What instrument/gear allows you to create music with as little thinking as possible?

The Lounge General Discussion
#21

Short answer: my usual suspects are a Wurlitzer, a Little Phatty or a Septavox. Electric guitar or bass come right after. Options and screens will get me out of the flow.

Long answer…

To me the answer is related to how limited the said instrument is. I find myself way more intuitive when the instrument does not offer a plethora of options. That being said, I find myself limited on non-chromatic instruments: I prefer having those 12 notes :slight_smile:

When it comes to electronic instruments, another crucial point to me is how familiar I am with the instrument interface: manipulations should be immediate and I like very much this feeling of the instrument “understanding” where I want to take it. For analogue instruments, in particular, parameter calibration can be a criterion too.

An effect pedal or two can help but more than that will get me into the brain area, so will any sequencer related instruments, like my beloved MachineDrum (even if I speak MD fluently) most probably because I need to relate a movement to an immediate change in sound vs a change in the pattern or whatever is “programmed”. The worst being a computer.

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

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#22

For me, it’s the Torso T-1.

It’s remarkably simple to go from nothing to full blown songs in minutes, with lots of happy accidents that all sound musical. No menu diving, and no screen - you hear something you like, you keep it. If not, tweak knobs till it sounds just right. Don’t need a computer either - plugs directly into hardware - it’s breathed new life into gear that I hadn’t used in years.

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#23

Whichever one you’ve been using for a long time so that you don’t need to think about it and it becomes muscle memory. So just pick a thing and use it a lot and eventually you won’t need to think much about it.

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#24

modular for me. when i’m away from my setup, i tend to daydream more analytically, but when creating music it’s like a fountain of what if ideas that spring up from somewhere and take me in so many different directions. definitely the deepest flow state i’ve found anywhere

even when i had no idea what i was doing, as long as i could get audio to the speakers, my mind was so easily blown. a 0-coast is great for this

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#25

virus easily does this and ableton

#26

that is why I quit buying synths l found good workflow with Elektron, modulars and Virus. Anything else can be supplemented with soft synths plugins from Ableton. Saves on spending too.

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#27

A ukulele, because the people who buy them tend to do as little thinking as possible.

[This is a joke, please do not flag me]

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#28

Bass guitar

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#29

I’ve learned a lot recently by working out on piano the vocal melodies and guitar hooks/riffs of guitar-based rock/pop songs I admire. I play piano and guitar pretty competently but have a hard time composing things I’m interested in on either (for different reasons, I think). This has been more revealing than I would have imagined. Even loading up a stock acoustic guitar patch in Logic and working out all the important parts to various favorite guitar-based music has taught me a lot. Like a lot of people, I never completely memorized the notes of the fretboard so when I learn songs on guitar, I don’t necessarily have major theoretical/generalizable takeaways. I learn shapes and moves and distances, but that doesn’t seem to get me very far. Because the note relationships are more obvious on the piano, I’ve learned more about the ingredients of guitar music by working them out on piano. If anyone has a similar background, I’d really recommend doing this. Also recommend writing/improvising/playing via a lame-o stock guitar patch on the keyboard.

I realize this isn’t quite what the OP was asking for, but just wanted to add to the suggestion about the piano/simple piano playing.

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#30

Personally, drums, then organ. There’s something about using all four limbs at once to play an instrument that lets by brain cool off a bit.

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#31

Either an electric bass or something simple like a Trigon (or P6/OB6 or Prologue, etc).

Synth wise something where I can dial a pluck or a pad in seconds and ideally move between the two without a lot of preplanning (and that’s the case with the Trigon and Prologue).

Drums are different, of course, and depends on the people I am working with - but usually some Elektron I am familiar with will do.

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#32

Answer: the gear with which you are already most familiar. If the question exists only to feed your GAS for more gear, then be warned that every new piece of gear, be it software or hardware, is going to involve a version of the overthinking you are trying to avoid (if you are interested in having more than a beginner’s level of skill or understanding on the gear).

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#33

Prophet 6.

Start with an init patch… add full distortion, add a low pass filter… go unison, a little glide…

add resonance, and start low passing until it breaks apart… back it off, and you got the gnarl…

…then wail.

Its my go-to when I feel bad… like I need to feel something that mimics me raging at the sky…

but it always falls into c min or g min blues…

edit… just saw this…!!

now I want an OB 6.

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#34

Squarp hapax <3

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#35

In terms of baning out sketches and stems these three allow me to do so extremely quickly.
1010 Blackbox
Digitakt
M8 recently. I saw people comparing the workflow to Elektron’s and wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but having sunk a lot of time into it recently I get it. It’s really a great little portable device.

As far as finishing whole tracks and there really isn’t anything else close…
Ableton. I get my best results when I limit myself to a couple vsts before I start working and I’ve already created templates for my channels and master bus. That said, I still do find myself spending obscene amounts of times messing around with synth vsts and rever b tails to the point that I start hallucinating. I’m not proud to admit it but there has been several times I’ve spent more minutes than I’m comfortable to acknowledge trying to dial in a sound before I realized I was tweaking the parameters of a muted device.

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#36

Sir you’ve just attacked several island nations all at once.

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#37

MPC One (at this moment in time).
Using its internal synths and my own samples.

#38

My drum kit

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#39

This made me chuckle. Probably because it resonated with me as I’ve definitely done exactly the same thing in the past.

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#40

Guitar. Thinking is the worst enemy of making music IMO.

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