

As our own journey has taught us, the forced scenario of restricting your options can help you focus on making actual paintings instead of over-preparing with regard to how many colours you have and making sure you have brushes for every occasion. Imposing constraints on yourself as an artist is a topic stressed by many great thinkers and it’s a real seed towards a more creative state of mind. Not only is there a wealth of music software options but you also have to be disciplined enough to steer yourself away from other computer-based distractions while working. Visually, you can be presented with too much information when using a computer.

This is worthy of note as the discipline of not using your laptop keys or screen and focusing on a hardware workflow has become more widely popular now – and with good reason. This was before the easier navigation of that came with colour LCD screens had arrived on the scene but creating a full song from an empty sketch pad was still possible on the earlier-generation monochrome displays. This writer first joined the Maschine platform at about software version 2.0, attracted by the potential for a 98 per cent hardware workflow, a workflow that was also unique to what we’d already established with the Ableton Push set-up.
