Creativity Gurus: Books & Notes

The Rick Rubens - Rick Beato Interview was the first time I really noticed what Rubens had been involved with and what he actually did.

I am a few years older than both Ricks, and was really into music, was working at Fairlight Instruments at the time designing electronics, and reading some of the music and much of the keyboard and synthesizer press back when Rubens started out. 

Rubens was a punk guitar player and played guitar and programmed the DMX drum machine on the 1986 Beastie Boys - No sleep till Brooklyn. That he understood that RAP was music at that time shows why he become the producer guru he now is.  I remember reading the USA Magazine KEYBOARD in the 1980s and the cover proclaiming something like RAP ISN'T MUSIC.  At the time I was so far away from that world, but still realized that wasn't a truth in anyway.

Rick Rubens, in his recent book, and in the Beato interview, seems to have always been a calm guru type, with a very wide perspective on music. 

An interesting read for the most part, but don't think he covers anything I hadn't thought about and considered in my own creative endeavors.  

The Fairlight CMI was a significant mile stone in instrument and music development. The sampling and composition tools made a one man band, that people like HANS ZIMMER ran with and made their career in film scoring with. Page R in particular. But it was all very expensive.

I look back now and think Rodger Linn's Akai MPC, had a much bigger cultural contribution, thru its use in RAP /HIP HOP. Not that the designer considered that at the time. It was a user sampling Drum Machine, but by sampling others music and raping over it generated a new world of music and copyright problems!  Rodger's original digital drum machine programming was also an inspiration to the PAGE R I mentioned about.  His matrix Linn Instrument is also interesting, but a real niche thing.

I wonder if Rodger is about to come out with his own book on Being Creative?...

Creativity. It isn't just paintings or songs. Designing instruments requires it was much as any creative endeavor. The form of it is just different from a book author with his characters, plot points and story.

Brian Eno has his own status as a Music and ART Producer Guru. His OBLIQUE STRATEGIES cards with ambiguous statements, is rather like Rick Rubens advice or suggestions. Very Guru Like.

There are between 100 and 128 cards depending on version with statements expected to trigger the stuck creative mind, like:

• Use an old idea.
• State the problem in words as clearly as possible.
• Only one element of each kind.
• What would your closest friend do?

I made up a version of this with a numbered 0 to 99 statements and D100 dice. An interesting exercise, but I have never really used it.  Here the dice rolled 59, which is Do the washing up

Latest version of OBLIQUE STRATEGIES cards on Eno store is 50+pp.

Brian Eno's MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS was on constant repeat in my studio around 15 years ago.  Like Tangerine Dreams Ziet, it changes the atmosphere in a room without taking it over. Both of these were firsts in Ambient Music, and bursts of creative genius.

Yesterday I was informed of  Brian's new book, ‘What Art Does’. 

The initial version is limited to 777, signed, with individual watercolor slipcase books for some ¥33,000, which seems outrageous to me. There will be a non limited version from January, but no word on that price.  It says the money is being donated to a charity, but is that one of those now, very rare,  NOT FOR PROFIT charities?  Asking the poster what the January price would be resulted in me getting blocked by the guy promoting it on Bluesky.  So is he part of that charity, do you think, and did so before I could ask if  it was non profit? 😏

"Eno and Adriaanse’s book looks at why people create art, how it helps people, and the role it plays in keeping communities together".

I am interested in seeing this new Eno book, but it is not about Creativity as such.  As I put on Bluesky, I know why I create art:   "... for people like myself, we have to regularly create something to be "Happy Campers".  Not everything is some great work of art, and it need not be, but we had to do it, at that time, in that place.  Where place is a mental state as much as anything else."

But to get back to Creativity, a video clip post I saw by the JHS PEDAL guy, repeats something I have found myself.  "You can't design a completely new original guitar pedal, by staring at a guitar. The inspiration or strategy has to come from outside, in a different field." 

The mind and where ideas come from may never be understood.  I am amazed that having time and no distractions is so significant to the process to me. Do something else, go for a walk, and you will see something out of the corner of your minds eye, that leads you to a new solution or the direction you need to go in.   Ambiguous statements and guru advice serve the same function to "look sideways".

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