This is part of my writing series of posting at least 500 words a day, but it’s a break from the topics I’ve been writing about, since today is the release date for my newest electronic EP, ‘it’s alive.’
Although I had been making beats on FL since as far back as 2010, it’s only been about three years since I started my journey into hardware-based production. It’s been a short while, and I know I still have a long way to go down the dawless rabbit hole, but I can definitely say it’s been quite the journey up to this point. This new hands-on approach to creating music is something I’ve enjoyed immensely so far, from learning how all the connections work, both audio and midi, to putting a dawless setup together and balancing all the necessary elements of it, to completely changing the way I finalize beats, actually recording live versions of the track at hand, which introduces more nuance to the end product, instead of simply exporting a wav file of the beat, like I used to do in the past.
I guess you could say I jumped right in and learned as I went along. Being a huge fan of old-school, soulful sample-based hip-hop beats, I knew I wanted to get into sample-chopping and experience the joy of physically banging out rhythms, so I started my journey with an MPC One. Sure enough, it was all that I expected and much more. Although I started learning about synthesizers and how they generally work, from the standpoint of using the MPC as a midi control center to sequence other devices, I was also just super impressed by the ability of creating full sequences and putting them together to create a final track without need of a computer, and I wanted to do some more of that. For that reason, my second piece of gear was another sampler, the Elektron Digitakt. It offered a much more limited workflow than the MPC, but the lack of so many options and menus made it even more hands-on, and I realized I could create trippy, atmospheric ideas and interesting textures much faster than on the MPC.
Whenever I had some time to myself, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to jam on the MPC or on the Digitakt. I knew I needed the best of both worlds, so I got the two machines connected via MIDI, using the MPC to sequence the different DT tracks. The MPC has its own synth engines, and I would create synth sounds on the Digitakt as well by chopping small sections of samples and having them loop around really fast. With this combination I started creating some very interesting jams. My curiosity for the hardware music world only increased, and before long I knew I needed to include a legitimate hardware synth in my setup. Not wanting to spend too much as a beginner I picked up two small synths, the Behringer TD-3, and the amazingly powerful Arturia Microfreak.
There’s been so much to learn, and up until now I still use the same main instruments, the MPC and Digitakt, as well as the Microfreak and TD-3. I don’t always use all of them at once, but almost all the beats on this newest EP, it’s alive, use all of the pieces of hardware I’ve mentioned here. The TD-3, with its loud, aggressive and distorted bass sound is really what makes these tracks similar, it’s the glue that holds them together as a record, I would say. These are all live jams, meaning that the different instruments of these tracks were not arranged in a DAW, instead each jam was recorded live as one track, straight from the mixer that all the devices are running into, the Tascam Model 12. Final mastering was done in FL, mainly just to make sure none of the jams were clipping and that they were all around the same volume. I hope you enjoy this project as much as I enjoyed working on it. Much love, thank you for listening.
rebel eye 