The built-in picks help when experimenting with John Cage's ideas. (Photo by Vicki Mitchell on Flickr. CC-BY licensed.)

Something in my last blog post prompted me to write this one. That happens a lot.

What I said was this:

I am, however, not much of a musician, really. I can play a few chords on guitar. I can work my way around a piano keyboard well enough to write out some parts. Real honest-to-goodness playing, however, has always eluded me. Always just good enough to get by, never what you would call “good.”

That’s a very telling paragraph, and it brings up an important question: Why am I so obsessed with making music when I can’t really play it all that well anyway? Or a person on the offensive might ask: If you can’t play, what gives you the right to try making an album?

Aside from the fact that I can do whatever I want as long as it’s not illegal, unethical, or impossible, it ignores the fact that composition and performance are two separate skills. Being an excellent performer doesn’t mean you can create good music, any more than being able to compose a great symphony means you can perform it on every instrument in the orchestra. Understanding theory and harmonic progressions and melodic development and consonance and dissonance has little to do with being able to find middle C on a piano, though it does mean you know what notes can be played along with it.

At this point, it would be easy to say that all sequencing and multi-sampling have done is replace the need for the professional performers, the orchestra, if you will, leaving the composer to his job, but I won’t do that. Because I really don’t like MIDI sequencing all that much.

I once had this to say on the REAPER forums about limitations and creativity:

I’ve always been a big believer that creativity is fostered by a distinct lack of resources. I’m a huge fan of the Radiophonics Workshop output from the early sixties up through the early seventies, where they did absolutely amazing things with very minimal tools. This forced them to get to know their tools very well, and to push them beyond their designed limits. David Cain of the Workshop once said:

“One thing about any definition of ‘Golden Age’, for me, comes also within music, comes within art, comes within literature: It is the point where the desires of the creator are greater than the technology which is available. There comes a moment where the technology gets closer and closer to the sort of imagination and creativity of the writer, and in the end, if you’re not careful, it overtakes. And suddenly, serendipity, which before was from your own sweat and blood, but you created something and thought, ‘goodness me, that’s great’, serendipity [now] comes by saying, ‘if I press one of these 397 buttons on this synthesizer, maybe I’ll get something out of it.’ Now at that moment, the machinery is driving the creativity, and the creativity is not driving the machinery. And maybe that’s where the Golden Age stops. Maybe.”

After a bit of discussion, coder extraordinaire Schwa had this to say:

Yeah, I would never say that a lack of resources is what you need in order to be creative. But working with limited resources definitely requires, and inspires, creativity. If you have to think about how to get what you want out of what you have, you are being creative.

Bang on the money, I say. Heck, this whole subject would make a great blog post in the future. And by “future”, I mean probably tomorrow.

What does this have to do with my playing skill? Well, if I don’t want to bother with sequencing, what I’m left with is whatever I’m capable of performing myself. And my playing skill is limited. And limitations foster creativity. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

I’ve often been impressed by simple, understated playing. I’ve never been annoyed by underplaying. I have, however, been annoyed by overplaying many times. I think there’s a pattern there worth noticing.

Or I’m just making excuses for not being able to play all that well.