I was trained first on the classical guitar. I began at seven years old—a Christmas gift that quickly became something more serious than anyone intended. What started as an instrument became an early discipline: a structure for sustained attention, and an unintentional scaffold for identity.
It was, in part, social integration—a way of belonging as a new immigrant to Canada. But it was equally an act of continuity: a quiet maintenance of familial connection to European heritage, carried through daily practice—supported and encouraged by my mother.
Which is to say: I was trained in touch, and in the quiet tyranny of accuracy. Classical guitar does not forgive carelessness. It exposes it. Every note is naked; every shift of position audible. It teaches you to listen to yourself in a way that is almost architectural—bass tones below, melody suspended above—polyphony contained within a single wooden body.
It trained my hands, yes. But more than that, it trained my attention. For more than sixteen years I lived there. Six strings. Nylon. A repertoire inherited, transcribed, curated across centuries. It felt complete.
Until I encountered the Chapman Stick.
The first time it felt less like discovery and more like inevitability. Two hands placed in opposed symmetry upon a fretboard. The “Free Hands” technique—inventor Emmett Chapman’s late-1960s solution to a practical musical problem—liberated the fingers from plucking and instead asked them to directly strike the strings, tapping notes into existence with both hands. Bass lines under the left. Chords and melody under the right. Or the reverse. Or something more entangled.
It was not better than the guitar. It was different.
This difference was geometric.
On the guitar, polyphony is negotiated through compromise: the right hand must decide what to emphasise; the left must accommodate position. On the Stick, independence is native. Bass, harmony, melody—three logics coexisting without apology. The instrument invited a new spatial imagination. Not vertical stacks of notes but interlocking planes.
I did not feel I was abandoning the guitar. I felt I was extending a question the guitar had already taught me to ask: how many voices can one body sustain at once?
The Stick itself carries a philosophy in its design. Chapman did not invent it as ornament or novelty. He designed it as a response—to the desire for fuller harmonic independence, to the limits of plucked technique, to the possibility that a single performer could inhabit the roles of ensemble. It was an instrument born of constraint, not indulgence.
That mattered to me. When I committed to it professionally, I was not choosing a gimmick. I was choosing a way of thinking.
And that is the first lesson new tools teach: they do not remove artistry. They reframe it. They alter the reachable geometry of thought. They widen the corridor of what can be asked—and therefore what can be answered.
Innovation as an Artistic Event
It is tempting to speak of innovation as if it were a technological story. As if progress were a sequence of improved mechanisms replacing inferior ones.
But artistic innovation is rarely about replacement. It is about reconfiguration.
The Stick is one moment in a long lineage of instruments that arrive not to erase their predecessors but to alter the questions available to the artist.
The modern guitar itself—so often imagined as timeless—was once an innovation, and not so very long ago. Its proportions stabilised in Spain in the nineteenth century; its voice refined, its projection strengthened. Its repertoire did not descend intact from antiquity. It was cultivated, transcribed, and deliberately expanded. Composers adapted older orchestral and piano works for it—not as compromise, but as declaration—insisting upon its rightful place in concert halls.
Perhaps its most ardent and strategic champion was Andrés Segovia. He toured relentlessly across Europe and the Americas, not merely performing but evangelising—persuading audiences that this gentle wooden box with six strings could bear Bach and Albéniz, and with them, the weight of history.
Without that deliberate expansion of legitimacy, the guitar would not have become a global instrument. Without that cultural labour, there is no clear lineage from Torres and Segovia to Hendrix, Page, or Van Halen. Instruments become languages only when artists insist upon their seriousness.
A new tool creates new questions the artist can ask. It makes certain forms easier, others harder. It reveals possibilities previously concealed—not by lack of imagination, but by lack of mechanism.
This is affordance as aesthetics.
The tool is not the author. It does not judge proportion or silence or restraint. But it changes what is reachable. It extends the arc of the hand and the ear and the mind.
The artist remains the site of convergence.
Which is to say: the decisive act is still selection.
Tools as Levers
Given the proliferation of emerging technologies applied to creative development in recent years, the temptation is understandable—to imagine that today’s digital tools are unprecedented. That software, synthesisers, loop libraries and large language models represent a rupture so profound that authorship itself dissolves.
