Category: Article

Get the Gear you Want!

When Function Over Form Gets in the Way of Creativity.

I remember a few years ago my friend wanted to get into recording music, without having any previous recording experience. If she had a MacBook or iPhone, GarageBand would have been the obvious easy choice, but we were both Android and Windows users. At the time, my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) of choice was Reaper, a Windows-compatible program that, after hurdling the learning curve, was pretty much capable of everything you could ask for at the price of free. So my friend downloaded the program, tried it out, and came back to me. She was mortified by the how hostile and complicated the User Interface was, and didn’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

It’s easier to notice the difference when you actually use the programs yourself, but from a quick look you can start to see how much more cluttered and intimidating the Reaper interface is(left), compared to the simplified and graphically pleasing GarageBand interface(right).

I thought she was being a bit stubborn, and that with some tutorial videos and persistence, she could get creating in no time. But the more she tried to engage the software, the more the software brick-walled her. It resulted in endless frustration and it was killing her spark for creativity, which was defeating the purpose of the whole thing.

I feel guilty now for invalidating her experience in the first place. I wish I instead told her that it’s okay to just try something else. In retrospect, Reaper really is unintuitive, even when you learn it, customize it, and get things going, it’s still kind of unintuitive. I bought a MacBook last year and I have to say, despite everything my dear Reaper and I have braved together throughout the past, GarageBand just feels so refreshingly easy.

Form vs. Function

The point is, I used to discredit tools like this that put form over function, aesthetics over versatility, and immediate gratification over long-term mastery. In the end, artists want to create, and we don’t want all this technical shit to bog us down when we have ideas pouring out. Ideally, we want a really good toy or instrument to evoke inspiration or new ideas.

Tactility and aesthetics are just as important as functionality when it comes to creativity. When someone is buying a guitar, the question of how it looks on you and how it feels matters as much as the craftsmanship and quality of sound. To a lot of people, it’s probably more important. It could make the difference between a guitar that gets picked up and played everyday and a thousand-dollar wall ornament collecting cobwebs in the corner.

Teenage Engineering

The famous teenage engineering OP-1 field portable synthesizer.

Let’s take a look at Teenage Engineering, a popular music hardware manufacturer. You could take a quick look at any of their products or videos, and it’s immediately clear what sets them apart from the pack. They take after Apple’s design ethos: sleek, minimalist, bold, and tactile. Even their product reveal campaigns resemble Apple commercials!

With it’s smooth layout and inviting design, I’d imagine that even a non-musician wouldn’t be able to resist getting their hands on an OP-1.

The Arturia MiniBrute 2 (above). It’s still quite pleasing, but it lacks that slick touch and mass appeal factor of teenage engineering’s OP-1.

As popular as Teenage Engineering is among artists and producers, they are not without their detractors. Many fault Teenage Engineering’s products for prioritizing aesthetics over functionality, for being over-priced, and under-delivering when compared against similar products by other manufacturers. They sacrifice versatility, flexibility and capability in the long-run so they can dazzle on first impression. Take this reddit thread below for example:

A chunk r/synthesizer thread discussing opinions on teenage engineering’s products.

For someone who is used to synthesizers, the OP-1 greatly lacks in UI transparency. Someone who actually utilizes every knob, slider, and plug-socket on the MiniBrute might get frustrated clicking through the OP-1’s tiny LED to achieve the sounds they want. For them, the OP-1’s interface is unintuitive.

But consider someone who has never touched a synthesizer like the MiniBrute. It would be overwhelming to deal with all those dials, buttons and switches, while on the other hand, the OP-1 looks far more appealing and quick-to-use out of the box. They don’t have to have years of learning and experience behind them to pick up and start creating.

Both of these users are completely valid in their feelings and know what works best for them. If you gave the synth-veteran the OP-1 and the synth-rookie the Arturia MiniBrute, both would feel stifled and oppressed by technical nitty-gritty, and it just wouldn’t be as fun to make the real magic happen.

