This is about musical snobbery. I have nothing against people preferring “art” music over “popular” music, if that’s their sincere, subjective opinion. Everyone should explore the full range of musical expression and come to their own conclusion. What I object to is when some people decide that there’s a single Platonic “ideal” music, constant and beyond dispute. This extends to the instruments used; some orchestral musicians look down on rock musicians, and in my field, guitarists can be outrageously snobbish about electronic music.
Is a sampler a musical instrument? Is a synth or a sequencer a musical instrument? To be honest, I don’t know. I’d rather not even contemplate those questions, because I don’t think the potential answers would be particularly helpful. I mean, is a piano a musical instrument? Or is it just a large box containing a hammered dulcimer and a remote controller for playing that dulcimer?
[[And Segovia said the electric guitar was an "abomination". Tosser. Where would we be if we took *him* seriously? Genius of the classical guitar, but stick to what you know, eh Andres?]]
So, let’s ditch the word “instrument”. It’s too emotive. “Tool” is the word I prefer. You use a hammer to knock in a nail, and the better the hammer, the more chance you have of knocking in the nail effectively. Of course, your personal nailing ability has a lot to do with it; if you don’t practise, you’ll end up with crooked nails even using the best hammer in the shop.
If you just want to make music, you have a range of tools at your disposal. They all require a certain amount of ability – to play a guitar, you need to learn how to work this particular tool; if you decide that’s too difficult and opt for using a guitar-type sound on a synth, you’ll still need to be able to work that tool.
A sampler is another tool. On its own, it’s just a pile of circuits and a disk drive. Even with a lot of sounds stored in it, it’ll just sit there serenely, happily overheating whatever’s sitting above it in your rack (always leave 1 unit rack space above a sampler, kids…) It needs you to tell it what to do. By plugging a keyboard into the sampler, via a MIDI cable, you can press the keys and trigger the sounds. You’re making music.
So you might like to think of a piano as a kind of mechanical sampler. It has preset sounds stored in its memory (the finite vibrational possibilities of each string) and you trigger those sounds by pressing the keys.
Now, the matter becomes blurred when we think about how most people use a sampler. Rather than playing it “live” with a keyboard, we generally enlist the help of another tool – a sequencer. This triggers the notes from the sampler while we sit back with a cup of tea and listen to the results. However, the sequencer has to be told what to do; we have to program it. We can do this in a “live” way… setting the sequencer to record, then playing all the notes on the keyboard in real time. Or we can program it note by note, typing in MIDI commands or drawing graphics on a screen. Or you can work at yet another level of removal – download a MIDI file (which someone else has programmed) and feed that into your sampler.
Again, the question “Is a sampler/sequencer/synth a musical instrument?” and again, I’m going to evade it because I… a) don’t know; and b) don’t want to know. Another question, though, is “Are the sounds from a sequencer/sampler music? After all, they’re not played by real people”. My usual reply is that you should consider the great composers. All we have today is their scores – instructions for an orchestra to play the tunes. A row of MIDI commands is *exactly* the same thing. There is no “soul” or “feeling” in a musical score, no matter how many extra performance indications (to do with dynamics, tempo or whatever) you add. Those performance indications are meaningless until someone comes along and interprets them in relation to their range of musical parameters (how loud is “loud”, anyway?)
Now, this is all based on a best-case scenario. You’d need to enlist a pretty cool programmer to get as much dynamic, rhythmic and timbral range from a MIDI-driven synth (or rather, rack of synths) as from an orchestra. But it’s theoretically possible. Any musical parameter can be quantified. Whether it could be done in practice is another matter… in fact, it wouldn’t be worth it. If your music requires an orchestra, use an orchestra. However, there are times when a sampler driven by a sequencer would do a better job. There are other times when a Les Paul plugged into a Marshall would be the only solution.
And… more importantly for most of us who live in the real world… there are times when you just have to do the best you can with the tools you have at your disposal. I don’t have the facilities for recording/playing drums, so I use a sequencer, which drives a sampler containing drum sounds. You do the best you can, because the MUSIC is the most important thing.
And that’s the crux of my point. Whatever tools you use to create the music, it doesn’t make any difference. Whether you’re using a traditional instrument, or something that wouldn’t usually be considered an instrument, they’re only the means by which you make MUSIC. As long as the resulting MUSIC is as faithful to your idea as possible, that’s all that matters. Us guitarists might be concerned with what so-and-so was using, but normal people don’t care. They want the notes to sound “good”. Whatever “good” happens to mean to you.