The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Look at this! It's from France...



** Screw these damn tags! WTF??? **

Just what the world needs, another "instrument" that requires no music background to play. Screw the French.

No, don't screw the French. It will piss them off more.

Generalizations and criticism towards a learning tool. That's why we love you.

What are you guys talking about? That looks really cool. And MAX/MSP is nothing to sneeze at. Unless you're allergic to stuff that's extremely sophisticated.

Easy, boys. Let's get back on topic. I think we were talking about <a href="http://www.cryogenicsinternational.com/music.htm">cool instruments</a>.

john m wrote:Generalizations and criticism towards a learning tool. That's why we love you.

Did I miss something? "For basic lessons, kids use just the controller with a microphone." Who cares if they can sing or not. "More advanced lessons are taught with a touch tablet and a monitor."Ooo, and after that they get to play with a mouse.

I guess in the end, anything used to raise a child's interest in music can be considered a good thing. I just wonder what's wrong with Music lessons.

LMNOP wrote:Easy, boys. Let's get back on topic. I think we were talking about <a href="http://www.cryogenicsinternational.com/music.htm">cool instruments</a>.

What kind of sick individual would freeze an instrument? Seems an unusual route to travel for better tone.

c hack wrote:What are you guys talking about? That looks really cool. And MAX/MSP is nothing to sneeze at. Unless you're allergic to stuff that's extremely sophisticated.

"This one is a hardware control surface connected to a G5 running MAX/MSP"

Connected to is not the same thing as teaching the user anything about it.

Dan-O from Five-O wrote:

john m wrote:Generalizations and criticism towards a learning tool. That's why we love you.

Did I miss something? "For basic lessons, kids use just the controller with a microphone." Who cares if they can sing or not. "More advanced lessons are taught with a touch tablet and a monitor."Ooo, and after that they get to play with a mouse.

I guess in the end, anything used to raise a child's interest in music can be considered a good thing. I just wonder what's wrong with Music lessons.

You need help reading. It's a teaching tool. They use the word "lesson" right there. It's used to give basic lessons and then advanced lessons on how to use a synth. It's not supposed to teach them how to sing, and it's not supposed to teach them music theory. It's supposed to teach them how to play a synth. Learning theory is not the only way to learn how to make music.

Then Casio and Yamaha have the same thing available for far less money.

Dan-O from Five-O wrote:Then Casio and Yamaha have the same thing available for far less money.

Excellent! You seem to be in the know about things. Could you show me a link to a Casio or Yamaha synth that provides tutorials on how to use all aspects of it; connected to a computer, with filters, envelopes, pitch-shift, delay, EQ and reverb; with 4 loudspeakers and both switches and faders that accomodates up to 6 people and acts as a digital sampler (with memory banks and looping, stretching, pitch-shifting and reverse playing) and real-time mixer that costs less than the Cybersongosse?

How much do those cost, btw?

good thing this thread's in Monkey Business.

erikb wrote:

Dan-O from Five-O wrote:Then Casio and Yamaha have the same thing available for far less money.

Excellent! You seem to be in the know about things. Could you show me a link to a Casio or Yamaha synth that provides tutorials on how to use all aspects of it; connected to a computer, with filters, envelopes, pitch-shift, delay, EQ and reverb; with 4 loudspeakers and both switches and faders that accomodates up to 6 people and acts as a digital sampler (with memory banks and looping, stretching, pitch-shifting and reverse playing) and real-time mixer that costs less than the Cybersongosse?

How much do those cost, btw?

Gosh Eric, you really showed me. I wasn't aware it could do all of that. But then there's always this. http://www.musiciansfriend.com/srs7/g=k ... id/702210/

Now maybe you can show me a kid that cares about, let alone has the capacity to learn about the rest of what the Cybersongosse can do. I'm guessing that child would be right around your age. Or maybe you can show me the parent that wants shell out whatever that contraption costs when there's no guarentee their child will be playing with it a month from now. Oh, and if you can have one shipped here from Europe for less than the Yamaha don't let anyone know, because you might be breaking the law.

Compare it to learning cello. The best players started learning in or before grade school, and a beginner's instrument costs about $600.

Dan-O from Five-O wrote:Gosh Eric, you really showed me. I wasn't aware it could do all of that. But then there's always this. http://www.musiciansfriend.com/srs7/g=k ... id/702210/

Now maybe you can show me kid that cares about, let alone has the capacity to learn about the rest of what the Cybersongosse can do. I'm guessing the child would be right around your age. Or maybe you can show me the parent that wants shell out whatever that contraption costs when there's no guarentee their child will be playing with it a month from now. Oh, and if you can have one shipped here from Europe for less than the Yamaha don't let anyone know, because you would be breaking the law.

