November drifts in, carrying with it a sense of…ahem, ok, productivity. Yeah, that’s it. I’m doing so much at the same time right now, but I’m having a blast. Things finally seem to fall in place with a lot of the work I do. Tracks getting finished, this website is getting more polished and I’ve gotten a better understanding of some of the work areas I procrastinated successfully before. Like mixing. It really can be a beast at times. Stuff I thought wouldn’t be much of a problem in my works, turned out to hit me badly. For example, phase cancellation. I don’t really do live recording of instruments and I thought I could just ignore it being a problem in that context. Turns out it really can be a problem with wide spread ambient sounds and sampled noise. Well, does anybody listen to music in mono these days anyway? I guess so, many bluetooth speakers, some older phones and the all new iPhone Air are only capable of mono playback. But just like many other things that make you think WTF—in the first moment when they appear problematic—it’s doable. Thanks to all the people tutoring about everything on YouTube, solutions came up quickly.
By the way: many of those tutorials, explanations and in depth reviews actually helped a lot to achieve the skills I have as of today. And all the helping knowledge is free to have. Well, kind of, you just need to develop a strong capability to ignore the bad advertising habits of YouTube. They really seem to have a refined algorithm to hit the videos with the wrong advertising at the wrong time. But still, I would not want to miss the possibility to get so much useful information on that platform. This especially holds true for reviews and explanations of eurorack modules. There is just no way to get to know the workings of those—as fast and practical—as with the plethora of videos about them out there. Interestingly, this also holds true for the free to use virtual modules of VCV Rack. It has also been very inspiring to me to see how others put those modules to work. From the usual and well known combinations of the standard modules, to the totally weird experimental stuff. And inspiration is so crucial to any creative work. Inventing everything by one self would simply be impossible. Whilst being a graphic designer, I learned that you have to seek inspiration actively. Otherwise you will certainly hit a dead end sooner or later, no matter how skilled or talented you are.
Speaking of graphic design, I just found out about the Affinity apps getting assimilated into the Canva portfolio. Those are graphic designer tools for vector and pixel based graphic works. Similar to some of the Adobe apps. The Affinity Apps have been interesting, because they have been sold as a onetime purchase, whereas the Adobe Apps needed an active subscription. Now the Affinity apps—under the Canva umbrella—are given away for free. No strings attached. Besides the odd AI thing baked right into them. Of course there are rumors saying the AI will be learning from the users input. I’m just so glad I skip this part: having paranoid thoughts of such things, whilst working creatively. I guess AI needs some inspiration too? I just hope the music production sector is more resilient to such developments. At least we have a much broader spectrum of DAW vendors. This really gives me hope, some of them will sustain a more conservative approach to their business model, ditching the temptation to bake AI into the core software.
But back to the inspiration thing. Humans inspiring humans, I mean. This has been the driver for creative expression since forever, in my opinion. Doing similar things differently. Otherwise we’d be all singing the same songs, in the exact same way. Whilst wearing the exact same dress and having all the same haircut. Although there have been efforts to achieve just that, we’re not. Actually, being able to have a consistent flow of creative output is an asset these days. And that’s—by far—not just the case for the jobs considered being “creative”. It holds true for so many people, in so many different work environments. It can also be an enrichment for everyday live in general, to have such creative skills. To develop those—for whatever usage—we need inspiration.
Inspiration itself can be found almost everywhere. It may not jump at you, at times. But it also doesn’t hide, if you go and look for it, when needed. Actively looking for sources of inspiration—no matter how related to my current work—has actually prevented me from ever have gotten writers block. That, and the explorative recombination of known work practices and stylistic elements. In a way it’s the good old “out of the box” thinking, the “know the rules to break them” thing. And it works very well, for humans that is. Will AI be able to duplicate such practices, in a way that it helps it getting creative work done on point of the topic? We’ll see!
Best regards, Dareka