Just today I was relating something that I had heard about Jack White--He apparently would purposely make his various instruments and pieces of gear difficult to get to and hook up (even for live shows!), i.e., placing guitars behind amps, etc, rather than making everything easy to reach/hook up/ put things in an 'easy' work-flow layout. He said that this actually made him more creative, made him think through his decisions and not take anything for granted. Anyway--what you related here brought this to mind. There is definitely a point where 'convenience is the death of liberty' (something that I SWEAR I heard or read years ago but have been at a loss to attribute for almost as many years...). Kudos to you for talking about process--the sometimes nitty-gritty side of creativity. And, yes--the analogy definitely works.....the Candy Store is a Killer! Often, our limitations are precisely what free us.
It can also help give you limitations to work around. It's hard to be creative when you are given infinite choices to be creative with. Your everything connected set up does sound pretty sweet though.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Having everything hooked up and immediately ready to go saves time, and prevents future headaches... Especially if you have a complicated wiring set-up (e.g.- multiple pieces of equipment going in and out of several different processing units). There are times where routing has taken me approximately 45 minutes to 2 hours to figure out, only to find I missed out on one thing, and have to do it all over again. Now that I got that part out of the way, and for as long as it's hooked up, I don't ever have to worry about it, Ever Again. Who wants to run through their wiring, constantly hooking up and unhooking everything? A Masochist, that's who. As I prepare for this move in the next week or so, I'm taking numerous pictures and videos as I unhook everything, to remind myself exactly where everything goes when I set it back up (which I'm not looking forward to doing, at all). My IDEAL set up is a center of a room with A Lot of physical space to move around. But along every wall of that room is all the equipment. And there's just one chair, which I can easily move between each "station". A guitar station, a synth station, a recording console station, a mixing station, a mastering station, etc. And EACH instrument, or rack that belongs to each station can be turned on with the press of just A BUTTON. Which means, once a melody comes, you can Get It Right Out. I was watching a tutorial from a pretty recognized guru channel, and the fella' was doing a tape bounce; but when he did his tape bounce, he wasn't hearing it LIVE through the device as it was being bounced. Instead, he played it back, after the fact; realized the levels weren't where they needed to be, and turned up the volume to push the original source to tape harder. He unnecessarily and painstakingly did this about 4 times. I wasn't the only one in his comment section who mentioned the ease of patch bays or taking the time to do all your routing/engineering Ahead Of Time. In fact, it was painful to watch him do this... even though he sped up the film and skipped to the final result. Now imagine doing this every day of your life, every single time you want to put something to wax. I think it'd be easier to just whip yourself with a belt, truly, lol But I think what you're talking about is something a little different. With synths, we tend to get lost in what I call "Preset Land". In fact, a lot of our judgements as to whether we're going to get a synth or not, is based on the presets we here. Though not all of us are truly getting our monies worth, by taking the time to read the manuals, or spend hours working on our own Sound Design. Same situation with guitars. I find myself looking for a different guitar instead of running through the same lessons on theory that I'd have to eventually run through on another guitar, anyway. But somehow I think the colour, body shape, or pickups of the new guitar is going to completely revolutionize my approach to my playing and be A Completely New Experience. And, well... Not Exactly. Sure, it's important to try different creativity hacks in order to look at your instruments, or how you approach making music differently. But once you make enough stuff, or you know enough to start making stuff. Then it's really unnecessary. Look at Frank Zappa... a lightswitch goes off, and he hears an entire song in his head, beginning to end. It's not something that just belongs to the super geniuses among us. No, it happens once you start putting enough chords together. Once you do that, you start hearing melodies in your head. Once that happens, then you start off with putting some chords down at some BPM sequence with some desirable patch/tone, and boom... you've not only started the creative process, you're in fact, knee deep. Because you have a melody with chords, NOW it's impossible not to hear the drum beat that accompanies it, or the bass part, or the lead, or the guitars, or the, etc. etc. etc. Once the basic part comes to fruition, the rest of the song begins to write itself effortlessly, requiring no great thought. I feel almost as if people are, at times, trying to mystify the music-making process. Sure, art can be mystical and magical, but I think this line of thought for ponderance arises when one starts thinking thoughts like, "how come The Beatles are regarded as one of the greatest bands to ever exist?", "How come I don't have a hit song?", "what's Brian Wilson's overall secret to creating his own veritable hits?" ...you can get into THAT world of ponderance, and it's interesting to philosophize about. The FEELING of that line of study, and the emulation thereof is spiritual, emotive, interesting, therapeutic. But at the end of the day, it's just whole notes and half-notes, set to pace, that evoke/arouse emotional responses, truly. This is the same line of creative rabbit hole thinking people go through when they start bringing Robert Johnson, The Crossroads and "The Devil" into the conversation of music. I feel. It's the same thing that happens to me when I get fired up watching a Beatles documentary, wondering what it was about them, their lives, their upbringing, or the magic of their union of collaborative minds that made them who they were... or was it also the acid and the meditation, the mantras... or was it Yoko, too, or was it anything at all Chapman did? Or the way society has a way of celebrating Human Gods? Was our own collective society and it's interpretations or manner of spreading cultural myths somehow to blame for their extollation? But I digress. Everyone from Ihsahn himself has been recommending Rick Ruben's latest book on creativity, so maybe we should take a breather, and check it out for ourselves? Then come back here and see if he actually managed to say some revolutionary stuff after all. Or has the wheel already been invented? Man, I don't know. One thing I do know is this may be food for thought, and you'll never get this 5 minutes back, you just listened to my song. Was it good? I don't know. Does it really even matter? lol
It's something I see all the time, creators publish dozens of synth songs, but in the end they all look alike and they all sound the same. Less is more! 🫀🫀🫀
