Stimulating your creativity, what are your rituals.

[frank_p]

What do you do when you feel like doing a mod.  Where do you get your ideas.  Do you feel ashamed to borrow from the members.  I think we should talk about this because it's a MAJOR issue.  Thanks for looking.

PEACE&LOVE

[newfish]

First off, the 'urge to mod' has to have a purpose.

I rarely open anything up 'blind' - the case in point being the BOSS SD-1 - not enough 'grunt' on the low end.

Google really is your friend in this respect - the amount of information available to us is staggering - and we don't even have to leave the desk!

There are an awful lot of things I've borrowed (learned!) from this forum - also Erik Hansen's site is very clear and concise.

As always, the hat must be tipped to the Geofex (R.G.Keen) site, and to the more senior members of this forum (Aron, Mark Hammer, PRR, RG Keen, Joe Gagan) - and lots of other folks, too - for always seeming to be able to explain *why* mod x, y, or z does what it does.

So in answer to your question, 'disappointment with existing tone' usually gets my brain working... 

[frank_p]

First off, the 'urge to mod' has to have a purpose.

It's a graffiti.

I rarely open anything up 'blind' - the case in point being the BOSS SD-1 - not enough 'grunt' on the low end.

What amp ?

Google really is your friend in this respect - the amount of information available to us is staggering - and we don't even have to leave the desk!

Google is a robotic God.  What you do to stop running like chicken.

As always, the hat must be tipped to the Geofex (R.G.Keen) site, and to the more senior members of this forum (Aron, Mark Hammer, PRR, RG Keen, Joe Gagan) - and lots of other folks, too - for always seeming to be able to explain *why* mod x, y, or z does what it does.

Acknowledgement, yes. But You.

So in answer to your question, 'disappointment with existing tone' usually gets my brain working...  

Disapointment, yes.  Then ?  What you do ?  Work on the floor ? Turn on the TV ?  Shut down internet ?  Light a cigarette ?

[Morocotopo]

Break your habits.
From simple like do things in a different order to difficult like don´t eat for a day.

[R.G.]

Stimulating creativity?

Ohmigod. How does one STOP? How can you keep the flood of ideas from crowding one another, fighting for attention?

A close friend (who was a practicing psychologist in their day job) once told me that although the popular view is that creative people like artists, sculptors, composers, writers, etc. are blessed with some inner advantage, that's not usually how it works out. Most highly creative people are cursed with the inability to stop. It's like an itch they can't scratch any other way.

Have you ever had a truly vicious, insistent, burning itch that won't let you think of anything else or stop clawing at it? Poison ivy style?

King Midas' curse comes to mind. Most highly creative people wind up being unhappy people who never sync up with the rest of the world. I suspect that a lot of the drug use in the artsy set comes from trying to calm things down a bit.

Creativity just happens. It happens best when you're well rested and not pushing.

Well, OK, there's that thing about necessity being the mother of invention. That's false. *Desperation* is the mother of invention. 

[Slade]

Ohmigod. How does one STOP? How can you keep the flood of ideas from crowding one another, fighting for attention?

+1

[frank_p]

Ohmigod. How does one STOP? How can you keep the flood of ideas from crowding one another, fighting for attention?

+1

Yes, but you guys have started and screwed so many times.  You guys had developed the art and have the experience under the belt.  No need to think.  You can go from blast of creative nonsense intuition to rigourous evaluation of what is possible and not.


I'll throw some  more cards on the table.


I feel more and more that I need a large table to be 'fluent'.
Parts bins don't need to be close to my  hand.  I just have to take to the table the parts I need to get started.
Scrap book with schematics glued.  No order needed.
Blank block of paper.  Write, write, write.  Tear sheets and glue in scrapbook.
A drawer to put all the parts that you don't want to tidy up.  In the drawer cookie boxes to put resistors, caps, trannies, and ic.  (semi tidied-up).
A corner of the big table to put mixed parts together.  Reference theory books and data must be close to hand (more than parts).

A flexible method or a starter idea.  Anyone is good but it's one you'll be motivated to do.  You can start with:

I wanna do a circuit with a coil and a BJT.  Two parts startup.
Booster with an opamp.  One concept and one part.
Tagboard and LDR. One substrate, one part.
Gyrator and veroboard: Concept and substrate.
Etc.

Start with a grain of nothing and expand.  At first don't worry about functionality too much: follow your inner mess.
And don't worry if you think it's not getting to stompbox town.  Just enjoy.

If possible don't use PCB: it's good for production.
Breadboard, tagboard, deadbug, Manhattan is good.
Don't use too precious/rare/expensive version of a part unless you really don't care. As Picasso used to do: cardboard is good enough for the work.  You have to work with ideas, not value.
Don't obsess on what you need, use what you have.  Discovery is more important.
Work as if the forum were not there until you hit the rock.
Then don't use the forum.
Try an other road with what you have.  Any road is good when you don't know where you are going.  You will screw, hit an obstacle, don't be able to do anything more.
Do that for at least two hours.
Sleep.
Check out what you have done, make an assessment.  You may have done more than what you think.

Stimulating creativity?

A close friend (who was a practicing psychologist in their day job) once told me that although the popular view is that creative people like artists, sculptors, composers, writers, etc. are blessed with some inner advantage, that's not usually how it works out. Most highly creative people are cursed with the inability to stop. It's like an itch they can't scratch any other way.

I've done arts and that is what I have to say about that:

If you take brushes and colors and lay spots and lines of color on a cardboard there is nothing in your way to do what you want except yourself, what you expect to be beautiful, good, equelibrated, etc. And the judgement of others.  The judgement of others is your own judgement to a certain extent.  You are a cultural drop of water in the see of cultural influences.  But to be living in your art you have to do it alone.  You have to start and explore and be curious all by yourself.  Your classmate can't hold your brush.  Then when you have done something, the teacher will put the work into pieces and will demolish what you have done.  As much as the work is you you have to separate from it when it come to get down to earth.

Now lets talk music:
Scales, arpeggios, chords, inversions, picking techniques, musical theory, etudes, etc. etc.  There is technique involved here.  It's more technically involving that doing spots with watercolors.  But you have to do spots to become good.  You have to practice but screw around.  You have to feel the ugly nature of technical stuff to make it your own.  It's hard.  If you have no friends and have nothing else to do than loosing your time on a guitar you'll be good.  You can explore by yourself and don't care about other say until you meet, the guides, the teachers or the master.

Now,
Take the Maxwell equations or the Navier-Strokes equations:  That is what eng students work hard for for only 'feeling' the complex nature of things.  You got to do your chops to be relatively good.  BUT THAT IS NOT THE POINT.
You don't have to be good.  You have to find the road, your inner road to the Maxwell eq.  You can start with barely anything, barely nothing but you have to take your lead wire and turn it to gold.  And that nobody will tell you the chemical element simply because its of no value.  You will study till four in the morning for years only to notice years later that technique is everything.  It's the path of love when all the technique is in your heart.  When you will understand that all that technique is the history of humanity and that history is yourself.  But be ready to be good because you'll eat your shoes when MBA maniacs will see you as their tool.

- Have you ever had a truly vicious, insistent, burning itch that won't let you think of anything else or stop clawing at it? Poison ivy style?

Yes, but not much in stompboxes.

King Midas' curse comes to mind. Most highly creative people wind up being unhappy people who never sync up with the rest of the world. I suspect that a lot of the drug use in the artsy set comes from trying to calm things down a bit.

Creativity just happens. It happens best when you're well rested and not pushing.

No stress no depress.

Quote from: newfish on Yesterday at 01:39:58 PM
-- So in answer to your question, 'disappointment with existing tone' usually gets my brain working...  icon_wink

- Disapointment, yes.  Then ?  What you do ?  Work on the floor ? Turn on the TV ?  Shut down internet ?  Light a cigarette ?

Cigarettes, eating, bear etc.   Not good.

Well, OK, there's that thing about necessity being the mother of invention. That's false. *Desperation* is the mother of invention.  

The blues or the black nights and no more money.

[petey twofinger]

+1 on what RG said .

i get "poison ivy idea attacks" often at UN-apropriate times . like when i am trying to watch a movie with my family .

the only way i can stop it is to get pencil and paper make a skecth , BOM , then notes . takes around 5 minutes , but then i can get on with the evening , but it still keeps popping up for the first hour .

thats the worst . it bugs my ole lady , and i totally understand , she can tell when i am jonesin .

a lil OT but ; i find my best brainstorming , especially "troubleshooting" or debugging type thought process occurs while driving or in the rest room , usually ALONE , and there is background music going on too . sitting at the work area , after it doesn't work , thats not the ideal scenario . at that point i should LEAVE for at least 15 minutes , but , sometimes its something stupid (not plugged in) , limiting that first run of error checking would be more productive than chasing non existent gremlins . know when to walk away .

[frank_p]

Arghh !  I get poison Ivy about anything but stompboxes.  Last time I built a stompbox I ended studying Hartley and Colpitts oscillators.
... so don't listen to me. 

So how do you wind your inductors.  Plastic tubes: I know plastic tubes well.

Phoque.

[aron]

Go to a quiet place - just relax and let the solution and creativity come to you.

[Cliff Schecht]

I think the best thing one can do to stimulate their creativity is to never stop learning and don't limit yourself in what you learn. Many of the non-audio related projects that I have worked on have in some way influenced my audio-based ideas/designs. And it's kind of cool that over the years I have taken what was learned in one field and applied it in another field that seems unrelated at first glance. All of the RF, noise, network and feedback theory that has been forced down my throat has turned me into a much better general purpose analog designer. With that knowledge I can usually go much quicker from new idea to real project or at least grasp the feasibility of an idea. Part of the trick to good engineering is knowing whether something is doable and worth pursuing.

The cool thing with audio engineering is we tend to throw the rules out the window. We are in the business of pushing devices past their intended operating points to extract non-linearities that we otherwise would not encounter. With that said, if you don't understand what rules you are breaking then you are throwing punches blindfolded in a fistfight. You might luck out and get something to sound cool but it ain't going on my pedalboard if you can't explain what phenomenon causes something to react the way it does (and/or if the circuit doesn't repeat its "trick" very well in all situations). There's a lot of bad artists in the world that still make a living but the ones that garner the most respect (and money) are the ones who have mastered their medium.

I find my best ideas come from needing a solution to a problem, whether that problem be how to power something or how to get a sound that I'm hearing in my head. While I do occasionally come up with something completely arbitrarily (fwiw my best ideas are either in the shower, on the toilet or when trying to fall asleep), these ideas usually take longer to flush out and tend to be a bit more "out there" than if I am taking someones work and modifying it for my needs. The first thing to do when you want to create something new is to see what has already been done (this is especially easy with Google nowadays!) and see if improvements can be made there. If not then I start thinking about the most elegant way to do what I want (elegant being cost effective and simple). The most beautiful/elegant equations are the simplest ones..

Also don't be afraid/ashamed to borrow from others! There is always someone smarter/more knowledgeable than you out there and having too much pride to ask others for help will hurt you in the long run! I think the only time I feel ashamed about something is if I borrow the idea without understanding the circuit.

[frank_p]

Go to a quiet place - just relax and let the solution and creativity come to you.

There is a park near my house.  Today I took my slalom skateboard and went across the parc and to the 'presqu'ile'  (barely island).
There is the river and the religious 'Missionnaires' establishment.  They have their own cemetery in a big garden.  On the tombs there is the location of the mission where the religious died.
Japan, Philipines, Africa and many more places.

I was looking for beavers there are a lot of them there.  And there are the wild ducks, the squirels and the snapping turtle.  When I was a kid I found a snapping turtle there in the middle of the grass.  We kept the turtle and brought it back in a bigger protected park near the St-Laurent river.

I found a beaver hole and told it to a lady who was looking at me.
The lady told me she was a nurse in in the north at the Hudson Bay and treated Amerindians who got sick from metallurgic poisoning of the rivers; many died.  She told me how they hunted the beaver.  How they killed them, prepared the fur and sell that.
Eleven dollars a fur, a hundred dollars for ten skins.

Trail is under the foot of the indian.
Indian must keep walking.

[frank_p]

I think the best thing one can do to stimulate their creativity is to never stop learning and don't limit yourself in what you learn. Many of the non-audio related projects that I have worked on have in some way influenced my audio-based ideas/designs. And it's kind of cool that over the years I have taken what was learned in one field and applied it in another field that seems unrelated at first glance. All of the RF, noise, network and feedback theory that has been forced down my throat has turned me into a much better general purpose analog designer. With that knowledge I can usually go much quicker from new idea to real project or at least grasp the feasibility of an idea. Part of the trick to good engineering is knowing whether something is doable and worth pursuing.

As I understand, to develop stompboxes you need to know electronics, the more topics, the more subject, the better.  You got to be a good technician (not pejorative).
I had a creativity class in ME.  The big picture is what you said.  You got to alternate 'wild thinking' with critical thinking.  If you get experience you do it even without thinking.  If you have the personality you may be a good inventor, R&D etc.

The cool thing with audio engineering is we tend to throw the rules out the window. We are in the business of pushing devices past their intended operating points to extract non-linearities that we otherwise would not encounter.

You can push into non linearity as much as you want:  if it's a good idea and you have an idea of what you are doing, it's a good thing.  If you are barely blind about theory it's naive art: but i think it good.  A noble aristocratic frenchman can judge a totem pedantly, it will take Gauguin to appreciate savage art.  I am pushing the limits but sometimes post doctoral mind steal their students.   Probably the student knows what he is getting to. 

With that said, if you don't understand what rules you are breaking then you are throwing punches blindfolded in a fistfight. You might luck out and get something to sound cool but it ain't going on my pedalboard if you can't explain what phenomenon causes something to react the way it does (and/or if the circuit doesn't repeat its "trick" very well in all situations).

Yes the Shaolin monk does not kung fu for nothing.  Unless he knows that it's for nothing.

There's a lot of bad artists in the world that still make a living but the ones that garner the most respect (and money) are the ones who have mastered their medium.

Well some good ones die before getting know-ed.  Music is very subjective and cultural.  I can not judge too fast but a virtuoso is a virtuoso.  Some are more composers or improvisers.  Some have unusual perspective.

Wild thinking: try changing perspective.  Put yourself in the head of your worst enemy.

I find my best ideas come from needing a solution to a problem, whether that problem be how to power something or how to get a sound that I'm hearing in my head. While I do occasionally come up with something completely arbitrarily (fwiw my best ideas are either in the shower, on the toilet or when trying to fall asleep), these ideas usually take longer to flush out and tend to be a bit more "out there" than if I am taking someones work and modifying it for my needs.

As Aron told, relax, go outside after stress or hard work.  The brain will continue by itself and place stuff for you.

The first thing to do when you want to create something new is to see what has already been done (this is especially easy with Google nowadays!) and see if improvements can be made there.

Data gathering, stop surfing read more.  Take notes, the menory is in the hand.  Moses was a great strategist because he knew how to write down what he thought about.  He could trace cards in the desert and put the right name on the objects he was persuing.

Also don't be afraid/ashamed to borrow from others! There is always someone smarter/more knowledgeable than you out there and having too much pride to ask others for help will hurt you in the long run! I think the only time I feel ashamed about something is if I borrow the idea without understanding the circuit.

At least, we should try to understand.

[markeebee]

Thanks Sensei Frank.  I am enjoying this thread very much.

I'm lucky because I live near the sea.....unpredictability, turmoil, irresistable force, and then resolution.....it's all there.

[Perrow]

I'm lucky because I live near the sea.....unpredictability, turmoil, irresistable force, and then resolution.....it's all there.

I, on the other hand, have kids. I get most of what you're saying, but that "resolution" you're talking about sounds fun, I might have to try the sea some time.

[~arph]

Well here is a way:

I just became a dad, which gives me less time building/tinkering/fooling around with circuits in the shed and more time thinking about designs.

So:  spend more time thinking about circuit designs then plugging wires on the breadboard.

[DougH]

My creative ideas are musical ones now, not electronics which is just a means to an end. I don't mod anything unless I have a specific thing I want to improve or fix. That's what drives me to do it in the first place.

[frank_p]

Thanks Sensei Frank.  I am enjoying this thread very much.

I'm lucky because I live near the sea.....unpredictability, turmoil, irresistable force, and then resolution.....it's all there.

It's Girlyman fault. 
Hey Mark, if you want to come see me just take your boat.

My creative ideas are musical ones now, not electronics which is just a means to an end. I don't mod anything unless I have a specific thing I want to improve or fix. That's what drives me to do it in the first place.

I don't know who would build stompboxes and don't like music in the first place.  Who would do that.  If someone get the kick for it in a moment in it's life or most of it's life: cool.  How I see it is that building ship into bottles can be tedious as a hobby.  If you build boats into bottles it's that you acquired the disposition of mind and a taste for boats.  If you get tired of putting and gluing toothpick in you last night party container, I see no problems.  Plenty of poeple come to the forum to talk boxes and tone and have a technical point of view on the topic, that is great to have a knowledgeable buddy who can point out that the stagecoach is driving right to the cliff.  We are doing all that for fun, but when the trill is gone, it's not there.  Wright ?

[frank_p]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120514134332.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100518064610.htm

[Perrow]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100518064610.htm

"Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box," says Dr Ullén about his new findings.

How's your box?