Such a nice, busy, day! I spent the morning working, the afternoon performing sundry domestic chores, and the evening puttering in the studio.

I’m not creating anything right now. Over the past few months I have picked up what has turned out to be a robust suite of electronic music tools, so there’s a lot of new software for me to get acquainted with as well a few thousand pages of accompanying documentation. So for the present it’s a matter of figuring out what I can do, and in a few months I should have a better idea of what I want to do. Not that I don’t have some ideas.

This software is sometimes so complex as to be daunting, like the cockpit of an airplane. I’m certain it will make sense when I’ve learned what everything is. As a visual aid, I offer this screenshot of one of the synthesizers from Reaktor. Remember, this is but a small piece of any overall system.

Today’s task was figuring out the basics of Logic 6. I’ve been using a basic sequencer for the past year, which I erroneously thought was powerful. I’ve gotten the basics down, such as creating instruments and making sounds come out the speaker in an organized fashion, but I’ve only scratched the surface of the surface. Strangely, everything I ended up with tonight sounded like background music for Miami Vice.

I have a fear that even after I learn all this software, I will be caught in the possibility trap; that is, that there are too many possibilities. Writing music for a woodwind quintet, for example, has a lot of limitations. The instruments have real, physical limits, as do the players. Working within those limits is part of the artistry. But what limits are there with this new software? They exist for sure, and I will be grateful when I bump into one. For now the limit is processor power, and that’s about as constraining as asking a writer to write anything, so long as it’s less than 200,000 pages.

This question is fortunately theoretical, as there is a hard constraint, being my ability to use the tools. My skill will increase; perhaps I’ll be able to rise to the challenge of X-Files background music in a few weeks.