There is a myth which musicians perpetuate that goes something like this: To be creative, you must limit your options. This myth is extremely close to the truth which is this: to be creative, you must choose your options. The difference between limiting your options and choosing them is “limiting” means working with a small amount of options, and “choosing” means selecting your own limitations.
Example: Let’s say that I take my old iPad 3, with whatever version of GarageBand it came with, and said “I’m going to make a song with JUST this iPad 3 and the software on it. OK. I’ve successfully imposed a limit on myself. So I launch GarageBand. There are a limited number of instruments in it and a limited number of effects. And there are only 12 notes, though you can spread them out and combine them into chords. So inside the limitations of the iPad 3, I have a universe of micro-decisions to make. What notes, what key, what tempo, what chords, what melody, what instruments, what length, what genre?
So I need to make a hundred micro-decisions to do this “limited” task. I can impose additional limitations and say “It needs to be a dance track and sound like the 90s and it needs to be under 3 minutes long and I will have one vocal, recorded with the built-in mic.” These are CHOSEN limitations. When I choose a key, and major or minor, I’m adding additional limitations on what I can do.
My point is that when we choose, say, DAWless jammming because it imposes limitations, we are choosing those limitations. For most of us, if we have enough equipment, every time we make music, we make many choices and those choses sort of rule out various possibilities until we come up with something manageable. Is this working with limitations, or is this just making choices? Or perhaps it is really just a matter of making a big choice first, which is choosing a goal, and then making choices that throw out options that won’t help us meet the goal.
My last album, Attack of the 80s Synths, was my attempt at writing 10 synth-pop songs that could have been written and recorded in the 80s, because I love that music. I chose to narrow the focus, which then made future choices easier.
AHA! No pun intended. Some people avoid computers because the computer expands your options to the extreme. The more software synths you have, the more options. The more manipulations you can do, the more options. Some people do not want all of the options because they fear they’ll waste their time considering the vast universe of possibilities instead of making music. I can understand that. Imposing your own limitations (choices) is mandatory in the creation of music.
This is what I would call the “menu” problem. There’s a great restaurant near me called Craft Street which has an extremely limited menu – there are something like 8 choices. That’s it. It’s easy to order, because you don’t suffer from “option paralysis.” There are some restaurants where you’ve got 80 entries to choose from, and that can be really difficult for some people. Why? Because they don’t know what they want, and they’re afraid of making a mistake and picking an option they won’t like as much as the imaginary perfect option that they can’t seem to figure out.
Back to music. How do we deal with option paralysis, aka the fact that we’ve got every sound known to man inside our computers and our DAWs enable us to do whatever we want? We can avoid the computer (and the problem), or we can use strategies to try to solve it. And the simplest strategy of all is to make some choices before we sit down in the studio. We start with a goal – what do we want to compose?
Example: I want to compose a funky drums, bass, and guitar song, but I want to have some non-standard chord changes, and I want to integrate keyboards into it in a non-traditional way, meaning no Prince-style synth brass stabs. It seems like I have a lot of work to do before I boot up the computer. This is an analytical approach to making music that some might find repulsive, but it’s worth considering. When a computer programmer writes a program, she doesn’t just start writing code. A good amount of time is spent planning.
Sometimes I sit in front of the piano and try to come up with some unique chord progressions. Those improvisations can sometimes lead to writing interesting songs.
To summarize, I’m not convinced that actual limitations are required for creativity. But making choices to create limitations to cut down on options to be considered can save a ton of time. We HAVE to limit our options. But the choice of which options to eliminate can come from having a goal.