Less, but better musical instruments

As a result of some personal events during the last couple of days, I am writing this post to rid myself of some thoughts. I will probably rewrite parts of it or add some more aspects. When I’m saying “musical instruments”, I’m refering to modern electronic instruments – software and/or hardware products for music creation and audio production.

First of all, I’d like to quote the first two paragraphs of a very interesting article on the O’Reilly Digital Media Website:

If you ask musicians what they value most about making music, most of them will say—in some form or another—flow. Flow is that wonderful sense of being lost in your work, when “work” becomes joy. Time disappears, and so do distraction, anxiety, and just about everything else, yielding to a pure unity of creator and creation.

So wouldn’t it be strange if many of today’s musical instruments were designed to prevent or destroy flow? According to a recently convened group of audio experts, that seems to be the case. The group issued a report stating that most electronic musical instruments are complicated, confusing, and just plain frustrating to use—and when it comes to supporting flow, they compare poorly to instruments that have been around for centuries.

I had my first contact with music software through Cubase 1.0 on an Atari in the late 90s and I got first insights to audio software development when I worked on the GUI design of Native Instrument’s Reaktor 3 in 2000. I felt and still feel appropriate to work on that kind of projects since I am an Interface Designer and an actual user of audio software since quite a time (you can listen to some of my music on the Nitrada website, hehe). What amazed me most back then were the seemingly endless possibilities this field had to offer: There were innumerable different programs and plugins for music creation and audio production out there and each could do plenty of cool things. You could find new and innovative ways of doing this and that sound or rhythm –or something you just couldn’t imagine before– almost every day. Most software products were digital rebuilds of our existing music hardware world instead of being new unique and self-confident solutions.

Today, things have changed a bit. There are still millions of ways to go out there, but several new approaches show an in my opinion good and reasonable direction for electronic music creation: Ableton Live, a pretty intuitive music production environment; or the apparently pretty fresh Meta Intuitive Navigation Technology that t.c. electronic just started within one of their reverb plugins; or the Lemur Multitouch Control Surface by Jazzmutant; or the Machinedrum and Monomachine by elektron from sweden …

But something really important has changed for me personally: I’m not impressed by infinite options anymore, I’m just overwhelmed and burned out. All these new programs and plugins appearing everyday in every corner that always make me wanna check them out for musical but also for professional research reasons distract me from focusing on something that still should be the essence: making music.

This lets me think of John Maeda’s post-digital idea. On one of his websites, he writes:

I am often asked what my term “post digital” signifies. It is a term that I created as a way to acknowledge a distinction between those that are passed their fascination with computers, and are now driven by the ideas instead of the technology. It is not an expression of Luddite-ism nor is it a loaded term like that icky “post modernism” business. If we are to consider the book by Nicholas Negroponte Being Digital as an affirmation that the computer has arrived, then the “post digital” generation refers to the growing few that have already been digital, and are now more interested in Being Human. Buying a good computer is easy. Being a good person is something that cannot be merely bought … even on the great god of eBay.

For example the sheer fascination for fast computers, large hard disks or extra deep color resolutions shouldn’t lead to overloaded software sampler monsters – just because the potential technical possibilities are more compared to an oldschool AKAI Hardware Sampler from 1988.

Of course new technical capabilities should be considered and used, but with a clear focus on the creative workflow, the output, the music – or the human part within the process of playing or producing music.

I don’t wanna sound negative, there definitley are excellent tools out there (I listed some above), I enjoy some of them and have a lot of respect for the development effort of complex software products. But I am seriously saying that I think many audio software or hardware concepts should be more progressive and more deliberate. More concentration on the user as a human being should lead to new electronic musical instruments that help and inspire musicians and producers with their music creation/production instead of distracting them with endless features and possible applications.

When I’m talking to friends who are also involved in electronic music production I can feel a clear tendency: As a result of frustration with superficiality a lot of those countless plugins are getting erased, sound libraries are getting shrinked down. And in search for inspiration and to enhance creativity through intentional limitation, powerful software solutions are getting replaced with dedicated hardware machines that don’t do very much, but do it better than everything else. And help you to intensively use their full bandwidth to create actual output instead of just being a one night stand.

Right now I’m enjoying my brandnew Machinedrum, digged up my analog Mackie mixer and work with my pretty limited yet handy BOSS FX pedals again … :-)