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A truly liberating moment

Past

As a young boy I had piano lessons including a mandatory annual live performance. Not a big audience but enough to make me nervous and let me rehearse more than usual in preparation. The goal was to reproduce classical pieces as close as possible to the composer’s intention (something the piano teacher was familiar with of course).

From age 15 to 20 I played drums in two bands. We played a few gigs and thus rehearsed to be able to reproduce our pieces the way we had decided them to be.

Present

It‘s may 2023 I’m into electronic music since a number of years, have a decision behind me to stick to making music in my small studio and something just doesn’t feel right all the time.

The Eureka Moment

Finally I get the idea: Whatever patch, sequence, beat etc I make I would save. In my mind there is still this concept of having to be able to reproduce what I just made. Additionally there is a strong »collector gene« running in my family including myself. I made a strong decision to leave this behind me for good. A few weeks into that approach I cannot find the right words to describe how liberating it feels to me.

The Approach

The aim is to create and record something on the spot. No more filling harddisks with patches and stuff like that for future reproduction. Following recording the Mixing job gets done and that’s it. Only if it gets to late, I can make an exception and temporarily save my settings for the next day.

Exceptions (not being dogmatic….)
While this »Start from Scratch Approach« boots creative experimenting and also is a great way to get to know my devices better, I have (so far) 4 Templates that let me save a lot of time and can be easily tweaked to my current needs:
  • A Template for Bitwig
    • 16 Tracks set to audio recording with respective sound source set
    • An Equalizer Plugin for each Track
  • A Template for Octatrack
    • All Audio Tracks set to Flex machine
    • MIDI channels and sync settings
    • Frequent MIDI CCs
    • Individual Track length checked
  • A Template Patch for the GR-1 Granular Synth
  • An Effects Stack for the Kdenlive Video Editor
Life is good!