Is this already electronica or still acoustic?

Well, by those definitions, any type of music that involves a source recorded with a microphone is electronic music. Because the microphone is an electrical device that converts vibration to currents, right? Also, if you use an analog EQ (electrical device!) to turn down the bass or treble of, for instance, a microphone (electrical device!) recording of a snare drum, you're de-facto applying "electronic manipulation"....

It's an endless rabbit hole and a line has to be drawn. I personally think that the "electronic music" label is only truly justified when the synthesis and/or manipulation significantly alters the sound, creating an outcome impossible to recreate using acoustic equipment, or at least an outcome that is very different to the original source.

Edited by Hrychu - June 20 2024 at 13:45

Reminds me of discussions at the time when instruments like the clavinet emerged. There, for example, metal reeds are plucked, then fed to the electronics via a pickup (usually a simple coil around the reed) and then processed as desired. Basically, the same way it is done with any electric guitar. But despite the distortion and modulation effects, it is not automatically described as electronic music. Or should we be more flexible with the categories?

That's an incredibly odd and also a bit fallacious way to define "electronic music". The Hohner Clavinet is an electromechanical instrument. Like you said, very similar to the electric guitar. Usually what people refer to as "electronic music" is almost entirely synthesizer-based.

Synthesizers aren't electromechanical, although there are some electromechanical instruments that kinda verge on being synths, like the Hammond organ, which uses mechanical guts (tonewheels) to synthesize the sound in a very similar manner, say, a Minimoog, or a Solina, would do it. The general rule of thumb is that synthesizers don't use any moving mechanical parts to generate the sound, only electronic circuits, with discrete components, chips et al.