I do not see it that way.
A digital audio workstation is not categorically different from a newly invented instrument. It is a lever. A word processor is not an author; it is a chisel with memory. A thesaurus is not imagination; it is an expanded drawer of pigment. A synthesiser does not compose; it offers new harmonic geometries.
These tools are—and ought to remain—agnostic. They do not carry taste. Their parameters do not possess restraint. They do not recognise proportion, nor silence, nor the ethical weight of exclusion.
What they do is accelerate workflow. They expand material availability. They remove friction in certain places and introduce it in others. They allow one to audition possibilities at scale.
And yes—I include here the now ubiquitous family of generative systems that populate the contemporary marketplace: text models such as ChatGPT and Claude; image engines such as Midjourney and DALL·E; music generators such as Suno and Udio; automated editing layers woven quietly into everyday software.
Their arrival has been noisy. Their reception, often anxious.
But the underlying question is not whether these tools exist. It is what we ask of them.
When tools remove busywork, judgement becomes more visible. When tools are mistaken for judgement itself, culture thins.
The nervous system is not an art critic. It is responsive to pattern. Repetition engrains. Exposure familiarises. Saturation produces credibility.
Which is precisely why the artist’s role cannot be collapsed into production alone. Meaning is not guaranteed by impact. Visibility is not equivalent to depth. Circulation is not coherence.
Tools can generate material; only artists generate meaning.
Meaning-Making as the Scarce Human Act
If tools proliferate and material becomes abundant, what remains scarce?
Meaning.
Meaning is relative consequence held in coherence. It is the felt alignment between parts and whole. It is the sensation that something has been shaped intentionally, not merely produced.
Information can be infinite. Meaning cannot. Meaning requires exclusion. It requires boundary. It requires that someone decides what does not belong.
The artist’s labour is not primarily generation, but integration—turning abundance into form, possibility into proportion.
This is where workflow becomes ethical.
How one gathers inputs. How one filters references. How long one allows a piece to remain unresolved. Whether one protects silence from premature exposure.
Coherence takes time.
Neo-Feudal Conditions
If we step back—gain some altitude over these processes—beyond the instruments, the lineages, the production tools—the systems frame comes into view.
Soberly and without melodrama: we inhabit structures we do not own.
Platforms distribute our work. Financial architecture shapes housing, security and productive waking hours. Infrastructure hums invisibly beneath daily life. Access is continuous, yet conditional.
Access to many of our creative tools is leased through subscription, credit and solvency. Hierarchy emerges not through proclamation but through price.
In such conditions, the most fragile resource is not talent. It is slack.
Slack is the right to experiment without immediate return. It is the ability to let a song, a story, a painting, fail privately. It is the time required for something to deepen beyond trend.
For artists, slack is the soil of meaning.
When slack erodes, latency disappears. Work must circulate quickly. Visibility becomes a form of rent—paid in attention and frequency. Relevance becomes metric. Metrics become proxy for value.
None of this is dramatic. All of it is structural. And structures shape time.
A Rational Artist
Given this, the question is not whether one can escape such conditions—escape is rarely absolute—but how to inhabit them without surrendering authorship.
For me, that has meant partial allegiances.
No single platform defines the work. No single revenue stream determines its direction. Tools are adopted where they serve, refused where they distort.
But this is not merely strategy. It is continuity.
The same question I learned at seven remains intact: how many voices can one body sustain at once?
On the guitar, polyphony required discipline. On the Stick, it required new geometry. Under contemporary conditions, it requires design.
Design of time. Design of attention. Design of allegiance.
The rational artist does not reject tools but designs their place. They decide which voices may enter the body, and which must remain outside it.
Slack, then, becomes harmonic space—not laziness, but the necessary interval between notes.
If every frequency is filled, there is no music—only noise.
If every hour is monetised, there is no depth—only output.
To preserve slack is to preserve polyphony. To preserve polyphony is to cultivate meaning.
Freedom, in such conditions, does not resemble rebellion. It resembles the quiet maintenance of interior architecture. The refusal to let every channel become amplified. The willingness to let a voice remain soft.
And so long as a body can still sustain more than one voice at once, the instrument remains what it always was: a lever of meaning.