Prisoners of our own devices

We invent things that change the world we live in. And then we get ensnared in the new world we’ve created.

At least, that’s my understanding of Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media. And right now, the medium we’re mostly talking about is artificial intelligence. Aside from providing lawyers with a major payday, one of the key fears about new tools such as Large Language Models is that they’ll take us down a path of creative stasis. It seems we’re going to be suffocated by grammatically perfect, but stultifying boring, prose. For the time being at least, LLMs aren’t actually intelligent, rather they are capable of endlessly repurposing the content on which they are built.

This doesn’t sound like a good thing. And yet, we’ve been here before, and we arrived without any help from AI.

I play electric guitars. And although my dreams of stardom and global domination are long since gone, I do still enjoy getting a sound out of them. However, I live in a flat in the middle of Madrid, so plugging a Gibson Les Paul into an earth-shatteringly loud Marshall stack is unlikely to prove the best way to cultivate harmonious Anglo-Spanish relations.

So, I needed some sort of electronic device that would allow me to unleash rock and roll mayhem without troubling the neighbours.

There was no shortage of such electronic gadgets to choose from. Pretty much every major music tech manufacturer has some sort of digital-amp-in-a-box for guitarists. And yet, the underlying design philosophy of every one of these competing devices is pretty much exactly the same. They’ve all gone and got together a bunch of vintage guitar amplifiers, put a test signal through them, and then modelled the resulting changes to original sound. Consequently, depending on whether you want to sound more like George Harrison, Nile Rodgers or Yngwie Malmsteen, you just have to select the amp model used by those players from a menu. The technology has now reached a point at which many professional musicians are happy to record and tour with these digital facsimiles, rather than lugging around expensive and fragile valve-powered equipment.

So far, so good, right? Well, yes and no. From a technical perspective, the latest technology is impressive, but it’s nonetheless guided by some pretty conservative design principles. The sound of classic rock music from the past is in fact the sound of musicians pushing the limits of the gear they were using way beyond what the original designers had in mind – sonic artefacts like distortion and feedback were originally thought of as things to be eliminated, not the quintessential building blocks of rock guitar tone. The launch of the first commercially successful electric guitar designs in the early fifties led to a two-decade long process of frenetic experimentation that took us from Buddy Holly to Led Zeppelin.

And while you might think that the potential of the latest digital processing technology might be used to explore as yet undiscovered tonal territories, the big bucks are currently being invested in a battle to produce the most realistic emulation of a Fender amplifier from 1964. I guess this is the musical version of wanting a faster horse rather than a car.

However, if you’re in the market for one of these high-tech sonic time machines, some of the best purchasing advice comes from Worship musicians. They’re all over this sort of kit. I don’t know if having an unshakable belief in the fundamental goodness of Jesus is a pre-requisite to becoming a guitarist in a Worship band, but landing a regular gig in a US mega-church does at least guarantee you the opportunity to unleash your inner rock god in front of a blissed-out audience every Sunday. Outside of Taylor Swift’s musical industrial complex, Worship represents one of the few growth sectors for live performance.

With the typical show involving a full band, numerous singers and at least one pastor in the MC role, to achieve slick production values Worship churches have enthusiastically embraced the latest digital tech on the market. The music itself is typically mid-tempo rock that builds from an acoustic guitar or piano introduction, towards a coda that usually owes more than a small debt to the noisy bit at the end of Coldplay’s Fix You. The sonic pathway to spiritual transcendence demands a certain level of investment in raw digital processing power: you’ll likely hear huge, echo-drenched, wide-stereo, eighth-note guitar motifs that build in wave after wave before eventually releasing the listener by crashing down onto a major chord resolution. Lyrically the songs are usually uncomplicated paeans to the power, love, or magnanimity of Jesus.

Had the current Worship scene emerged thirty-five years ago – before the release of U2’s The Joshua Tree – you’d have had to concede that it was musically original. But it didn’t. So, it isn’t. Instead, it showcases just how well cutting-edge digital technology can emulate the sounds of sixties valve amplification, in the service of delivering a supremely professional homage to middle-of-the-road stadium rock. And in turn, this explains why Worship players make some of the best product demo videos on YouTube.

All this isn’t to say that the growing use of AI tools won’t further accelerate our tendency to walk backwards into the future. It’s just that we’ve already adequately demonstrated our capacity to turn technological progress into creative stasis. Maybe we’re just born that way.

And so we play on, songs that don’t sound current, ceaselessly recycling the past.