Limitation isn't the thing stopping you. Sometimes it's the thing that makes you.
This is a true story. In 2022 I had a laptop with all my sample packs, all my plugins — everything I needed to make music. I thought that laptop was the key to my sound.
Then one day it just died. Stopped working completely. And I remember thinking: this is bad.
I had an old laptop at home. It still had Ableton on it, but no sounds, no plugins, nothing. The one thing it did have was an MP3 of a random rock song — and that song opened with a little guitar riff.
So there I was, trying to make music with Ableton, no plugins, no sounds, and one MP3 with a guitar riff in it. I sat down for about half an hour, sampled that riff in the weirdest way I could, and ended up making a track.
That track got signed to a proper label. It's done over seven million streams.
I'm not saying it's the best thing I've ever made. But there's something to what limitation does for your creativity. I was panicking — convinced I'd never make anything as good as before, because I didn't have my sounds.
But the truth is, it was never in the laptop. It's all up there. And sometimes the limitation is exactly what pushes you to do something you'd never have thought of if you'd had everything.
