[sdiy] Wakeman

[Neil Johnson]

Richard,

> Re: SOS vs FM

(playing devil's advocate for a moment...)

Sounds like a very different editorial model between the two.  In defence
of the SOS approach, it sounds more like academic writing: you spend
months writing a paper, then send it off to a conference or journal; if a
conference then you might hear back in 3 months, a journal can take 6 or
more months, and mostly to get a "no" (a very popular conference will
have an acceptance ratio of worse than 1:50, I know of one that had
1:400.  Many are around the 1:10 mark).

Every paper is peer-reviewed by at least three people, and then a panel of
experts.  Sometimes the discussions can get quite animated.  If you're
running a conference, and you get 200 submissions for 20 paper slots, you
choose the best 20 papers, and reject the rest.

Getting two reviewers to review the same product gives the editor a
choice, rather than being stuck with whatever a single reviewer decides to
write.

Yes, I can see from the writer's perspective that having a monopoly is
attractive, but from the reader's perspective having competition for
quality (assuming this is the case) is better.

> It's probably not a good idea to mention that according to an anonymous
> source not a million miles from their offices, the SOS readership is
> 'Mostly IT types who like to play at being musicians.' ;-)

I can see September being an 'interesting' time :-)

> The *real* problem with all of these mags is that they sell you on the
> idea that buying more gear will let you make better music. This, of
> course, is bullshit.

Indeed.  But if you consider them purely as gear reviews, then they
satisfy that requirement: gear reviews and adverts, that's all.  If I want
to learn anything I'll go and grab a book on the subject, not rely on a
few pages in a magazine.

> Certain toys are nice to have and once you get to a certain basic level
> you can forget about the gear and get on with being creative.

>From my perspective, its interesting to see what features are appearing in
modern synths, if nothing more than to feed into the creative process for
designing my own synths (or design cockups to avoid!).  Either that or to
laugh at the more bizarre creations!!!

> But the idea that you have to keep buying and upgrading is just plain
> evil, IMO.

Too true.  Such is the consumerist society today, with the idea that you
can "buy" talent!  Then again.... (looks round at current pop charts)

Cheers,
Neil

--
Neil Johnson :: Computer Laboratory :: University of Cambridge ::
http://www.njohnson.co.uk          http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~nej22
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