Like Chess: Chess as an Analogue

Consider a game of chess and the person playing it in a competition environment.

1. There are strict time constraints. Sometimes time is very limited.
2. You are not allowed to have notes or books to hand.
3. You are not allowed to use the internet to help you.
4. You are not allowed to recall previous games from backups.
5. Everything must be done, within the time constraints, from memory and calculation.
6. When the game is done, it's done. You won't ever play exactly the same game again.
7. You can't load the game up and tweak some of the moves to see how it 'sounds', at least:
   1. You can study previous games and consider moves you didn't play, but
   2. You have no idea how your opponent would have responded in actual game.
8. A game, once played, is played. If you want to play again, you start anew, and while you may try to reproduce an opening that worked, eventually things will diverge. 9. The exception here is a 'standard bore draw' that you see some pros play out: they know a line is a dead draw, and so rapidly blitz things out until a threefold repetition.

Time Constraints And No Saving

The idea here is to consider the analogous approach to sound design and production.

1. Give yourself a time limit. Say you have only an hour or two.
2. Save your work only in case of a machine crash.
3. When your hour is done, all you keep are the audio recordings.
4. Any synth programming you have to remember. You can take notes, but taking notes takes time.

The idea here is that by forcing yourself to work within such time constraints, you get better at not wasting time when in a real production scenario; and you get good at having everything in your head, so that you know the outcome of patching a synth in a certain way before you even do it.

Game Trees

Starting from a fixed starting point, the space of all possible chess games spreads like a tree, branching at every move into a handful of possible continuations. Most of those continuations aren't fruitful. You have to learn what is and is not fruitful.

When programming a synth, you have to decide what buttons to press and what knobs to turn and so on. Now transposing happens a lot more with synths: selecting a saw wave first and then turning down the filter gives you the same result as turning down the filter first and then selecting a saw. So the space of possible pathways to a synth patch is more like a directed graph. If you do things as quickly as possible, you won't reach the same settings twice. Morever, any given set of settings has a shortest path to get there: don't turn the filter cutoff knob twice if you only need to turn it once. In chess, there is a concept known as tempo: moves are a limited resource, and by taking three moves to accomplish what could have been done in two, you are giving your opponent a free move to do something with. Experts can do a lot with such a free move.

Then getting back to chess, there are known lines and variations. If we are playing with synths, then you may select oscillators, filter types, and envelope settings the same way you did things before, and then explore how you could have done things differently. This is like starting with a known line for say a dozen moves, and then trying something different to see where it goes.