• Friday, 06/30/23 ** 12:50 To understand how to innovate in a category, you have to intimately understand the status quo. Why MacOS? Why Ableton? Why Adobe? You can only truly innovate once you understand the value that those services bring and make a demonstrable improvement.

Flashy intros and landing pages, cool new tech, fluid animations, etc... feel good, but do not matter. Make a tool good enough to convince someone to abandon convenience and the status quo for innovation.

Sound design is about two things: limiting inputs and engineering outputs. You can't present someone with an empty python file or complete waveform and expect them to understand how to change things, bit by bit. Give them different parameters to tweak - and make sure those parameters are the most important ones. Strike the right balance of flexibility and limitation; your tool will not be able to do everything, but on the right axis it should be able to change in all of the relevant ways. Ableton understands this way of crafting, of twisting knobs, of taking true modularity out of the eurorack and bringing it into the digital world.

This is only possible with the correct live visualizations. ** 12:56 So many of these notes could be grown into long-form essays. When will I be ready? ** 13:46 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVAGnGWFTNM

Now that we have abundance of information, we have to be incredibly disciplined about the role we are playing during work at the current time. If you can modify your instrument and add 9 or 11 strings, you will keep modifying the tool and no longer be trying to perform with it; you will become the developer again, not the musician or the performer. Be very disciplined about the mental role you're playing when working, and focus on just that role - your job is to focus on doing X and nothing else, so look at all of your work from this perspective and keep moving.