Many years ago, I asked a friend what kind of case she plans to buy for her shiny new flip phone. She paused, slightly offended. “I don’t like buying things for my things,” she said. Those words drilled straight into my hippocampus, never able to depart. She is right! I thought. Don’t buy stuff! Too simple! I’ve tried to stick to that principle ever since, and it’s gone as well as you’d expect. Sure, I could spend $1,000 on a smartphone driven by the tech giant, but I only do it every three years (nodding softly) instead of every two years. This is how we win.
The problem is that some types of content simply attract more things. The house is an obvious one: It craves sofas, sweaters, buffet cabinets, chandeliers. Computers are another thing; they develop USB tentacles. Smart phone is born headphone, cloud backup and subscribe to music services. I envy the people who make it work with an Eames chair, a stylish stool, some good art books, and wealth inherited from generations. Their iPad is too empty, with only a few apps, while I have 60 terabytes of storage on various flashing devices because I download large datasets for fun.
I often fool myself that the road to less can be paved with more. Recently, under the influence of some long-repressed percussion lust, I purchased a drum machine. It truly is like a mobile production studio — a hardware-based update of music sequencing software from old Amiga computers. It has buttons, a jog wheel, and a display that’s mostly numbers. It’s called Polyend Tracker, but I think it’s Sonic Spreadsheet. Everything you can do with it can also be done on a laptop. However, it is important that it does not connect to the internet.
I bought the Sonic Spreadsheet with the fantasy of going offline, away from the centralized world I live in, making sick in the backyard or at the kitchen table. I want to stare at a small screen instead of a big screen, that’s how I do the land return. Instead, I ended up having to crouch in front of my regular monitor, watching YouTube videos of various shooters demonstrating how. surname create beats. Most of their beats are not so sick. However, their lighting is very good. Maybe the sickest beat makers aren’t YouTube videos.
After a few weeks of use, the Tracker started to chirp: Feed me compensations. Storage boxes are starting to arrive — bent legs to support it, rubber feet to stabilize it, a padded box to protect it, a battery pack to power it. it. While I had a microphone and multiple headphones, I decided that I wanted a special microphone and special headset just for this. Then I download 100s of audio sample gigs from the 1990s, which means I need to upgrade my Sonic Spreadsheet’s microSD card. (And of course, the patterns are named inconsistently, so I wrote code to organize them.) Each item, each unit, comes with its own pet supplies—the holder. , foam cover, cord, instruction manual, a small drawstring case. The supply chain is Fractal: Enlarge your content and have more, internal advertising.
The result of all this was that I had absolutely no musical aptitude. I spent hours cutting and pasting, turning those little expressions into whole songs, spinning those jog wheels like a pro, and when I was back on those tracks the next night, I continued. I keep finding out that I don’t have a single creative idea. My drum tracks sound like a nervous rabbit kicking a bongo. If you need flashy, flamboyant digital music, maybe also Christmas carols played to the sound of dogs barking, then I’m your guy. I am not a musician. I am the system administrator for my digital audio workstation. There will be no SoundCloud for me.
