Maybe it’s not the quantity of options, but how they are used or not-used?
Maybe it’s about having lost a playful mind like a child (having fun - expecting nothing - beeing happy if something happens out of nowhere) and instead repeating a well trained workflow over and over again and wonder why nothing new appears on the horizon?
I had some success with changing just the workflow or a tool and spend some quality time to master it. For me sampling was completely new. As a kid I started to play the piano and not having keys and pedals to play an instrument was completly weird, but somehow it changed something.
Similar experience with different synthesis or off-mainstream sound engines. There is so much to explore, which is not possible with subtractive synthesis and can inspire new ideas.
Where can I learn more about this kind of stuff - I mean, how the technical features (velocity/accents and microtiming) relate to ‘feel’ (such as ‘layed back’) ?
For me there’s some kind of guilt linked to possession, and it’s not just about music gear.
If I’ve got a camera and unused lenses I feel like selling the ones I’m not using because it hurts me that some object was manufactured just to be left to collect dust in a cupboard.
Each and every object we mass produce has an impact on the planet. And with each year passing I grow terrified of the hurt I’ve inflicted and the very few positive impacts I’ve had. Right now, for me, the balance is not great to look at. And I can’t say the “artistic” stuff I’ve done repays in beauty what I’ve subtracted to the land.
Of course the best way to not have an impact at all is to just die and I’m not quite ready yet. I still buy gear sometimes but anything that isn’t used for a year goes away, hopefully to someone that will make better use of it.
To be more on point:
The more unused gear I have the more guilt I build
The more gear you have the more straining it is to use it all, all the time.
Therefore there’s a maximum amount of gear that I can keep, or I’ll start neglecting some and building guilt
One method is, like @natehorn said, to apply syncopation.
Well … the following is not a typical learning medium, but maybe it’s a starting point …
Syncopation is staying on-grid and, as an example, accentuates particular beats like in 4/4:
ONE-two-THREE-four … repeatedly … every other beat is “strong” and the beats in between are “weak”. But this is only one way to do it. We can have one measure like this and in the next we change like: ONE-two-THREE-four-ONE-two-three-Four and repeating this, or more complex rhythms, which overlay the 4/4 scheme. Okay, this maybe very theroretical and not helpful practically.
What helped me “programming” groovy pattern in step-sequencers was to learn some drumming basics on real drums. For this you don’t even need a real drumset. A book or videos for the beginning drummer and self-training, a pair of sticks and a drum-exercise-pad , or just something you can beat with your sticks might be okay for the beginning and get the “feeling”.
There are a couple of books like “Encyclopedia of Reading Rhythms”, which explain rhythm patterns for various genres. A research in the net should also get you basic to advanced knowledge.
It’s not witch-craft. Different velocities/accents are most often used for syncopated patterns. Okay your sound-device has to support this. All Elektrons do.
“layed back” is microtiming a beat a wee behind it’s time-position in an exact grid and “driving” is just the opposite. Elektrons support microtiming, meaning shifting the note away from it’s supposed exact 1/16 grid position, and they provide “swing” as well. “Swing” is a general shift of every other 1/16 either to an earlier or a later time-position.
Sounds quite conscientious to me! Although I would counter with the fact that music gear isn’t disposable and so if you’re buying used, or selling it to someone else when you’re done with it then the impact you’ve had is fairly minimal. And as long as you’re enjoying the process I wouldn’t worry too much about the quality of your output, which is subjective anyway. Everyone has an audience, even if it’s just you.
You’ve definitely given me a new scale to work to though! I will now ask myself daily:
“How productive do you feel on a scale of mildly guilty to thinking you should be dead”
Everything is disposable to some level. After a while everything is just litter. After a long while it’s just dust. Sometimes the good kind, sometimes microplastics.
An interesting subject that we can all relate to a greater or lesser extent. I myself have made the mistake of acquiring more instruments than I could “process” in the past and have learned the simple following lesson:
Producing music, like any creative process, requires one fundamental thing: making decisions. This sound or that one? This chord progression or this one?
The speed and foresight with which we are able to make these choices determines both our productivity and the quality of our work.
Our ability to make these choices is correlated to the complexity of the situation and our ability to navigate that complexity.
With no surprise, the complexity of the situation increases with the size of our setups. While our ability to navigate this complexity comes with time and mastery.
It may seem obvious, but I understood better my relationship with music gear after that, and how it can be as much a pain as a big boost of inspiration when it comes at the right time.
Take your time, don’t bite off more than you can chew.
Good things are coming.
And to add to that; we tend to only have so many decisions in us in a given day. For those of us where this is not our day job or who have other responsibilities that require decision making, that leaves us with even less decision-making power when we sit down to make music.
Which is why I subsist on pretty much the same meals every day when I am the one making them. I can make something else, but those are precious decisions being wasted.
I don’t avoid nice meals, but I do deny them my decision-making essence.
ahh, okay … I thought someone was making a connection with music that sounded ‘laid-back’ (to a non-musician) by applying some (as yet unknown to me) technical stuff. I didn’t realise what was actually being said was directly related to the microtiming.
I tried to find a ‘uniform’ outfit. Turns out that it’s really hard to find brands that don’t fuck around with even their basics range making it next to impossible to replace something like for like at a later date which means you have to commit hard and just buy 20 of everything you want at once or suffer the whims of fashion.
Typically “laid-back” is a “feel” a musician creates intentionally and/or beeing a human by playing not exactly on time.
Step-sequencers quantize each note exactly to the grid and generate a typical “techno-style” precision. To overcome this, a couple of step-sequencers provide microtiming facilities to shift events away from the grid and allow to generate “artificially” a different and more human like groove.
