A Vow of Chastity for electronic music?

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Fri May 13, 2005 5:05 am

FaX-01 wrote: Bit of a moot point though with iMac 2.0ghz G5 being so affordable and having as much juice as a Pc laptop by in large .

voicing aloud your consumer tendencies again?

i feel your pain.

FaX-01 · Post by **FaX-01** » Fri May 13, 2005 5:12 am

AdamJay wrote:
FaX-01 wrote: Bit of a moot point though with iMac 2.0ghz G5 being so affordable and having as much juice as a Pc laptop by in large .
voicing aloud your consumer tendencies again?

i feel your pain.

Yep the iMac + Metasynth looks so damn tempting.
That would be the ideal software rig I reckon.

iMac 20' 2ghz G5 with ......

Live
Metasynth
Reason 3
Reaktor 5

Would be neat compact selection of killer apps which cover all bases IMHO.
Reason would make a great standard conventional sample playback tool with a good library.
Metasynth + Reaktor 5 would just be sonically off the hook.
And as shallow as it sounds the iMac looks way more sexy than my P20 Toshiba (though the Toshi looks pretty spiffy for a PC laptop) ....
Anyone wanna help me rob a bank

.

anonymouse · Post by **anonymouse** » Fri May 13, 2005 5:40 am

would a mac mini be sufficient for metasynth?

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Fri May 13, 2005 6:07 am

FaX-01 wrote:
iMac 20' 2ghz G5 with ......

Live
Metasynth
Reason 3
Reaktor 5

careful with Reaktor 5.
i checked out the Beta for a day thanks to a kind friend at NI, and while there was about an 8% increase in cpu effeciency of playing back Reaktor 4 ensembles - Reaktor is still very much more effecient on a PC.

If you thought Live wasn't very well optimized for Mac, Reaktor is somewhat worse. Now, with the lower level programming, its plausible to think that version 5 ensembles that do similar things that v.4 ensembles did could be better optimized. and yea the 2ghz iMac is more capable than my G4 1.5ghz.

all i'm saying is be careful, see if you can run Reaktor 5 on an iMac before you make up your mind to rob that bank.

smart1123 · Post by **smart1123** » Fri May 13, 2005 6:22 am

Me and a buddy were working on an all original minimal house set where we could only have 8 sounds per song, closed and open hats and you've got two sound already, I found it quite a lot of fun for a while, but the work flow definitly slowed down as we only had four sounds each per track, picking each sound and what to do with it became way more important, ultimately it only worked well for about three tracks and then it got too inhibiting.
Now we like to just jam out together and get a big mess going then stretch it out into a 7 to 12 minute track. The hardest part of the creative process is moving sounds and settings between our two setups so that we can work on things separately as well, getting something good going this way is easy for us but the tech of combining our sessions and then getting them efficient enough to play back is a real bitch

FaX-01 · Post by **FaX-01** » Fri May 13, 2005 7:23 am

AdamJay wrote:
FaX-01 wrote:
iMac 20' 2ghz G5 with ......

Live
Metasynth
Reason 3
Reaktor 5
careful with Reaktor 5.
i checked out the Beta for a day thanks to a kind friend at NI, and while there was about an 8% increase in cpu effeciency of playing back Reaktor 4 ensembles - Reaktor is still very much more effecient on a PC.

If you thought Live wasn't very well optimized for Mac, Reaktor is somewhat worse. Now, with the lower level programming, its plausible to think that version 5 ensembles that do similar things that v.4 ensembles did could be better optimized. and yea the 2ghz iMac is more capable than my G4 1.5ghz.

all i'm saying is be careful, see if you can run Reaktor 5 on an iMac before you make up your mind to rob that bank.

A) I can't afford Reaktor 5 and B) I'm way to broke so robbing the bank is about the only option I've got

....

Hey I can dream though can't I

ikeaboy · Post by **ikeaboy** » Fri May 13, 2005 5:36 pm

matthew herbert has a personal manifesto titled
Personal Contract for the Composition of Music, he lists a number of out-of-bounds
techniques in his own music creation that include no drum machines, no sampling
of other people's music ("strictly forbidden"), no replication of
traditional acoustic instruments where the possibility of using the real instrument
exists and so on

ultrasource · Post by **ultrasource** » Fri May 13, 2005 9:27 pm

Now that I switched to Live and bought Operator and a couple of other vst's..... I mostly sit in the middle of the woods with my martin backpacker to compose WITHOUT my laptop. Strange but true.

