If you read nothing else in this issue (not, I trust, a likely eventuality), read Paul D. Lehrman's article entitled Why MIDI Music Stinks (Sometimes). If you've ever wondered why it is that so much bad music can be produced when so much good technology is available to musicians, you'll find the answers there. Or if you think you understand the problem, you may find your beliefs articulated.

The problem, to put it briefly, is that technology has made it so easy to create perfect sounding music that we can get away with murder — mediocre music proliferates, and not enough musicians take up the challenge that technology throws down. We must master our new tools, not simply mess with the toys. We need to work harder to produce anything of worth.

As Paul points out, bad art has always overwhelmed good, so no-one should fool themselves that there was ever a golden age when all music had great artistic merit, was wholly original, and was never produced for commercial gain. Every generation of musicians has appropriated ideas both from their own and from previous generations, for example, and one common application of sampling simply gives us a new means to an old end. Is it inherently less valid to incorporate samples of old records in original material than it ever was for a classical composer to base a new work on a traditional folk tune? No, and it is intellectual snobbery to insist otherwise.

The problem lies, as it always has done, with us as musicians. There is not, and never has been, anything wrong with technology itself, but there is something wrong with the way many of us use it. I'll leave it to Paul to explain the solution.

Once you've finished with Why MIDI Music Stinks, there's plenty more to check out in this issue. A good deal more than usual in fact, as we've bumped the size of the magazine up to 128 pages so that we can fit in reviews of 12 assorted new products, from Roland's new JV synths, to Steinberg's Cubase 3.0 and the Zoom 9000 effects processor, alongside features on Soul II Soul in the studio, improving home studio acoustics, sampling classic electro sounds, and a longterm 'soak test' report on the Roland JD800. Now read on...