You
don't need forty-eight tracks and forty-eight grand to make a
dance record--just a home computer. And, say masters of homemade
techno Orbital, you don't really need the computer either.
By Phil and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital
Some people imagine that to make electronic music at home you
need a Ph.D., a computer big enough to coordinate Desert Storm,
and loads of money to spend on more and more new technology. They're
wrong. There would never have been an explosion in dance music
and techno if it were so expensive to make. And we would certainly
never have been able to do it: In 1989, when we made our first
single as Orbital, Paul was still working in a pizza joint and
Phil was working on a building site. We made do with the cheap
equipment that we'd gathered over the years, and the record, "Chime,"
got in the top twenty partly because it didn't sound like it had
cost a fortune. In that respect, electronic music is a little
like garage punk: You use what you've got to get what you want.
We never expected that we'd end up playing places like the Glastonbury
festival, or remixing Madonna. We only wanted to make music like
the early Detroit techno records. But even though we're seven
years and four albums down the line, our methods haven't changed
that much. Here are a few things we've learned along the way.
Your basic kit: There are as many combinations of equipment
as there are different kinds of dance music, but you're always
going to need the boxes that make the noise and something to record
it all on. A good, flexible sampler with a built in synthesizer
can do the jobs of several (costly) individual items of equipment.
It can create and manipulate sounds; it can double as a drum machine,
by grabbing looped beats or individual drum sounds; it can snip
out that vocal sample of Martin Luther King to give your house
record some atmosphere; and best of all, if it's got a quantize
function, it can correct your dodgy keyboard playing.
Names to look for: We recommend the old, discontinued Emax
samplers: They're very cheap, and they have a synthesizer in them
as well as a sampler, so you don't need a separate synth. (We
did our whole first album on old Emax IIs.) Akai samplers like
the S1000 or S900 are good too, although you have less freedom
with the sounds. Any Esoniq sampler will also do you fine, but
avoid the Mirage--it's too old, and its tiny memory means your
concentration will be interrupted by constant disc changes. Most
sampler modules don't come with a keyboard, and you'll need one
to play them. Again, you can use a cheap synthesizer as your keyboard,
like the Casio VZ-1 or the Yamaha DX11 (Mike Paradinas, a.k.a.
µ-ziq, uses one), and you can never have too many sounds to play
with.
Don't get hung up on computers :It's handy if you've already
got a Macintosh or a PC; it will be able to control a lot of sequencers,
the machines that play a preprogrammed series of notes. We've
often used an Atari 1040ST computer, and software packages like
C-Lab Creator (now called Emagic Logic) or Cubase are easy to
learn. But a computer is by no means necessary. For the cost of
a middling Macintosh--which will probably need memory upgrades--you
can get all kinds of inexpensive, versatile samplers and sequencers.
Shop around for cheap gear: With synthesizers, older is
better. Vintage synths are full of lovely analog filters, which
have a warmth and fluidity that new digital machines don't. That's
where people like the Aphex Twin get their signature sounds. Secondhand
shops can be great sources for four-track home studios (remember
what the Beastie Boys said: Check your heads) and for effects.
Reverb, delay, flange, and dozens of other treatments will give
your sounds more life and presence, but you don't need to buy
expensive digital effects setup when you can get cheap guitar
pedals and abuse them horribly. Everyone loved the spacey fee
on "Chime," and only we knew that it came from a single dodgy
Boss guitar delay pedal.
Enjoy yourself: Do what you want to do--that's all we've
ever done. If you're self-conscious about fitting in with trip-hop
or Goa trance or jungle, it'll show. Just try to make the music
you want to hear, and if that means imitating Toddy Terry or Aphex,
that's fine. You'll almost certainly come up with something original
by mistake.
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