System-Building Syndrome

Nathan Ho — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 04:20:12 GMT

Synthesizer forums have a long-running joke about “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” that pictures the stereotypical hobbyist with all their Hainbach-endorsed gear, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they’re intended for making music. Trite as the joke is, the culture that reduces synthesizers to boutique furniture deserves all the mockery it gets. I’m a bit annoyed that I don’t remember who said this: Eurorack is millennials’ equivalent of model trains.

A lot of the audience of this blog is electronic music DIYers and open source fanatics, and many of us have good reasons to sneer at this culture. I myself own very little music hardware and basically never use VSTs, and I admit I feel a little smug when I read about how much money people can blow on synths and even plugins. Then I remember my own history with electronic music.

When I was first getting into SuperCollider — my first ever experience making electronic music — I found my way to DSP conference papers and became totally obsessed. I read every DAFx paper that seemed remotely interesting to me; I learned C++ to implement these in my own UGens. I was pretty certain that with enough effort I could replace any VST plugin I read about.

I thought I was being clever circumventing GAS by building everything myself, but what really happened is that I had fallen into my own version of GAS: I had System-Building Syndrome. System-building can be personally enriching, and no doubt more cost-effective than buying roomfuls of synths, but if your mission is to produce and release music then getting into engineer mode will actively hinder your efforts to do so. When I sat down to make music with all the nice fancy UGens I made, my music sucked. It discouraged me from making more music, so I’d spend more time building UGens since clearly I didn’t have enough of them.

Nathan Ho (Posts about essay)

System-Building Syndrome