Idea of hardware more fun than the reality?

The Lounge Other Gear
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I was reflecting that after multiple years of multi box hardware setups I’ve never completed a single track and a great deal of it has been quite frustraiting.

I started off with a Circuit Tracks which got me into electronic music and I loved, but lacked the ability to make a full arrangement due to only 2 synth voices.

I tried connecting up some synths, (Reface CS, SE-02) but still struggled and got the idea of (foolishly) flipping the Circuit for an MC-707 so it was all in one box. Never managed to complete a single track.

Got a Polyend Tracker and made loads of stuff, but only ever standalone arranger never as a hardware setup then Bitwig on a laptop which I’ve made loads of stuff with.

Since then I’ve had at various times a Syntakt, S1, T8, Uno Pro-X, Circuit Rhythm, Model Cycles, B1, Drumbrute Impact, TR-6S, B1, Microbrute, Edge all connected to a mixer with a Zoom CDR and my reflection is that I spend huge amounts of time dicking around with wires, wondering why stuff isn’t working changing MIDI settings, getting confused by switching different sequencer paradigms, working out why things aren’t quite in sync, trying to put boxes next to each other, but the cables get in the way, finally getting to play and finding it’s all just a bit uninspiring.
BTW I’m not constantly flipping my rig I’ve generally rearranged it about once every 6 months over about 4 years.

Maybe it’s just my personality. I know in guitar world a lot of people are building pedalboards with switchers and modding their guitars and I’m just a plugin and play person, all of that just gets in the way of making music. (I don’t even change strings unless they break)

If I’m honest the only times I’ve ever truly had fun making music with hardware have been:

  • Circuit Tracks - just jamming with no plans to make tracks (might get another)
  • Drum Brute Impact + Donner B1 - 2 box acid just jamming
  • Polyend Tracker - Purely as an arranger / workstation

I see all the guys on here with the massive rigs with 4 Elektron boxes and 5 synths and I’m wondering how do you do it?

Are you really making cool tracks and having fun with this gear or is the fun in building the rig and learning the gear?

Should I just accept I’m not a hardware guy?

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Yes

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Yes.

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I have a mid-sized home studio of the shape you are thinking about. I spend most of my music making time NOT in front of it, and when I do, I usually only use half of it. That’s fine! Some people use setups much bigger than mine: that’s also fine!

Most of my music making is done with one or two boxes only, so that I can use them in depth. I keep changing which ones I pick, and I get to make music whenever I carve some time (which comes after family and work). That is what works best for me at the moment. To each their own.

Now, I read frustration in your post. You went through lots of gear, and gelled with only a fraction of it, at small scale. Then that is probably what works best for you: no need to chase what does not fit your preference. Like all other options: it’s fine not to be a hardware person, or an only-one-or-two-hardware person.

PS: finishing tracks only matters if it matters to you. If that is your goal, then pick what works for you to finish tracks. If you enjoy just noodling around, there is nothing wrong with that either.

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If you look at hardware as a guitar, do you enjoy playing guitar or do you enjoy the sound of a guitar? If you do enjoy playing the instrument and not just hearing the sound of it, maybe you connected with those specific pieces of hardware because it either felt like an instrument, or it served as an extension of your purpose i.e. you were able to use it like a longer arm to reach farther with it.

If that’s the case then I think that it says you haven’t found synths or grooveboxes that feel like instruments or maybe you aren’t a guitar player style of musician. The plug and play aspect yes, but the fingering the instrument part maybe not.

If that’s part of the guitar that you do enjoy, maybe look at the parallels between hardware you’ve enjoyed and how it relates to the way that you used it.

It’s certainly possible to make music without hardware but personally, I am least appeased by the arranging paradigm. I prefer to play stuff with mutes or wobble the knobs or whatever just to make some noise with it.

It doesn’t have to be 5 boxes, it can be one or two and I think that the thing is, most people really only have enough focus to competently babysit one instrument at a time and that’s the reason that before advanced hardware controllers, people with non-keyboardist hardware setups mostly focused on “playing the mixer” rather than focusing their attention on tweaking every piece of hardware as part of the “performance”.

This is not to down sell your ability to make actual progress with bitwig or whatever you might choose, and maybe you’re at a different place now than you were when you got into music but I bet if you found the right hardware that felt like you were playing music and not doing math it might change your paradigm of what is important for a piece of hardware for you vs how some (many?) of us are often in search of the ultimate spec sheet.

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it’s all so subjective. but if someone is banging their head on the wall w/hardware then why bother? move on.

i’ve made music in different ways. at times a laptop on a couch for an entire album. other times purely just a eurorack set up. other times, a mix of hardware/software… which is more or less where i live these days. but i think if someone has hardware it’s best to have just a few things and learn them and do it every day and get it set up like a system for making music. shut the brain off to other bits of gear and not search for other bits of kit to “complete” the set up.

use what one has… make tracks… embrace limitations and work arounds for getting there. it’s a good way to learn problem solving/trouble shooting in the studio.

but it is all about workflow and all that… if someone has to battle chasing down bad cables and re-learn the set up because they aren’t able to practice enough then it can be kinda demoralizing.

but, personally, once i got comfortable w/a eurorack work flow and had a better idea of what i was doing i was able to record a ton of music then edit/mix or snip out the bad bits and call it done.

w/software i think people need to do the same thing. set up a template that functions as a system. launch the DAW and go. jam. record, refine, edit, experiment etc.

in the end, it doesn’t matter, just make tracks the way it make sense. don’t close yourself off to anything though.

