The future of sound begins where the plugins end. Why Your Best Music Might Come From Doing Less A creative manifesto from iServalan You can jump to the music school here and follow all my updates and new tracks We live in a strange era where thousands of “producers” have the exact same toolbox. Same presets, same AI-assisted workflows, same shiny plug-ins, same templates, same quantum-polished everything. And you know what? It shows. Some of my earliest tracks — the ones I made when I barely knew what a compressor did and used GarageBand to teach myself how Logic worked — have more soul, grit, and personality than anything created with a $2,000 chain of plug-ins. They breathe. They wobble. They contain errors. They sound like a human being was involved. Once you have too much technology, a funny thing happens: You stop needing yourself. The more skills you build, the less tech you need If you can play, if you can improvise, if you can think in shapes and structures, i...