How Japanese technology shaped dance music

I&#x27;ve wondered if, when Moore&#x27;s Law stops applying and new technology now is less revolutionary than new technology in the past, mass revolutions in popular culture will become rarer to see along with it. It seems that a lot of earlier music was a product of the kinds of software&#x2F;hardware that was available at the time (along with many other factors, of course). When there are more options to produce music than ever in the present, choosing to go back to one of the &quot;old-school&quot; eras becomes a conscious creative choice, instead of a result of hard limitations.<p>It&#x27;s kind of like how the jump from DVD to Blu-Ray was more significant than 4K to 8K in my mind.

Not just dance music but hip hop too! The Akai MPC has been a dominant sampling and sequencing tool of some of the most prolific producers, even as software started to eat the electronic music world.

I think the main thing about the japanese instruments were the lower prices. There was plenty of great products from E-mu, Ensoniq, Oberheim, Linn, Moog, and Sequential in the 80&#x27;s. But they were pricier, which lead to lower market share, which meant worse economy of scale - a classic death spiral. Out of desperation, quality begins to suffer and then it was pretty much over for all of them in the early to mid 90&#x27;s.

Perhaps I skimmed too fast, but the key &quot;event&quot; it doesn&#x27;t mention is that much of the first wave of gear was not intended to for &quot;dance music.&quot; It was intended for rock &amp; roll. But that market shunned it.<p>It wasn&#x27;t until some &quot;crazy kids&quot; said &quot;What&#x27;s this stuff? What can we do with it?&quot; that modern &quot;dance music&quot; was born.<p>I suppose you can liken it to the invention of the urethane wheels for skateboarding. You want inspiration for innovation? What the &quot;Dogtown and Z-Boys&quot; documentary.

Whenever I think of the beginning of Japan&#x27;s rule, I think of the 1977 US$4800 (twice as much in the UK). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roland_MC-8_Microcomposer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roland_MC-8_Microcomposer</a>. This is two years after the Pop Electronics article on the Altair.<p>Ralph Dyck-inspired, [1] with an 8080A micro, starting with 4K (1100 notes) of expensive RAM (later 16K). 22 quarter-inch jacks, 30 push-buttons, LEDs.... An inch-thick manual. This wasn&#x27;t just an improvement on anything that existed. It was a Kakehashi moonshot - wine and roses. Only 300 made.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110918103549&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.soundonsound.com&#x2F;sos&#x2F;1997_articles&#x2F;mar97&#x2F;rolandmc8.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110918103549&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.soundo...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rolandmc8.wordpress.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;exclusive-interview-with-ralph-dyck-godfather-of-the-mc-8&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rolandmc8.wordpress.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;exclusive-intervi...</a>

While the Japanese are amazing at hardware, they seem totally incapable of building world class software.<p>No notable audio production software or soft synth plugins is Japanese, which is weird, considering that many of their synths are digital in nature (thus contain basically a soft-synth).<p>Same thing in cameras, Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Sony built amazing camera yet the camera software is basically stuck in the 90s, not to mention stuff like Instagram...

Definitely incredibly influential, but I would say that Roland, KORG, Yamaha, etc. are matched by the likes of Moog, Sequential, Oberheim, Access, and many others (from E-mu to Linn to modern Eurorack) on the hardware side, and on the software side by DAWs such as Reason, Live, FL Studio, Logic and myriad plugins. Definitely a fair amount of US and Europe as well as Japan.

This headline is the antithesis of the &quot;That&#x27;s going to be short article&quot; joke.

Relevant video: &quot;Breakbeat Deconstruction: From hip hop to drum &amp; bass and beyond&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eJf9Jptq7VY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eJf9Jptq7VY</a>