I have chosen electronic music, because it offers the greatest degree of expressive freedom while at the same time being the easiest genre to actually make. In the past I used to think of this as a bad thing causing lots of derivative copy-paste and lazy artists but I changed my mind since. One of the goals of an artist is to master their tools. It doesn’t matter how difficult that is, how long it takes or how widespread it is. The common fallacy is that easier tools,  by allowing more people to get started in an art, lowers the quality of this art. But this isn’t the case if the simple tool can produce the same quantity of expression. In that case, there is nothing that would force an artist to make the simplest possible thing and move on, it’s a decision and nothing stands in the way of choosing to work on every detail for years just to produce one song. There is a case to be made, that the tools available to electronic music producers can’t just express the same things as earlier compositional methods, but many more and one crucial aspect of this empowerment is the speed with which different parameters can be changed. One of the ways this is achieved is with controlled randomness. Let’s say you need an arpeggio somewhere in the background. Each individual note doesn’t matter. The key it is in, notes on strong beats, the general movement and rhythm are much more important, so I would like to focus my time on testing different variations of these large scale  qualities and not draw in or play every single midi note. I could just randomly generate pitch, tone-color or any other parameter in a second and just change by hand the few places that determine most of the impact of my mix. You end up with more variation and more time to think about what you want to express with your music. Is this lazy or does the artist somehow give up their integrity or authenticity? After all, anyone could push a couple of random buttons. This is a very old critique, one that has actually impacted myself for a long time and one that is becoming increasingly invalid. If you have this mindset, art or any other craft becoming simpler makes the people involved less valid than their peers from their past. In the extreme, when we have let’s say machine learning tools which can not only generate random numbers but random samples from entire genres, who would still need artists, right? The artist does always express themselves on a certain level of technology and societal expectations. What amazes us is their unique viewpoint, the new esthetics and insights, not their methods. Most of us don’t even know the methods involved in the art we consume! As long as an artist can express everything they need to describe their feelings and observations, they can in theory make the most impressive artwork of their lifetime. Virtuosity might have been a good way to judge art, when very few people could do it, but when everybody can be an artist, you need another way to find good art for yourself. More important than the implications for art appreciation is how artists see themselves. When the tools become simple and many people are able to achieve similar results, it is very easy to dismiss your art as commonplace and cheap. You might get into the habit of producing quick and bland work to seem professional and popular because most people are not in the mood to contemplate big and important ideas most of the time. And when just starting out, you might be discouraged by art having become an industry and authentic expression having lost its value. I think the best way out of this mindset is to focus on the artist rather than the art. Whether you make 1 song or 100 is less important than what you say with them. As an artist you tell a story and the actual musical piece is only a small part of it. You have to consider how you present yourself, what you talk about, how you look, where you play, with whom, your biography or that of your artist persona in its entirety. You have to communicate yourself and be able to react to whatever topic you chose quickly and intuitively in order to channel your unique story as directly as possible into your art. A quick tool for which you have built up an intuition makes this possible but it allows you also to start thinking about projects in other artforms and domains, on bigger scales and in completely new ways, without depending on large numbers of collaborators. In other words, the story you’ll be able to tell becomes richer and denser. A masterpiece is never entirely innovative. In fact we wouldn’t be able to categorize it as a very good example of any genre, if it would consist entirely of parts that have never been heard before. Having to redo what is almost the same to what everyone else does is a waste of time and a tool doing this for you is welcome. You want to focus on the new things only you can make and it is your decision how much you add or how much you’re going to alter the suggestions your tool provides. I now actively embrace randomness or combinations of modulators that I cannot easily predict for a couple of reasons. First, composing this way becomes somewhat like improvisation or a jam session. You have a rough idea, get surprised while putting it into place and react to the surprises. This mixture of performance and preparation appeals to me. Second, I try to dedicate my time to different subjects and find different expressions for them. I want to explore, not stay in the same wheel and run in circles with the same 5 tricks I learned sometime in the past. Lastly I am lazy and don’t like to spend time on things that don’t matter. A bassline has to be low and have some movement. You need small changes every couple of bars and one or two big changes in a song. I don’t need specific things to happen, because I don’t want to sound like anybody else or even like myself in earlier works. The same is true for all other elements of the songs. In a couple of minutes you have all of them together and now the interesting things happen: what do you want to say? How can you create analogies between your topics and the music? How do the elements work together? You have to tackle these questions anyway, the more time you have, the better! Once the song, it’s meaning, it’s importance for my story, it’s mood are all set, I can easily understand if it actually succeeds. What determines this are actually tiny details. A 2db velocity curve you draw over your final mix, a random sound you add into a break, a silence somewhere in the climax, the tempo and master. Deliberations over these details are not even noticeable for the general listener. Yet they have the biggest impact on what perceived story your music tells and they will always be down to personal choice. They carry your authenticity, your artistic persona. If recent developments in machine learning tell us anything, it’s that we’re all, even as artists, just about the same to everybody else. What makes us different are small and easy to do variations and what makes us recognizable is the consistency in how we choose these variations.  Let’s focus on what matters most, which is almost nothing.s