Recent forays into musical experimentation with various electronic devices has taught me a new concept: wet and dry sounds.
As I understand it, and simply, dry sounds are raw, clean and unprocessed audio coming directly from an instrument while wet sounds are sounds that have been enhanced with reverbs, echos, delays and other effects. The latter is usually achieved by the use of pedals or pass-through devices that are controlled by a musician for deliberately altering, distorting and otherwise enhancing the source audio.
I bought a little low-budget synthesizer about a year ago and have had some enormous creative fun learning to first play it and more recently how to make music with the device. But dipping into a world of music that I had little previous experience—at least as a creator—meant that I often found I was edging up against creative barriers that I didn’t know how to understand or articulate.
Case in point: wet versus dry sounds.
My synth is dry. And I have since ordered a pass-through device, a pedal, that allows me to add some of those wet features that I have been missing.
My point: sometimes creating with what we know and what we have until such time as we reach a point when we notice the gaps is the best way to discover new concepts.