What ra sudeep? Too much DAW you're using?🤨

This year marks 11 years since I started producing my own music. It's been a long ride - one of creative highs and lows and some pretty f***ing cool music (even if most of it never saw the light of day) - and I'm glad that, despite some prolonged bouts of writers' block, music making has stuck with me for this long. However, I've been wondering - is it time to switch gears and try something new?

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I haven't published any new songs (individually) for nearly a year. Everything I make these days just doesn't excite me the way it used to, and I genuinely think it's because, barring a couple of cover projects (that I might get to sometime later this year), I've made most of what I wanted to. Still, despite my predicament, I can't seem to get rid of my DAW. Seriously, I've tried, but I always end up reinstalling it and tinkering.

Much like a sketchbook to a visual artist, my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is sort of a canvas for my ideas, allowing me to jot them down quickly so I can come back to them later. This could be anything - a song, a voice recording, or even SFX - and, lately, I've been exploring quite a bit on the non-music audio side of things. This has opened up a world of possibilities that I've yet to fully wrap my head around.

In the past I have created car engine noises, modulated my own voice to sound cooler, and created horror SFX using lots of REVERB. Lately, though, I've been wanting to take it all a step further. The other day I was messing around with some drum kits and synthesisers and ended up creating some weird sounds - stuff I probably wouldn't have made if I was focused on getting a song out. Just last month I even downloaded Reaper - the Linux of DAWs - and started customising the hell out of it. I don't exactly know what all this tinkering can be called, but boy have I enjoyed doing all of them.

My customised Reaper interface (top), above the stock Reaper (middle) and stock Logic Pro interfaces (bottom).

Messing around with all this stuff has made me realise why I've consistently run into writers' block when writing music. While a song is a perfectly-packaged chunk of entertainment built for wide consumption, this other stuff that I can't quite label yet doesn't really take on such a fixed form. It can just be... weird, and I like that. It can exist as an experiment with no requirement of success; no audience to satisfy and no vision to meet.

Seriously, why does what I make need to serve an audience and feel complete? This particular question has been on my mind lately, and it's taken me a while to realise that creativity doesn't need to be bound to a brief or time limit. Rather, by creating bits of audio, software or tools with no overarching purpose, I can get something done while expending all my pent up adrenaline (fine I admit I'm biiiiiit🤏🏻 of an addict). Moreover, it might actually be of use to someone else making music (more on that in my next post😊).

I frankly don't know where all of this is going to lead me. I mean, there is an entire market for audio loops, samples and tools, so I must be on to something! All I know right now is that tinkering has been far more creatively rewarding than writing songs. I'm keen to delve a bit deeper and see what comes of all of it. I shall report back soon! Until then, here is an unrelated but arguably fitting quote to encapsulate my latest revelation.

"The club can't even handle me right now!"

~ [Flo Rida, 2010]

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