I totally get it, and I really feel your ultimate point is spot on - all of this is about making music. I think your comments at their root digs at a deeper point though, which is really about how much software really helps us vs. hinders us. I am still greatly fond of the memories and power of using an Alesis QS6.1 with an MMT-8 and feeling amazed at the ability to put together a reasonably full song with no software whatsoever. It’s weirdly challenging to still find hardware like that now - decent, functional, reasonably-priced sequencers, non-restricted workstations or synths with multi-timbral support. I actually have an Alesis Andromeda and Squarp Pyramid, both amazing in their own right, which I thought would give me a similar and powerful experience … nope. Just not the same … with options comes complexity and functional challenges in the creative process.
I make electronic music. I grew up in very small rural towns with 3 radio stations: a top 100 station, a county station, and a hard rock station. I didn’t know what electronic music was until 6th grade and the teacher’s son brought music in from a “big city”. InfoSoc, Kraftwerk, and Depeche Mode grabbed me like an alien spaceship beaming up a hillbilly out of the woods … it’s some of the only music that’s ever made sense to me (immensely so at the time). If I could just pick up a guitar to make everything that’s in my head, I’d never experience any of these issues at all … but my creative demon flies very differently.
Much like how VR and AR seek to expose us to new worlds, yet face continual uphill battles with ergonomics and comfortable user experiences (for many reasons), I constantly find the same with so many of the tools we use when writing electronic music. The force of constant OS upgrades and version changes to our software and creation process … the changes to the infrastructure (DAW, protocols, hardware, etc.) … these things regularly force us to adapt new workflows while introducing new problem. I feel like it’s greater when you write electronic music from scratch, constantly seeking new and interesting ways to make sounds and rhythms, especially without a cohesive set of standards for MIDI implementation and plug-in foundation. Things NI’s NKS is one of the most promising solutions I’ve ever seen … yet it does come laced with it’s own issues, like anything else.
The greatest challenge I face regularly writing and mastering electronic music (often done in part on the fly because of the sheer dynamic range of frequencies and FX variation during the creative process) is raw processing power and the performance of the tools I’m using. Changes in tempo, changes in keys, changes in synced delays and LFOs … all of this needs close to or immediate response to maintain the same immersive creative experience that you might find if you were working with that single guitar … and that means performance in your tools, and things that aren’t getting in your way. It means feel comfortable and in control hammering out your current workspace to accomplish what your trying to do, with all your tweakable controls very close and right there.
I often think of Orbital … I’m not sure I’ve ever heard another group (maybe Apparat or wisp, maybe) who can pull of such diverse but incredibly cohesive frequency explorations in the electronic space … but it’s where they live, and they’ve had the money and tools to explore those solutions and make them happen … not without challenges of their own no doubt, but they’ve done it time and again.
It’s a search, it’s a battle. In some ways I’m sure it will never be completely resolved … but when I can write all my stuff without performance issues, it will be an incredibly awesome space. It’s close … my toolset is mostly happiness that allows very flexible creativity searches … but yeah, I’d like this part solved, lol.
Mickey
