In Praise of Constraints
- Alex Morgan
- Creativity
- June 27, 2024
Our digital lives allow for so much sprawl, we get lost, I get lost.
Over the years I’ve experienced plenty of moments where I’ve struggled to get going creatively, a sort of paralysis in the gaze of endless possibility, which paradoxically holds me back from even starting.
I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of boundaries, the creativity in constraints. I’ve found there’s a massive difference when I set limits. There’s a part of me that sees a constraint and immediately looks at how I can bend or break it. I think this comes from my background in skateboarding, punk, hacking and graffiti, where you’re constantly exploring and re-imagining the world around you. Through this lens, constraints start to look really different but they are always there in some form.
I’ve enjoyed limiting my colour palette to black and white in photography & giving myself just two hours to write, record and publish a song, these self-imposed boundaries act as a catalyst for creativity, for me. In this post, I’ll share why and how I’ve enjoyed the counterintuitive nature of constraints and limitations, and how they’ve lit up way more energy and creativity in me than I ever expected.
To kick things off, let’s jump into music, where I discovered that some of my best work came from a self-imposed 2-hour limit to write, record and publish online.
Waves Under Pressure
I was about 12 when I got my first guitar. Since then I’ve played in a bunch of bands, punk, industrial, indie (forgive me!) and still play and write. I remember vividly when my mum started dating (and later married) a man whose son had a dual cassette karaoke machine! It had two tape players, you could record to tape whilst playing another or just record onto one. It had a mic attached to it…
I can’t remember now, but I’m pretty sure it was one of these, a Concertmate 2000! I’d never seen anything like it, but quickly figured out that if I put the mic on a book on the floor near the guitar amp I could record some riffs and then use the mic again to “sing” over the top. Those tapes are lost now, but I remember the feeling… especially the feeling of a tape suddenly getting mangled in the player!
Back in 2010 I decided to start writing some punk music, I had an almost exact idea of the sound and feeling that I wanted ( I was listening to a lot of The Germs, Minor Threat, The Shitty Limits, Nine Inch Nails and much more). I bought an electronic drum kit and decided I was going to record straight away (whilst properly learning the drums). I lived with 3 flatmates: a couple and a friend I worked with at a supermarket when I was younger. It was a big old house in a seaside town outside of the city, I took over the separate dining room (soz) as the studio. I put some pretty heavy constraints on myself and the process was really different to anything I’d done in the past. I loved it! I definitely look back on it now with a nice amount of ’nostalgia agony'.
Here’s how I made music in 2014 and what I got out of it:
Constraints
Think simple, think live.
- 2 hours to write, record and post online
- Song length roughly 1/ 2 minutes
- Limited takes - 3 max
- Don’t worry about choruses - Drums would have some repeating patterns but I wasn’t thinking much of a chorus, though it almost always appeared
- Don’t think of things as separate instruments
- Don’t record multiple layered tracks, think about it sounding live
- Vocals were just another instrument and sound to fit in, not the focus
- Lyrics would be in the moment, stream of consciousness, taken from scraps of paper with random writing on
- If something doesn’t work, keep moving
Steps
- Play and record drums
- I would think about what the rough length of the song would be, as I’m playing, recording rough takes pretty quickly, thinking off the top of my head what a break or lead-in would be to a a rough structure
- Play and record bass
- Now I’m not really a bass player, I can play a bit but guitar was the main instrument for me so this affected how I played, though I tried to think of it as a sound and movement in the track
- Play and record guitar
- I might record 2 guitars, I was always thinking of the live version rather than layering
- Record vocals
- Grab nearby bits of paper with random thoughts or “lyrics” written down
- Mix
- Post on Soundcloud and play it to flatmates
Constraint shift
I felt so good after those first posts, getting something down and throwing it out onto Soundcloud, it just made me want to do more and more and had this compounding effect. I started to expand and change the process, 2 hours to write, record and publish turned into 4 hours, which turned into 1 day, which turned into 2. My flatmate played and sang on tracks and added way more to it, I enjoyed every moment. I got more and more comfortable with the sound I was using and got good at being quick, I was getting better all the time.
In a year I released about 30 tracks, and then we hit a new constraint: space, and the ability to record. We moved flat and it threw a spanner in the works! My flatmate and I were pretty keen to move to Brighton, where we were living was boring and there wasn’t much going on, it was a small seaside town. Brighton was great in a lot of ways but it killed writing new music. We moved into a tiny old flat, with thin walls and floorboards. My bedroom was in the living room and the second bedroom could fit roughly 3 hamsters in (for the record we didn’t have hamsters!). So recording was now out of the window. This new constraint meant we decided something different, we decided to get in a rehearsal room and play the bloody songs! With a couple of friends from work we hit some rehearsal rooms in Brighton and it was great.
We should have done some shows! But, before we did we split as I moved to London and my flatmate to a different seaside town. A shame really but to this day I still love listening back to those tracks and the recordings from the rehearsal rooms.
The new constraint of space and air took away one way of creating but pushed me into another and hearing the songs live with a full band was so great. The recordings had one problem, the drums, I was average at drums and the samples on the electric kit were poor. You lose so much power with bad drum sounds, my flatmate would always tell me “The drums sound like shit, you should change them”, yeah yeah, shut up De-Burgh, I’ll do it soon (the day has yet to come where I re-record the drums!).
