3 ms·

As a person who plays several instruments (including drums) in professional situations, and as a person who enjoyed Guitar Hero, I always find it strange when f

As a person who plays several instruments (including drums) in professional situations, and as a person who enjoyed Guitar Hero, I always find it strange when folks are able to take the "experience" of Rock Band / Songstar /etc as a proxy for the experience of practicing music. I actually do sight read for a couple of instruments- nothing in any of those games has literally anything to do with that. Hell, my (very good) reading for clarinet and double bass has nothing to do with my (very poor) ability to sight read on piano. Whatever gets folks interested in stuff is great, but to me it's like saying "I watched 10K hours of MTV in the 80s and that was very helpful in my career playing jazz"... The same thing is true with writing and other skills replacements- much of my ability and desire to write comes from the experience of using it as an adjunct to thinking. Having to figure out how I should connect ideas and state them in a way others will understand clarifies my own thoughts, so the idea that I am somehow gaining idunnowhat by adding a bunch of verbal noise to my writing misses a lot of the reasons why I like to write. I'm happy to use LLMs to draft things like the contracts I need for the mechanical royalty payments I make when I record other folks material, but that's only because I am not trying to learn how to think legalistically. And further, creating documents via might spark an interest in legal language and how it get used, but it's not going to help me understand the underlying reasons for what's going on any more than watching a whole lot of porn is going to help me be a better lover...

chaps 2mo ago
No true musician got their start in Guitar Hero, eh? I got my start in drumming from playing on Rockband. When I mentioned it to the folk that I bought my first e-kit, they rolled their eyes. Fine, whatever, I expect musicians to be pretentious. But yanno what? I still learned a lot. The controller itself was midi-capable so I was able to hook it up to my kit and play the game while practicing my form and timing. Was it perfect? Fuck no; it sucked. But it guided me into recognizing that I wasn't as good as I wanted to be, which led to lessons and many many hours of practicing. I owe a lot to rock band because it opened a world of play beyond the game itself.
- scarecrowbob 2mo ago
  Nothing can invalidate whatever path you found to music. I'm sorry you had folks rolling their eyes at you when you got your instrument. That's an exceedingly common thing to happen. Especially with singing. But it doesn't make it okay or correct or nice. But the lessons and the practicing aren't the same thing as playing a video game. In the same way that no matter how good I get in Fallout it will never have anything to do with how I am able to deal with folks in my real life. For instance, I enjoy Fallout and it's very validating to play it and be the "good" guy. For a quite a while I considered that maybe there was something ethically useful in that kind of "education". As I have gotten older I have come to feel that it's actually closer to some kind of ethics porn: none of the choices have material consequences for me or my community and I can go back and do things from a save game. I have total control over the situation in ways I never have in real life. And further, I have come to think that this way of thinking ethics might actually be harmful to my practical ethics: because I'm not forced to make choices that actually impact me or anyone else, that game might start to erode the parts of that process that deal with the often-negative outcomes of those decisions. So, like, sure: Fallout made me more interested in how my ethics function. But it's so far removed in how we actually move through the world that it might actually mess up how I do things. I used to have an octapad back in the oughts, and if that was the only way I was interacting with the drum kit it would have done a lot of harm to my playing. If I played the video game drum set like I played my real kit, it would get destroyed in short order. I am certain that you know what I mean when I say that the specific techniques around stick/beater control have virtually nothing to do with the mechanics of that kit, and further I am equally certain that you understand that the timing involved in these games has little or nothing to do with the strictness (and often looseness/feel/dragging/etc) of the timing when we play drums with other humans. My point isn't even about the specifics of these games, but about how folks seem to abuse AI so easily these days. I -don't- think there is anything pretentious about buying an instrument you don't play and then doing whatever you do. That's not pretense, that is the process of learning to play music- that's what it is in itself. But I also don't think that is the same thing as playing a video game, and I think the distinction is important to make because there is much in our world that asks us to pretend we are doing things we aren't doing. In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote. I have to come to terms with the limitations of my ideas and how I can state them-- if I crapped "fuck your strawman and the fleshlight version of music and thought that is generated by an LLM" into an LLM, then I wouldn't really be getting anything at all out of these kinds of interactions. So when I read and write, I often struggle. But I think that having those difficulites and sitting with them is what is different than dropping half-baked reactions into an LLM or playing Guitar Hero.

chaps 2mo ago

No true musician got their start in Guitar Hero, eh? I got my start in drumming from playing on Rockband. When I mentioned it to the folk that I bought my first e-kit, they rolled their eyes. Fine, whatever, I expect musicians to be pretentious. But yanno what? I still learned a lot. The controller itself was midi-capable so I was able to hook it up to my kit and play the game while practicing my form and timing. Was it perfect? Fuck no; it sucked. But it guided me into recognizing that I wasn't as good as I wanted to be, which led to lessons and many many hours of practicing. I owe a lot to rock band because it opened a world of play beyond the game itself.

scarecrowbob 2mo ago
Nothing can invalidate whatever path you found to music. I'm sorry you had folks rolling their eyes at you when you got your instrument. That's an exceedingly common thing to happen. Especially with singing. But it doesn't make it okay or correct or nice. But the lessons and the practicing aren't the same thing as playing a video game. In the same way that no matter how good I get in Fallout it will never have anything to do with how I am able to deal with folks in my real life. For instance, I enjoy Fallout and it's very validating to play it and be the "good" guy. For a quite a while I considered that maybe there was something ethically useful in that kind of "education". As I have gotten older I have come to feel that it's actually closer to some kind of ethics porn: none of the choices have material consequences for me or my community and I can go back and do things from a save game. I have total control over the situation in ways I never have in real life. And further, I have come to think that this way of thinking ethics might actually be harmful to my practical ethics: because I'm not forced to make choices that actually impact me or anyone else, that game might start to erode the parts of that process that deal with the often-negative outcomes of those decisions. So, like, sure: Fallout made me more interested in how my ethics function. But it's so far removed in how we actually move through the world that it might actually mess up how I do things. I used to have an octapad back in the oughts, and if that was the only way I was interacting with the drum kit it would have done a lot of harm to my playing. If I played the video game drum set like I played my real kit, it would get destroyed in short order. I am certain that you know what I mean when I say that the specific techniques around stick/beater control have virtually nothing to do with the mechanics of that kit, and further I am equally certain that you understand that the timing involved in these games has little or nothing to do with the strictness (and often looseness/feel/dragging/etc) of the timing when we play drums with other humans. My point isn't even about the specifics of these games, but about how folks seem to abuse AI so easily these days. I -don't- think there is anything pretentious about buying an instrument you don't play and then doing whatever you do. That's not pretense, that is the process of learning to play music- that's what it is in itself. But I also don't think that is the same thing as playing a video game, and I think the distinction is important to make because there is much in our world that asks us to pretend we are doing things we aren't doing. In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote. I have to come to terms with the limitations of my ideas and how I can state them-- if I crapped "fuck your strawman and the fleshlight version of music and thought that is generated by an LLM" into an LLM, then I wouldn't really be getting anything at all out of these kinds of interactions. So when I read and write, I often struggle. But I think that having those difficulites and sitting with them is what is different than dropping half-baked reactions into an LLM or playing Guitar Hero.