Looking back over the years and playing your favourite music from past eras – the 70s and 80s – it is so liberating to hear music strife with personality, creativity and dexterity. With the change in style, creative process and actual genre, you can see the shift how the dynamic has changed, with physical instruments ultimately stripped for processed lo-fi beats, sampled acoustics and recordings. So, what happened? Where did the personality go in music?
There’s often times where I listen to current, topical music and I almost always reminiscence about past music that had “actual” instruments. Hiring a studio and actually playing the parts, rather than delegating sampled beats to each playmaker. You can always tell if a part is true to itself or not, because every drum hit is played differently and every guitar chord struck sounds melodically different. That is, if an instrument is involved.
Two of my favourite musicians on YouTube have recently delved into this subject and it’s quite interesting to look into. As they perused through the top 10 on Spotify, they tried to find any type of “actual” instrument in the song. Whether that’d be an actual drum kit or an actual person playing the accompaniment of the guitar. The result is probably what you’re expecting.
Nevertheless, I’ll leave them below so you can have a look and have a laugh like I did.
Hoped you liked ’em as much as I did. Anyways, this is important insider knowledge to our talk today. Is there any personality in music anymore? Does music have to have actual instruments for it to be personable and more musically adept? Or is it merely old folks who are beating a dead horse and saying that current chart music is crap again? Let me know what you think to this one.
mvm. 
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