Amateurs Have Got Talent

Is the proliferation of TV talent shows any kind of threat to low level, cash-in-hand, professional singers?

I think reality TV is a threat to human intelligence.

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I wasn't thinking so much about talent contest winners moving into the job market, I was thinking more of the preponderance of good quality amateur singing on TV - endlessly repeatable on YouTube - catering to needs of the general public - their appetite for singing, music, choosing the songs and singers they want to hear, any time of day etc.

I wonder if this has an impact on the career fortunes of meat and veg professional singers standing up in a cafe or hotel bar with a keyboardist and singing an hours' worth of covers. Is there still demand for them? Do customers want/need it? Are there just as many gigs available as there were before TV went potty for talent shows? I was thinking about that side of it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/arts/music/for-more-pianos-last-note-is-thud-in-the-dump.html

"In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before radio and recordings, pianos were the main source of music, even entertainment, in the home. They were a middle-class must-have.

So from 1900 to 1930, the golden age of piano making, American factories churned out millions of them. Nearly 365,000 were sold at the peak, in 1910, according to the National Piano Manufacturers Association. (In 2011, 41,000 were sold, along with 120,000 digital pianos and 1.1 million keyboards, according to Music Trades magazine.)

The average life span rarely exceeds 80 years, piano technicians say. That’s a lot of pianos now reaching the end of the line.

Piano dealers also blame other changes in society for a lack of demand in the used-piano market: cuts in music education in schools, competition for practice time from other pursuits, a drop in spending on home furnishings with the fall of the housing market."

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Today, you can have an electronic piano in your home that sounds like those pianos did, yet taking up a fraction of the space. I learned piano on one of those huge home pianos, and the piano I have now sounds better than that one ever did.

Originally posted by JS357
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/arts/music/for-more-pianos-last-note-is-thud-in-the-dump.html

"In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before radio and recordings, pianos were the main source of music, even entertainment, in the home. They were a middle-class must-have.

So from 1900 to 1930, the golden age of piano making, American factories churned ...[text shortened]... rom other pursuits, a drop in spending on home furnishings with the fall of the housing market."

Good article. Thanks for sharing.

I suspect that one problem is, with the rise of technology, immediate satisfaction
worship, and the dumbing down of society, that anybody who remotely
suspects that he or she has some sort of talent, immediately seek, relentlessly,
fast and at any price, the fame they think they [i]deserve[/].

That irks me. A lot. And the nobler, simpler things in life, like cooking, playing
music, or even being funny, have caused a generation of "attention horse"
trying to cut corners at any given chance. These last two or three generations
are lost.

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I still have my Yamaha even though I upgraded a couple times. Yeah, weighted keys are a must to get that 'real piano' feel.

I play a lot of jazz, I love to noodle around to albums. I play classical mainly as an exercise to stay in practice. Some of that stuff is intensely difficult. If you can play that, you can play anything. 🙂

Originally posted by Seitse
Good article. Thanks for sharing.

I suspect that one problem is, with the rise of technology, immediate satisfaction
worship, and the dumbing down of society, that [b]anybody who remotely
suspects that he or she has some sort of talent, immediately seek, relentlessly,
fast and at any price, the fame they think they [i]deserve[/].

That ir ...[text shortened]... orse"
trying to cut corners at any given chance. These last two or three generations
are lost.[/b]

There are kids coming along (I mean early, in elementary school) who are really good at the arts. They need to be encouraged without the onus of having a parent who is living vicariously through their kids. Those are bad news.

Originally posted by Suzianne
There are kids coming along (I mean early, in elementary school) who are really good at the arts. They need to be encouraged without the onus of having a parent who is living vicariously through their kids. Those are bad news.

There are kids with talent in every generation since the dawn of time.

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We had a spinet piano and it sounded terrible, I seldom played it. Now I have a kurzweil 88 key weighted key digital piano that not only has piano sounds and feels like a real piano, but it is also a Midi controller so I have a version of Kontact which has a bunch of different piano sounds as well as the built in one which also sounds great.

I have composed some nice tunes on the keyboard but also compose on acoustic instruments also, new one on my little Martin just last night, need to record it before I forget how it goes🙂

I just got a really neat recorder, the Tascam DR44wl, an amazing device. 4 channel recorder, 24 bit 96K recording or 16 bit 44.1 regular CD level, built in mic preamps, 2 recording modes, you can do anything you can do on a 4 track tape deck but a LOT more. 2 built in electret condenser mikes and two XLR/1/4 inch jack for external mikes.

It is about the size of an old small transistor radio but the recording capability is astounding. The price of a reel to reel 4 track pro machine in the 1970's was almost $2000, that would probably be more like $5000 to day but this device costs less than $300! I only wish I had it back in 75 when I had my first band Southwind Irish band. We have some recordings of us on my old Teac 4 track 10 inch reel and one from a studio and some from our TV show we got on back in 1980, the Lou Grant show. But I moved to Phoenix due to job opportunity and the band broke up. Sigh. We had a good sound back in the day.
Did have a couple other bands though.

We had a number of really great musicians in Southwind, Larry Model on fiddle, Des Reagan on button accordian, Sylvia Herald, vocals and guitar, Mark Simos on fiddle once, Judy Gameral on hammer dulcimer, Richard Adrianowitz on guitar, vocals and fiddle and me on guitar and mandolin, Ken O'malley, vocals and mandolin, he still plays in LA to this day, his band there is the Twilight Lords. Mark now teaches songwriting at Berklee College of music in Boston, which BTW, my daughter Heather is alumni, and Slyvia now plays and lives in San Francisco in several bands, She is a really great singer and guitarist. Mark is a frigging genius. Judy's dad was the #2 man at 20th Century fox back in the day, the comptroller. Judy lived with her mom and dad in Beverly Hills, very posh place! We did a lot of rehearsals there. Sigh.