The gulf of intent: Rhodes scholar
One of the odder bits of phenomena that plagues the musician who composes solely at the computer is the moment when you realize there’s a notable gulf between the music you think you create and the music that just happens to be coming out of the speakers. A tidbit of a progression, hastily recorded, hinting at something worth investigating, slowly gets smothered by disparate ideas and ends up a chroma that’s altogether unintended. What I mean is: How often do computer musicians end up creating music that they otherwise would never listen to? Is recognizing that gulf a moment where one should back up, start over, abandon – or it a moment when one should let go and accept, using your trained faculties to merely bring a level of completeness to the image and let it live on its own merits?
It happened to me, quite often. For example: Here’s one trinket where a series of guitar chords, transcribed into music notation software, spit back out as MIDI and then tracked by a Rhodes softsynth, got blown way out of proportion to the point where I just assumed it was unfixable, and gave up. The question now is: How many steps back do I need to take to start feeling like I’m regaining ownership over the ideas, or is there some strange stubborn way I can work further forward?
Tags: sound
