When Two Worlds Collide

For a long time, I have had a split personality when making music. I either start playing with synths and go wherever that leads or I start with my guitar and explore that. Of course, guitar occasionally garnishes the electronics. But the approaches feel very different and separate.

Intellectually, I know this needn't be the case. Intellectually, I know that synths have oscillators (or some other sound source) that gets heavily processed. And I know something about that processing.

About a month ago, in a chat I verbalized that a guitar is really just six oscillators that get passed through a similar (but constrained by convention [and superstitions/biases/etc]) set of processing tools or modules.

Until recently I hadn't actually acted on that line of reasoning. One day I was fooling with Absynth (prodded by some tutorial ware that floated by in the RSS stream) and I remembered that you can use it as an effect. So in the preset browser, I selected effects, picked up the guitar and started exploring. Wow, some really out there stuff. A completely different and new pallette. I then tried the same with FM8.  And then Reaktor. And then my head exploded.

I have years worth of things to explore. And I'm stoked.

So look in again in your toolbox. Maybe there's a way to connect things that you hadn't considered before.