Are constraints good, actually?

Everyone is always saying something along the lines of "limitations breed creativity" but you rarely get much practical detail about that. Assuming it's advice, it seems to be suggesting that we choose to be limited. But what sort of limitations might be useful and what might they be useful for? I don't have answers but I do have some thoughts and reflections...

I was prompted to think about this because I briefly thought I might buy a choir plugin for an upcoming project. I looked at what was available and realised I didn't want to do that for a number of reasons:

• Janky microtuning support (if any at all);
• Many are intended for pop or soundtrack production and don't sound "classical" enough for my needs;
• Weirdly that also means they're very conservative -- lots of smooth oohs and aahs that sound like John Williams doing a Christmas movie but not many interesting textures;
• Many of them exist in a hellscape of iLok dongles, "software hubs" and the like, or are cloud-based and need constant internet access, or are subscription services;
• The ones you do actually own often eat your entire hard drive.

Never mind that the total cost for something that would work for me would run to at least £400 and it's not likely I'd use it a lot. Indeed, that's about the price point where I'd start to feel like I had to get a decent amount of use from it to justify the purchase and I don't like it when a purchase colours my creative decisions in that way.

So I'm going to have a figure out a different way to get the sound I had in my head last night. And when I was thinking that this morning, the words popped into my head: Yes, but limitations are good for creativity! To which my inner monologue snapped back: No, a lot of the time being limited is just annoying and we should avoid it. That led me to reflect on some specific ways I've benefitted from limitations in the past.

My reason for doing this is that a limitation that you choose because you can see how it will help you achieve a goal can be great; a limitation imposed on you against your will is of course more likely to kill your creative ambitions than help them. And, most importantly, those you adopt because somebody told you you need them but without thinking about which limitation or why are probably a crap shoot.

To prevent decision paralysis: We all experience the horror of the blank page. Creative blockage often comes in the form of not knowing how to start and some constraints force you to start in a particular place because you don't have any other options. If you're looking at an empty DAW project feeling hopeless, you probably need to close the software and get a pen and paper out instead.

Your first idea isn't always your best one: This is the one that applies to my search for a choir plugin. On reflection, I don't want to stick a Hollywood choir into the noisy, abrasive track I was working on yesterday -- I want something a bit like that. But what? Well now instead of doing the obvious thing I have to put creative work in. The result will certainly be better than if I'd just spent money on the first thing that came to mind.

To develop your own approach: Anybody can make something with unlimited resources and no limitations, but it will probably be something generic and boring. Every really distinctive musical voice I can think of worked with extreme limitations on what they could do. Think of the great guitarists -- not the really competent ones, the "greats" we can recognise from a single bar of their playing. They went deep into one thing and most of them couldn't do anything else. I once heard BB King say in an interview that he didn't know any chords. Imagine that! While I'm a fan of learning lots of things, especially early in your career, I think rejecting a lot of those is an important step to take later. Your style is defined by what you don't do (perhaps even can't do) as well as what you do.

Creating unity and internal logic: A piece of music made with limitations will naturally have a kind of consistency that's very hard to get otherwise. Sticking with a set instrumentation, scale, rhythm or whatever creates a very obvious glue that holds the music together. Even limitations that are less obvious to the listener, such as a 12-tone row, create inner consistency that I think can be good for your music. (This one is a very modernist perspective; you might reject inner logic and consistency and make great music.)

Reducing complexity and removing distractions: This time I don't mean in your music but in your workflow. When looking at choirs I briefly revisted the world of Kontakt, which I used a long time ago, and the whole world of scripting that enables us to apply microtunings and other tweaks to the sample libraries it can load. And I realised I did not want to spend my composing time fiddling with code -- I was willing to cut myself off from Kontakt and its vast ecosystem of instruments to avoid that.

Let's end with a warning.

The image at the top of this post is a painting by Emerson Everett Glass, a profoundly poor American painter who made his own pigments by grinding down whatever he could find. Much of his work uses extraordinary and distinctive colours. He died in poverty and his paintings, though they don't come up for sale often, aren't worth much; he has no entry in the histories of art, or even a Wikipedia page.

It's true that a severe limitation, imposed from outside, can provoke a creative response that enriches your work, just don't depend on it. We remember some thanks to dumb luck and think the poverty caused the creativity, which is nothing but survivorship bias. Glass would probably have used the same striking colours if he'd been able to afford oils; it was his eye that made those possible, not his poverty. Without the latter he would almost certainly have had more success and a better life.