After posting in a previous note about hiding and longing to pursue music, I’ve been trying to break down what’s been holding me back, in hopes of finding a clearer path forward. This led me to thinking about how I break down my music creative process. Asking questions like, what do I want to create? How do I want to create it? Do I want to publish it? If so, where and how? What’s keeping me stuck?
After a lot of this searching, I was able to break down my process into a few main parts: capture & inspiration, writing & arranging, and output. There’s more to uncover in the process, but even breaking it down like this has helped me see where I get stuck → not having enough time to sit down to create new ideas (capture & inspiration), and then getting stuck on one idea and not knowing how to take it any further (writing & arranging). It also helped me see that in this season, I don’t really even care about output or what I do with the songs/sketches I write. I just know I want music to be in my life on a regular basis.
This led me to start thinking about what I can realistically do. Not having the studio shed complete is a limiting factor, which is fine, but also enlightening. I need a compact way to capture and ideas on musical concepts which will also let me build on these ideas. Through this thought process, I wound up pulling the trigger on a used Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field.
In short, The OP-1 took the synth world by storm about a decade ago and the OP-1 Field is the big update to it. As much as I want to talk about the full details of the OP-1, what I’ve enjoyed most about it is treating it like a musical version of my pocket notebook – my own personal musical sketchpad.
The unit is perfect for helping me capture inspiration from multiple instruments and sound sources and then recording and doing some simple editing to try out other ideas. It’s small enough that it lives in my bag wherever I go. At the time of writing this note, I’ve had it for 4 days and I’ve already written more in 4 days than I have in the past 6 months. It’s been incredible and extremely encouraging to my music journey. It’s also just been so much fun.
More to come.