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Creativity / Inspiration ....


Zo

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Today and since a while in fact i was checking stuff around , looking to grab a new controller (Keystep pro , kst 37 , TR 8S for seq and sounds ect ..) and i 'm investigating since like 2 weeks , also i went even deeper in the fantastic under estimated fonctionnalities of Maschine MKIII (already fantastic for daw control but also in a step seq mode with per step mod capability internaly or in daw) 

 

I can't stop thinking that a lot of us might encounter productivity / inspiration problem , due to a lot of option / sounds / tools  ....but in fact very poor interfacing ....

Software are superb , great sounding and most of the time more capable versus HW , but interfacing is a pain , so is the workflow ...

I really think that what will def boost your work achievement is the right controllers / HW and not having 200 vst'is ...... period !!!

So my advise is be sure to digg in this cause the impact is immediate ....there's controllers , and controllers ... keep your money and go for a solid set up .... stop buying plugins cause they're cheap , period .... you can have the best aresnal but without the right way to take full advantage of it , you're just collectionning stuff !!

 

 

Stuff i liked lately 

 

 

 

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6 hours ago, craigb said:

I suppose that's more convenient than something like these:

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Everything healthy until exess ...this what are the thing i learned in life ... modular and 500 modules are imho real world plugin folders lol

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9 hours ago, bdickens said:

I'm with you on this. I got my old Korg X3, a Minilogue and more VSTis than I will ever use. Along with a bunch of guitars, two basses, a bouzouki and a drum kit. I'm working on making the most of what I have and weeding out what I never use.

I still have my Korg X5 I bought new many years ago. It still works like new although I had to replace the battery a long time ago. A lot of the sounds in it are as good if not better than most VSTi's I've heard. Especially the drums. I've sampled the drums a few times and used them. We started using backing tracks in my band way back in the 90's before it was the norm. There were guys using keyboards with memory cards for different sounds, but nobody that I'm aware of in our area was doing backing tracks. It and my acoustic were all we used. They were all live tracks recorded on to 8 track and transferred to DAT to keep the speed right. No software or midi sequencing or editing.

Now, it's the norm. It's how things are mostly done especially the one or two man shows that play at coffee shops and winery's and places like that. We were decades ahead of our time and all I used was a tiny little Korg X5. If I were still back home my old drummer and I would be killing it right now. Life duo's at places like I mentioned are exploding out there in the NJ area where we lived. Not so much here ...

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I tried a few gadgets (Push, QuNeo, Octatrack) and it was enough to determine that gadgets don't increase my productivity. I sold them all eventually after having given them a few more chances (too many, in retrospect).

I've been using simple MIDI keyboards on and off, but now only plug one in if I need to do stuff like trigger effects. It doesn't help with composition at all, is completely redundant, eats up the little desk space I have, and smuggles in all kinds of ill effects that easily fixate me, like getting stuck tuning in velocity curves, getting lost in improvising (hours spent with nothing substantial to take home), or trying to learn finger-drumming while toing through 150 drum kits.

To me, everything that is not mouse & keyboard is a now a pile of expensive junk whose primary function is to get on my way.

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11 hours ago, sarine said:

2deep4me

Probably good for live performance, and a fun toy.

From production perspective it looks like an effective waster of time, saver of none.

I don t know , thing is that editing in daws is so non fun that i tend to skip it aspossible witch can lower production quality sometime as a result of lazyness ....

Those type of tools alows complex move to be fast and fun ...

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48 minutes ago, Zo said:

I don t know , thing is that editing in daws is so non fun that i tend to skip it aspossible witch can lower production quality sometime as a result of lazyness ....

Those type of tools alows complex move to be fast and fun ...

It isn't fun, it doesn't have to be fun, and - in my case at least - it can't be fun. When working on a project at some point I reach the point at which I know what has to be done, and from then on there's very little room for fun. When I'm busy and not having fun, I know I'm getting things done. A good DAW, mouse and keyboard are the tools that enable me to get stuff done, not a bunch of gadgets that I could toy with for hours on end just having fun.

Don't get me wrong; I have never used a near-perfect DAW. They all suck in some ways. I stuck with the one that I qualitatively assessed to suck the least in the most important problem domains for me personally. It still sucks and I can name a handful of DAW's (that I don't use) that do this, that or those things better, but - on the whole - when push comes to shove it does my bidding.

For inspiration, I see some merit in these gadgets. But for me, creativity is a state of mind best reached in solitude. Fooling around twiddling knobs and playing with gimped hardware sequencers doesn't get me into that state of mind, on the contrary I see them as jealous friends that demand too much of my undivided attention in all the wrong places.

Neither do they increase my productivity, because the operating interface is by necessity laborious compared to pointing at functions on a screen where you can have thousands of direct controls easily accessible by virtue of the mutability of a software interface and not having to mentally keep track of state.

 

I'm not arguing that these devices are fundamentally bad and that your experience can't be the opposite of mine.

I'm only asserting that for me they were a red herring that ended up consuming a lot of my time and effort (and some money, although it could've been worse) without giving back anything except this realization.

The reason for voicing my discord is that there must be some poor ***** sucking up all the hardware hype just like I did, and I'm just here for the slap to remind them that no matter how many recommendations you hear, they could all be wrong. Because those people are not you, they don't think like you do, they don't work like you, and they don't do what you do. It took me much longer than necessary to realize there was nothing wrong with me just because I was unable to incorporate the myriad of posh tools and workflows into my creative processes, so here's hoping my uninvited opinion could help someone else like me to have the confidence to keep cultivating their strengths and stop hallucinating about the perfect producer bliss.

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It all depends on where you are in the porcess , each tools has its place if used at the right moment  ...

There s a diff between your feeling about a tools and its legitimity to be used there .

production is the most violent process , formalising something unfirmal ...this process is (like all ) depending on the human ability to do it right , the more time , the less you re close to the instant truth , the more your brain is in the task the less ckose you re to the instant truth .... evrytool than can speed up:this process and make your interaction feeling smooth is by essence benefical even if you don t feel like so by/lack of consciousness of you re very work at this time .

To each its tool .... this thing can do wonder to leads you to creating something unique and generate that instant truth witch gonna lead you to somthing pure artistic wise in oposion to something poluated by processes compensend by technique and habbit giving people the illusion of quality referenced to something  already heard ...

Don t know if i m clear .

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20 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

I am looking at stream deck and maybe a way to control automation better. That's about it.

Stream deck looks great if i recall well Dom sigalas done a video on it ....

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I guess it depends on the kind of work someone does. 

I so some of the same things over and over again, so tying a button to it would be a good thing. TBH I would probably use it more with Q base since there are some very well made templates for it. Someone  probably made good ones for CbB too.

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59 minutes ago, Tim Smith said:

I guess it depends on the kind of work someone does. 

I so some of the same things over and over again, so tying a button to it would be a good thing. TBH I would probably use it more with Q base since there are some very well made templates for it. Someone  probably made good ones for CbB too.

I hear Bapu has buttons for his normal posting replies... "Ya," "Typical," etc.  😁

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