The Gear:Productivity Ratio

[djst]

@brisket

So what to do?
I think: accept that there is a time when gear is inspirational, but that may be behind you. You have been dispossessed of a simple joy – the joy of ignorance is gone. You cannot get it back. You can never again be excited by learning what filter modulation is.

You are not empty-handed, though, because you have gained knowledge. But this is the part where gear can’t help you, because you already know how it works. You need an instinct, a theory, a meditative practise, a demand placed upon you by external forces, a task upon which to exercise the skills you have learnt. But the gear will no longer provide you with creative momentum, whether it’s a roomful of modular or the proverbial laptop with Ableton.

Great writeup and I agree with nearly all of what you say. As I was reading it, I thought to myself that yep, this isn why I no longer need an MPC: I know all those production tricks already. And this is why I don’t need an MC-101: I know how those sounds are made and the difference between a true roland JX chorus and an off-the-shelf chorus is negligible in my tracks.

There’s still one big exception though and that’s the Elektron workflow, in my case the Syntakt. Specifically, ctrl+all. There is just something entirely unique about it. Of course, I understand it from a practical point of view, but the point is that I could never recreate that in the DAW. There is no easy way (at least in Reason) to assign a macro that will manipulate the filter cutoff of the synth oscillator envelopes at once. And it’s impossible to know what those type of real-time manipulations will do to your song sketch until you try it.

Bottom line is, you’re right, after ten years of music making, I have definitely reach a point where I don’t need most of my hardware anymore… except my Syntakt!