Going back a couple pages,
Rinsemeister wrote:My problem is that I can spend hours tweaking Operator / Analog and lose my creative flow.
I have a suggestion that is presently helping my rate of accomplishment a great deal. I have finally decided to act on a notion that hit me shortly after I got Live 7 last year: Live is more a set of building blocks than a series of individual instruments and effects to be pulled in channels the way you'd use a typical DAW. It's natural for people to start threads like this wanting more of the building blocks, but there are already too many of them in a way...you end up getting mired down in something really complex like building an operator patch from the ground up, and you don't get a song written.
So my response to this idea is, I will take these building blocks and build myself a set of flexible-
yet-limiting tools, and then I will set out to record an entire album using nothing but those tools. Within reason of course...there will be places that call for a certain effect or something, and I will pull it in.
The first tool of this sort that I've started building is a 16-voice synth drumkit, finished 10 voices so far. I'm going through the individual operators and doing some major fiddling with them, finding the eight parameters that do the most interesting things to the sound and mapping them to macros. So for instance I have a kick drum voice that can go from a huge, long decay hip-hop sound all the way down to a tight, thin, knocky minimal type, and it's very easy to get from one to the other, and anything in between, dicking with nothing but those eight macro knobs.
Part of this is helping me get over my lust for an Elektron Machinedrum, too. Why spend $1500 on a lust object when I already have similar synth power at my disposal? Hell, I can even ape the 12-bit sound of those things. When I make my first million on my all-Operator album, I'll buy a MD and MM.
At any rate, my point is that I'm sacrificing finishing songs right now to get all the major fiddling out of the way, knowing that when I have the instruments built, I will be able to create efficiently. I love the way this kit is sounding, and it's inspiring...I threw down some really excellent beatery with it last night, even in its unfinished state.
At the risk of dragging on way too long here, and completely off topic even...another aspect of this "limit yourself" mentality has been to move my big dumb midi controller off the desk and replace it with a padKONTROL, nanoKONTROL and nanoKEY...this minimal/limiting/highly usable setup has been an inspiration in itself. padKONTROL + homemade synthdrum rack = nuanced, hi-po beat throwdowns.
And now that I've written War and Peace, I will throw in my feature request: a totally overhauled Analog that's easy to use. I suppose some people think it already is - I do not.