The corsetry of freedom

When I returned to musical composition & recording in my late 50s I set myself a list of rules & restrictions, primarily concerning the ways I engaged with the creative process. These were generally exclusions & thresholds, ways of working that were forbidden, constrained, or had some sort of limits imposed on their use. It wasn't a long list but it severely restricted what methods I could employ to bring my music to life.

The immediate question is why? With no serious external constraints - the extensive, demanding fanbase I had dreamed of had somehow never materialised - I should have been free to follow my muse wherever she should lead. Particularly so in my chosen genre of synthesizer electronica where the potential range of sounds & textures are almost infinite. With a vast palette of sounds and an unlimited range of styles & forms what was the point of putting arbitrary obstacles in my own way?

My problem with infinite possibilities is that it's a daunting, sometimes terrifying prospect. Where do I start? How do I begin? I'll usually have at least a glimmer of an idea when I sit down to play but that initial impulse can seem pitifully small & weak when compared against the endless possibilities of a blank page.

And the last step can be as difficult as the first. When is a piece finished? My technical proficiency could charitably be described as 'adequate' and it's rare for me to feel properly satisfied with a lot (most?) of my playing. The temptation to keep rerecording passages to get ever closer to the perfect ideal is always present with me, a hopeless Zeno's paradox of a goal always tantalisingly out of reach. Or, considering my tendency to relentlessly rework & refine, a Red Queen's race where I use all of my efforts to just stay in place.

I was inspired by the approach of Dogme 95 (the Danish filmmaking movement) and the often derided 'Mission Statement' fad in the corporate world. In both cases these were declarations of purpose, a way of defining what the system or organisation was attempting to achieve and a reminder of the overall objective in the face of immediate setbacks or abstracted side quests. "When you're up to your ass in alligators it's hard to remember that you set out to drain the swamp".

So what was my objective when creating music? With no realistic chance of a Hit Single (or even mildly popular download) I was free to do whatever I wanted, so what was that? Over time I came up with a fairly short list - regularly produce new tunes, develop my skills on the synthesizer(s), have a decent (& improving) level of quality, and push my musical knowledge & capabilities into new areas. And above all to have fun while doing it, I didn't mind putting some work in but I didn't want my hobby to become a chore.

And so I wrote my list of rules. These were intended more as guidelines than hard & fast regulations but still to be respected and only broken when I could justify it to my (former) self. They have undergone some revision & reevaluation over the years but have generally worked well in keeping me creative & productive while still maintaining an overview of why I'm doing this.

Maintain a quick turnover

The simplest way to prevent myself sinking into prevarication & endless refinement was to set a time limit for creating a new piece. In the early days this was draconian - I'd only allow a few days between starting a tune and finishing it, sometimes working late into the night to complete a song in a single session. This led to some decidedly 'demo quality' results but these came in a (pleasantly surprising) wide range of styles & formats - I wasn't just churning out variations on a theme but exploring diverse creative pathways, at least from my own perspective. With a tight deadline I found myself trusting initial ideas and quickly moving on to next steps, letting new parts coalesce around the emerging structure and often drifting away (sometimes far away) from my first impulses. Deciding that a piece was finished became less a case of Is everything there? and more Is enough there?, quite a radical change for me.

Once a piece was 'done' there was a similar imperative to start on a new one. I've found that my creative impulses (not just with music) have a certain amount of 'inertia' associated with them and if I leave too long a gap between projects it's much, much harder to get started again.

Over time these limits have gradually eased. As I acquired more elaborate instruments and developed more involved song structures it became more rewarding to spend time going deeper into the creative process, both technically & in terms of composition. Having somehow proved to myself that there's a (fairly) reliable source of inspiration inside I'm more relaxed about having the occasional hiatus. Since I've started releasing my work as albums they have provided a new workflow pattern, I'll push myself to complete a set of tunes but then take time off before starting on the next set.

No structural editing

With modern (usually computer-based) audio setups it's possible to record what's being played on a keyboard and then edit it before sending it to an instrument to be actually 'played'. This lets you change the notes (both timing & pitch) and to copy & paste entire sections without having to record them individually. I'd used this technique years before but I decided that this time around I'd actually play everything myself, both to improve my lamentable keyboard skills and to have the resulting music be more personal & nuanced, warts & all. I'd allow myself one track with sequencers or arpeggiator as these were a fundamental part of my musical style but once that was in place everything would be played in real time.

