Mapping Audio to Color

There is a temptation, especially now, to wonder whether tutorials are even necessary anymore. We live at the dawn of a new kind of assistance: an AI that can answer almost any specific question the moment it comes up. So why sit through a forty minute tutorial when you could just ask, the instant you get stuck?

Both approaches have a place, and they are not really in competition.

Tutorials do something an AI answer cannot: they map out a territory before you have a reason to go there. They give you vocabulary, the names for things like feedback loops, displacement, level remapping, so that later, when you hit a wall, you actually know what to search for or ask about. Without that vocabulary, even a good AI assistant becomes harder to use, because you do not yet know the shape of the question you are trying to ask.

Asking AI in the moment is best suited to concrete, verifiable problems. Getting stuck on XYZ coordinate mapping and asking for a fix is a perfect example: the question is specific, the answer can be plugged in immediately, and you can see right away whether it worked. That is a genuinely good use of the tool, and there is nothing lesser about reaching for it.

Although I made it through, what I wanted to create turned out different because I didn't follow any tutorial, much like the tutorial above, which you can find on my Patreon.
Patreon