Antonoff condenses months of creativity into eight minutes. It left me think about how much learning is assumed to get to a point of understanding the technology to get to a point of control. I remember when I was young, I had a Roland G707. I would use a cassette player to record tape after tape of tweeking with the various sounds. There was something about the physicality of it that was never matched when I moved onto Fruity Loops.
π¬ Limitless Tools
It has been interesting to see the transition in soft synths Oliver. The interview with George FitzGerald reminded me a short clip involving Jack Antonoff. He too restricts himself to original equipment:
Thanks for responding to this Aaron. It’s a really interesting area, I can see so much resonance for music production and I wonder if there are general points that are relevant for other disciplines/activities. I’m sure there are but not quite put my finger on it yet!
I think there’s two distinct parts to this. One is the physicality that you mention at the end of your post. There is something powerful about interacting with media using physical controls rather than virtual ones. You can get this with soft synths and a multi purpose midi controller – and for simply manipulating a couple of parameters this works well. I often remap a couple of knobs on my hardware synth to a soft synth to ride them a bit through a passage. However, for more involved things like programming new sounds or getting really creative with manipulating sound this isn’t a substitute for a dedicated physical interface designed for exactly what you are doing. There’s something about how we associate physical objects with particular things and how our muscle memory works that makes this really powerful.
The other aspect is the restrictions. I can see how this is tangible and obvious if you restrict yourself to physical instruments. However, once you realise the power of that idea, there seems to me no reason why one couldn’t achieve the same by putting some arbitrary restrictions on process. I’ve tried setting up a template project in my DAW with a set of instruments and tracks that I go back to. I’ve got inputs for my hardware instruments, but also one MiniMoog soft synth set up read for bass, one Jupiter 8 for synth keys sounds, one instance of Absynth for pads, etc. Trying to keep to this setup as a ‘virtual band’ as George FitGerald describes could have some interesting results… I’ll keep you posted.