Social Networks And Delay Effects

delay, echo and reverb are some of the most important effects in music, often the effects that define the whole feel of a song, or even a genre. (Krautrock, New Wave, Shoegaze without these effects? impossible). it is actually one of the most basic and simple effects, compared to some of the more complex forms to process music. yet for literally decades, it was quite tricky to create before the advent of digital sound procession. basically what you have to do is to take part of the audio of a track, loop it (play it again) with slowly (or faster) fading volume each time. when perfoming live, the room the band plays in automatically adds reverberation to the sound. but how to recreate this with electric or electronic equipment? engineers came up with all kinds of adventurous solution to this... from reverb "spirals" and echo "plates" to tape delay effect units, which were amongst the most logical and most consequential solutions back in these days. but all these were far from being perfect. they could neither fully reproduce the sound as it was intended, nor the natural ambiance of a real room. often even change in temperature while perfoming would alter the sound slightly, or even more. they often had an artificial, outerwordly sound to them.
with digital sound processing, all these seemingly problems were over. a sound program, or workstation, or plugin could take a 100% copy of a sound and 100% correctly repeat it in echo and delay.
now, seemingly, all was well.
yet people started to realise that something was wrong. yes, the sound was perfect. but exactly because of this, it suddenly felt cold. dry. it has lost its sparkle. so a lot of people went back to the analog reverb units, especially those using it for their bands, but also people in the analog electronic music field.
it turned out that the imperfect, artificial, often low in frequency feel of the early reverb units was actually what added a lot of magic to the songs. it stood out. it gave the music a spacey feel. an otherworldly attribute.
the early sound of new wave and postpunk are unthinkably without the specialness of analog reverb. same goes for the krautrock of the 70s. or the rock'n'roll of the 50s. the outer world looped "woo!" shouted echos of the rocknroll singers that spiralled into psychedelia made up a large part of the impact of this type of music (note: for rock'n'roll, often even more "primitive" methods were seemingly used: the bands just played in large empty buildings during recordings, like farm silos).
the disadvantage was the advantage. the problem was the solution. that the units recreated the sounds imperfectly was the biggest plus. it was the whole point of them.

now on to social networks. before the advent of the internet and social networks, if you had a, let's say, strange taste in music, culture or politics, it was hard for you to find likeminded people. to reach out and get in contact with the others. to attain the music you like. to find out more information. to get fanzines or books if they were available.
now with social networks, this is wholly different. you can reach out to thousand of people. find dozens of new songs everyday. find every info about every band you ever want. see their concert videos or their studio work.
seemingly, this is good. but just like the example with the digital reverb units. it killed the magic. it made a lot of things disappear.
because that you had to *struggle* if you had a different or more sophisticated taste or point of view was the whole point. it was what made it worth it. it was what created results. that everything is so easy now in the internet age destroys so many things, it feels like too much to mention.

let me give an example. imagine you were the only one in your place to discover, krautrock, or punkrock, or techno first. at least the only one you knew of. so in order to spread this music, the ideas, to reach out to others, you had to do something. create a fanzine. annoy your record store to stock these records. organize a small concert in a local youth centre or another place. hand out flyers.
and by this, you already had created something. something beautiful. and out of this, more could grow. in your local record store you meet a girl that has similiar taste and you both start a band. and maybe you get picked up
and become known nationwide...
do you think you would start a band because you and others clicked on the same song on a social network page or commented on the same video? (note: one out of a billion it might happen... but much, much less than it was the case with real record shops).
the struggle was the point. it was what put things in place, enabled growth, and make wonderous things happen.

but don't get me wrong. life doesn't have to be hard. there are the solutions. but social networks are not the solution. and most other things on the internet are not either.

all you do is click, click, click, and nothing happens. watch videos like videos read biographies get news look up biographies. and nothing happens.

change this.