Making electronic music without using computer

Hello all,

This is my first post on steemit and I would like to share my experience about how making electronic music without a computer can bring a lot of creativity and freedom in your music.

As most of the electronic music fans out there, we have all dreamed of making the hit electronic music just by installing the latest music software with plenty of virtual instruments, drum kits, sequencers and a lot of automation.

Hope that this music intro will be the start of my first album

The truth is that for many years, I've been trying to create simple electronic music but failed. I'm a computer geek and have been working as a linux sysadmin for many years and said :

"Well, I sure do know computers and making music with it should be a very easy task" .

How wrong was I...

Some people without being a computer geek can use extremely well computers to easily replace their artistic tools, doing a piece of art only using paint is not at everyone's reach and it's the same for music. I've been installing dozens of music , beat making and effects processors software but never managed to do anything that I could call music. However I've learned a lot about sound design with Puredata and being experimenting with it whenever I got time. Additive, subtractive, FM, ADSR started making sense to me

Then one day, while traveling to Ho Chi Ming City, Vietnam for work, I saw a grey box with lot of knobs in a music shop near to my office. It was written : KORG VOLCA BASS on it ! I new korg but never heard of volca series. After a quick youtube search, my mind was blown by the capacity of this little device and how easy it was for some people to create nice tunes and fat sound that I've never heard before. I then get mine soon and started to play with it. Having so many knobs that changed completely the sound was so amazing !! No need to care about booting the OS, click and right-clicks and annoying pop-ups. This was actually the start of a very nice journey for me in music creation !

Soon, the Volca beats joined the family and I bought a cheap Chinese mixer to get all those sounds together and add some delays. Then comes : Let the house be acid, my first electronic music composition.

My first electronic music : Let the house be acid

I was so excited that I managed to do in 1 week what i never managed to do for years ! My first electronic music :) It's quite basic but was at least a completed project.

Then, Korg MS 20 mini joined and is still my favorite synth. It kinda brings Puredata like capabilities in the physical world and is so powerful and flexible. Soon after, I created a new song inspired by cyberpunks themes :

The Alley, cyberpunk inspired

Recordings of those songs were done using physical recorders like BOSS BR-1120 and BR-800. Unfortunately, I had to use a desktop computer to upload them on the internet.

Having played with hardware synths have greatly opened my mind on music creation and gives a lot of freedom and uniqueness to my music. Sometimes you'll create sounds by mistakes as your fingers will touch some knobs but those sounds may be what you need to create this wow effect in your compositions. We are really blessed that most major synths manufacturing companies like KORG, ROLAND and others are following the trend of relaunching or creating hardware synths at much lower prices than it was 30 years ago.

I really encourage everyone out there struggling to make some basic tunes to start with hardware equipment. Korg volca series are very good examples of such equipment providing a quick jump to electronic music creation world. You'll surely need to save some money to make your dreams come true but I can guarantee that you won't regret it. Nothing is more awesome than making electronic music in such an interacting process of turning knobs, changing sequences pattern, modifying filters etc.

See you soon for more music related posts !

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