A poor workman…

When I was a boy (in a Yorkshire accent: “When aah wurra lad”), I helped out in my dad’s factory to earn pocket money. One of the jobs I really enjoyed was dismantling, cleaning and rebuilding machinery. If I caught my finger using the wrong spanner, or scraped my hand with a wire brush, I’d complain about the offending tool. One nugget of advice my father dispensed in this situation was ‘It’s a poor workman that blames his tools’. A straightforward, fairly unsympathetic and you might say typically Yorkshire comment. I took this to mean that skill and craft is always more important than the tools you use, and so maybe even the wrong tool could be made to work in the right hands. I’ve carried this notion all my life, until recently.

Recently I revived my interest in music production and spent time with Logic Pro; Apple’s music production software. It’s a brillant and powerful tool to write, record, edit, sequence and mix music, with built-in instruments and synthesisers and countless ways to manipulate audio and MIDI data. Logic places a heavy emphasis on hotkeys and using control surfaces and keyboards to interact and create. This physical interaction is incredibly important when you have so many parameters under your control.

And here’s the thing; Even if you’re a good musician, if you want to work with your sounds in a tool like Logic, then you simply must learn how to use it. There are also many features that can make the creative process easier, but you wouldn’t know about them unless you take the time to learn; through trial and error, from a manual or video, or from someone else.

Technology is a tool. Laptop, smartphone, Excel, Word, an app, or a pencil. They’re all tools. You can only be fully creative when you first get the right tool for the job (it needs to be good enough for the job at hand), and secondly, when you learn how it works and how to use it properly.

Even in these days of ‘intuitive design’ of software – here’s an interesting view on the necessity of this learning. Timoni West argues that when designing software, having the user learn interactions as opposed to intuit them, isn’t a bad thing. Also consider this video from 1984 on how to use a mouse; a  now ubiquitous tool to work, play and create. We’ve all learned how to use a  mouse at some point (as West points out ‘you’re not born with it’), and originally with instruction from Apple.

So there’s creativity, and there are tools. Where the two intersect is knowledge of the tool itself. When you know the tool, it becomes transparent to you, and that’s when it gets out of the way and you can focus on the subject matter, and become truly creative.

So it’s not ‘A poor workman blames his tools’, I think instead ‘A good workman knows his tools’.