Limitations and Creativity
People often state that one of the reasons they love hardware is the limitations. On top of hardware usually containing tactile controls, and tactile controls that map directly to settings and workflow, there is often a claim that “limitations breed creativity”.
How do limitations help with creativity?:
Options can be overwhelming, often times simply going through every option and testing them out can take the majority, if not all, of a creative process, By the time we’ve even gone through every option we’ve likely forgotten previously explored ideas. Most of all, options don’t give us anywhere to start. Limitations can help impose a starting point, be it a small set of controls, a specific tone or color, or a particular instrument, we now have a place to branch off of, a decision has been made, there is something to work with.
Limitations also narrow the web of potential decisions, they give us a path to follow, there’s some structure to the decision making process. Importantly, this allows us to try out new ideas without fear of forgetting our previous choices. With too many options it is easy to land on a decision and avoid exploring more due to concerns of messing up something nice that we’ve already made. This is where “limitations breed creativity”, limitations give us a smaller set of combinations to try out. Limitations also force us to work with a different aspect of our creative decision making, they take us away from the details to some extent. Without limits you can spend eternity on a single detail, you can loose sight of the larger picture.
The capacity for creativity within limitations is important as well, especially as we are learning. It can be a powerful tool to be able to take one skill, and turn it into something creative. There’s always something to learn, but there’s always something to create. If you are starting out, you may not know how to do much with the tools in front of you, but if you know at least one thing, try to figure out a way to make something interesting from that one aspect. This may not fit your ultimate creative vision, but that time will come when you have the capacity for it. For example, if you can draw a circle, you can draw two, you can draw three, are you able to make anything interesting from just circles? If you can play only a few notes, but at least know they they sound good together, can you devise a melody or song from only those notes?
This is a great place to start, and the earlier you can get creating, the earlier you can find joy in learning and developing skill. This may not seem like much, but consider that there is always something new to learn, especially when you don’t put what you’ve learned into practice and have to learn it again. Other than developing creativity, this puts what you’ve learned so far into action, it builds it into your repertoire, you develop an understanding of how to utilize what you have learned. In this sense, as you learn you can self impose new limitations, you can iterate on this process, add one new concept to your palette at a time, see what you can do creatively with that one aspect alone, and build from there.
Even within these limits, there is often more we can accomplish than what is on the surface, this is where deeper understand can be built. There is an aspect of puzzle solving when working within limits. How can we accomplish something new with these restrictions, how can we bend these restrictions into new territories. This is where you’ll find a lot of techniques. As an example, I’ve made presets on a synth that doesn’t include a looper, but by using modulation and a delay to both cut off input signal and boost delay mix/ feedback, I was able to create a looper. If you are really exploring different limitations thoroughly, testing new ranges and approaching them like puzzles, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of more complex and less limited spaces.
The big problem with forced limitations, is that eventually you hit a wall, and eventually this will restrict your creative vision and you’ll want to break from these limitations. However, it was these limitations that got you to the wall in the first place, which is why so many of us struggle once we open up tools that lack limitations. The key here is to self impose limitations, learn to work within invisible limitations, so we can reach that same wall we could previously, but instead now continue to develop our work beyond the imposed limits. Setting these limits can be tricky, especially when they don’t truly exist, but following them will be easier once you have developed a skill for working within them.
I’ll discuss in a future article different ways you can self impose artificial limitations in otherwise limitless environments and how you can go beyond those limits after you have followed them. For now I suggest discovery as a form of limitation, as stated earlier, learn one thing at a time, and see how many ways you can apply that one thing, try to create a song or something original from the new information. In a sense, starting alone is a form of imposed limitation, because once we’ve started, we’ve narrowed a path from which future decisions will be based upon.
If you enjoyed this article you may enjoy my previous musings on creativity and process: