If you produce music, you are probably aware that the industry offers a wide variety of choice in software and gear. Not only can you choose from an ever-growing buffet of plugins, libraries, instruments, pedals, and gadgets, you can also swear your undying loyalty to countless manufacturers and brands. Recurring sales on store websites, bundles and affordable subscription models make it enticing to load up on samples and effects, all while reviews and tutorials on YouTube try to convince you that you only need to buy just this one console emulation plugin to make your music finally sound like a professional recording. And that one. And this one, too.

For most people, this might be fine – even great, as today’s market allows people to make music who perhaps wouldn’t have had the opportunity forty or even thirty years ago. Furthermore, today’s options offer flexibility and make it easy to find just the right gear for your preferred style of music, and some plugins just feel good to use. But to me, the wealth of options comes with a downside, because the huge pile of software I have amassed over the years – still comparatively small to what I imagine professional composers have installed on their hard drives – has become too big to handle for my little brain. I feel overwhelmed by choice and, in turn, often find myself unable to make music.

Too Many Synths

The reason for this has its roots in how I deal with stress, anxiety, and the general problem of not living up to the standards I set for myself. As a coping mechanism, I trained myself to buy and download software excessively.¹ It’s a first-world problem, but nevertheless has come to the point that it keeps me from making music. Instead of writing songs, I keep losing myself in the search for sounds and samples. Sometimes, I don’t even start doing anything, because my DAW’s plugin browser has become a crowded mess even when grouping plugins by manufacturer. Other times, my brain guilts me for not wanting to use a certain library that I ought to use based on the amount of money I paid for it, so I start using something that has no business in the song I am writing.  

Software synthesizers or libraries are a prime example to illustrate this issue. Having access to about a dozen of them and being well-versed in exactly none, I repeatedly find myself paralyzed by the choice. There’s Massive, with its gazillion expansions that I can’t keep apart from each other. The Sound and Recording podcast talked about Vital once, so I tried out that one. In addition, there’s the Ashlight/Pharlight/Straylight trilogy of granular synthesis libraries in Kontakt that I still haven’t really explored. Leaving Kontakt behind, Slate Digital’s subscription comes with ANA 2, a complicated-looking synth packed with loads of presets. I also invested into Spitfire Audio’s Aperture: The Stack, a library of synths and instruments being recorded through a wall of amps. Speaking of Spitfire, there’s always LABS, an excellent collection of free sample packs which received a lot of interesting synth sounds over the last couple of months. Finally, there’s the Analog Lab V, which came with my Arturia audio interface and packs a bunch of sounds that I enjoy a lot. 

While this might not read like much, losing myself in thinking about all of these great programs costs a lot of mental energy, because in addition to the search for the right sound, boy do I have opinions on the user interfaces of these plugins (and sometimes even the companies behind them). But let’s focus on the sounds for now. I keep going in circles for hours while combing through a long list of presets, swapping out synth plugins again and again, listening repeatedly to the same MIDI loop. Some people enjoy that process, I don’t. I like to write down my ideas in MIDI or track it with my controller keyboard and move on with the writing. Having to interrupt my workflow to look for sounds makes it hard to do what I want to do, which is writing music.²

Sashay Away

Eventually I decided that if I wanted to go back to writing music again, I needed to get rid of some of the software that I had installed on my system. But deciding what to keep and what to get rid of proved to be difficult. Some of the libraries that I wasn’t using regularly could prove themselves to be useful in future projects. Other plugins look and feel cool, but don’t quite fit my style or my other instruments. Finally, some software feels redundant even if it isn’t. Piano libraries, for example, might sound quite similar on a surface level, but may have subtle differences that could turn out to be just right for a specific project.   

To make the task easier, I worked out three criteria that are important to me when using software: simplicity, uniqueness, and efficiency. The first one, simplicity, is not just a question of aesthetics. I simply don’t care that much about built-in effects and hundreds of knobs, sliders and toggles because I like putting my own choice of effects on it. For a similar reason, I don’t enjoy having samples installed that feel redundant, save for the purpose of layering them over each other. Sounds, effects and libraries should feel unique. Finally, leaving the actual functionality and usability aside, I tend to like software more when it’s as efficient as possible both in hard drive space as well as in CPU and RAM usage, at least to my untrained eyes.

In addition, I challenged myself to limit the list of manufacturers I was using plugins from, since sorting by manufacturer had been proven to be a handy way for me to navigate my plugins within my DAW as long as the list is small enough.

After establishing my criteria, I examined all plugins and libraries I had installed on my system. Some decisions were easy to make. For example, I found out that while I enjoyed the sounds it offered, I hadn’t much use for Arkhis, a library of blended orchestral texture layers and swarms, because I am usually creating my own textures by using sampled orchestral instruments or sections, which is offering me more control.³ In a similar way, I decided against Damage, for one because I always feel cheap using it, but also because I eventually want to start building my own heavy impact drums within my DAW.

Other decisions, however, weighed harder on me. A good example for this is Battery, which I was looking forward to using when I started making beats for the Narkson & Vollbass project. It seemed to be the right tool for the job, and it mostly was. But even after finishing just a couple of songs using Battery, I realized that I wasn’t happy using it. It just took too long for me to find cool sounds and drum kits and I had to redo the routing every time I loaded in a new preset. Plus, having trained myself on EZdrummer for years, I was used to a certain visual representation of the drums I was using, which acted as a sort of mental bridge for me to remember cool sounds and kits. Finally, I was used to EZDrummers MIDI layout, and having it changed with every drum kit I loaded into Battery proved to be a constant annoyance. In the end, I decided that Battery just didn’t fit my workflow, and continued to uninstall it as well as all its expansions from my hard drive. Keep in mind that this is not about me disliking Battery, but only an admission of failure on my part to adapt to its workflow.

But my brain works in weird ways and therefore I make weird decisions such as, for example, keeping around the 70GB Albion Solstice library which I mostly use for its choir, layering strings and the folk instrument section. It shouldn’t stay on my hard drive with that file size and for the comparatively small things it’s doing in my compositions, but it does. I just want to keep it Same goes for Evolve Mutations. I don’t use it anymore, but since it was one of the first libraries I ever bought, I have a lot of nostalgia for it.

Finally, I have to admit that my rules are a bit arbitrary and flexible, depending on my mood. For example, in the middle of the process, I decided to try out Musio, which allows me to use Cinesamples excellent orchestral samples in my compositions. It even lets me decide which articulations I want to download instead of needing to download all of them, which, for a storage-conscious and easily overwhelmed person like me, sounds like a good deal.⁴ It’s efficient and it’s simple to use (browsing the catalog took me a while to get used to, though), but it is kind of redundant because I already have orchestral libraries, and it’s another collection of samples that have the potential to overhelm me down the line.

Do What you can do

After going through my whole list of plugins and libraries, I found it easier to focus on making music again. With fewer sounds to choose from or effects to pile on a track, I started to feel almost liberated. The option paralysis I used to feel browsing through my plugins wasn’t gone entirely, but I was experiencing significantly less of it when choosing my sounds. Most notably, navigating my sounds and effects has become much easier. Writing music is fun again.

However, I found out that reducing the digital clutter on my system reached an early ceiling. For example, while I was able to clean up my collection of software synthesizers and synthesizer sample libraries, I still feel like I have more of them installed than I know what to do with, either because I want to use them or because I am afraid that eventually, I will have to use them. Similarly, I still need to keep a boatload of launchers, DRM programs and installers such as Native Access, Pulse or IK Multimedia’s Product Manager on my system, which feels messy to me (I would love to have a Steam-like solution for that).

Related to that, limiting myself to certain manufacturers hasn’t been as easy as I thought, since there’s so much cool stuff out there, and I feel like I’m discovering new cool libraries every day. 

There’s also the issue of the hardware I am using right now. I am a PC user because of its expandability and modularity, especially in terms of storage. I do, however, have a huge crush on the elegance, performance, efficiency and especially quietness of the recent Apple Silicon machines. In pursuit of minimalism, I would have probably switched already. However, I am not made of money, and a MacBook expanded by several external hard drives loses a lot in terms of elegance in my opinion, so I’ll be sticking to my butt-ugly, power-hungry, noisy beef boy of a self-built PC for now. It’s a mess, with my music software as well as my projects folders distributed over several types of storage mediums (traditional hard drives for backups, SATA-SSDs and m.2-SSDs), which is neither elegant nor efficient. Loading up a massive project such as Of Battles and Bases takes a bit of patience and I had to apply several tweaks to the system, for example slightly undervolting my CPU to keep the cooler’s noise level down. Overall, it feels a bit wrong, but it’s what I got and I have to make use of it, as dropping a cool 3k to 4,5k in hard-earned Euros on a Mac isn’t an option right now.

There are Dozens of us

Despite hitting a comparatively low ceiling in my quest to minimize the programs and software that I am using, I found it to be a useful exercise. I examined my workflow, took and honest look at my preferences, and broke with the unhealthy habit of buying and installing software just to feel better when I was down. But most importantly, I started having fun writing music again.

Making music can be complicated as it is, with all the possibilities the language of music allows us to explore. For some of us, therefore, it can be helpful to not further complicate it by having to navigate a gazillion different plugins, samples, libraries, or apps just to explore our ideas. But even aside from that, I found out that there are good reasons to minimalize one’s setup that I haven’t touched upon in this article. From not wanting to support certain manufacturers or brands anymore to not wanting to give up any more precious physical or digital space for gear and software, as well as to limiting yourself as a creative challenge, there are several good arguments to be made in favor of getting rid of unnecessary baggage.

Personally, I found it extremely liberating to uninstall software that I hadn’t used in ages but had installed anyway in case I needed to use it one day. Fewer plugins meant that I was able to find the ones I wanted to use more quickly, as well as allowing me to dive deeper into the functions of the software I continued using. Finally, with the shadow of option paralysis gone, I was able to focus on making music again. At least until the next sale on a manufacturer’s site comes along.

Footnotes

1. In another draft of this post, I lost my point trying to explain this in detail. I decided to spare you the details of my mental health issues and the extensive history of my software purchases of the last fifteen years.
2. The feeling of being overwhelmed extends even beyond the confines of my DAW. For example, Native Access, Native Instruments software center-thing, installs all its libraries and plugins as separate programs that show up in the list of installed apps and programs in Windows, which makes navigating that list a pain at times. Granted, I don’t have to use it that often, but it’s annoying when I do, with the irony being that I need to delete software from my system to increase its usability.
3. I know that it is not the same and that Arkhis is offering sounds I can’t approximate with my method, but it’s not enough to have it hog 12GB of valuable hard drive storage.
4. In general, I am skeptical of subscription services, both with entertainment and software. But I have to face the reality of my situation: I am a hobbyist, and I don’t have the kind of cash lying around to spend a couple of thousand Euros a year on samples.