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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

The oddest thing about this Cambrian explosion of possibility at dirt cheap prices is what it did to my creativity: It actually hurt it.

I started just a tad later and fully digital than the gear in this article, so the floppy discs I got Scream Tracker on with its included samples plus whatever I could rip from a few .MODs I could get my hands on had to do. There were four tracks. There were a hundred samples, half of which was obscure crap (and even those found their use).

Building with it and making them sound awesome, plus discovering the amazing tricks the OGs of tracker & demo culture did with their editors (sliding and bending notes! dead stops in the middle of the sample!) was endless fun.

Nowadays, I get Native Instruments Ultimate — and despite sounding orders of magnitude better, all I do is toying around. I always have the nagging feeling there's gotta be one sound or effect in that endless library that's still better than the one I'm using right now.

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> Nowadays, I get Native Instruments Ultimate — and despite sounding orders of magnitude better, all I do is toying around. I always have the nagging feeling there's gotta be one sound or effect in that endless library that's still better than the one I'm using right now.

It may be you're accidentally veering away from "music" into the realm of "sound effects." Many audio software environments too easily lets you drift in that direction. (Although I'd argue that's still better than drifting into the direction of becoming an audio software environment programmer. :)

>Nowadays, I get Native Instruments Ultimate — and despite sounding orders of magnitude better, all I do is toying around. I always have the nagging feeling there's gotta be one sound or effect in that endless library that's still better than the one I'm using right now.

That's why I never start a track without a finished idea in my head. I used to noodle and would get lost in the rabbit warren.

I agree with you for the most part. How do you sketch out your ideas, if you don’t me asking.

Depends on the style of music. This year I made techno. I created the kick sound(s) I had in my head. Selected the other drum sounds and mapped out a really rough arrangement on pro tools. Then I applied all the reverb and compression to get it sounding at least reasonable. Added the non drum layers based on the initial idea in my head and then started to shape the sounds to what I actually wanted (fx etc). After I started to tweak to glue it together. The important thing for this process is to get to this stage as quick as possible before I forget the original idea. Sometimes I’ll leave it for a while and come back with fresh ears to finish it off and other times I get it done in a day or two.

Thanks for the detailed response. Aside from the genre, a lot of what you said there applies to me. But I am trying a different tack recently. I want to be able to "jam out" on some weird sound that I found in my virtual audio stack. Even if that includes some weird mastering effect artefact. I want it all live.

This led me to focus on excellent but simple triggers, and the lowest possible latency. I can't overstate the impact of low latency on making the entire DAW/Virtual Instrument stack feel "real."

My quest for low latency with robust DSP lasted for 3 months of orders and returns. I ended up getting a Focusrite 4Pre which has a Thunderbolt 2 interface. I got the Apple Tbolt 3<->2 adapter and I can get robust ~2-3ms audio playback latency even on Ableton/Windows running on a 2017 XPS 9560. When you plug a drum trigger into something like that, it's whole different beast. I had no idea. I ended up with the NI Maschine Mikro Mk3 for the drum trigger. I can't believe how these NI pads feel with low latency audio.

Has anyone else gotten further down the latency rabbit hole than me? Please share!

I do jam out ideas on the ipad sometimes. Using iMS-20 or iMPC. I then record it into the DAW as is and replace the sounds on new tracks on the grid bit by bit.

FWIW your attempt to get the latency really low could be misplaced. If you play in a band for example and you are standing 5 metres away from the drummer the sound is already taking ~15ms to reach you. We're really good at adjusting to these timing differences and can handle much more latency seamlessly than you are designing for.

Micro-timing (otherwise known as groove) is much more important imo and you can train yourself to groove to your setup even if you have huge latency (though this is of course undesirable).

> FWIW your attempt to get the latency really low could be misplaced.

I totally understand your point, but it turns out I can have my cake and eat it too at an affordable price if I eBay and take chances on the fractured PC thunderbolt implementation landscape.

