On most traditional instruments, even an engaged amateur will never reach the level of mastery of an accomplished professional, yet this does not prevent most amateur musicians to both enjoy making music themselves and listening to others’ performances. I agree that there is something particular in electronic music making that might be related to the relative ease with which anyone can produce almost perfect sounds and conversely the difficulty of sensing futher progress after a couple of months with a new synth. Learning is much slower with traditional instruments, but the joy of sensing progress also lasts longer. I try to combine both - I have moments when I am focusing more (and sometimes rediscover) the synths and others where I find more joy with my acoustic instruments.
This is true I would agree. But you made me think that acoustic instruments are like, wonderful platforms for learning foundations of music. Bodily involvement - like on a drum kit. Your body grasps percussion and it sort of goes through you. But likewise learning harmony on one instruments sort of grants access on another. I personally know nothing about music theory and just go all on hearing and feeling.
But I do hear the OP’s probs. It happens to me all the time. Just can’t be arsed. I just stopped worrying about it. Go for a bike ride. Do yoga. Eat food. Have some beers with some mates. I’d rather be fully engaged or have a curiosity I’m pursuing than it being work. But I guess work is how you get stuff done.
Same. Real time is best.
I think you’ve made a really interesting and thoughtful post, and your point about satisfaction of creativity is important. For some people, there’s great enjoyment to be found in going deeper in the ‘cerebral’ process, working on more complex programming for instance, but it sounds like you’re wanting something more tactile.
There’s loads of electronic music that bridges production/sound design with instrumentalism - Herbie Hancock, Terry Riley and even Vangelis come to mind here. They’re often using effective ‘electronic music production’ processes, but are playing with a level of feeling and virtuosity more common in acoustic music (watch any of the billion covers of blade runner theme music on YouTube to see that Vangelis’s skill isn’t just in making the right patches).
And there are performers who aren’t tied to the keyboard - Suzanne Ciani’s Buchla stuff is living and breathing (and you don’t need a Buchla for this).
Obviously programmed and sequenced music dominates electronic genres, but there’s still a tonne of stuff that’s actively played. Maybe that’s where your middle ground lies?
When I look at the albums, artists and individual tracks that I like and always come back to, they all in some way say something that perhaps cant be said in words. It’s an expression of something.
Why not focus on making music that you like and that makes you feel something. Forget genres unless you are a librarian.
As a suggestion, take a scene from a movie or game you like and doing something that fits the mood can be a good starting point. Or envisage a particular time/place for something to be listened to, commuting to work, watching a sunset over the ocean, 3am in a club etc and make something for that.
And yeah effects can be a crutch. I always try and make something that works without them and know it will sound better when I add them in.
There is definitely something about the mechanical practise of learning a real instrument and zoning out practising, working on technique. It is a way to switch off and disconnect.
Conceiving, creating, composing, arranging and producing music is not the same as practising scales or playing the tricky bit over and over until the muscle memory has it. It’s not really relaxing or enjoyable, instead I find it focused and technical work. I get more done when I treat all of those as seperate stages.
You’re not always going to be in the mood to create, its good to have alternative options like regular instruments. The problem with them is they have generally been fully explored and very stale/boring.
I played blues guitar for some 20 years and I still enjoy jamming out but its also very boring musically to me. I’m thinking of picking up classical guitar again as it has more technical depth.
Piano is great from a theory pov if you like western harmony as its the perfect tool to explore the concepts.
First, you’re not alone to question ^^
Now I’d like to underline one of your sentences:
And throw a few ideas:
This, IMO, might be a bit too high a goal, as it is set here. But what about little steps towards it?
First step I see is learning your actual gear from A to Z and experimenting with it.
Accumulating gear gets in the way, as said on any anti-GAS thread ^^
Learning Production is actually very interesting, and makes the experience of creating and listening to music a new one.
Check the forum to know where to get started.
This said, playing (and learning) an instrument such as the piano is also a nice experience. If you have a field recorder, you can sample yourself and start from this.
Keeping pushing it is the way!
Create tracks, even if you’re not totally satisfied with them.
They are not a goal, only milestones.
