These past few days I’ve written about my journey into hardware-based music production, which started about three or four years ago. The first post I wrote was about some of the hardware that inspired me at the very beginning of this journey, namely the Akai MPC One, the Elektron Digitakt, and the Arturia MicroFreak. The MPC was my first piece of music hardware ever, apart from my PC. It made me realize I really wanted to start approaching music in this way, and things escalated quickly from there. The Digitakt was the first true piece of equipment for my hardware/Dawless setup, since the MPC is really a Daw in a box after all, complete with a touch screen, virtual instruments, and the capability of storing samples as well as exporting fully finished tracks into an SD card or hard drive. With these two extremely powerful samplers, or grooveboxes, the next logical step was to acquire a hardware synth to pair them up with, and after some research I realized I couldn’t go wrong with the Arturia MicroFreak, which I’ll get into more detail about in a future post. Yesterday I wrote about some of the utilities that went along with all of this, things that are necessary for any hardware-based or hybrid production set up. My first audio interface was the Focusrite 2i2, which I bought kind of impulsively without realizing I would need a lot more inputs for audio recording down the line. I quickly upgraded to the Focusrite 4i4, but that was also quickly used up by the MPC and Digitakt. By the time I got my first synth, the MicroFreak, I knew that rather than simply upgrading to an audio interface with more inputs, I wanted to get my hands on an actual hardware mixer. A mixer is kind of like an audio interface, but it has a lot more hands-on controls to manipulate the signals coming into its different channels. I opted for the Tascam Model 12. By this point I was fully dedicated to growing my hardware setup indefinitely throughout my whole life, so I knew I’d eventually need more than 12 inputs, but I couldn’t really afford a Model 16 or 24 at the time, so I figured I’d just deal with the issue when I came to it. I don’t regret my decision, and the Model 12 has added a lot to my workflow. One of the coolest things about this mixer specifically is that, apart from having all the hands-on controls that are expected of a mixer, such as a compressor, EQ, and even effects, it can also work as an audio interface when connected by USB to a computer, or even an MPC. This means that the dry signal of each separate audio channel can be recorded individually, along with a full stereo mix that includes the audio from all the channels, as well as all the hands-on parameter tweaks one can perform live while recording. At this point the Model 12 has become sort of like a musical sketchbook for me. Whenever I’m working with any specific synth or group of synths, I simply press the record button that corresponds to its channels, and I can play around on those synths to my heart’s content while the mixer records everything. These sessions can then be loaded into the MPC or a DAW, and used for chopping samples or generating new song ideas. Tomorrow I’ll get more into some of the things I enjoy most about my hardware studio workflow, and I’ll offer some ideas that might be useful to those who are looking to get into setting up a home studio, or just getting into playing around with synths and drum machines.
I appreciate you reading.
rebel eye 