Lo-Fi Massahkah · Post by **Lo-Fi Massahkah** » Fri May 13, 2005 9:45 pm

ikeaboy wrote:matthew herbert has a personal manifesto titled
Personal Contract for the Composition of Music, he lists a number of out-of-bounds
techniques in his own music creation that include no drum machines, no sampling
of other people's music ("strictly forbidden"), no replication of
traditional acoustic instruments where the possibility of using the real instrument
exists and so on

Now this is interesting! Where can I learn more?

conny · Post by **conny** » Fri May 13, 2005 10:26 pm

Interesting thread, thanks for thoughts.
I can't resist downloading alost every new VST/VSTi I get a small interest in. And then there was nothing really done that evening either.
I strongly feel something has to change.
I have a personal like for minimalism, for things like japanese rooms where only one thing is on the table for the guest to see while the tea is made.
I think B Brecht said something like if you have only a short pencil and three sheets of paper in a cold room, you will not write so much crap.
While having some kind of nervous illness for some time, I have noticed that the things I manage to write while my hands trembling and I'm the cold sweat runs up the back have a lot of substanse compared to the pages before and after.
No, I don't want to cut of my hands or anything, but as has been said here, limitations are, especially for us living in a worlds of unlimited possibilities, a great productions tool when one wants to make things that matter.
It's fun that LoFo mentions Dogma - I was about to propose that as an musical working ground some weeks ago!

New strategies? Some good has been mentioned. I was thinking about this pencil again. Maybe a music dogma start also could be to write down or draw a picture/schema etc of a tune you have in mind - just one sheet of paper - and them stick to it in some sense when that when going to the sound machinery.

And Adam (besides the Mac thing) - good, mature thoughts!

// C

conny · Post by **conny** » Fri May 13, 2005 10:32 pm

Another:
What about thinking of a piece of music like a dinner you are preparing for yourself and one guest.
I mean, when the rice is boiling, you will not suddenly change that to pasta. Now rice is cooking and the wine is already bought, we will not make a beef and beer dinner, than.
Etc.
You have to do the shopping, follow some order and quantities. But you have free hands to try a new spicing etc - main point: the guest is coming, the rice is cooking...
You wan't go shopping (for new sounds/effects etc) when the guest is in the elevator.
(Obscure post, maybe... I must be hungry.

)
// C

conny · Post by **conny** » Fri May 13, 2005 10:37 pm

Yet another:
Follow the Ableton song contest rules

// C

forge · Post by **forge** » Fri May 13, 2005 11:48 pm

smart1123 wrote:Because I have kids and a job and wife i have set times for writing music +latenight (you try it after an 8 hour day and six hours with a 3.5 yr old and a 9 month old), but I don't always feel the inspiration in those times, so my system works like this.

When I'm not feeling it I make sounds, lots, I'll put Live into record and start changing patches on my synths, tweeking, doing variations, get bored, move to a new sound...more of the same, at the end I get about 2hrs of tweeked sounds, load them into Protools, strip silence and add them to the Library. Or i play with plug ins and create new patches for fx or synths or whatever, record all the time to get those happy mistakes.
Then, when i'm Feeling It, the Library has lots of new sound options already in it and I can just focus on writing music,

Cheers

pretty much in the same boat and I find the same - tweak and make sounds/loops etc sometimes, then other times make tunes/jam the sounds

that's the good thing with live, once you've got the sounds there on your hard drive you can just get jamming when you get the urge...

supster · Post by **supster** » Sat May 14, 2005 1:28 am

really great thread, some thoughts on this whole thing:

most people that are doing this are in agreement .. with unlimited potential for sound, its very easy to get bogged down or lost in any number of traps

- too many VST's that you dont have time/patience to learn well enough.

