Equipment manufacturers frequently boast that with their gear, your creativity will be limited only by your imagination. Electronic musician Ian Boddy explains how increasing his limitations actually enhanced his work.
While on holiday in Canada recently, I checked out a store advertised as 'The Biggest Book Shop in the World'. As a keen reader, I expected to find much to excite my interest, but after about an hour wandering up and down great avenues of books, I grew disillusioned — there was simply too much to choose from. In the end, I left, credit card balance significantly unchanged, and convinced that I could have spent a far more interesting time in a pokey old sci‑fi bookshop.
I think the lesson I learnt from this can be applied equally to the process of hi‑tech music making: very often your music can suffer as a result of you being presented with too many options. Consider, as modern musicans, the bewildering variety of sounds and samples available to you these days, and all the equipment and software crammed with features, many of which you will simply never use. This degree of choice isn't a bad thing in itself — but you have to discipline yourself to use just those functions or sounds that are needed if you are ever to finish a particular job.
In my own studio, I use a sequencer and a hard disk recorder, but I purposely restrict my use of this technology to enable me to work faster. The sequencer I use most of the time is an Akai MPC3000, and whilst this doesn't have all the bells and whistles that my version of Cubase does, it's actually quicker to use because it doesn't afford me as many opportunities to fiddle with things. If tracks sound OK to me, then they're finished, and if I make a mistake when playing, I just play it again. In a similar vein, I've decided I'm not bothered about seeing loads of waveforms whilst I'm recording to hard disk: it's not until I actually come to edit a track or CD together that I want to indulge in squinting at the waveforms on a computer screen — particularly as I'm only using the HDR like a tape recorder for my analogue gear anyway. This leaves me with more time for actually making music, which is after all, the idea behind having all this equipment!
I recently made use of this deliberately restrictive approach at an unusual concert in an art gallery, where I was asked to play continuously for eight hours, as part of a Comic Art festival. Obviously, there was no way I could play a 'normal' gig for that length of time — after all, I would need food, drink and the loo at some point! With this in mind, I restricted the number of sounds I had available for the day, and decided on an improvised ambient‑style approach to the music. I set up a bank of about 20 to 30 sounds in each of the synths I was using, plus a couple of volumes of sounds on my sampler's hard disk drive. Together with just a few pre‑prepared sequence lines and a couple of drum kits on the MPC3000, I had a reasonably manageable amount of data that I could grab off the various bits of gear as the fancy took me, and it then simply fell to me to play, compose and improvise throughout the day. The eight hours went surprisingly fast, because I had a great time — I was primarily playing music, and not having to worry about the technology.
After this gig, I have tried more and more to work this way in my studio. Rather than work on a track piecemeal, synth by synth, I've been using all the equipment together live as one big instrument. I have to admit it beats step editing and staring at waveforms, and I can always go back and tidy up a track later — if it's necessary.
I've found this self‑disciplined approach to technology liberating, and it could work for you too. Try restricting the sounds and features you use at any one time, and it may enable you, as it did me, to produce music faster and have fun doing so. After all, if you can't achieve that, what's the point?