The Age of Disinformation

As much as my last post was about, Make A Good Sound, this one is about getting sound advice, or more accurately, getting correct advice about making music. 

 It's 2013, and anyone with a computer and an internet connection can claim to be an expert on some subject, then proceed to post audio, video, or words for all to see. The 2 biggest examples of this are Wikipedia and YouTube. Both are filled with wondrous information for free. It's really quite amazing. But the other side of this is, there's an amazing amount of bad, and just plain wrong information being presented.


I have a son currently in college, and he cannot use Wikipedia as a source for term/research papers, just because so much of what's out there is more opinion than fact. This is not to say there isn't a lot of great info, but you really have to be careful about what you believe as true. When in doubt, look for second sources to back something up.


A perfect example of this is one person presenting a drum instructional video on YouTube all about triplets (I'm not even going to link to this one so the hit count doesn't go way up, but I'm sure you can find it…). 

 For clarification, this is what triplets are:




Now this person proceeds to demonstrate, for 5 or 6 minutes, what he calls triplets, when in actuality he is playing this:




Yes, he is playing notes in groups of 3. No, they are not triplets.

 This is just one example of potentially thousands of videos on music that are giving wrong information. YouTube is a great resource, with thousands of fantastic instructional and inspirational videos, but you have be discriminating. So for you young or inexperienced musicians out there, when you watch videos on YouTube, Vimeo, etc., if you suspect what is being presented isn't right, ask someone else for confirmation. Also look at the source. See if you can find further information on the person presenting the video (website, credentials, etc.). Just because it's on the net doesn't mean it's correct.
A good amount of the information on the internet is wrong. - Abraham Lincoln

 Be careful out there…

 ~ MB 

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