Yeah, but I didn't make any of those claims. You claimed Yamaha and Casio made the same thing for less. They really don't. The synth you linked to doesn't even come close to having all the features of the Cybersongosse.

From what I've read about the Cybersongosse after a few minutes googling the name, it's marketed to schools. If 6 kids can be working on one station at a time, you could have 5 or 6 and have enough for a whole class. Have one lab worth of them, and that's enough for the whole school. This is not something that a parent is going to buy a child. If I had this in school, with a competent exciting instructor, I would have been so jazzed to be making music, learning about easy stuff first, and more complicated things later on, over the course of one or more years.

I could show you tons of kids who would be stoked about getting to make music on this thing. They're not going to care about all the finer points of EQ overnight, but the fact that the thing is a bad-ass sampler and a mixer, that they can be in control of the music that they would be creating at some point in the future would make this much more attractive and actually useful to them when compared to a Yamaha synth.

Tonamel wrote:Compare it to learning cello. The best players started learning in or before grade school, and a beginner's instrument costs about $600.

In the interest of disseminating correct information:

A) It's never too late to start learning cello. Especially if you already play another instrument. It takes about two years for someone who is adept at one instrument to become competent at another instrument. If you work at it. If you don't play any other instruments and are an adult, there are certainly easier instruments to learn than the 'cello. But to that I reply: don't be a pussy.

B) A "beginner" instrument, for a kid in elementary school, will most likely be provided by the school. If it's not provided or the student isn't in school (an adult student for example), you can rent them for about $30 a month. For a child, you don't want to purchase an instrument, because they will start on a fractional size and move up to bigger instruments as they grow. The youngest Suzuki 'cello students start on something like a 1/8 scale 'cello. Tiny little things. So cute.

Dan-O from Five-O wrote: Now maybe you can show me a kid that cares about, let alone has the capacity to learn about the rest of what the Cybersongosse can do.

Go to your local public elementary school and choose 5 fourth-graders at random. You've found at least one. I'll bet 10 second-graders will get you one as well. Hell, my 2-year old would spend hours on it once she found a couple buttons that gave immediate results.

I'm not understanding your problem with this device. A colorful plastic computer that makes a wide range of strange, cool sounds: that's practically the definition of half of all children's toys on the market today. This one just makes more, and young users will intuitively learn pretty complex concepts like carrier frequencies, band-pass filters, and the difference between frequency and amplitude. The won't explicitly learn the terms, just gain an intuitive sense of the concepts which will make learning any college-level time series analysis much, much easier.

And:

Dan-O from Five-O wrote:Just what the world needs, another "instrument" that requires no music background to play. Screw the French.

The linked article wrote:They’ve been used to teach French kids about recording technology and synthesis since 1973.

Dan-O, I recommend switching.

Mostess wrote: I'm not understanding your problem with this device. A colorful plastic computer that makes a wide range of strange, cool sounds: that's practically the definition of half of all children's toys on the market today. This one just makes more, and young users will intuitively learn pretty complex concepts like carrier frequencies, band-pass filters, and the difference between frequency and amplitude. The won't explicitly learn the terms, just gain an intuitive sense of the concepts which will make learning any college-level time series analysis much, much easier.

I'm challenged to find the right thing for my kids. My 5 year old and I built a little buzzer from those wires-and-capacitor kits and he just loves it. Sort of a conductivity theremin, where when he squeezes the wires between his fingers the pitch goes all crazy.

Then we have this crazy plastic electric double neck guitar thing with samples and beats. Noisy as all hell but he's putting patterns together (finally passing his 3 year old brother's jams).

But most music toys are so crappy, they fall apart after a few months. On the other hand...young boys really beat the shit out of things. I don't want to invest in anything worth much more than $40 for fear of it being wasted in a day.

Aside from the time I do spend with them and my cherished studio equipment, I am always looking for recommendations for decent, cheap-ish kids toys/instruments from other people who have experience. And I'll post mine as well.

All this interest in something I said totally off the cuff and in jest almost a week ago that no one had any interest in until someone stumbled across it today. Here's what I've learned:

1) Don't badmouth the French
2) There's some company out there cryogenically freezing instruments in order to make them sound better.
3) A lot of people will gloss over the fact that I said "I guess in the end, anything used to raise a child's interest in music can be considered a good thing." a long time ago in this thread.
4) The Cybersongosse might be useful in a classroom environment if the school could afford it, and the teacher could use it, and the kids didn't forget what they learned from week to week during the fifteen minutes or so they actually got to spend with it, and of course, if they didn't break it first.
5) Eric will debate anything and then later claim he didn't say it.
6) You shouldn't spend $600 on a beginner's cello, you should buy the small one that's really cute and costs less.
7) Mostess thinks I should switch to decaf.
8) It's fun to watch how far one of these threads goes off topic.

As they say: it takes a village.