I Start Here: One Random Patch at a Time

Randomness can be an incredible source of inspiration. Being presented out of the blue with a sound you weren’t expecting can lead to creative ideas you would’ve never ever contemplated otherwise.

As a part of the first #teoperator community briefing courtesy of Heymun (@heymunmusic), I wanted to show you how I use randomness to kickstart my creative process when I’m looking for inspiration. Thank you, @joshuamorganmusic for “nominating” me!

Having been producing music for around 15 years now, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I’ve finally been able to demystify the concept of inspiration for myself. Note that this is of course my own experience and almost certainly doesn’t apply for everyone out there.

I’ve found that the easiest way for me to get into a state of flow when creating music is to find a sound that inspires me and see where things go from there. Said sound can be something as minuscule as a hi-hat or snare sample. Sonic texture and timbre have always been the most fascinating aspects of music to me – hence naming my first studio “timbre”.

With the OP-Z, rather than having to scroll through thousands of presets until I find something that sparks my imagination, I can just pick a synth engine and have the OP-Z generate a random preset. This feature has become my absolute go-to whenever I start a new track and has led to some sounds that would’ve take me a lot longer to discover otherwise.

The randomizer function takes a given synth engine and generates totally random parameter values across all 4 parameter pages. While this also produces a lot of barely useable sounds, more often than not I end up with something really fun and musical.