Learning Reason: is ignorance bliss?

[adfielding]

This is actually something I think about on a semi-regular basis.

A lot of my older tunes use techniques and approaches that I almost certainly wouldn't touch nowadays, but I often wondered if that more spontaneous/messy approach was partly responsible for how those ideas turned out in the first place. Nowadays I think there's a bit of a symbiotic relationship between the spontaneity of ideas and generally fumbling/having fun with new techniques where one kind of informs the other, and I think that can lead to some really cool results.

I've always loved having ideas sparked by things I haven't fully figured out yet - whether that's when I first started using Reason and when I was getting to grips with synths in general, or when I first really started leaning into working with live instrumentation, or when I've been messing around with a more hardware-centric approach... that sense of exploration and spontaneity is a wonderful thing to experience, and it can lead to interesting ideas that I might not have otherwise considered.

On a semi-related note, I also think part of the fun of releasing music publicly is that it acts as a bit of a time capsule in terms of where you were at when you released it - whether that's in terms of emotional expression or technical prowess, it's a semi-locked represntation of where you were at when you released it and I love that. There are loads of things I would do differently had I released my earlier tunes nowadays, but I think those differences are part of what make them special.