mrgreynoise wrote:
My advice to you is to focus on a music education if you want to be a composer/producer.
From my experience, whilst I am young, and perhaps with an unrealistic naivety, I believe that although obtaining a musical education is crucial in the process of becoming musician, where this education is obtained is not important.
In fact, I might even go as far as to say that for producing techno music, an institutional education may even be counterproductive (in some instances). Often the music works with far different principles to those which are effectively applied in jazz and classical music. For example, you might listen to djs for an entire night and not hear a single key change but the crowd is still joyously captivated by the performance, just from simple variations in timbre and rhythm.
Obviously, I do not wish to imply that a composer/producer must simply work with feeling, removed from all forms of ritualised study, referential analysis and collated experience. But rather that these are things which can also be learned through carefully directed self study, especially with the glut of information in our immediate virtual environment... wikipedia, internet forums and other people's music, for example.
Another reason for me believing this way is that often the terminologies used in classical western studies are fairly concealing. All musical principles can be related to maths and physics (which to me is the easiest way to understand a lot of them), and in many instances the definition in western study makes little reference to this. For example a 'perfect fifth' is meaningless unless someone is familiar with the historical context, whereas 3/2 is something that most people can easily understand.
I don't want to imply that an institutional musical education would provide no useful materials to apply to repetitive dance music, because that would be stupid. I jsut want to challenge your view that the process of becoming a composer/producer definitely involves an education in the classical sense.
Obviously my view has been formed and therefore biased through personal experience, and I would be happy for you to prove me wrong. I actually find many of the concepts in classical studies fascinating, but it is the arrogance with which they are often upheld that has been particularly offputting to me.
