Creativity - Purpose - Accomplishment .. What is your list?

What equipment has helped you the most in achieving these things in your music?

original unique inspiring sounds.

working quickly.

Making a reality of what you hear in your head.

I was listening to a classical music station today, and they were interviewing a young accomplisher. You will not believe what this girl has accomplished.

They first played a violin piece and said that she had performed it solo. She'a violinist. She also does stem cell research and discovered a new method for extracting stem cells and tracked their delveopment. She's enrolled in Harvard university now. She got a 50K scholorship to continue her stem cell research. She also learnt to program C++ by reading the book "Learn to program C++ in 27 days" and wrote a program to track her stemcell development! She's also currently scoring music for an independant film. Did i mention, she's enrolled in harvard?

I'm guessing that most of these "accomplished" types dont spend any time in forums. They go out and work on their skills and techniques till the cows come home.

I forgot to mention her age. She's 17 now.

> original unique inspiring sounds.

Hmm - the synths of course, and my varioax guitar and digital guitar processors all provide a bit of that, but I guess the recent thing has been the addition of a load of decent hardware fx processors that finally bring both rigs together and are letting me find my sound and my genre.

Umm - big computer monitors - 24" widescreen at least and a decent pair of DAW controller (one on the desk, the other a little wireless unit). The Alsesis Fusion because I use it as a receording and sequencing sketch pad at times to avoid fekking around witht he computer. MY MachineDrum because pattern sequencing it and other synths with it is so damn wuck and easy. My fx processors because they allow me to work away from the computer and just play stuff and generally mess about without being distracted by the a computer based DAW.

Erm... working quickly and simply is the key for me - too much fekking around and I will lose the plot - so synths and fx with good easy to use UIs are most important. Getting stuff sketch recorded without any fekking about (ie to an HD recorder usualy rather then computer). Knobbage - cranking a knob on a synth or fx box is somethigny you dont have to think about, you just do it, and focus on the resulting sound - opening a plugin UI, finding the find display mode, taking both hand off the keys while you tweak with a mouse - all of that just gets in the way for me and often causes me to loose ideas. Software is purely a post production and programming tool for me - music and raw on-the-fly creativity lives in hardware. One day the might meet hopefully

I guess I should ask what synth equipment has helped you acchieve your goals the best.. also what style of muisc?