Seems you are saturated with your “wiggling”, aren’t you? … And this
seems to show that you are starting to enjoy “making music”. I can’t guess, what you did with your gear, but a piano is an instrument as all the others, be it mechanical or electronics. But it seems that the piano has catapulted you out of your comfort zone. That’s what gives you new perspectives … new impulses … and new fun … keep going … enjoy it 
I was a little surprised by reading this …
Bob Moog, Don Buchla, and others said that electronic instruments are built to create sounds, which nobody has heard before. They only gave us canvas, color palettes, and brushes … by intention … but the picture has to be painted by us 
If I switch on my Moogs and whatnot, well they have a nice inital sound, but even nice presets become boring very quickly. It takes some work to get “my sounds” right. I say this as somebody who started as a kid with piano lessons and learned some other mechanial instruments later. Many electronic instruments are much more complex for sound-design and deep musical expression than many mechanical instruments I know to play. It’s IMO even an unfair comparison.
This said … keep your gear, follow your new way of making music for some time, spend good quality time to practice, and I think, after some time you might want to take your new experiences back to your electronic gear and have even much more fun.
In band music, dedicated amateurs consistently make most of the more interesting music. Seems to be the opposite in electronic music.
Been there, sold up 3x times now. Sold rooms full of gear only to want to get into it again when I’m bored and discover I’m back in the situation I was in just before I sold up the previous time.
I’m in that predicament once more after thinking I need more eurorack and just spent another £2k on new modules which kept me occupied for the last couple of weeks, as new toys do, but they haven’t pushed me into actually recording anything.
This time though it’s worse. I’ve invested about £30k so far into gear. It’s a big sell with a lot of money loss should I decide to go down that route again. I know that once sold , give it a few months and I’ll remember I have some DAW licence or whatever, which then moves on to playing about with a cheap midi controller and some VST’s and as time moves on I have another room full of stuff… It’s like crack.
By this I mean that there is little to no in-the-moment “bodily” action involved in creating a synth tone. Its mostly the result of a set of parameters, which can be saved (in a modern synth), transferred and replicated.
Don’t get me wrong – creating great patches on a synth is fun and challenging and probably an art form, but it’s very different from getting the tone of an acoustic instrument right while performing.
My impression is, that many people actually seem to be missing these bodily, one-off performance aspects in electronic instruments: We deliberately buy instruments which don’t let us save patches; new synths and controllers come with all kinds off approaches to “touch”; older synths get MPE; and so on.
Really interesting post.
I’m a software engineer and did my master thesis on algorithmic music composition. All my early productions and performances where using computers and DAWs. I have produced and publish all sorts of electronic music over the years as a hobby.
I reached the exact same point like yourself where the computer being so flexible and powerful became so boring and creatively depressing. This is the point in time where I decided to take a plunge into the analogue world.
Initially I was put-off by the physical limitations these synths / gear. i.e. having to work with a single filter on each channel and no EQ etc. This eventually became a challenge to learn how to sculpt sound and use my very limited toolkit to create high quality output. So this in its self was and still is a fascinating process.
The second aspect was the complexity of these machines. Even a tech geek like me who sees the world as a series of steps and algorithms was challenged by the sheer depth of some of these Elektron machines and the immense muscle memory required to get to a fast enough workflow that doesn’t hamper the creative process.
Finally I have realised I might be more into complex puzzle solving and understanding than into publishing / performing. Don’t get me wrong, I still love performing. But the process of learning and mastering a new machine or synth is really what gets me excited. Hence why I have now a load of Elektron boxes that I keep rediscovering again and again.
The other major change I did is to try and take a focused approach on my gear. Just because I have 5 Elektron boxes does not mean I have to use all of them at the same time for a performance - which is something I used to try and do. Now my setup needs to be big enough to be able to perform something live, have fun and rather enjoy the process. This also helped me master each of my machines separately and using them better together when needed. I’m ok with putting my Analog Four on the shelf for a few months and spend time on my Octatrack to then rediscover it again!
For me I realised what I enjoy the most is the process of exploration and learning and creating something from nothing. Hence why I believe writing code or a producing music have very similar rewarding effects. So next time you get that ‘good’ feeling try to understand what is really giving you that feeling and you will be able to replicate it!