What near-zero latency gives me is the ability to use the immense power of my DAW’s dsp controls, to modify the sound of my voice and guitar, and record nearly that exact sound.

I’m middle aged, and to me this is the promise of real-time pc-based DAW, finally delivered for a few hundred dollars.

The crazy thing is that it seems Focusrite gave up on providing non-Mac computers with thunderbolt interfaces. The support costs were just too high. This is due to things like crappy Thunderbolt implementation by Dell and others.

My research led me to find that to get the best $ per low latency, you have to buy a used 4 Pre or 8 Pre, as Focusrite moved thunderbolt support up to their 10x priced Red line.

According to an official Focusrite support response on Reddit, thunderbolt support only adds around 1 ms of latency advantage. While I believe that specific metric from that source, isn’t it true that thunderbolt might allow for more simultaneous CPU <-> outboard DSP bandwidth? It certainly feels like that over USB. It feels like I can have a lot more cpu-intensive stuff like reverb and delays over thunderbolt.

In any case, for my crappy playing chops, having near-zero latency gives me the ability to record my stream of consciousness audio outbursts with newfound accuracy and steadiness.

I can echo this sentiment exactly. I started as a kid with a Yamaha PSR-500 with a built in multi-track sequencer. I wrote SO many songs on that thing. In my teenage years, I added a Boss DR550 Mk2 drum machine synced via MIDI and my song crafting went through the roof! Then I added a Korg M3R sound module and my productivity went down. I added a Yamaha DX7, Korg DW8000 and an Akai AX73 and I was barely doing anything other than noodling around. Even today with all the money I've spent on Arturia VSTs and an M-Audio controller.... a really beefed up computer just for recording. And I've written nothing. It's not for lack of creativity. It's just become such a pain to set everything up and get it going. By the time I've got sound in the headphones, I've just lost interest.

I wonder if it's the technology or if it's just getting older. Not a musician, but I used to do all sorts of creative stuff as a bored 13 year old. Programming, painting, coming up with board games, experimenting in the basement. Now that I'm an adult, I blow 1/2 my waking hours at work, then there's the family that wants to go hiking next weekend, and a kid to play with, and paying bills, and doing taxes, and cleaning the house, and mowing the lawn, and fixing the leaking sink, and being on boards and committees in the community, and on and on. I can maybe carve out an hour a week to do something creative, and by that time I just want to down a six pack and catch up on sleep.

I think today's technology does stifle creativity as well, though. Music was meant to be spontaneous and improvised, which is very easy to do with older synths and acoustic instruments. Production in a modern DAW is anything but that, and it's way less tactile.

Have you tried any of the pocket operators? They seem to be a nice mix of lots of knobs to twiddle combined with older synth/drum machine.

Yeah, this is spot on. The plethora of great VSTs out there makes it hard as an artist to choose a tool. You can easily get stuck in ‘preset surfing’ mode where you quickly realize you’ve spent an hour not really making anything.

For me it was important to acknowledge this and help myself set boundaries to how I spend my time producing. I also found myself gravitating toward vintage gear because of its limits and how it enforces decision making (e.g. printing synths directly in audio, which was a game changer in terms of process)

Yes. I started out using a cassette 4-track. I made music all the time. Then I upgraded to a roland 8-track that used zip discs! Still made music all the time. Eventually I was creating with Cool Edit Pro.

Before getting into software, I worked as a recording engineer for 7 years. Got to use many large format consoles, 2inch tape, great rooms and mics.

Over 20+ years I collected a decent amount of gear myself. But creating has slowed way down. It’s not just computers, I was deep into making electroacoustic/computer music composition in college.

There is paradox of choice, but also how we live as a society now, and the damage being connected to information has done to my attention.

So my current solution to this has been meditation, and consistently sitting down at night to get a little more music done.

To get songs finished, I use a combination of a notebook to sketch out structure, concepts and forms. Then sometimes trello, and sometimes org-mode.

> a roland 8-track that used zip discs

Hey, I had one of those! So much better than the tascam 4-track it replaced.