I've generally stuck to this rule but have started to loosen it recently. Since introducing the 'single instrument' rule (see below) I've allowed myself more than one sequenced track, usually when building a 'rhythm section' of bass, percussion, and/or repeating patterns. In keeping with the original intent I start each track manually so that in some sense I am 'playing' it.

Other, more concerning, transgressions have come from my seemingly declining dexterity. I've had one occasion where I couldn't accurately play the musical phrase I had in mind, even after many, many attempts. Eventually I resorted to programming it in a sequencer which produced the required result but felt a bit like cheating (and was more metronomic that I would have done it by hand). Another example was deciding that a phrase I'd recorded needed to be in a different place in the song but not having the confidence that I'd be able to reproduce it, so I copy & pasted the audio into the new position. This didn't break the letter of my original rule - no note editing was involved - but I felt that I was weaselling out of the spirit.

In both cases I felt that I was using the technology to overcome a physical failing rather than as a convenient shortcut. Perhaps I could have persevered and mustered the skill to complete the tasks but it felt dangerously close to using my shortcomings as a justification for giving up on my creative flow. The fact that I questioned my own rules and reexamined my motivation seemed, in some strange way, to be a vindication of the system itself.

Make all the results public

Whatever I produced had to be placed in a publicly accessible space. This was intended as a form of quality control, was I willing to put my name to something that was open to comment, criticism, condemnation, or whatever? At first this just meant hosting mp3s on my website and announcing them on social media but I now release albums on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, & various other streaming sites as well as posting early mixes on YouTube.

Although I've stuck to this for almost all of my work it's not quite had the effect I was hoping for - making something accessible doesn't mean that people will actually listen to it. The YouTube videos normally get a few dozen plays but the download & streaming sites only show a scant handful of followers & listens, let alone purchases. It's been disappointing (to say the least) to find that the art I labour over has negligible popular appeal but it has forced me to go back & reexamine my motivation for doing it in the first place. Although there's a part of me that longs for the moment when my unique genius is (finally!) recognised (& rewarded, with praise if nothing else) it's evident from both the numbers and feedback from friends (& the occasional listener) that my primary audience is, in fact, myself.

And that has turned out to be something I'm (mostly) happy with. I listen to my back catalogue a lot - reviewing recent albums, randomising my entire release history, or just having tracks turn up in my usual shuffle play - and although some of the warts grow wartier over time the overall impression is that this is good stuff. It's not that surprising that what sounded good to me a few years ago still sounds good today but I often find myself unable to remember how I managed to produce some tunes, almost as if I'm listening to someone else. Tracks can evoke memories, either a sense of atmosphere or a specific occasion, sometimes familiar but occasionally strange & distant. A fascinating record of what parts of 'me' persist, which ones go through change, and how much remains darkly unexplained.

This rule was probably the most challenging when I first started but has had the least impact on my actual creative output - I now publish tunes with barely a thought about popular acclaim or derision. But on a deeper level it has forced me to seriously evaluate what I'm producing with future me as a (fairly) critical eventual arbiter & audience. Being my own judge (or at least Quality Assurance department) has always been difficult but projecting out to an abstract, future version of myself does provide some 'distance' and at least an approximation of objectivity.

Use a single instrument

This was a later addition to the rule book and came about almost by accident. When I added my first 'serious' synthesizer to the new recording setup I felt I needed some time to get to know its capabilities, so I began recording pieces with none of the other synths involved. This resulted in a flood of new tracks and inspired me to package them up into an album - Stavro - which in turn led to me regularly releasing albums and publishing them on wider platforms. After Stavro I reintroduced the other synths but after a while I found myself using them less & less and mostly sticking with a single instrument. As new synths arrived I repeated the process of using each one as the sole instrument, exploring their individual sounds, features, & quirks, and eventually this became my standard practice.

Although familiarising myself with a new machine or exploring deeper into its capabilities remains the main purpose of this restriction I think it's also a way for me to avoid the paralysis of too many choices. Since moving on from my first, relatively simple instruments the synthesizers I've used have been complex, multi-featured devices with a vast array of controls and potential sounds. By limiting myself to one this becomes (relatively) manageable and lets me take my first, tentative steps without worrying about the multitude of paths not taken. I can focus on the Specials without having to plough through a seemingly endless menu of options.

Familiarisation isn't just an issue with a new machine. When I spend a while using a single synthesizer it lets me build up a subconscious 'mapping' of how it operates so quick changes to a patch can be made without needing to dwell on the individual steps involved (or, in the worst case, referring to the manual). Ironically the less I have to think about making an adjustment the more I'm likely to consider an alternative approach, as if detaching from the minutiae of the process allows me to analyse it from a higher, more abstracted perspective. I'm not simply increasing the release time but letting it persist for longer which opens up different ways of achieving the effect.

