No great result is really random

I was fiddling with the mix and arrangement of the latest Spaceforce song and realized that I was messing with something that one of teachers said in at Musicians Institute. It wenst something like this:

- Parts of the production might appear to be random, such as the slight out of tune guitars on a nirvana album, but in truth it never is random. It is well through out and set to be just that way conciously.

There is a lot of wisdom in this and it does apply to a whole lot more than nirvana songs. It happens to apply to Spaceforce as well, when the production is young it has a lot of randomness in it coming from the first iterations which define the structure of the work. But the process of finishing anything is partially about removing everything random and replacing it with the concious refinement of the data.

This also applies to game design and storytelling, maybe you start with randomly generated pieces, but you should be well aware of why you keep anything which was randomly created. It will rarely do more good than harm to the end result.