It may be you're accidentally veering away from "music" into the realm of "sound effects." Many audio software environments too easily lets you drift in that direction. (Although I'd argue that's still better than drifting into the direction of becoming an audio software environment programmer. :)
That's why I never start a track without a finished idea in my head. I used to noodle and would get lost in the rabbit warren.
This led me to focus on excellent but simple triggers, and the lowest possible latency. I can't overstate the impact of low latency on making the entire DAW/Virtual Instrument stack feel "real."
My quest for low latency with robust DSP lasted for 3 months of orders and returns. I ended up getting a Focusrite 4Pre which has a Thunderbolt 2 interface. I got the Apple Tbolt 3<->2 adapter and I can get robust ~2-3ms audio playback latency even on Ableton/Windows running on a 2017 XPS 9560. When you plug a drum trigger into something like that, it's whole different beast. I had no idea. I ended up with the NI Maschine Mikro Mk3 for the drum trigger. I can't believe how these NI pads feel with low latency audio.
Has anyone else gotten further down the latency rabbit hole than me? Please share!
FWIW your attempt to get the latency really low could be misplaced. If you play in a band for example and you are standing 5 metres away from the drummer the sound is already taking ~15ms to reach you. We're really good at adjusting to these timing differences and can handle much more latency seamlessly than you are designing for.
Micro-timing (otherwise known as groove) is much more important imo and you can train yourself to groove to your setup even if you have huge latency (though this is of course undesirable).
I totally understand your point, but it turns out I can have my cake and eat it too at an affordable price if I eBay and take chances on the fractured PC thunderbolt implementation landscape.
What near-zero latency gives me is the ability to use the immense power of my DAW’s dsp controls, to modify the sound of my voice and guitar, and record nearly that exact sound.
I’m middle aged, and to me this is the promise of real-time pc-based DAW, finally delivered for a few hundred dollars.
The crazy thing is that it seems Focusrite gave up on providing non-Mac computers with thunderbolt interfaces. The support costs were just too high. This is due to things like crappy Thunderbolt implementation by Dell and others.
My research led me to find that to get the best $ per low latency, you have to buy a used 4 Pre or 8 Pre, as Focusrite moved thunderbolt support up to their 10x priced Red line.
According to an official Focusrite support response on Reddit, thunderbolt support only adds around 1 ms of latency advantage. While I believe that specific metric from that source, isn’t it true that thunderbolt might allow for more simultaneous CPU <-> outboard DSP bandwidth? It certainly feels like that over USB. It feels like I can have a lot more cpu-intensive stuff like reverb and delays over thunderbolt.
In any case, for my crappy playing chops, having near-zero latency gives me the ability to record my stream of consciousness audio outbursts with newfound accuracy and steadiness.
For me it was important to acknowledge this and help myself set boundaries to how I spend my time producing. I also found myself gravitating toward vintage gear because of its limits and how it enforces decision making (e.g. printing synths directly in audio, which was a game changer in terms of process)
Before getting into software, I worked as a recording engineer for 7 years. Got to use many large format consoles, 2inch tape, great rooms and mics.
Over 20+ years I collected a decent amount of gear myself. But creating has slowed way down. It’s not just computers, I was deep into making electroacoustic/computer music composition in college.
There is paradox of choice, but also how we live as a society now, and the damage being connected to information has done to my attention.
So my current solution to this has been meditation, and consistently sitting down at night to get a little more music done.
To get songs finished, I use a combination of a notebook to sketch out structure, concepts and forms. Then sometimes trello, and sometimes org-mode.
Hey, I had one of those! So much better than the tascam 4-track it replaced.
I think it might also be that we are exposed to so much music than before. Because of that, our expectations on what is good has become harder and harder to meet.
First, the lower barrier to entry meant more wannabes creating more "noise." Not aural / sonic noise, but noise in the shopping and buying experience. There were still needles of joy, but the haystack was getting larger and larger.
Put a different way, the higher barrier to entry meant only the determined stuck to it. And in sticking to it, pushed themselves and their gear harder. Amazing things happen when there's push.
On the other hand, the new and easy to use gear isn't as "inspiring". Good is too often good enough, and great takes too much work.
There's a dark side to cheap & easy.
I think creativity likes having small struggles and challenges.
> “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
(Information on the quote's provenance, for those who might be interested: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/24/art-limit/)
I guess the first cause of creativity is a 'what if' not an 'it surely will'
Anyway working with those limitations was very educational.
Fast forward to today, I've been playing the baritone sax for 18 months. I got a cheap vintage instrument. I traded it in this week for a modern Yamaha, and it's so much easier to play, and the quality of my playing has gone up orders of magnitude. But then again the initial struggle with the sub-optimal equipment was very educational.
In a sense, every creative decision imposes a new limitation and narrows the space of what is possible. It’s almost like sculpting: the final product is a result of cutting away potentialities until what’s left is recognizable as what you wanted it to be.
What am I missing?
You’re right about range and precision too. With knobs, the interface creator can fine-tune the precision without it being surprising. A knob that changes oscillator waveforms can have large, comfortable slices between each waveform, while an envelope length can be more fine-grained.
One could build in coarse/fine adjustments based on swipe speed, but that seems a lot harder to get right. I’m still quite hopeful about what VR synths and controls can bring. Synthspace may be the thing that makes me get a VR headset, and if someone ever ports VCV Rack to VR I’ll be there in an instant.
As I said in a reply below, I think the touch interface on flat glass is a stepping stone to VR synths where the skeuomorphism is more natural: grab the knob and spin it, just like hardware!
I need a band or something, idk.
But that question is where the magic happens.
It allows you to hit that flowstate that you can hit playing a bonafide instrument. The sound quality is good enough, the arrangements arent that hard,its house and techno anyway, and allows me to get away from the tedium of engineering, that as I get older, wears on my patience.
Lately I've been limiting myself to a simple groove box and working pretty hard on getting able to perform interesting stuff on that box alone.
One thing that is nice about this practice is that it has made me way less picky about tools... I've been mixing an album this week for a band I'm in and I pretty much am just using Logic pros default eq and comp, plus a single reverb and a single delay plugin. So, like 4 plugs for a whole album and I'm not finding it any harder to get a good sound out.
Now - as you say - we have shovel-ware sample collections that anyone can buy and use, and it's so much harder to do anything that stands out with them.
I started just a tad later and fully digital than the gear in this article, so the floppy discs I got Scream Tracker on with its included samples plus whatever I could rip from a few .MODs I could get my hands on had to do. There were four tracks. There were a hundred samples, half of which was obscure crap (and even those found their use).
Building with it and making them sound awesome, plus discovering the amazing tricks the OGs of tracker & demo culture did with their editors (sliding and bending notes! dead stops in the middle of the sample!) was endless fun.
Nowadays, I get Native Instruments Ultimate — and despite sounding orders of magnitude better, all I do is toying around. I always have the nagging feeling there's gotta be one sound or effect in that endless library that's still better than the one I'm using right now.