Get Creative With Limitations: Music making challenges to focus the mind

Hi
I wrote this article on using limitations for Sonicstate:

Do you have any particular techniques to limit your music making?

What other limitations might inspire creativity?

Chris [midierror]

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I was, for awhile, creating entries for the weekly Disquiet Junto project. For one of them I used a 3/4 sized acoustic guitar, making samples and using those for the track, sometimes filtering the samples with comb filters, ring modulators, etc.

I liked the results so much I decide to make an album with the rule “Only use sounds made by the small guitar.” device chain effects allowed to process the samples.

(OK there’s my voice on there as well.)

Hence the title. 10 pieces of music, made from pieces of small guitar samples.

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No. I was limited for my whole life in terms of music making until I started to use Renoise 10 years ago, so I don’t want to limit myself anymore in any case. No more hardware limitations, no more software (DAW) limitations, no more track limitations, no limitations at all. The only limitations there are is the lack of time and my brain. :wink:

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Yes. I absolutely love the creativity inducing power of limitation. I’ve made pieces synthesized entirely from white noise: Stream stochazm v1.2 by •zensphere• / SLVJR | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
and only using sine waves: Stream signs & sigils by •zensphere• / SLVJR | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
and otherwise appreciate the power of constraint to promote lateral thinking, creativity, and unorthodox methods to achieve one’s chosen goal.

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I miss the old Dead Dog Renoise Competition, that was all about limitations with different themes and rules for each round.

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Haha same for most of us…have a look at the second challenge: Life!

That’s really cool! I’ll give this a listen tomorrow. Would you do something like this again? Was it fun?

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Sounds great, maybe we could re-kindle it? Could even be a cross-daw challenge…? Inter-daw?!

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Wow I absolutely LOVE these ideas!!! The idea of only using white noise is brilliant :drummer:

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Maybe an Undead Cat Competion should be a thing?

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It was great fun. The album I did after that was all electronic (to be fair that restriction is pretty open-ended in what you can do).

yeah, man. DO eet!

It was surprising to me how much I learned & how creative I had to get with sound design with this limitation. There were a bunch of others who participated, too. The thread, if you’re interested: White noise/native synthesis challenge

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I like the weeklybeats project ( WeeklyBeats.com every other year, for forcing me to work relatively quick and not dwell too much on high standards or get stuck in peripheral matters. Time is limited so it helps me to try to focus. Still hard to do with work and kids.

Having collected gazillion plugins over the years, sometimes i set limits by only using plugins from a certain vendor. Limitations that act as a starting point, because in the end always stuff gets added :slight_smile: . Similar to only use sounds from a kit, pack, fieldrecordings or custom made sample collection. I think limits are a good starting point, but not dogmatically sticking to it, in the end the music should dictate what is needed?

Here is a track though only made from 2 sounds as an exercise;
Listen to Richard Jonas - ZÓÓ Niet GOED - 04 Went Soot by R.Jonas (arty farty) in ZÓÓ niet GOED playlist online for free on SoundCloud . The 2 sounds used can be heard in the first 3 seconds.