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I mean there are some very cool midi sequences that can more or less make you whole studio feel like a single unit… for me that was cirklon. only trouble is I wouldn’t ever want to take my whole studio out live. But you also need the free time to actually learn all your gear.

Other wise I agree smaller setups is often a better result. Guy with 4 elektrons out like can probably put in just as good of a show with 2 of them but I suppose likes having more. But yeah I dunno I think 1 sequencer sampler + 84hp of euro is my sweet spot small setup.

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This is very insightful.

I rarely get to use my setup and I got a whole day to use it as much as I wanted yesterday. After I’d got everything working (a cable had gone bad and some MIDI settings had got messed up) I just couldn’t get inspired and realised I wasn’t having fun. Maybe if I was using it daily then it would be a different story.

It’s never second nature ot me it’s always frustration.

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To me, Hardware puts the fun in electronic music making.

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try making a song in ur head

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what kind of music are you making? for techno, i always enjoy the approach of warming up to making tracks by making locked grooves - just really nice loops that can exist nicely for a while and you can play around with a few elements coming in and out over 5-6 mins. once you get a few of those down, you’re already making ‘tracks’ and that confidence will help guide new arrangement choices with hardware and ways of working with your machines.

eventually a natural workflow for you will emerge that will help get you closer to your goals. for me, i jam on hardware a lot, but the stuff i think is really good all gets multitracked into ableton eventually, where i can get a more ‘modern’ sound with tools like multiband compression and the like.

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This is very insightful.

The devices that are just instant music without barriers for me are the Drumbrute Impact, Circuit Tracks, and Donner B1. I know them all backwards and really enjoy them so I think there is a big part of finding stuff that fits with your brain.
I think also understanding that they are for jamming and I’ll never create a track with them will let me focus on enjoying them for what they are.

The Polyend Tracker is also amazing, but strictly standalone. I rarely turn it on without making a track.

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Hardware is very fun, but you need the right pieces. Personally very few of the ones you listed I enjoyed much or would want to own.

I think you have to be really picky about what you are looking for and what you are trying to do, or else it just becomes a big mess of cables and gear that you never learn completely.

If you make dance music, then a good drum machine and a way to record it can be all you need to make complete tracks with, especially if you can sample with it…

Personally I find it really enjoyable to zone out with 1 piece of gear. Sometimes that is just my laptop, or it can be a sampler or drum machine.

Also, it is very important for me to only buy gear that sounds really good and adds a character to the sound that doesn’t need much processing after it’s recorded.

Choose wisely, don’t buy a lot of gear, and learn what you have inside and out. All of my best tracks have been made with 1-2 pieces.

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I have accumulated a fair number of toys over three decades.

But I always use only one device at a time. Maximum two, in a bilateral relationship.

  1. A groovebox, that also works as a collector organiser omnipotent everything machine (m8 op1f octatrack) that can make whole tunes.

  2. A generator (synth, drum machine, etc) that can produce sounds, to record into the groovebox (and be fun to play too).

Huge setups with sync and cables… eurrgh… they give me the fear. Nothing but trouble and troubleshooting.

In the 90s you had to do it that way, with single purpose devices, especially if u couldnt afford an all singing sampler (1k in 1990s money, plus a sequencer, effects…). there was no cheap daw, m8, or Octatrack. Stringing a dozen devices together was full of annoyances then, and it’s still dreadful now.

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For context, and for the joy of trivia, I just checked prices… the mpc3000 came out when I was a student. It was the first serious device with sequencer and long sample length and effects, so you could feasibly do everything in it, like an m8 or octatrack.

It cost £3,000 in 1994 money, that’s £7,500 today.

My string of half arsed studio devices in the 90s, that I could get by on, and have fun, but with endless troubleshooting and sync woes and ground loops… cost nothing even slightly approaching that.

Modern omnipotent grooveboxes are a wonder. I’d never choose to go back to ground loop spaghetti.

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It seems to be very governed by the hardware rather than whatever I’m trying to do.

With the Polyend Tracker it seems to be trip hop type stuff.
With the Drumbrute / B1 it’s retro Acid old school Techo / House type stuff, but that’s really driven by the equipment.

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It’s like making a film, you go shoot footage. But if all you do is shoot footage are you really a film maker? You have to move to the finishing part, the editing, to complete the process.

Unless you do it all live, which can be the benefit of hardware. But then you need to get organised, organise your sounds, the playspace you’ll work in for a certain track, then you need to get better at improvising a whole track out.

Things take time, practice makes perfect. A lot of people stop learning guitar after learning a few chords and a few covers, but if you stick at it, you might uncover your own style, methods and approach.

Make your next goal finishing one track. That’ll show you that process and what you need to do next time or what you might change. But get used to the feeling of the whole process, rather than just stopping at shooting footage.

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as long as you know yourself just follow your musical heart, to not do so is the only wrong answer.

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Yeah, I think that’s basically me.

One arranger / brain + some kind of noise making box is probably the sweet spot for me.

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i totally get that. i know for myself, i wouldn’t be able to be productive like that though. for me to actually go through the motions of ‘finishing a track’, i need a very clear aesthetic and emotional direction, with a clear idea of the labels i might like to release it on if it makes it that far. without that, there would be too many possible directions to go in in any moment, and i would get lost in the sauce so to speak. this kind of focus also lets me get a bit more explorative in sound design, as whatever sounds will immediately be obvious if they fit or don’t fit within the framework and emotion im striving for.

also, for me there has to be a strong sense of inner truth in the style of music to allow me to go through the whole process in a somewhat unbroken flow state. i love electro, and would love to make some electro tracks, but i can feel that my sense of truth in that lane isn’t strong enough for me to actually see the process through… for now