These past few days I’ve been describing my journey into hardware-based music production over the past few years. I’ve been producing music for over a decade. I started out on the PC, using FL Studio and various VSTs like Nexus, Serum, and Omnisphere. It wasn’t until a few years back that I decided to finally pick up an MPC One and give hardware a try, having always been a fan of old-school soulful hip-hop beats. Before the MPC I didn’t even use a Midi keyboard to produce. When I ordered the MPC, I definitely expected that I would enjoy it, but I didn’t expect just how much I’d enjoy it, and I especially wasn’t aware of how much it would completely reignite my passion for music production. As I mentioned, I had already been making beats for years, but the mouse and keyboard workflow didn’t inspire me too much, and I was mainly focused on my writing and rapping, only making beats in order to save the money I would have to spend on purchasing them from other producers. I got the MPC Bible along with the MPC, and I also watched countless YouTube videos in order to really master it. This new hands-on approach to music production was a total game-changer for me, and before I knew it, I had acquired a couple other pieces of gear, namely the Elektron Digitakt and Digitone, and the Arturia Microfreak. I really got to enjoy sampling into the MPC and just playing patterns on the pads, but my interest for playing and composing original melodies was also growing, so I bought an Arturia Keylab and started learning to play the piano from a great instructor on YouTube named Bill Hilton. My purchase of the Arturia Keylab included access to Analog Labs, a powerful piece of software that includes presets which are meant to emulate the sounds of various classic hardware synthesizers. The more I learned about hardware synths, and the more I played around on Analog Labs as well as the Digitone and MicroFreak, the more I realized I was really getting into this, and it would probably be something I’d be very interested in for the rest of my life. I also realized that synths are very expensive, but thankfully I was able to pick up a few cheap mono synths from Behringer. Behringer is a controversial brand for a lot of music producers and synth enthusiasts, because they manufacture clones of various legendary synths. One example is the Behringer TD-3, which is a clone of the classic Roland TB-303 bass synth. Because of its inexpensive price I ended up picking up a TD-3 in order to add a gritty bass sound to my hardware jams. Although I only had like three hardware synths at this point, plus the MPC and Digitakt which are grooveboxes/samplers, I needed something to capture and record the audio from all these devices, and after two Focusrite audio interfaces I decided I needed a hardware mixer instead. To this day the Tascam Model 12 is an essential part of my workflow, since I can use it to record all my instruments individually into FL Studio or my MPC. Now, because I was on a budget and bought the Model 12 instead of the Model 16 or 24, I actually started to run into limitations with it much quicker than I had anticipated. However, my inspiration eventually led me in a direction which, in a way, managed to solve this problem for me, and which marks the beginning of another chapter in my journey with music production hardware. I’ll get deeper into this in tomorrow’s post though.
I appreciate you reading.
rebel eye 