Hate starting with an unattributed quote, but it's so good, I can't let it pass. Some designer in some documentary I watched once said, he didn't really know what he had designed until years after the fact. Because, he explained, for the first year a woman owns one of my garments, she wears it the way she thinks it should be worn, or the way she believes I think it should be worn. It's only after it's been in her closet a year that she begins to wear it the way she wants to, and it's only then, when I see it on the street, that I really know what I have designed, when my customer stops caring what I think.
I don't design clothes, but this characteristic he's talking about is pervasive when engaging in any creative endeavor and I think it is closely related to the 10,000 hour rule. I think it's especially true when it comes to new technology for creativity.
I first opened the music making program Garageband in 2005. I hadn't really made any music in about 7 years, when the PC running my midi system died. I had purchased a guitar in 2001, not with the idea of making music, but with the idea of learning how to play guitar. I practiced on and off, leaning scales and chords, not songs.
I opened Garageband because I needed music for a video. Once again, video was driving me to make music. I was curious to try Garageband, because I knew that even non musical people could make "original" music with it, and I was curious to see how that worked.
I had seen other programs for non musical people to make music with, but they were all too limited, in the sense that, everything sounded like it came out of that program, not like it came out of the "composer". I could quickly see how, in Garageband, you could make music with no skills at all, and how you could make something really original if you made unusual choices (say, mixing a classic rock acoustic guitar riff with a reggae drum pattern and a jazz organ loop).
At the time, I'd recently launched a business designing iPod products, but before that I'd really been concentrating on painting and photography. I had no plans to start making music as my primary means of creative expression, but I really liked Garageband and wanted to delve deeper into it, to see how good it could be, using it as it was designed to be used by non musicians.
I built a jazz track, using jazz and "non" jazz elements. Taking midi loops designed for one instrument, and assigning them to a different one. Using the same midi loop between two different instruments to have them "talk" to each other. As I built more tracks, my imaginary "band" started to take shape, the leader played the sax, the talented drummer played all styles (jazz, rock, electronica, reggae, you name it). The bass player played all three types of bass, acoustic floor, electric, and keyboard. And the guitarist could also double on the keys when needed. I knew where each member of the "band" would stand during their shows and placed them there in the mix when making "my" songs.
Funny to call these "my" songs, since I didn't write a single phrase of music for them. Thought I transposed and rejiggered some of the loops into new musical phrases, mostly they were melodies written by others, but in my songs, they became the leaping off point for some "improvisational" jams my virtual band performed.
I have a friend who really likes jazz, so I decided, at some point, I would do an entire album of these loop based jazz songs for him as a Christmas present. A one of a kind CD that he would have the only copy of, in the world. If Garageband was the designer's garment in my closet, the jazz album was my first 6 months with it. I was trying to use the program to the very limit of how I thought it was intended to be used.
The next 6 months saw me realize a dream I'd long had of doing a Christmas album that blended Rock and Electronic Dance Music. I love non-traditional Christmas albums and have a little treasure trove of them.
Now I felt like I was going to take Garageband a little bit outside of it's intended use. Employing the same methods I'd used making the Jazz album, I began to build my Christmas tunes. Of course, I couldn't use the musical loops in Garageband this time, because I needed traditional Christmas tunes. However, once I had the main melodies in midi form, I constructed the tracks exactly the same way I'd constructed the Jazz tracks, but leaned the style towards the rock/EDM hybrid I was aiming for. I was still using Garageband's loops for drums, though I had also found some additional sources of drum loops, which I was using as well. When I finished the Christmas album, I felt I had really used Garageband up to and past the point of its intended use. And that was important.
Because, along the way, painting and photography had become impossible to pursue, owing to the state of my apartment at the time. The business designing iPod products had reached a successful conclusion. And I had decided to try devoting all my free time to the making of music. I could see the possibility of doing original music in Garageband, and getting very good results, but I had to exhaust the program first. I had to use it to it's very limits before I could begin to go beyond its scope, which was necessary if I was to create some truly original music. Almost more importantly, this time, video would not be driving me to make music. It would exist for itself, a departure for me, a scary one.
To be continued.
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