The way music is made is changing, and it is a fact. Music festivals such as Tomorrowland and Ultra Music Festival show that electronic music is booming and has come to stay.
It is worth remembering the beginnings since the Djing, which began with the vinyl, continued with the cassettes, passed to the CDs to finally finish in the digital media. It should be mentioned that vinyl never died, but there are fewer and fewer DJs that truly make use of vinyl, be it timecode or real vinyl.
Just as technology has evolved, so has the “DJ” concept. DJ is the abbreviation of disc jockey, which started at the beginning of the radio to mutate every certain generation. As far as we have been able to investigate, the concept of the modern DJ began in the golden decade of disco music, that is, in the historic Studio 54, located in Manhattan (USA).
But does that mean that traditional music and new technologies are at odds?
Of course not, the internet and new technologies are opening us infinite possibilities both in the creation and in possibilities of music distribution.
On a professional level, very great changes are taking place. Right now, the music producer cannot be regarded only as the person who “records” and fixes the theme. It is also that now the figure of the DJ arises, and the current software allows you to create your music from scratch to a crazy level. But let’s not think that this is going to take the work away from musicians, the more you know about music, the more you can do with these tools.
What happens is that the model has changed. Now a musician who knows about production can produce a quantity of material by himself and reach levels of experimentation that did not exist before.
You no longer need to call your friend the saxophone player to record a track and know how something will sound. You can make a mockup that will sound real with virtual instrument libraries, but it broadens the possibilities, it doesn’t take away work. Normally, it is then recorded with a real instrument.
Thanks to the internet, musicians and music producers can now offer their services anywhere in the world, such as online mastering.
On the other hand, electronic music also reaches live and live music. Groups like The Chainsmokers or The Do mix electronic music with traditional music and know very well what they do.
You have to have a lot of musical knowledge of harmony and melody to get what they do. This is where synthesizer keyboards arrive, and there are increasingly more sophisticated instruments that allow you to create and modify music in real-time by modifying the parameters of the sound wave and even creating rhythmic patterns “on the fly.”
Finally, say that there are more and more websites and online communities to orient in this world that is increasingly complex and has more possibilities.
Electronic music has always been there: in the past, it is now present and will be in the future; The progress is there.
We have lived through it all this time: in the last two decades, things have not stopped moving forward, transforming, and in the case of electronic music its recent history and its current moment are considerably more vigorous than those of neighboring genres such as rock or jazz, whose cycles already seem complete.
The future is now
Today the level of the DJ has been increasing, moving from the booth to a production table. Usually, you start by remixing some songs and then go full to production (or vice versa). Those who have skills for music, playing some instrument will have an advantage over the rest. It should also be mentioned that many producers have jumped from production to the cabin.
There are many who claim that musical creativity died in the 80s, and everything that has come out later are mergers of what the great musical geniuses did. It should be mentioned that groups such as kraffert from Germany were one of the pioneers in inventing instruments to reproduce sounds that at that time could not be done with traditional instruments.
Is DJ Music The Way Of The Future? Our position is to affirm that the future is now, and the next thing that comes, it will be something based on what we currently live, but improving the user/software/computer/music interaction.
For electronic music there is still room. How much? Maybe not much, but certainly enough not to have concluded its main story yet.
Our forecast is that the future of the DJ lies in how technology lets us interact with our music, closing the gap between the production studio and the DJ + Video booth. How, who, where, and at what cost? These are the questions we all ask ourselves.