Dekay,
I just finished a couple of books on Zappa. The device is called a synclavier. He loved it, he said, because he could type notes in and push a button to immediately play it back.
Part of the love, I take it from the books, is that he had a terrible time getting orchestras (I'm not talking about his bands here; they were another story) to rehearse sufficiently and then do a good job playing his pieces. He noted the primary limitations of the synclavier as being that it cannot improvise (of course) and cannot reproduce emotion absent a level of complexity of the data inputted that was debilitatingly time-consuming--I'm sure folks could argue about the latter forever. I'm no expert; this is just what I've read in the last two days.
I just finished a couple of books on Zappa. The device is called a synclavier. He loved it, he said, because he could type notes in and push a button to immediately play it back.
Part of the love, I take it from the books, is that he had a terrible time getting orchestras (I'm not talking about his bands here; they were another story) to rehearse sufficiently and then do a good job playing his pieces. He noted the primary limitations of the synclavier as being that it cannot improvise (of course) and cannot reproduce emotion absent a level of complexity of the data inputted that was debilitatingly time-consuming--I'm sure folks could argue about the latter forever. I'm no expert; this is just what I've read in the last two days.