Every time I have a bit of a break from work I take the opportunity to clear out the studio and move things around a bit to improve my workflow. It’s something I would recommend to anyone writing music - if you find things are getting a bit stale, or you are lacking in inspiration.
This time, however, I went a bit further than usual and completely unwired the studio and pulled everything out of the room! Working like a thing possessed, it took several hours but eventually all the gear was out of the way and all the cables were organised and neatly stacked.
When I started plugging everything back in, I spent a bit of time playing with each bit of kit in isolation. What surprised me though is how much fun I had just fiddling around with the synths when they weren’t all routed through the computer - without a tempo lock or a bank of presets to play with I got some pretty good sounds and grooves going. A much more “back to basics” approach seems to work pretty well when you are lacking in inspiration.
I even plugged the sampler back in (yes a real hardware device) and recorded a few arpeggios from the Nova through it - it all seemed so limiting in comparison to software based devices, but it took almost no time to get something that sounded great! Not only that, but the patches just seemed so much more playable…
Time to get the guitars out.