As I told in my previous post, I would like to talk about my experience with setting limitations on my work, something that has helped me a lot since I’m on this sound world.
Setting limitations is a really great exercise both for newbies and professionals. It’s a fantastic way to improve your skills and learn new things and new ways to do the stuff you normally do. Also, in the future when you have less limitations, your work will be even better because you already learned how to do the right thing with a few resources. It’s great!
I always remember a quote from Ren Klyce, one of my favorite sound designers. He said:
“If you have all the toothpaste or shampoo in the world you’d probably use it up much more quickly than if you only had one. You’d learn how to really conserve and make that work, and get just using the right amount of shampoo, not too much and wasting it.”
So, here are some of the limitations you can set for your work:
- – Limit the number of tracks of your layering structures
– Limit the number of plugins you can use in a session
– Design some sounds using just a limited sound sources
– Try to design some kind of sound without going through your typical way
– Set time limitations for doing some sound or getting a mix done
– Try to re-create a sound using several different sources
This method of limitations works really well not only in creative decisions, but also in the real life, with all the things you do everyday. It’s a really constructive process, which makes us better in everything we do.
Do you set limitations yourself? What kind of methods would you recommend?
Image credit: Speed Limit on Flickr (CC)
When i was still at uni we were set a task to do a small piece of sound design for a video only using a door creek sound. To make things more restricted we were only allowed to edit & pitch the wave.