5/4/07 MTF

4/5/07
I’m really enjoying the presentations – but I will talk more on them next time!
This week, I’d like to ask a question that came to me fairly early on in the MTF sessions. I have been meaning to ask it of Steve – and this now seems the most appropriate forum for it.
Q: Now that we can do anything we want in the studio (thanks to the progress of technology), what is it that constitutes being creative these days??


Steve touched on this in our first or second session – and he played us some really creative tracks that creatively use ‘the studio’ from the 1970s or so. It really struck me (and I think this was Steve’s point…) that these productions ‘back in the day’ were more interesting and cutting edge than a lot of what passes for creativity and experimentation today. Have we become less creative, now that our creative boundaries have been pushed so far by developing technology?

Other versions of this question might be: is technology a creative friend or enemy?

If we need to be pushing against the boundaries to be really creative, then it seems to me that it might be more difficult to be creative today. Why? Well, the boundaries are just further away, and therefore harder to reach.
Do we even know what the boundaries are? Or has technology made the boundaries of creative production techniques so distant from us that we are never likely to approach them, let alone ‘push them’.

I utterly love technology (said in sniveling little music-tech-geek voice…). I love Autotune. But when I come to mix a track these days, I am presented with such a vast array of possible choices about how to mix, what effects to run, (etc) that it now feels like a kind of paralysis can set in. We might call this pathology: creative freedom induced panic paralysis syndrome. (Otherwise known as inexperience….)

And maybe technology will be our saviour here. Perhaps we need to find some cutting edge software and get right into it: find out where its boundaries are and then: push like we’ve never pushed before!! If I am disciplined enough to restrict myself to the use of just one plug-in and really force myself to use it for things it wasn’t designed to, I might be creating an artificial barrier that I will then have to push against.