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No, instruments really don't. The point of conventional instruments is that once you learn them - which takes years - you can instantly express almost any musical idea using all the possible degrees of freedom available on that instrument.

With something like Ableton Push, you're one step removed from the sound generation, because you're triggering automata with a very limited expressive repertoire. (With Push, it's often just a triggered sample, which has almost no expressive potential at all.)

You can change keys instantly on a piano. You can play any chord you can get your fingers around, in any inversion, using any voicing, with fine control of the relative level of each note in the chord.

With button controllers the best you'll get is one chord per button with no fine shading of levels, no control over inversions or voicings, and so on.

It's absolutely fine to make music like this, but it's not fine to demand that all music be made like this.

Controllers like Push are good for performing effects - filter sweeps, and such - which aren't possible on a keyboard. But that's a different skill to learning scales, and much more expressively limited.

Electronic art forms generally are more rigid and less expressive than non-mechanised media. In theory you should be able to do more, but in practice no one has cracked the problem of building high-bandwidth expressive automata that are as physically responsive and open as traditional instruments/media.

Aesthetically, that can be a problem. A lot of machine-assisted art is either chaotic and formless, or formulaic and repetitive. The best classical music and classical performance lives in an expressive and creative sweet spot between those extremes, and it's incredibly hard to hit that spot with machine assistance.

You seem to be pegged on what current controllers can do... And that's exactly what I am saying: they often suck!

But they can improve and I am confident they will. When I am learning a brand new instrument I can literally feel my brain knowing exactly what I want to do way before my fingers/mouth/feet are able to perform the task at hand. How is this not an interface problem?

With button controllers the best you'll get is one chord per button with no fine shading of levels, no control over inversions or voicings, and so on.

No way. If you don't have to be memorizing stupid things such as "where is the minor 7th again on this one particular instrument?" maybe you could use your free mental cycles (and fingers, feet, mouth) to control that instead... And who knows, maybe you could now do 4-5 inversions in the same amount of time it would take you to do a single one on a piano. Or maybe you can do inversions way more effortlessly on another instrument and focus on really nailing the vibrato.

It's absolutely fine to make music like this, but it's not fine to demand that all music be made like this.

I never said this, I'm just saying that a lot more can be done with a lot less effort if instrument/controller interfaces improve.

Once you actually practice a physical instrument for a reasonable amount of time things like the concept of "memorizing where the minor 7th is" quickly become non issues - the only memorization involved is that of your muscles i.e. the cognitive load is essentially nonexistent. Involving more parts of your body than your cognition is one of the joys of playing a physical instrument, versus pressing a button and thinking a lot.

I play several! But of course I'm not proficient in all of them, which is the whole point. There isn't an "universal controller" that is expressive enough across a variety of timber types... Yet if that existed one could master one interface and do a lot more musically with that acquired skill.

"The point of conventional instruments is that once you learn them - which takes years - you can instantly express almost any musical idea using all the possible degrees of freedom available on that instrument."

But the degrees of freedom of conventional instruments are severely limited compared to what is possible.

Let us also recall that every "conventional instrument" was at one time not only unconventional, but even radically new. The piano, is itself only a few hundred years old. I'm sure when it was invented there were some people who argued against its use and that one should instead stay with "conventional instruments", which then did not then include the piano.

I strongly recommend a talk[1] by Jordan Rudess, who is widely considered to be one of the greatest living keyboard players.

In this talk, Rudess discusses and vividly demonstrates the greatly expanded possibilities that innovative keyboards bring to the table.

Novel instruments that somewhat resemble conventional instruments like the keyboard are only the tip of the iceberg of music interface possibility, however. There are plenty of novel music expression technologies that don't have even the remotest resemblance to conventional instruments, and allow ways of expression that were hardly imaginable a hundred years ago. Things like whole body position tracking, which allows you to make music through dance.

Of course, mature musicians like Rudess who've spent their entire lives learning and practicing on traditional instruments will be unlikely to switch to something radically different, as they'll be starting from ground zero on those instruments. But others with less to lose will be more open to learning something completely new.

It's impossible to tell which novel instrument will become the conventional instrument of tomorrow, but it's very likely some will, because that's how we got all of the conventional instruments of today.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h-TsqoSWgo

Let us also recall that every "conventional instrument" was at one time not only unconventional, but even radically new.

Amen.

Thanks for sharing the talk! I'm a proud owner of one of those keyboards he is playing, a ROLI Seaboard. It is indeed an amazingly expressive, fantastic product

This is utter BS, you can play the Push as if it were a piano and the sound design options are endless.

Saying electronic music is either too chaotic or too repetitive is not only entirely subjective but completely impossible for you to say. Artists like Kiasmos or, famously, Aphex Twin, just to name a couple amongst hundreds, make music that can be neither repetitive or chaotic, for example.

> I think we also need way better digital instruments... That make it easier to stay on scale (or to modulate, etc -- whatever the mood is), for instance, allowing people to just play away which is what actually matters.

I'm not sure what new stuff has come out in the last few years, but Ableton Push is exactly what you're describing. It's a grid where you can select a key, scale, and tone, and then you can apply effects in series / parallel. The notes in the scale light up. There's a bunch of other stuff you can do as well.

https://youtu.be/0CdMvkBOUgs?t=69

Thanks! I've played with Push, it's pretty good... but as someone commented above it's fairly limited in many ways too.

This is an interesting piece of software I have used before: http://autotheory.net. It simply translates incoming midi data so you can use whatever controller/instrument you're already familiar with. The creator is nice and responsive, he often attends shows like AES and NAMM.

Thanks for the recommendation, I just bought the Hook Theory book and it looks quite good. I've been searching for something like that for a while!

I've not read the book but the tool is amazing. I believe the authors have been working on a HTML rewrite for some years now (currently it's Flash). The whole site design got redone a month or two ago, so there may be more changes on the way.

> In case anyone is searching for a really smart, modern method for learning music theory, this is it: https://www.hooktheory.com

I really want to buy the books but they're all DRM'd :-(.

Here's hoping someone from there reads this page and releases it as an epub...