Mean time to music
Recently, Mcq and I were working on a track together. Its been a while since we’ve done this together and for my part I’ve not been making a ton of music on my own so I’m a bit rusty.
We use Reason, which I used to use a lot but haven’t in a long time and am not up to date with the latest release. Reason is a very good music production software and is known for being one of the easier to learn and quicker to do work in.
But boy, its amazing how much farfin’ around goes into making a track. After spending the better part of an afternoon at it we have but the start of a track. OK maybe if I was better, more versant in Reason, etc., it would’ve gone faster, but still there’s just something wrong with music software. There was just so much micro tweaking of pixels, driving of the UI, to make what little we did. I’d estimate only about 20% of our time was actually “making music” proper. Our mean time to music just wasn’t very equitable.
Lets contrast this with say playing the cello (for Mike) or the djembe (for me). You just pick it up and start making sound. Its immediate. True, there’ll be post-recording editing required, and one must count in the time having learned the instrument and vs. time spent learning the software.
I don’t have a lot of time to spend making music and I want it to be as effective as possible. I’m not sure if its that the software isn’t there (ok that’s part of it, Reason has some real quirks that hurt usability) or if the way in which we are interacting is poor.
By contrast, check this out this guy using a Lemur multi-touch panel and a Max/MSP patch to his sequencer. Look at how he just glides along the UI. He really did an excellent job at designing the interface, there’s some nice touches beyond the typical pattern sequencer. Watch how handy it is to be able to use both hands to point to things.
What I find particularly interesting is that although he’s using a Lemur which supports multi-touch, he’s rarely if ever using more than one finger at a time. Rather, he’s making use of the fact that its a touch panel, and that he has this great library of visual interaction shapes which the Lemur gives you in its SDK. In theory, you could reproduce the experience with a regular touch panel (a lot cheaper!) and some other library of shapes that then trigger midi events (hmm, could be a nice SWT or processing project). His video reminded me of Nash and I using the Smartboard and Ableton Live, fluid, immediate, and immersive. It reminds me that to achieve that, you need both the right software and the right input devices.