The flip side of this is falling into familiar patterns too readily but I'll go into that in the next section.

An interesting revelation has been finding that my personal style can transcend the machinery I'm using. Although the characteristics of each instrument have a profound effect on the created music the end results always seem to sound like me (at least to my ears). I find this strangely reassuring, an affirmation that although my creative urge is mediated by the tools I use it's still recognisable as my own. And I can observe a two way process in action as these diverse tools & techniques open up previously unknown or unexplored areas of personal expression, the unknown unknowns outside my conscious consideration.

Since adopting the one synth rule I've only broken it once (which I'll explain later), in fact it has expanded to the point where virtually all of my albums have each been created with a single instrument. In three instances these have been with synths that I've only used for a single album and in each case I persisted with them until I'd created an album's worth of tunes, an unexpected side effect of this rule combining with the 'public release' one.

No presets or saved patches

When I decided to add a 'proper' synth to my setup I was very wary of spending too much on an old man's folly, a callback to youthful dreams that would quickly fall into disuse and gather dust on an attic shelf. So I restricted myself to something relatively inexpensive and eventually ended up with a secondhand Waldorf Blofeld. This was a wonderful instrument but had been clearly aimed at a more budget-conscious buyer with a control layout which used a small number of knobs & switches in a clever matrix pattern to give access to the wide array of parameters. It was effective but fiddly to use, making creating a patch from scratch a fairly tedious procedure, so I soon adopted the process of scanning through the long list of preset tones and tweaking them to get the sound I wanted at the time. This was very effective but over time I started to think that I was just scratching the surface of what the Blofeld was capable of and was being gently led to the same (admittedly great sounding) presets time & time again.

When I bought my next synth I compensated by going for a very different control layout, one with lots of physical controls and a more hands-on interface to the sound engine. With this new ease of use I decided that I'd begin each new sound from a plain 'init' state, building each patch step by step and getting a better understanding of how the various elements interacted. One of my initial objectives was to develop a better sense of sound design and this felt like a very practical way to approach it.

The initial results were discouraging. After spending years with professionally designed presets my first attempts often sounded thin & weedy and I found myself having to rediscover some of the synth basics that I'd not used (or thought about) for decades. But these old skills came back, often more swiftly than I was expecting, and I was pleased to discover that my new patches were not only full & 'interesting' but sounded appreciably different from the majority of the conventional presets that came with the synths. And it often wasn't much more work to craft an original sound than to find and adjust a suitable preset.

As new synths arrived this routine became even more useful, encouraging me to explore their specific features and often illustrating how common functions could be subtly (or wildly) different on different machines. And all the time my knowledge of general sound design principles slowly grew, making me much more confident about setting off to craft a particular sonic texture or tackling a new synthesis method. Nowadays I make a swift pass through the factory presets of a new instrument when it arrives but hardly ever refer to them again.

As time went on I allowed myself a small exemption - sometimes I'd use a patch multiple times in a piece and needed to make small tweaks to have it fit; high in the register it might be too 'fizzy', lower down it might be too thin, sometimes the effects were too strong or too weak. In these instances I'd save multiple, adjusted versions of the patch as required while adhering to the principle that the first one needed to be 'from scratch'.

The main drawback to this rule was finding myself stuck in sound design while I was still working through the musical aspect of a new song. Often the notes & tones will develop in lockstep, changes in one leading to changes in the other, rinse & repeat, but when I have a specific melodic or rhythmic idea in mind it can be hard to hold it while building an appropriately matching sound. My solution is to allow myself one patch from the song I've most recently finished as a starter to get myself going. This will usually end up heavily modified by the time I'm happy with it, and is technically still a patch that I've constructed from an 'init' state, so although it's another 'letter rather than spirit' exception I feel OK about using it. I never thought I'd end up looking for legalistic loopholes in my self-generated guidelines but here we are.

I have noticed one regrettable tendency creeping in as a result of this rule - it's easy to fall into (bad?) habits when starting from the same blank slate every time. A common failing of mine is to overuse a newly discovered function or technique but a more insidious one is falling back on tried & tested 'tricks' for quick solutions to immediate requirements. Over time I've developed an internal red flag for methods that I know I've used too often in the past, triggering an imaginary arbiter to decide if this is lazy design or a good choice for this element. Often I'll try to put myself in future me's shoes and consider if he'd be disappointed in a half-hearted shortcut, by which time it'll be too late to fix it. Luckily he's very understanding.

