It was my birthday last weekend. After years of drooling over Moog synthesizers, I finally treated myself to one. Nothing beats a Moog’s deep, ever-present bass and lush, evocative pads. As a modern composer who writes for film, loves electronic music, and tries to blend the old and the new, having a Moog is a rite of passage. After years now of trying to mimic Moog sounds (unsuccessfully) on software synths, I’ve finally joined the family.

This model, the Matriarch, is 100% analog and semi-modular which, besides meaning nothing to most non-nerdy people, is the reason I got it. It’s old school. It doesn’t have modern features, like being able to store sounds. What you see and what you create with your fingertips is what you get. The semi-modular part simply means that I can re-route the circuitry in a literally endless number of ways, creating sounds and evolutions that are totally unique and will be totally lost forever as soon as I turn a knob (if I don’t record it first).

While this limitation might seem like a liability, I find it to be a feature.

I’m making a lot of changes this year, all in a direction from the virtual toward the corporeal: from social media to hanging out face to face, from streaming music to attending live shows, from my phone’s screen to physical books, from Netflix’s shitty programming to actual DVDs that I foraged at secondhand stores, and, in my music, from the safety and controllability of software and MIDI programming to organic and unpredictable hardware.

It’s a learning curve for me. I was taught to play what was written and to compose with notation. Everything controlled, precise, repeatable, and practiced to the point of no mistakes. I’ve had to learn on my own (sometimes the hard way) how to rely on my intuitions.

And that’s what I want to get better at: relying on my intuitions. I think Rick Rubin addresses this topic brilliantly in his book The Creative Act. He calls it “experimental faith” and “innate instinct rather than learned behavior.” I’m currently reading Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. He’d call it the “peripheral vision of the mind.”

He also said in the same chapter: “superior work has the quality of an accident.” And that’s what I’m hoping for with this new, tactile instrument – some nice quality accidents.