Musician too, but also a scientist.

whether a lot of people will actually build stuff in it? as with reaktor, there will probably be way more consumers than producers. but that’s ok. usually these communities are all about sharing. so expect some cool tools that will become part of your everyday toolkit.

and yes the ‘too much tools’ virus is out there. i tr to fight that by dividing my time between work and play. you need both, but most time should be devoted to work, if you’re serious about it. fooling around with max4live would definitely be play. unless there’s a really specific thing that i *need*. in the end it’s all about discipline.

Obviously, you can get lost in these things. But I find that the DIY thing is actually often about simplifying. When you have to build stuff for youself, you often end up with *less* functionality than a big off-the-shelf tool. You may have to pare down to, say, a basic compositional idea — and focus your music in the process. That’s possible with Live, too, but then it’s a reductive rather than additive process.

And most often, *because* these things can be time sucks, the people who are productive in them use them to solve simple problems. That was the case with the Reaktor patches our friend Jonathan Leonard built for Kore, for instance.

That said, there is one way in which you become scientist rather than musician, and that’s when you program out all if the actual playing (which I find can be a problem with Live, too). But then, you can take Stefan Schmitt’s approach and drop all the LFOs and automated envelopes and play everything live! ;)

Now, when I write some software (e.g. a Max patch) that is completely geared towards one particular artistic work, I see this as ‘first order removal’ from the creative task — the programming is tightly coupled with the artistic goal. However if I write software for *general* use, e.g. a plugin, this becomes ‘second order removal’ — the programming process takes on a generic nature, only loosely related to the artistic task.

The issue for me is to be clear about the purpose of my programming activity, and if I am primarily working towards artistic ends, to avoid the temptation to remove myself too far from the creative process.

And there’s some convergence in there: If you happen to use MaxMSP you could do the things Volta does out of the box(with the right interfaces, that is) – DC voltages can be generated by using only two objects and a cable – super-easy.

Volta is a little more specific but again takes the software ‘outside the box’ and allows it to talk to ‘pre-digital’ machines which are very task-specific (for all the VST virtual analogue plugins out there, there’s not much that can stand side by side with analogue goodness!). And all this using hardware that’s already in peoples studios… It’s a niche product but looks like the ‘killer app’ for that particular niche.

Totally agree with you about the gear lust getting in the way of the music at times, but it’s not really fair to blame the gear for that is it? :D

BTW regular reader, love the blog, keep it up etc!