Our digital tools for creating music and art becomes more and more advanced, and with that falls an important responsibility on the creator: He or she has to make the process as difficult as possible. When the tools are sophisticated enough, lack of innovation on the user side leads to conformist results. And what fun is left in pop culture then?
What seems like an eternity ago, I sat at home making music on my Amiga 500. I had bought a vintage synth, a Korg Delta, that I used for samples. Good times. The well-known Amiga musicians were deep into funk and acid-jazz and worked with electric pianos and brass that they struggled with to make them as realistic as possible.
I wasn’t happy with using generic sounds. Actually, I wasn’t happy with the analogue strings my Delta produced either. I was saved by my friend Benny who wrote a tiny bit of assembler code that generated sounds. I could just tweak some values in the code to change the sine waves, compile and find the soundfile on my harddrive.
The problem – or, rather, the blessing – was that the code had a bug in it that damaged the sine wave. Right at the beginning of the sound there was a millisecond of distortion, sounding like an overload of electricity.
I loved that program. Whereas others had to sample second rate pianos from their Roland D-50s, I had something entirely unique, something that wasn’t available to the rest of the world. That my music in the end didn’t live up to the expectations didn’t matter, because at least I sounded differently.
Looking back, this detail is what I’m most proud of from the years in the early 90s. I’ll get back to why.
In those days I listened a lot to Aphex Twin. His early stuff, tracks like “Didgeridoo” and “Polynomial-C”.
What I loved about him was that he had a world of unique sounds at his disposition. It didn’t sound like anything else. Back then, I didn’t know what the reason for this was. Back home in Cornwall, he was using his soldering iron to build Machines of Evilness. He created his own synthesizers and programmed computers to do unspeakable things.
Finding this out, years later, it was obvious to me why I’d loved it so much. And why it had been so hard trying to replicate his sounds on my own.
As our tools get more and more advanced, the necessity of using them in unique ways is increasing.
For example, no one could argue that a detail carpenter from 1920s had a certain style because he or she used this or that knife. Today, it is obvious when someone has used preset plugins to create a bad ad in a magazine. “LOL! Photoshop!” we exclaim and laughs, although there’s a good chance all ads in that magazine are done with Photoshop.
What separates the good ads from the laughable ones aren’t necessarily the ideas and concepts behind them, but that they have been created with personality and innovation instead of templates you get when installing the software.
The reason I look back on my Amiga days with a sense of pride is that I was young, naive and ridiculously immature, but still had understood something. I had grasped that there was a point in making things uncomfortable, to scrap the easy way with sampled pianos and instead fight with those sine wave values and compiling faulty assembler code.
Okay. I admit I didn’t necessarily understand why I did it back then, but it makes a good story.
Those who succeeds in combining something of quality with a unique expression always get their reward, regardless of art form. While an album like Mylo’s “Destroy Rock’n'Roll” today sounds soulless and dated, there is a reason why Khonnor’s contemporary “Handwriting” still is an exciting listen.
The first is put together in software like Reason and Ableton Live without any deeper attempts to treat the sounds like something else than parts that make up songs. The latter is probably produced with the same help, but in a process where presets and templates have been ignored and the software instead works more like the carpenter’s knife:
It’s a tool that facilitates the creative process, but doesn’t define it.
My belief is that refusing the comfortable way is always rewarding. True, Hollywood blockbusters and crime bestsellers are all cast in the same mould, but he or she that wants to create something with longevity, that wants to make a personal impression, needs to have a tasteful distance to presets and templates.
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