Yngwie Malmsteen paradox
Also known as the Jazz paradox, the Yngwie Malmsteen paradox addresses this irony: the power technology has to make our lives easier which, when we deploy it, winds up making them harder.
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Towards more picturesque speech™
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- Guitar World: What happens in the case of a chord like G13?
- TUFNEL: Okay. This is my other theory: If you're playing that type of music, you shouldn’t be doing it.
- GW: Shouldn’t be doing the Nigel Tufnel Theory of Music?
- TUFNEL: No. You shouldn’t be playing music.
- — Nigel Tufnel, interviewed by Guitar World Magazine, April 1992
Modern information technology allows us to freely manipulate, desiccate, desecrate, defibrillate and duplicate data. A good enough algorithm can, in theory, handle any kind of syntactical complexity, costlessly ingesting and processing the densest textual construction. With a simple cut-and-paste we can replicate, vary and augment at will. But this generates what we call the “Yngwie Malmsteen paradox”[1]: Just because guitar technology[2] means you can play 64th note flattened mixolydian arpeggios at 200 bpm doesn’t mean you should.
See also
- Reg tech and why it is so disappointing — due in part, by analogy, to Yngwie Malmsteen.
References
- ↑ Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel might have called it the “Jazz paradox”
- ↑ Scalloped frets, flat radii, locking tuners, rectified amplifiers etc.