The 'no presets' rule has been the most obviously beneficial as it's forced encouraged me to delve deeper into the workings of my synths and build up a better understanding of how they work. The blank page becomes much less daunting once you've returned to it multiple times!

Don't save partially completed pieces

This started off as a way to prevent myself slyly abandoning a piece by putting it aside 'for later', once I'd started on something I needed to finish it or explicitly discard it. It worked well, giving me a short period to determine if an idea was worth persevering with and then working on it until I had something that felt complete. Listening back there are definitely some of my tunes that could have done with more development time but I'm not convinced that a period on the back burner would necessarily have helped.

I think this was also a reflection on how my creative process worked. Once I'd started on a piece it seemed to occupy the majority of my artistic capacity, I'd never been able to work on more than one tune at a time and once I'd put a project down I found it almost impossible to pick it up again & continue developing it. This also happened if I paused work on a piece for too long, somehow I lost track of it and couldn't get back into the sense of what I was going for.

I'd not felt any inclination to challenge this rule until earlier this year when I was going through an extended barren patch. On two occasions I got to the point of recording a 'foundational' track - the primary sequencer line that defined the overall structure of the song - but couldn't seem to progress any further. As this was further than I usually got (and I was concerned about my inspiration starting to dry up) I broke with my guidelines and saved the project files for some future me to complete.

A few months later (with a newly released album under my belt) I remembered these abandoned songs and decided to have another go at them. To my surprise I was able to resume work on them fairly easily and managed to turn both of them into tunes that I was very happy with. Ironically I had another idea pop up during this process and was able to record enough of a snippet to return to afterwards and develop it into another full song.

I'm still not sure what has changed to enable this new ability (or overcome the old shortcoming). Having a fully laid out structure gave me a solid framework to start from and the long break let me approach them with fresh eyes (& ears) but neither of these feels like a satisfactory explanation. I suspect that I've just built up enough experience of my personal style to be able to step back into those earlier shoes and carry on, not necessarily to the same destination but with a similar intent. Which feels like quite an achievement.

One of the 'salvaged' fragments used a synth that I'd sold in the interim, making the final result my only exception to the 'one synth' rule. I'm still open to the idea of using multiple instruments on a piece (and I have a new drum machine that may force me in that direction), perhaps mixing up a structural foundation on one synth with accompaniment from other(s) may be the next step towards that?

Conclusions?

It's always hard to evaluate the results of self-imposed practices - would I really have blithely continued with my worst traits without these rules? - but it's clear that at the very least they prompted me to review how & why I was approaching my musical creative process. I'd like to think that it would be a natural process to monitor & steer my artistic & technical development along broadly similar lines regardless but having these 'imposed' restrictions pushed me into a wider perspective and introduced some distance & some form of objective view on where it was taking me. Even when I was bending or breaking the rules I found myself internally debating the purpose & justification for doing so, rather than just going for the immediate, easy option. By deferring to the strictures of past me and pandering to the (presumed) expectations of future me I can avoid the big questions of intention & purpose and concentrate on the interesting details of how to bridge the two. Which is often the fun part.

My choice of rules has definitely shaped the resulting music (it could be argued that the reverse is equally true but it's more grammatically challenging to discuss it that way round). The emphasis on immediacy (fast turnover, playing rather than programming, avoiding saved patches & presets) has led to a high throughput at the expense of polish & refinement but that feels like a worthwhile trade off while I was attempting to jump start my long dormant musical expression. My patches are not as intricate or complex as they might be, and this is compounded by using a single synth for all the sounds, but along the way I've learned a whole lot about sound design while building up my own style and this is reflected in my more recent, more intricate soundscapes. My 'good enough' criteria for completing & publishing tunes leaves them somewhat sparse and decidedly rough around the edges (and often deeper than that) but it lets me enjoy the fun part of composition & arrangement without slogging over the refinements & finishing touches that neither I nor my non-existant fanbase would appreciate. The rules shape the results but they were the results I was aiming for anyway so - success!

The most satisfying outcome has been my willingness to comply with these rules while maintaining an open approach to modifying them as circumstances change. I defer to my earlier self who set up the rules but in turn he needs to defer to me in the present when I determine that a rule has outlived its usefulness. It all boils down to balancing the needs of the moment with a wider perspective while not overextending one way or the other. A rule can be a useful support or a restrictive barrier, the trick is to find ones that help you on your way and remember what that way is. Until you change your mind...

September 2025