What started from a 2 hour limit led to so much more and really helped to light a fire creatively. The best part is knowing that this isn’t the only formula for me to use to feel like I’m doing some great work. I didn’t really know that at the time and a lot of it was unconscious, it was just one formula that evolved over time You’ve just got to keep creating, the best is yet to come!
Black and White
Just as the limitations of time and equipment shaped the music I made, I enjoyed constraints in photography. A constraint can come in the form of the tool you use, like the karaoke machine recording on tape, or in photography, you might use a film camera instead of digital.
I studied photography at college and enjoyed plenty of time in the dark room. I got to go through the whole joy of breaking open a film canister inside a black, bag making sure not to expose it to light, loading it onto a reel and then going through the whole developing and printing stages, each stage giving another opportunity to make a mess of the whole thing! This was, of course, dependent on the fact you set everything properly in camera and took any good photos at all! Digital cameras allow for so much more, and in the land of DSLRs there are some great options; I got 2 cameras in the last couple of years, a Fujifilm XT-4 and a Fujifilm X100V (great cameras!), and I decided to set the cameras up so they use a black and white film simulation (Fujifilm cameras have excellent film simulations built in based on their film https://fujifilm-x.com/en-gb/products/film-simulation/), basically forcing black and white images in-camera rather than editing in post. This is a pretty limiting palette and shifts the focus a lot in an image. Occasionally I’ll switch to a colour simulation, but that’s rare. If it wasn’t for how great the digital cameras are and how much I enjoy taking photos I’d switch back to film completely.
One thing I’ve found really interesting is the grain emulation on these cameras cameras and in editing software, it’s pretty good, but it doesn’t quite feel the same. Films that are shot on film just look and feel different in a very visceral way. A recent example is Past Lives, which was shot on Kodak 35mm film. It creates this added romance to the whole experience, you could go so far as to say that constraint of the film cost and only being able to have so many takes adds to the way something is filmed. Dune part 2 was shot on digital cameras (ALEXA 65 and the ALEXA Mini LF) but that they took the graded digital footage, laser printed it onto Kodak Vision3 5254 film then rescanned it back to digital, to remove some of that digital gleam. That’s expensive, but a filter won’t do the same, digital randomness is very different to analogue chaos. It will always look a little different, and sometimes that digital look can be amazing and work so well. There’s a great article on this on the indepthcine site.
We went out to film negative and then scanned it back in. It was night and day what it gave the highlights, what it gave the patina, what it gave the texture. - Greig Fraser
Those constraints on takes for filming or anything else play so much into creating. That feeling you get when you create something and you have a limit on the output. Like a throwaway camera. The Fujifilm or Kodak throwaway camera was something I used to grab all the time when I was a kid. I’ve got shoeboxes full of those folders with 26 images, almost all with stickers on with advice on how to not take a shit photo. I’d take them to gigs and usually leave with no usable pictures at all, it was great!
Note taking and Zettlekasten - Giving a restraint to what you write, remembering that a page can only hold so much compared to a digital note, a sticky note has to get across so much information just in that space, those constraints can lead to you being more concise and direct.
The Sea is Never Still
From punk rock recordings to black-and-white photography, I’ve come to see constraints not as limitations, but as catalysts for innovation. Like the sea, creativity is never still, always shifting and adapting to the boundaries it encounters.
Constraints keep me creative ‘and’ productive. That productive part is key for me, having something I’ve completed and out there is great. The process and having those limits are fun, it gives a box that I can then find the edges of, smash apart, push past, or draw around.
Think of creativity as an ocean. Without boundaries, it can feel overwhelming – a vast expanse with no direction. But when I introduce constraints, suddenly I have a shoreline to explore, waves to surf, depths to plumb. In music, my 2-hour recording limit became the shore against which my ideas crashed and took shape. In photography, the black-and-white palette became the depth that forced me to focus on composition and contrast.
Rules and constraints are there to be tested! They are not laws. To some, and even to me at times, the word ‘constraint’ can feel like a block to creativity. It might seem paradoxical, making some creative people feel like an orca in captivity, trapped and forced to perform in a goldfish bowl.
But here’s the part that has struck me over time: You are the master of your constraints. You can choose them, shape them, and break them when the time is right. In corporate life some get enforced but there’s always space to reimagine what you see, and remember that it’s you being creative not the formula being the only drive.
“Sometimes a formula has diminishing returns. Sometimes we don’t recognise that the formula is only a small aspect of what gives the work its charge” - Rick Rubin
So, I encourage you to embrace constraints in your creative process, whether that’s in purely creative work or anything else, really. I’ve used this in security as well, and it’s worked well in brainstorming sessions like for the naming frameowork we worked on. Set some interesting and different limits for your next project. Limit your colour palette. Use only one tool or instrument. See how these boundaries push you to explore new territories.
Remember, in the vast ocean of possibilities, constraints are not the cage that plummets you to the ocean floor, but the vessel that helps you navigate. Master your constraints, then see past them. The sea is never still, and neither should you be.