Never Have Too Many Toys To Play With

Most of us here, if not all of us, know that nagging feeling of gear lust, or gear acquisition syndrome or plugin acquisition syndrome or whatever you want to call it. There are the Big Shiny Things we have, and then there are many more Big Shiny Things that we don't have. And we want them. Again and again, we see a synth on some kind of seasonal 50% off offer, like the sound of it in a youtube demo, and get out the credit card. I've been there, again and again, and most definitely I have too many toys to play with, and so I'm writing this to pass on the experience of hindsight: I would have been better off just having a small select number of plugins and fully mastering them. The trouble with Too Many Toys is that it is hard to resist the pull of a plugin you're not currently using; instead of learning one synth, you hop from synth to synth; and without spending the time to thoroughly learn a synth, you hop from preset to preset. Then, having auditioned the 50th bass patch, you can't remember what the first few sounded like. And moreover, none of those 50 bass patches sounded like what you wanted and, not having learned the synth, you don't really know how to tweak them to get the sound you are after.

The thing that has shocked me over the years, is youtube videos by producers who have basically mastered one or two synths. They get sounds from a synth that I never realised they could.

Dividing Time

There is the famous Bruce Lee saying, which I happily repeat in many contexts:

If you have an hour to spend, and you divide it between 12 things, then each of those things gets only five minutes. Five minutes is not long enough to get anything done, and moreover, whatever you spend the first five minutes learning will be overwritten in your head by whatever you learn afterwards. To learn anything thoroughly entails not doing anything else when you learn it. If you're trying to bake a cake, you need to ensure that only the correct ingredients for the cake go in the cake. If you try to bake ten things at once, and you're not careful (and when it comes to 'learning hygiene', none of us is that careful), what happens is that some of the ingredients of the carrot cake end up in the chocolate cake, and some of the chocolate ends up in the lemon drizzle cake, and all of the cakes end up with a bit of pasta sauce and curry sauce in them too. The result is an unsavoury mess. It is the same with learning.

Thus: be clear on what you are trying to learn. Focus on that, and only that. Spend as much time on what you are focusing on, and as little time and effort on everything else. Then, just as your eye moves around making up the picture that your Mind sees, so your practice focus moves (but much more slowly), building up your experience one small part at a time. The whole picture, like with sight, is an illusion; what is real is the many small parts which are individually focused on. So your focus could be some aspect of composing, or arranging, or sound-design, or mixing, or mastering, or something else. But if you try to do it all at once, you succeed in doing none of it very well. What you repeat, you remember; the more you repeat it, the more you remember it; what you don't, you forget. If you don't focus tightly, you don't repeat thoroughly enough to drive the learning in. This is why some say: amateur musicians practise until they get it right; professional musicians practise until they cannot get it wrong. The latter, practising until you can't get it wrong, takes dozens of times longer than practising until (it seems like) you get it right. Not getting it wrong means learning in a more immersive and robust way so that distractions and perturbations of your flow don't disrupt you. The amateur who has only practised it enough to get it right in the comfort of practise at home, will fall to pieces when trying to reproduce the same performance in the pub, or on stage.

So it all comes down to not dividing your time too much.

Diminishing Returns

Having talked about not dividing your time too much, I should also say something about the opposite: not dividing it too little. Say you are learning a bit of a classical piano piece. You can only do so much practice in a day before things stop going in. Maybe that's 10 minutes, maybe an hour. But at some point, adding another half an hour doesn't add to the progress you've made. That unproductive half an hour is better spent on something else. So you have to measure what is the optimal way to divide time: perhaps three or four things a day, if you have say two to three hours to practise things. For example my classical piano practice is around 50mins a day (generally split into two 25min chunks, so I'm practising two aspects of the piano at a time). My daily Taiji practice is 1 to one and a half hours, again broken into chunks which can be continuously repeated. My aim with the philosophy I'm discussing here is to do the same for learning music production. The thing is, with the piano, the pieces are already written by the great masters, and many of the important lessons of how to practise are already known, and for students of a traditional martial art, things are already systematised into forms, katas, and other exercises. In the case of music production, I seek to unearth the equivalent of the Karate student's katas, the Taiji player's forms, the pianists scales, arpeggios, and study pieces.

Buying To Learn

Whether or not you spend currency to acquire a piece of music software, such as a synthesiser, if you are going to get anything out of it, you will have to invest time into learning it. That time is something that money can't buy, and time wasted cannot be taken back for a refund. So along with deciding how to spend money wisely, you also most take care to spend your time wisely too.

I think the learning and exploration process, and how it can transform you, is more valuable than any creative output. Just as a martial art is all about what you put into the practice, and how that transforms you, so it is with any serious musical discipline. If you fall into the modern trap of just using preset and sample packs, or even AI tools, to 'automate the creative process', then even if a pleasant sounding result comes out at the end, you have cheated yourself out of what proper learning and practice can do for you.

So when it comes to selecting what software to install, and possibly to buy, think in terms of what you will learn from it. If you want to study old school analogue synthesisers, but can't afford the actual hardware (like many of us), then perhaps something like Diva will be beneficial provided you take a productive route to learning it, so that afterwards you'll know what you're doing if you meat a real old school analogue hardware synth. If you want to play with modular synthesis, then one way is the 'deep end experience' of getting VCV and a massive ton of modules. But that falls into the 'too many toys' trap all too easily. Halfway to modular are synths like Zebra or Phaseplant. Such semi modular synths give you a first taste of the flexibility of modular synthesis without overloading you with the vastness of choice that is out there once you decided (if you decide) to dive into full on modular synthesis. What you can learn of modular synthesis from a semi-modular is arguably better learned with a semi-modular, so that when approaching a full-modular synth, you only have to explore what's left.