“I’ve always thought of it as a tapestry. A visual puzzle”: Luxxury needs to visualise music to nurture creativity – here’s why

Despite music being an audio art form first and foremost, Luxxury has long relied on visual elements for creativity.

“The way I was built was – even though it’s music – I had to see on the page what all the ideas were so I could allocate them properly. I’ve always thought of it as a tapestry. A visual puzzle,” Luxxury, real name Blake Robin, says in the new episode of MusicTech‘s My Forever Studio podcast, made in partnership with Audient.

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Robin has been producing music since the earliest days of Pro Tools, but before he got his hands on his first DAW and started producing his summery, feel-good dance music, he was recording ideas on his guitar into a four-track recorder. After a while, he had audio of 30 tapes with 50 riffs each, but he had no concept of what to do with them.

“I didn’t know how to take these ideas and string them together and make something complete out of them,” Robin says.

Soon after that, he spent $1000 on a Digi001, Digidesign’s first consumer-grade Pro Tools system, even though he didn’t know how to use it. “I looked at Pro Tools and I looked at the tapes and I was like, ‘How does this become that?’”

Robin found an ad on Craigslist from someone offering to help set up home studios. Her name was Patty Boss, and she digitally arranged Robin’s tapes into an audio file within Pro Tools. This allowed Robin to visualise each idea.

“My first batch of material came from the computer enabling my brain to find songs in all these ideas floating around,” Robin says. He then took his favourites and made them into one tape entitled BBTALL, for Best Bits Together At Long Last. He drove around listening to that tape, and from there he pieced together different ideas into his first productions.

Listen to the full episode of My Forever Studio with Luxxury below:

The post “I’ve always thought of it as a tapestry. A visual puzzle”: Luxxury needs to visualise music to nurture creativity – here’s why appeared first on MusicTech.

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