Thanks for being so thorough and thoughtful. I went to the same university a few years after you, though I graduated from the liberal arts school after getting discouraged with the BA/BFA program. That was always something of a disappointment for me, and I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what if. I’d studied theory, and was good at it, but because of red tape, it was a nightmare to take classes there. Instead, I just played in indie rock bands and recorded musicians for grocery money when I was sick of eating cream cheese and ketchup sandwiches.
I learned about Eurorack after getting well-enough established in a non-music career. Initially it was Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith who drew me in, and only after I bought my first oscillator I learned about the YouTube videos. I’ve approached this with the opposite point of view as you: I’ve felt like I didn’t have enough theory or performance hours under my belt, and have tried to cram about six years’ worth of downtime into the last year to catch up. I’ll come up with something that I like but then worry that it isn’t, I don’t know, theoretical enough.
Anyway, I appreciate this thread. This has made me confront a lot of the biases I’ve had in approaching music, and the roadblocks that have stopped me from actually making it.