I think it might also be that we are exposed to so much music than before. Because of that, our expectations on what is good has become harder and harder to meet.

In my previous professional life I owned a record store. We sold "dance music" vinyl records to mostly DJ's from 1990 to approx 2007. The creativity and quality degraded as time went on.

First, the lower barrier to entry meant more wannabes creating more "noise." Not aural / sonic noise, but noise in the shopping and buying experience. There were still needles of joy, but the haystack was getting larger and larger.

Put a different way, the higher barrier to entry meant only the determined stuck to it. And in sticking to it, pushed themselves and their gear harder. Amazing things happen when there's push.

On the other hand, the new and easy to use gear isn't as "inspiring". Good is too often good enough, and great takes too much work.

There's a dark side to cheap & easy.

I see this pattern a lot I wonder if it's been named and discussed before.

I think creativity likes having small struggles and challenges.

It's not 100% applicable, but it's close enough to the subject that I have to bring up this awesome Brian Eno quote.

> “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

partly and I think it shifts the question toward "are there limits to todays medium" ? will we see a ultrasonic punk ? or crypto metal with sha256 over harmonics ?

I think this (alleged) Orson Welles quote says it best: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

(Information on the quote's provenance, for those who might be interested: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/24/art-limit/)

The similar quote I've heard is, "Form is liberating." I feel like I heard this in the context of poetry in high school, but Google turns up a bunch of references to The Mythical Man Month.

yeah kinda

I guess the first cause of creativity is a 'what if' not an 'it surely will'

There's something to be said for limitations. I learned to drive linux on a old p100 laptop and floppy disk installs. It had very limited resources (you had to aggresively nice oggvorbis to play .ogg files without skipping). The hard drive was failing and I had to put it in the freezer from time to time to bring it to life.

Anyway working with those limitations was very educational.

Fast forward to today, I've been playing the baritone sax for 18 months. I got a cheap vintage instrument. I traded it in this week for a modern Yamaha, and it's so much easier to play, and the quality of my playing has gone up orders of magnitude. But then again the initial struggle with the sub-optimal equipment was very educational.

there's a sweet spot between limitation and DOA. My first bass was what I'd describe a shovel. I thought a good player should be able to groove on anything.. but I saw my error the day I tried something more balanced (even a simple squier vintage was enough to help progress)

Seems related to the paradox of choice. Creativity is shaped by and can be fueled by limitations. Part of the creative process today, since so many tools are freely or cheaply available, is choosing a set of limitations for yourself.

In a sense, every creative decision imposes a new limitation and narrows the space of what is possible. It’s almost like sculpting: the final product is a result of cutting away potentialities until what’s left is recognizable as what you wanted it to be.

choice and price, there was a lot of choice in the past too but you'd filter from cost and how much you wanted to try something

Totally agree with this. I make music on an iPad with zero external gear and I've come to embrace this limitation as a deliberate choice that make me think more creatively about how to achieve what I want. Even down to the DAW I use -NanoStudio 2 - it lack's some pretty essential features like AUFX automation, but it's so well thought out in terms of how you use it on a touch screen that I'd rather work to its limitations than use something like Cubasis which really gets in your way in terms of interaction design.

I just checked out that DAW and I’m curious as a newbie — why are skeuomorphic “dials” considered good UX? They seem like the worst idea ever and yet I see them all over the DAW/synth landscape.

What am I missing?

They are controlled like sliders (swipe up/down to adjust) and contain the same information, but are much more compact.

Aha! I was trying to position my finger over the dial and turn it. Thanks for clarifying.

Ha, I couldn't work out what _isn't_ a good UX about them until you posted this. It's worth noting a couple of extra things about them too, while taking up much less space than a slider they operate in the same way - this often means you can get a lot more range / precision than if you'd tried to fit it in a slider as your touch can slide way outside the bounds of the control itself. The other is that there's a convention in touch-interface audio apps that double tapping the dial will return it to its default state, whatever value that might be. This arguably could be done with a slider, but I've not come across that on any of the apps I use.

