My route into music making is kind of odd and even now I’m kinda uncomfortable calling myself a musician.
I bought a portable minidisc recorder an a Sony microphone to make field recordings back in the old days of minidisc and I used to record the seashore/woodlands/thunderstorms for home listening in the evenings, when I used to um, smoke.
Messing around with the minidisc recorder a lot I found I could insert track markers into my recordings to split them into tiny bits of sound, then rearrange the bits of sound, remove some of the track markers (so I just had one very short track made up of a number of small sounds) and then I’d set that track on repeat.
At this point I decided I needed to record this stuff somehow and so I bought a magazine called Sound on Sound and did some reading and ended up buying a BOSS BR8, which was a multitrack recorded that used zip disks. So music making for me began with looping tiny bits of field recordings on a minidisc recorder into a multitrack recorder and using waaaaay to much delay. (Hmm… still haven’t really got over that delay yet. My wife thinks it’s very funny when I stop a sequence I’m working on and get out of my chair and the sound keeps going for a few minutes afterwards.)
Then I ended up selling the multitrack recorder (I felt it was too guitar centric) and bought a second hand sampler called a Korg ES-1 and a sample CD called Abstract Hip-Hop. At this point my music became a lot more like music. Looking back I think maybe I should of stuck with the multitracking a bit more as I rarely ever make anything that I’d call a track, and ever since I’ve been reshuffling a very minimal amount of cheapish gear until I’m basically at the point now where I have a okay/meh i7 laptop with Ableton & Sunvox, Focusrite sound card, a tablet, various pocket music making things (Bhajis Loops anyone?) and a Digitakt. I’m kinda minimal/ruthless about stuff because my Dad is a proper serious horder of stuff/junk and growing up with that I get uncomfortable if I have too much stuff that I feel I can’t justify.
The funny thing is that last week while walking home I saw someone had left an old cassette multitrack recorder (Fostex XR-7) on the wall outside their house for free (we call this ‘wall swag’, happens a lot round my way, get some nice furniture sometimes…). The only problem with it was with the power supply, where one end of the cable had been torn out. It was an easy fix though and it seems to be working great, although I’m just using it as a mixer at the moment and I’ve not tried the tape.
So I’ve found myself enjoying feeding into the XR-7 it loads of looping and delayed bits of sound from various mobile devices at once (not all at the same BPM!), and bringing the levels of each in and out, fiddling with the EQ… and somehow I feel like I’m returning to something I’ve been missing. Kinda funny how my current favourite bit of gear was someone elses trash! Really should of bought a mixer already.
Anyway, Elektron stuff… The Digitakt. It’s my first bit of Elektron gear and in many ways it feels like the first professional bit of gear I’ve owned. I’m not using it for drums so much, more just looping tones and little bits of field recordings with lots of delay. I really wish it would allow me to play my samples polyphonically, but I knew about this limitation before I got it, and I can still midi sequence other stuff with it polyphonically, so I really can’t grumble. It does remind me of the old Electribe ES-1, but the Digitakt is just 3 million times better, like how you can apply effects etc individually to each trig etc. At the moment I’m barely scratching the surface of what it can do, but having spent a lot of time using ableton, I’m really enjoying the immediacy of the Digitakt. Turn it on, have a play, turn it off. Repeat.