Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: April 12 2003, 21:58 |
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I think Mike Oldfield should give up making music and go back to sawing guitars in half and stealing potatoes from the greengrocers, then at least we'd not hear the same old "Mike should stop making music" arguments any more, and we could start interesting discussions on instrument building and potato recipes.
Have the people calling Mike's efforts amateurish spent much time around amateur musicians? Mike's work rarely strikes me as anything less than the work of a very competent engineer and musician. It doesn't always strike me as the work of a very competent engineer and musician who's made all the right decisions of course, but I'd not question whether he fully knows what he's doing. The work of amateur musicans can be very good, but there's also a huge amount of rubbish out there (the stuff which one might call amateurish), and Mike Oldfield is definitely amongst any of that. His stuff's acceptably in time and in tune, and the recordings are always clear sounding and well balanced - I've heard an awful lot of work from bedroom musicians which isn't any of those things, and to say that Mike falls into the same category would be a load of over-opinionated balls if you ask me. I do feel that some elements of his (not just recent) output only serve to cheapen the sound, but it's still a classier sound than would come out of a cheap set of soundblaster samples (though these things get better seemingly by the second...). Both the sax on Tres Lunas and this bass which has sparked so much discussion are from software synthesisers, though...make of that what you will.
P.S. If anybody didn't catch the irony in my opening paragraph, I wasn't being serious...
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