Live looping a real piano (also my wife’s ) with the OT is seriously relaxing! I can’t really play or read music, but still I enjoy it! I can play chords on the guitar and look for a scale or just a few notes that fit by ear and that is enough for my purpose. The OT can do his magic.
I almost never record that! It’s a live experience, mostly I don’t even save the flex recorders. Next session is a new life.
The problem with posting on YT and Insta or even the streaming services is that there is the aspect of competition that creeps into it sooner or later.
Bah, I hate that! Competition is for sports … and not necessary for self expression in any form.
Just my 2c
can’t say I have had the experience of
but I probably just don’t have the hang of it
when I try it always ends up sounding like some totally off brand weird shit…
also, the 70% that sounds the same is not really the interesting bit you got into music to emulate surely?
I dunno, I keep on at it because there’s a folorn hope that if I do it enough it’ll sound like the 1% of electronic music that expands your mind and changes your life, not to emulate the trance landfill that pads out beatport charts.
ymmv.
(also nothing wrong with taking a break and learning to play piano for sure - only going to help you make more electronic stuff later if you return)
This is a really interesting train of thought!
I have a somewhat similar background (computer science, math) and figuring out the machines has been a huge part of my fascination with them as well – especially in the Eurorack rabbit hole, where it’s so much fun to think “how would I build that?”.
It now feels a bit like after having reached a certain skill level of machine mastery, I’m realizing that I’m less and less in love with the music the now mastered machines are making. Like, now that I understand a lot of the tech I’m thinking “Wait, what is the music I actually want to make?”
From my experimentation with the piano, I’m finding that the answer is probably not another, more complex machine (although I’ve always been tempted by algorithmic stuff and making music with Python), but mastering harmony and a performance instrument.
If you find that everything you create sounds generic exactly how expressive are you being in the creation of your music? Sure, with some knowledge you can almost paint by numbers certain genres, but are you really putting yourself into what you create?
I’m only closing in on a year of studying and trying to produce, but I find it almost overwhelming how many ideas and paths I could take with a track. I lack the knowledge to do what I want at this point, but I’ve never felt like what I COULD do was limited to sounding like everyone else.
I can see why just recreating tutorials of electronic music can get boring. Do you get no pleasure from the creative process itself? Considering how wide the sonic palette of even a simple monosynth is, you’d think you would never run out of new sounds to discover.
I mean when I’m making music, the sounds I make inspire me and give me mental pathways where to go, and following those paths sometimes leads to a song. I get more satisfaction from the process than the end result. I mean I get the same pleasure from a path that leads nowhere than one that leads to finished, possibly released music.
It’s important to distinguish the tools you use from the music. Making electronic music has two parts: you need to understand the tech, but you also need to understand the music.
If you focus only on the tech part, like how to use the machines, and how to do the production things, it can become boring. It’s like kids become bored with toys after a while, once you have figured out how the toy really works you want a new challenge.
But music is more than just playing with toys. If you have artistic intention, you can make it work with any instrument. The challenge in electronic music is that most instruments have this toy factor built in, and it’s so easy to get lost and stop focusing on the artistic intent.
I’m still struggling with this myself, and have learned to overcome in part by focusing on very few instruments. It’s also interesting to try and focus on the intent of the music before you even start using any gear. Just spending a couple hours by the piano also helps a lot.
I think this is a good point. My best work at work has always been collaborative (I’m a programmer, and the best stuff has been pairing, team work, mutual creativity.) I’d love to find someone local to play music with. I was in a band as a kid, and I miss the fun social side, but also the interactive creation side.
I have some friends who still play and we’ve sent recordings back and forth and mashed them up a bit, and it’s fun. One is a sax player, the other a dyed in the wool classic rock guitarist. It’s a weird mix.
This has always been a goal for me. I play the guitar a bit but I’m no musician. I dream of learning to play the piano one day really well - I’ve never been classically trained. I got into music through technology! And there is the hint again, it’s about learning! 
I’ve found electronic music nice exactly because you don’t have to master the instruments to create good music. Playing bass in a band means A LOT of repetitions. Mastering an instrument would mean even more rudimentary repetitive practicing, much more than I’m willing to do.