiple plugins (or plug-outs, using their terminology). The System 8 will host models of the Jupiter 8 and Juno 106 natively as well as a third plugin synth as well as the System 8's own sound engine. I find these latter two synths interesting curiosities at the very least. Can we say that Roland are finding their mojo again? They certainly seem to be trying to.

Moog Music are, in many respects, the granddaddy of synth companies. Bob Moog was probably the guy who started the whole commercial synthesizer business off. We should note he started off making a modular synthesizer though and that the Minimoog, a cutdown version of this, came later. Incidentally, you can now buy new Minimoogs again. The company that lives on in Moog's name has periodically come out with many interesting synths in the last few years. The Sub 37, which built on the Sub Phatty, is a very capable instrument and its Mother 32, a synth that can sit on a table or in a Eurorack system, makes the Moog name available to synth fans at the lowest price ever. They do still crank out the odd huge modular system too though and were, until recently, cranking out Moog Voyagers, the successor to the Minimoog. Their range of synths is not the biggest but then Moog have gone for the compact but classy approach to synth making and they trade on the idea of quality. And, of course, their products are analog as befits a company named after a man who invented the first commercially viable analog synth. It can be said that with Moog you usually know exactly what you are getting and it is important to the company that whatever they produce is quality.

Arturia were once known as a software company that produced software models of classic synths. Some did not like these models (I saw Dave Smith in one interview saying he thought their Prophet 5 sounded nothing like it) but then the French company went and changed everything when they brought out a hardware mono synth, the Minibrute. This synth was an instant hit because it was cheap and it sounded different to other mono synths, having a brash, ballsy sound provided by a single multi-wave oscillator (with various wave shaping tricks available for each wave) and a Steiner-Parker filter to which was added the "brute factor", the old Moog trick of sending the output back through the synth again to provide overdrive. Building on the success of the Minibrute, they brought out an even smaller mono synth, the Microbrute, and now they've added a much bigger mono synth, the Matrixbrute, which boasts a huge 256 button matrix on its large front panel. This latter synth is aimed to be the king of mono synths but has seemingly suffered from being introduced to the public before it was ready for prime time. Still, this is not bad for some software developers working in the shadow of the Alps. It certainly seems that they are not afraid to have ideas and try things out although there have been grumbles about the build quality and availability of their instruments. Taking this into account, it seems best to advise caution regarding their gear and the need to allow them time to bed it in properly. 

Elektron are perhaps one of the major successes of the synth world in the 21st century. Founded just before the turn of the century in 1998, they have released a run of innovative instruments based on their own, unique thinking about how to design synths and electronic instruments. At first, these were all digital but starting in 2013 they have moved into creating analog instruments with digital control, all paired with their unique sequencer in table top instruments (save the Analog Keys, which is a keys version of the Analog Four). Indeed, if table top synths or "groove boxes" are your thing then Elektron are probably the Rolls Royce of this market at the moment. Their instruments are premium priced but also feature packed. And the feature set of their instruments is probably one of the contentious issues about them. When someone like Alessandro Cortini describes your instruments as "awkwardly structured" as he does of their sampler device, the Octatrack, then you have to admit that Elektron devices are certainly idiosyncratic. 

This fact may have deterred some from taking the plunge and I can certainly say from personal experience that coming to an Elektron instrument cold is a frustrating thing. There is undeniably a learning curve in the first few days and weeks of owning their gear since everything is done their way or not at all. That said, if you know one of their instruments then, in some sense, you know something about them all as their philosophy carries across their range of gear. I have not really heard anyone complaining about the sound of their instruments and the sequencer they have, capable of multiple parameter locks per step over 64 steps, is still today more powerful than many in other manufacturer's gear. Recently, they have introduced Overbridge technology which enables analog instruments to essentially become plugins in a Digital Audio Workstation on a computer, a first of its kind, making these unique in a studio environment. If you have the money I don't see why you wouldn't buy their gear.. provided you are prepared to learn their way of doing things.

Dave Smith Instruments is the latest company to benefit from the design skills of Dave Smith, formerly of Sequential Circuits back in the day. In the last few years DSI have concentrated in premium quality synthesizers such as the Prophet 12, Prophet 6, Pro 2 and OB-6, the latter a joint project with Tom Oberheim. Their market seems to be the pro gigging and studio musician and although they do produce cheaper products this has never really been their focus. You get the impression that Smith just wants to make the best synths he can. Another collaboration, this time with Roger Linn, produced the Tempest drum machine back in 2011. This was another feature-rich, premium priced product. The products themselves are in some senses fairly conventional and the major advancement in recent years has been adding ever more granular methods of control. Smith introduced a character section to his Prophet 12 and Pro 2 synths which allowed more control over the tone of the synth and the screens on these synths were cleverly designed to make sound designing intuitive. The Prophet 6 and OB-6 were call backs to greatest hits of old from Smith and Oberheim respectively and these were both well received as premium synths of today with an authentic heritage. Smith's synths also seem to enjoy a good reputation in the pro music community such that they justify their prices at the higher end of the market.

Analogue Solutions will probably be the least well known of the synth companies I mention here in this brief tour of synth world. They produce boutique analogue synths loosely based on classics of the past but each with their own unique tone. This ranges currently from the Nyborg 12 and Nyborg 24 through to the Telemark and Leipzig-S, the latter a brutal synth originally designed with percussion in mind, and on to premium synths like the modular Vostok Deluxe and Polymath. These synths are definitely meant to stand within a wholly analog tradition and you can tell that they are made by people who venerate the Moogs and Arps and Oberheim SEMs of old. The company is also actively engaged in producing Eurorack modules and so have feet in both the fixed architecture and modular synth camps. Being wholly devoted to analog synthesis, the focus of these synths is on the production of a distinct analog tone. If that is your thing then these boys deliver the goods.

                               The Analogue Solutions Polymath

Of course, there are other manufacturers besides the few I've been able to mention here in a relatively short blog. Feel free to mention any others of note, in good or bad senses, in the comments. What is clear from even this brief survey though is that synth buyers do need to beware when buying things. Some manufacturers may have a dodgy reputation or seem to have run out of ideas whereas others chug along producing reliable and solid if unspectacular instruments. And then there is the fact that some will be better at some things than others. At the end of the day, of course, its what you do with what you've got that counts. A name is just a name and having Item X piece of gear guarantees nothing.