Synthesis Options Limitation and Inspiration

I think there is a unique challenge with synthesis, as a music creation tool, synthesizers are a vast network of creative options.
Synthesis is a challenging field to fully grasp, and takes a significant amount of research and experimentation to truly understand.
On top of this, due to the architecture and design of each synthesizer, what works on one, might work differently on another.
This challenge creates a mystery and mystique that causes many of us avoid truly understanding what is directly in front of us, and instead grasp for whichever tools lead to the easiest inspiration.

This challenge is exacerbated by a common unwillingness to use presets. We often feel it is cheating or taking an undeserved shortcut to use a sound someone else has crafted. 
But imagine if most guitarists insisted on building their own guitars, imagine if you insisted on growing the tree, cutting the wood, smelting the metal, and making your own pickups and strings.
This too would become a similar challenge to understanding synthesis, there are many many more variables involved with designing a guitar than playing one.

These two aspects come to a crossroads, where we both want to fabricate the sounds from scratch, but take shortcuts in our understanding of how to do so. This leads to metaphorical “guitars” that are often not up to the quality we need to produce the music we imagine. On top of this, by the time we are building a “good enough” guitar, we’ve spent little time actually practicing how to play it
I don’t say this to describe anything that is “wrong” with this method, but to highlight the importance of both actually understanding how to use our tools, and the importance of utilizing what has been previously built.

But, as my own devils advocate, building is fun, synthesis is fun
Exploring all the various options and combinations is engaging and stimulating. But it’s all too easy to get lost, to loose track of which sets of controls lead to which sounds.
Synthesis requires a scientific approach, you need to adjust variables one by one, test new ideas.
Follow a process that you can reproduce later, because making a sound is one thing
getting back to a sound when you need it is another.

The move from software to hardware is often inspiring, because a lot of hardware is almost like a great preset
a carefully crafted set of macros, rather than a full on tool for instrument design.
This provides guidelines or handrails in the exploration process. It also limits the amount of options that are available to us at a given notice.
You have one box hooked up and plugged in, you can’t just click to another synth and hope it inspires you instead. This one is there and the only option, you might as well see what it can do.

I'm personally at the point where hardware zaps my creativity, I love the expansive nature of software
and being able to endlessly refine a sound to whichever point I find satisfactory.
But I’ve also developed a process where I can impose my own limits in software
and this is where the scientific approach comes into play.

By crafting little sound experiments, with controlled changes, you impose a limitation upon yourself where none truly exist.
You can somewhat create your own “hardware limitations” if you have the self control.
There’s almost a call to the void we must ignore in software, where the endless options beckon us from our tool box.
“what if this other synth is better for the job?”
“maybe a different effect will inspire me”
This is where the endless options create unrest and anxiety in our process,
but it is important to carry on with the task at hand. We’ve set restrictions and it is time to adhere to them.

Remember our goal is inspiration, our goal is creation. If at any point you find flow or inspiration, you come across a sound that begs to become a song, go with it. The manufactured scientific process is only a guideline of self imposed restrictions, it’s purpose is to avoid endless hunting and procrastination. It is important that you don’t allow the process to interfere when creativity does strike. In many ways Hardware forces this process, but the downside is that hardware doesn’t open the doors for you once that creativity strikes. Which leads to a different problem, where gear not only interrupts creativity, but becomes the solution via new purchases. 

I will go into more details of my personal “scientific process” for sound design in a future article. It’s worth mentioning that this is not the only approach to music and creativity of course. To wrap up the other side of this topic, I also strongly advocate for the usage of presets. Presets can be an incredible way to simple start writing a song. You need to be able to take a sound and actually create with it anyways, so it’s worth exploring that aspect of music creation alone. A preset might not be perfect, but you’ll never write beats and melodies if you spend hours alone on sound design and never any time on application.