The r/synthesizer community may have some valid reasons to recommend more powerful and value-friendly synthesizers in place of the OP-1, but if at the end of the day, the OP-1 simply looks more appealing and fun to use, that is reason enough for the prospective buyer to justify their reasoning.

Another user from the same thread dropping off seeds of wisdom.

Given these select examples above, I must clarify that Teenage Engineering is nonetheless quite popular within the professional music production community. Many famous musicians like Bon Iver, Childish Gambino, and Flume have used OP-1s on their recordings, in live sets, own as a super-portable option for recording ideas on-the-go.

Accessibility is for everyone!

A guitar chord presser accessory I found online.

Here I present another case. It’s beckoned by several names: guitar chord-presser, guitar chord trainer, guitar learning aid, and so on. Essentially, It is a mechanical accessory that attaches to the neck of your guitar, and at the press of a single tab, it mechanically frets all the notes that create the corresponding chord. It overrides the precision and dexterity needed to articulate the notes so that you can strum away to your favourite tunes, without a fret! (ha-ha.)

It’s a wonderful accessory, and no one can deny that it’s a lifesaver for people who suffer from arthritis, motor-skills complications, or similar impairments. But who’s to say such a device should only be limited for people who have a “legitimate” accessibility issue? If this device inspires you to play guitar, then no one should stop you from using one. It’s damn difficult instrument to learn, and some people just want the gratification of being able to get to the end of a single song early on. Of course, you can still learn how to articulate chords aid-free later. But maybe you don’t even want to do that, and just enjoy using the chord-presser to get your ideas flowing. Don’t let some greasy unemployed guitar-playing puritan tell you you’re not really playing guitar when you’re using one of these devices because as far as I’m concerned, if you’re making sounds and having fun doing it, that’s what counts.

So what does this all boil down to?

A lot of discourse around music hardware and programs (like in many other fields) place versatility, value-for-money, and craftsmanship high on the hierarchy of importance. That’s not a bad thing at all. But remember, musical instruments are not a pure utility in the same sense a lawnmower, a car, or a coffee machine is. In essence, they are toys designed to stimulate your imagination and creativity. Elements like novice-friendliness, aesthetics, and (to a certain extent) gimmick features are conducive to creativity, and thus, can be considered with equal importance when buying new equipment. Certain music production communities can be hostile and stubborn towards creators who lean in to products that cater to these things, as though they are only selling themselves short by buying an over-hyped or inferior product. In the end, you are only going to use what that speaks to you and gets you in the creative zone.

Paul McCartney with his Hofner 500/1 (left), and the Ibanez SG300EMGB (right).

By the way, check out this Hofner Bass that Paul McCartney made world-famous. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It’s actually a cheaply-made instrument that didn’t sound particularly good and suffered from intonation issues. I bought this bass guitar with my parents when I was 11 because it looked cool and had that the ultimate celebrity endorsement that money couldn’t buy. I loved playing it. When I brought to my lessons, my bass teacher took one look at it, scoffed, told me what a piece of shit it was, and eventually convinced me to exchange it for a plain black Ibanez SR. Go figure.

October 7, 2026
Boredom

The Art Life

Creativity takes time. Some ideas require an uncomfortably long and uninterrupted period of time. One of David Lynch’s early mentors, Bushnell Keener, said to him: “If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.”

When we think of our favourite artists, we might imagine that they are just always bursting with inspiration, and once sat down in their creative space, they go at it, drafting, reorganizing, cutting, editing, doing, un-doing and re-doing. That’s sort of the glamorous Hollywood version of it. But we don’t typically imagine them in periods of creative block. It’s that moment when they seem like they are much more like ourselves, where there is nothing in arm’s reach and the artist much reach further. Lynch elaborates:

“It’s a matter of sitting back and studying it and studying it and studying it; and suddenly, you fin you’re leaping up out of your chair and going in and doing the next thing.” He ends the thought: “If you know you’ve got to be somewhere in half an hour, there’s no way you can achieve that. (Lynch, 2006, pg. 11)”

Down Time.

