The case for instruments you can hold in one hand.
After two years of writing music exclusively on a screen, I sold the laptop, bought a single grey synthesizer, and started finishing songs again — sometimes three in a weekend.
I spent the winter of 2024 rewriting the same eight-bar loop inside a piece of software that, as far as I can tell, has approximately four thousand menus. Every session began the same way: open the project, stare at the routing matrix, lose ninety minutes to a plugin update, and quit before recording a single note. By February I had bought three new pieces of software and finished zero pieces of music.
In March, on a trip to Malmö, I walked into a second-hand store and bought a small grey synthesizer with four colored knobs on it for the equivalent of two months of plugin subscriptions. It fit in a coat pocket. There were no menus. There was a speaker on the side. By April I had finished two songs on the train.
§ 02What the menus were hiding.
The argument I want to make is narrower than "screens are bad" — that one has been made, badly, by people who type it on screens. The argument is about the difference between an instrument and an environment. A piano is an instrument. A digital audio workstation is an environment, and most environments will, given the chance, ask you to landscape them before you are allowed to live there.