Creativity - Notes

I was born in the year Street Fighter II was released for the SNES and played it well up until is was 8 maybe 9 years old, loved it, still love the series and of course, I loved the music (At this point I just YouTube`d the OST and I recommend you do the same).

Back in the SNES and NES days sound chips were limited by the amount of notes they could create and what sounds these notes could be, I once loaded 250 instances of Native Instruments Massive just to see if It would crash and No luck , they could all play complex patches together without a problem and I`m sure on a newer computer it`s for all intensive purposes limitless(Hans Zimmer`s template has over 1000 instruments loaded).

The effect of being limited to 3 notes(1 per instrument) is that you have to focus more on the melodies because essentially all you have is 3 melodies from which you have to cover chords, melodies, texture, percussion, rhythm and progression and of course, keep it interesting throughout.

This limitation lead to some very creative techniques such as creating reverb by playing the same note very quickly but lower in volume in the later times with the filter applied and it is fair to say the creativity extended well into the compositions themselves.

The point of this article is to remind you(and myself) that we don`t need multiple EQs, compressors, reverbs or even more than 4 instruments to create a brilliant piece of music. I recommend you open your DAW and load up 3 instruments, make them all monophonic and see what you can do! eventually you will come up with some really interesting melodies, rhythms, poly rhythms and chord progressions then at a later date you might want to export the MIDI and bring them to higher fidelity instruments and essentially `orchestrate` or expand it into a full piece.

Good luck!