- for that matter so many presets you can never listen to them all or remember where "that sound" was

- too many samples to browse through ... same thing

- too many techniqes / technologies to learn ...

what works for me:

i have an idea of the "feel" or style of a track i want to do.
then i start making sounds, building grooves, tweaking loops ...

sometimes i pull them randomly from loops, or run through presets, or a sample from my library and start effecting it

doesnt matter where i get the sounds from. if its a preset, fine. i use presets like instruments. so i have thousands of instruments to choose from.

when i get sounds that start to "lock" .. i keep them. then the groove/progression/melody starts to pull me in a certain direction.

i know my main "go to" vst's and effects and techiques well enough at that point, that if i start to hear the way this is going in my head, i can usually get an approximation of what i am aiming at, sometimes better if i'm lucky...

main point:

sometimes i start out with artificial restrictions, but most of the time no. the sounds start pulling the song in a certain direction, and i just run with that

once ive been zeroing in on the groove/harmonies/melodies etc and have tweaked them for a while, i'm automatically eliminating a lot of other possibilities.

the track starts taking on a life of its own, and ive filled up frequency bands with stuff that i cant step on without ruining what i have.

so ... i guess to sum it up, the sounds and elements im choosing along the way are defining the track. if i find a sound thats really working, i just stick with it and keep refining it until it gels with all of the other elements.

its like .. you know you want to make a stew, but you dont really have a definite recipe, and you have all this stuff in your closets and fridge that you open up and say "hmmm ... a pinch of this, a dash of that" and you start creating something brand new you hadnt quite expected

once youve committed to a bunch of ingredients and its been boiling on the stove for a while, you keep tasting it and ya know when its tha bomb or it isnt

you trust that you know not to all of a sudden get lost, and dump in a bunch of chocolate syrup.

but personally i dont say "ok i can only use steak, and green peppers, and carrots, and some pepper". its one way of doing things i guess ..
.

RiotNrrd · Post by **RiotNrrd** » Sat May 14, 2005 2:30 am

I think that personally-enforced restrictions are a great way to focus ones creativity. For example, I've done pieces in Reason where I went into them with the idea that I would ONLY use the Malstrom. All sounds had to be Malstrom sounds. If I needed a kick drum, then it needed to be a Malstrom-generated kick drum. Lead? Malstrom. And so on.

It's like in the world of poetry you'll find artificially imposed restrictions. Haiku's require a syllable count of 5-7-5. There's no logical reason for this restriction - certainly plenty of poems don't conform to this structure - but forcing oneself to work within it can require more creative thinking about how to express oneself more concisely.

Or take sonnets as another example. They have an extremely rigid structure. The number of lines, which lines rhyme with which other lines, the syllable counts per line, and even the cadence of the syllables, is all predefined. It's all completely artificially imposed, so it's more like a puzzle or a word-game in how you piece one together. You can certainly write poems that don't conform to the sonnet structure, but then they aren't really sonnets, are they?

But even working within this rigid structure, plenty of quite beautiful sonnets have been written. As long as you conform to the existing rules, you have complete freedom as to subject and content. The structure isn't there to restrict creativity - it's there to focus it.

Musically, how many bands made it big with just a single drum kit, a bass guitar, a rhythm guitar, and a lead guitar? Talk about restriction! Play a song, then play the next song, then the next, all on the same set of instruments! How many of US do that? Not too many, I'd guess. And yet bands that restrict the number of instruments, or even sounds, that they use are frequently the same bands that have a certain signature "sound" - you hear a song by them and you KNOW it's them even if you've never heard the song before. A lot of bands WANT that ready identifiability, as it can be enormously commercially successful. The Beatles had it, The Who had it, The Stones have it, Boston had it, Kansas had it, Bruce Hornsby has it, Bob Marley had it, Jimmy Hendrix had it, and so on and so forth. Bands that don't have it sound like every other band that doesn't have it. Who cares who they are? They all sound the same. The successful bands of the past all managed to find their sound by restricting the pallettes that they used. Sure they would bring in some new sounds on every song for variety. But overall they all had a core set of sounds that they returned to again and again, and I think that had a lot to do with their success.

So, next time you're feeling uncreative, write a piece that uses only piano and flute sounds and nothing else. Or decide that all sounds must be generated by a single VSTi. Or... whatever. Make up a restriction, then focus on staying within it. Use only the black keys. Or only the white. Use only consonant notes (BCDFG). Whatever. It doesn't matter. Think of it as a game or a puzzle - how can you take this restriction and do something cool within its confines?

You might be surprised what you come up with.