Heh. I was in the “youth” choir at my church from 1975-1980. The new “hip” young priest persuaded the monsignor in charge to hire a newly-minted BFA from USC to come in and take over the music program. One of the songs he transcribed for us to use was Gaudete, as performed by Steeleye Span (we did it without the Cockney accents and nasal tonal quality, but it sounded pretty good anyway). The one snag was that, virtually every time we rehearsed it, we’d check our pitch against the piano, and find out that we had lost maybe a quarter tone by the end. Not enough to make the Mass an act of blasphemy, but a bit of a problem for when we wanted to cut an album for a fundraiser.
Fortunately, our director and the engineer were able to tweak the tape speed at the appropriate times to bring us in on target for the final track.
The Looper pedal allows musicians to create an entire song by themselves. For example they’ll strum the chords and save it. Press the button and add some simple riffs.Save it. Add more riffs save it. Now they have backing track.
It’s very useful for beginning songwriters. They can quickly develop a song in their bedroom. It can be used to demo & sell the song to a recording artist.
Ed Sheeran uses a Looper live on stage. It’s fascinating to watch him throw together a backing track in a couple minutes. Then perform a song with it.
Looper pedals are fantastic for practicing lead guitar. You used to need a 2nd person to strum chords. Not any more.
Not exactly what the OP is asking about, but another thing modern musicians can do is attract a worldwide audience without needing an agent or label (it’s still difficult, but it’s now possible). That’d probably be a lot more impressive to most musicians in 1980.
I was thinking about posting much the same. In the '80s, if you were a pop/rock/country musician, and you didn’t have a record deal, you were likely playing at local clubs, selling a few casettes at those gigs, and trying to get the attention of a promoter or agent, in hopes of getting a deal.
Today, thanks to sites like YouTube, Spotify and Patreon, you can be successful without that deal. For example, there’s Pomplamoose – as far as I can tell, they have never had a record deal, and don’t issue their music on physical media, but they have over a million subscribers on YouTube, and 3000 patrons on Patreon (from which they’re netting over $15,000 per month).
As someone who played back in the 80s and still does, there’s a lot that is possible now that wasn’t back then.
We had to learn everything by ear or buy the sheet music, etc… I wore out many cassettes and tape decks rewinding and playing track back over and over to get the parts right. Now you have the internet with lyrics, chords, tablature, lessons, demos, live clips, etc…
The biggest change to my rig has been sound modelling and effects processing. Instead of collecting and mucking around with a dozen stomp box settings and amp/cabinet combinations, I can reproduce any sound tone possible and I don’t really even have to figure it out by myself, there are millions of presets and patches available.
Digital recording is the biggest innovation though. In the 80s, everything was recorded and mixed on analog then digitized for CD, etc…
Today you can digitally record, manipulate, edit, mix, create high quality audio files, share tracks, burn your own CDs, etc… all on your home computer.
I’ve long suspected that this is a big part of why “bar bands” have fallen on hard times, and most of them are still playing “classic rock”. You simply can’t accurately recreate modern music with 3-5 musicians. When I was the bassist/vocalist of a bar band, we had a hard enough time covering the “classics” while still making sure the essentials were covered when we were just a 3-piece, guitar/bass/drums. A lot of my job involved modifying bass lines to “suggest” a rhythm guitar part behind guitar solos, simply because some songs just didn’t sound right without it.
And still, a lot of younger audience members (based on conversations I’ve followed online) think a cover band sucks when they don’t sound just like the original, because they don’t realize a 3- to 5-piece band simply can’t cover everything the original artist did in the studio.
Yup. And bar gigs don’t pay well enough to allow musicians to buy the outboard gear or hire more players to do a faithful reproduction of modern music.
Not only do people think any band should be able to reproduce the original, they think we know every song written. And the folks who hire us think we’re like a stereo that you can play at any volume and it still sounds good. I can go on.
You probably need to be a future musician because I don’t know how far you can push a current laptop, but at some point a computer will be able to substitute for several missing live musicians, with adequate results depending on what you need.
Amp modeling came out in the 90’s. I am not sure when impulse response for speaker cabinet emulation and convolution reverb were invented but they definitely were not around in the 80’s.
Drum replacement plugins were not around then. Hell, no VST or VSTi plugins were around then.
Sequencers were much more primitive. I am not even sure if they had DAWs but if they did, there is no way they would have the features and GUIs that they have now.
Modern DAWs can edit on an extremely zoomed in level. They could not do that back then either.
You can do that now. Push just a little bit further and you can still do it. It’s called “playing the stereo.” Where does the point come that you don’t need any other musicians, just a guy to push Play?
OK, but then why didn’t you guys do just that? I mean, assuming you needed/wanted to— nobody expects a reduced arrangement to include every note from every original instrument, or a live performance to sound exactly like something that was put together for weeks in the studio from hundreds of tracks.
If we define what it is we need from a musician, then either the computer can do it, or not so well. Of course playing prerecorded tracks is a non-issue, and dozens of virtual instruments (including high-quality samples of real instruments) playing at the same time are not a problem either.
Even in the ‘80s sampling technology was starting to enter the home recording market with companies like E-mu and Ensoniq (RIP both) and Akai. Digitech came out with a pedal sampling delay (looper). MIDI was common (linking and syncing controllers and sound modules) and could be used for layering synth and sample tracks. Pros had access to Synclavier and Fairlight sampling/production systems.
The big difference between then and now as previously mentioned is processing power, memory, and storage so now a lot can be brought into a single device. You still need a ton of computing horsepower and a geek hat to make it all work smoothly though.