Just For Fun!
- by Darwin Grosse

Whether doing sound design, music production or soundware creation, I often find myself getting into ruts. I may be obsessing about something pointless. I may be spending great effort polishing a turd. I may be taking the high road when the answer is in a ditch. For whatever reason, I become confused, ineffective or (gasp) dumb.

I almost always get out of it in the same way — by having some fun, then co-opting the result. Let me give you some examples:

• Some years ago, I needed to do a live solo gig. I’d been working with a particular drum machine/analog synth/digital synth combo for a long time, and felt comfortable with that setup. However, I was really having a hard time getting anything interesting for the performance. Solution? I begged/borrowed five digital delays, and hooked them all up to the analog synth just to see what is was like. I was able to come up with some neat ambient results, and did the gig with only one synth. Everyone liked it (although they weren’t sure that I was really doing that live), and I yanked myself out of a rut.
  
  
• Recently, I needed to develop a softsynth for a client. It needed to be unique, and have an interesting look. I decided to randomly open a magazine, and emulate whatever I found therein. I happened to choose an issue of Future Music that contained an interview with Karl Bartos — talking about using vocal phonemes (basically, the elements of speech) as a percussion instrument. I hauled my spouse into the room, and had her read all of the phonemes into my HD recorder. Bend/fold/mutilate, and — TaDa! — a new phoneme-based synth is created.
  
  
• I needed to do a demonstration recording of an old analog synth that I happened to own. I just couldn’t figure out what kind of track to create. I decided to record 16 tracks of synth — "blind", meaning that I didn’t listen to previous tracks while recording new ones. I made the rule that I couldn’t play a note until I couldn’t stand hearing silence. Doing this 16 times gave me an interesting palette of sounds and notes — and some creative mixing left me with an excellent track in the end.
  
  
• I was working at a local music store, and wanted to do a demo for a new automated Digidesign control surface. At first, it was hard to come up with a song that would "show off" console automation — I mean, who can be entranced by a slider moving slowly up-and-down. I decided that I wanted to make the control surface "dance" to my music. I created a smooth trance-y track, then added a bunch of unused audio tracks that contained automation moves. I could now make the sliders and knob indicators flick around in rhythm to my music, without have to actually automate the audio itself. I wanted to have fun with automation — and it developed into one of the funniest demos to watch as well.
  
  
• I needed to do some splash screens for some instruments I’d created. What the heck was I going to do? I’d worked on fancy Photoshop’d lettering, fancy cutouts and bold coloring — and the result looked ridiculous and amateurish. So, instead, I took a DV camera around the house and took a variety of shots of common stuff, but at a variety of zoom levels. I then u/l’d it to my drive, pulled out individual pictures and imported them into Photoshop. I didn’t want to repeat my overdone previous attempts, so I decided to only allow four things to change — focus, brightness, contrast and color balance. The end result is better than I could have imagined, and is pretty well liked by everyone that has seen it.

These are just five example of me getting out of a rut by focusing on fun. Henry Warwick (in his Spark columns), Andre Stordeur (in his In Search of My Muse columns) and others have more ideas — but you can probably come up with some I hadn’t thought of. If there is a fun activity that has helped you out of a bind, drop me an email with the technique — I’ll probably give it a try, and will post it to the forum for others to share.

- Darwin Grosse
- 02/24/2002