Monday, March 12, 2007

Reasons for a lack of stardom...

...a lack of talent? Possibly, but that's not what I wanted to say.

I am in the process of working on some new material and patchery, and I have realized what one of my problems is; I spend too much time listening to things in their raw state. This week, it's been revisiting and enjoying the pleasures of Nathan Wolek's granular toolkit for MSP, reminding myself that the whole granular thing may well appear to be "overused" because people only opt for a tiny subset of what's possible [as Marcel Wierckx' work suggests, which was always my view of FM synthesis in earlier times]. To that end, I'mve been taking materials I'm really familiar with and rather exhaustively tweaking parameters very slowly in various combinations, and spending a good amount of time living inside/alongside the results. For hours and days.

I expect that by the time I think I've got it figured out, some part of me thinks that no one else will be interested; my inner midwesterner shows up, pronounces the results "nothin' special," and moves on. This "slow preparation, fast execution" stuff is tricky.