Huh, didn’t know about the double-tap, I’ll have to try that.

You’re right about range and precision too. With knobs, the interface creator can fine-tune the precision without it being surprising. A knob that changes oscillator waveforms can have large, comfortable slices between each waveform, while an envelope length can be more fine-grained.

One could build in coarse/fine adjustments based on swipe speed, but that seems a lot harder to get right. I’m still quite hopeful about what VR synths and controls can bring. Synthspace may be the thing that makes me get a VR headset, and if someone ever ports VCV Rack to VR I’ll be there in an instant.

https://www.patreon.com/synthspace

It’s a hidden interface mapping for sure—you have to know about it before it makes any sense. It might help if a “ghost slider” appeared when you first press on it, but that could also clutter things up.

As I said in a reply below, I think the touch interface on flat glass is a stepping stone to VR synths where the skeuomorphism is more natural: grab the knob and spin it, just like hardware!

I have the same issue; I frequently get an interest in making music again, buy an instrument (because of course what I have available isn't good enough), doodle with it, then let it collect dust.

I need a band or something, idk.

sounds like the Paradox of Choice. the length of time spent choosing completely suffocates all attempts at creativity

And scarcity triggers innovation. So instead of digging deep and asking "How can I alter the bounds of what appears to be limitation", and over-abundance of choice prevents that question from surfacing.

But that question is where the magic happens.

I've invested in a Dawless setup, I have a groove machine + analog bass synth + a mixer (mpc or something like an octatrakt) to orchestrate and apply fx. It avoids the tedium and allows for a level of electronic music improvisation that reawakened my love of the craft.

It allows you to hit that flowstate that you can hit playing a bonafide instrument. The sound quality is good enough, the arrangements arent that hard,its house and techno anyway, and allows me to get away from the tedium of engineering, that as I get older, wears on my patience.

Amiga-era trackers carry the music equivalent to graphics limitations in older computers actually bolstering creativity.

Yeah, I went from my ableton DAW to modular for this reason, but now eurorack possibilities also have exploded I end up with the same problem. I spend more time reading manuals of new modules and fiddling around than actually creating music. Still fun though.

Same here, although I find the expense of Eurorack gear (and HP even more so) limits the depth of the rabbit hole a bit. Still, I spend a lot of time reading manuals for modules I don't even own, and even more time tinkering with circuits for my own modules. The notion that getting "out of the box" will make you more productive musically is a farce, a fun farce, but still a farce.

Haha yeah I'd say going to a eurorack setup really puts all of those possibilities right in front of your face instead of hidden behind menus! I've always been interested in those modules.. they look so fun!

I feel similarly.

Lately I've been limiting myself to a simple groove box and working pretty hard on getting able to perform interesting stuff on that box alone.

One thing that is nice about this practice is that it has made me way less picky about tools... I've been mixing an album this week for a band I'm in and I pretty much am just using Logic pros default eq and comp, plus a single reverb and a single delay plugin. So, like 4 plugs for a whole album and I'm not finding it any harder to get a good sound out.

Tracker composers did some absolutely incredible work with almost nothing, and the limitations weeded out anyone who wasn't passionate and forced those who were to push the boundaries.

Now - as you say - we have shovel-ware sample collections that anyone can buy and use, and it's so much harder to do anything that stands out with them.

What really helps me is to compose a complete song first and worry about the sound later. Just use whatever patch kind of gets the job done at first. Once the full song structure is in place, including all melody and transitions start tweaking the actual sounds.

Remember when playing an instrument was a thing? Not like a dude in a basement playing four triad chords on a midi keyboard, but actual people playing their instruments with mastery and finesse. It is a dying art...

A friend of mine described this as "exploring the endless possibilities or endlessly exploring the possibilities"...

> I started just a tad later and fully digital than the gear in this article

Expecting to hear about your Alesis DAT recorder....

Maybe you simply lost one feature from the past: youth (and the endless amounts of time that comes with it).

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