Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
The producer here is clearly talented, but the fact remains that notwithstanding Liam Howlett's setup in the late nineties, today's most basic music  production software is a country mile more powerful than that which produced some of the most memorable music of the last twenty years.<p>I often think that there exists a clear analogy between electronic music and video games. The computer games of the 80s and early 90s possessed a simplicity and level of fun - often characterised as <i>playability</i> - which was to a certain extent lost when the exponentially-increasing power of hardware in the late 90s led to programmers to concentrate on all encompassing 3D effects at the expense of simple fun.<p>Likewise, I feel that many musicians today get too caught up in the neverending technical possibilities offered by their software (and digital hardware) at the expense of good, simple music which hits a spot close to the heart.<p>All the gear, but no idea - to coin a phrase.<p>I'm not sure what you'd call the musical equivalent of playability, but I think more musicians should bear it in mind. :)