It’s becoming ever more difficult to find ourselves that space for long, deep uninterrupted time. Many of us who have jobs, classes, chores, or children might say to Bushnell Keener: “Who the hell has 4 hours of uninterrupted time, anyway?”

But even when we do have down-time, sometimes at the bus stop, walking the dog, having our first morning cup of coffee, or laying awake in bed; our phone is always beside us.

With unlimited access to the infinite spring of information, we are able to impulsively zap away every pang of boredom the moment it creeps up. We put in our earphones. We google a query. We check our notifications. We watch a movie. Sometimes we don’t even want to, it’s just an automatic muscle memory response. Our impulse to eliminate boredom prevents us from immersing ourselves in it.

Boredom.

A lot of us may think of boredom as something bad, and some philosophers and writers such as Kierkegaard or Baudelaire would agree. Even the earliest Christian teachers had something to say about idle hands. However, consider Walter Benjamin. He had a really romantic and refreshing way of seeing boredom.

In his essay The Storyteller, he touts: “If sleep is the apogee if physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. (Benjamin, 1936, pg. 367)” When we allow ourselves to steep in boredom, once we overcome our restlessness and fidgeting, our brains begin to attune to a slower frequency and we find ourselves capable of deep contemplation and immersive reflection. We may begin to observe details in the banal. In Lynch’s case, an idea that’s been laying dormant suddenly leap out from the dark in front of him. Benjamin describes boredom as:

“…a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home then in the arabesques of its lining.” (D2a,1, Arcades Project, Benjamin.)

Immersive Attention.

In the article titled: Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts teaches the value of immersive attention, Mrs. Roberts divulges her prescribed method for students preparing to write an extensive art analysis. Before allowing the student to do any research on the piece or the artist, she assigns them to “go to the Museum of Fine Arts, where it hangs, and spend three full hours looking at the painting, noting down [their] evolving observation as well as the questions and speculations that arise from those observations. (Roberts, 2013)” Now doesn’t that sound familiar? Roberts claims her initially reluctant students again and again return surprised by how much detail and depth they uncover from within the paintings in those three hours.

This process of deceleration is meant to slowly open up the senses. You get past the immediate first impressions, and and then to the point when you’re convinced you’ve observed every detail sufficiently. And you keep going far beyond that point. And then you see something new. And something else new. You discover peculiar details and make subtle but profound connections. Roberts describes her own process as she observes John Singleton Copley’s 1765 painting A Boy with a Flying Squirrel:

“It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly— and that Copley was making some kind of connection between the animal and the human body and the sensory capacities of each. It was 2 minutes before I registered the fact that the fingers holding the chain exactly span the diameter of the water glass beneath them. It took a good 45 minutes before I realized that the seemingly random folds and wrinkles in the background curtain are actually perfect copies of the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye…”

And so on. While “it is commonly assumed that vision is immediate,” Roberts explains, “[students discover in a visceral way] that in any work of art there are details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive.”

Conclusion

In a world of instant gratification and hyper-productivity, we are rarely forced into these moments of true down-time, where we allow ourselves to become truly bored and allow our minds to wander uninterrupted into deep territory. And it certainly doesn’t come easy at first. Patience and immersive attention is a skill to be honed, a muscle to be worked and developed. We have to overcome that restless fidgeting urge to distract ourselves from boredom, and instead and embrace the lush grey tapestries that Walter Benjamin speaks so dreamily of. It is there in which our most profound and creative ideas swim, waiting to be caught and reeled back up to the surface. David Lynch says,

“Desire for an idea is like bait. When you’re fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in—those ideas. (Lynch, 2006, pg. 25)”

October 2, 2026