I’ve always been more of a hardware guy, mostly because as that’s all you could be if you were trying to make music in the late 80s! Sure I was a computer nerd and I did try to make music on my Amiga, but it wasn’t until I got my hands on an analog synth that I felt the true excitement of making music!
I’m also a firm believer that you must continue to challenge yourself to learn new things, especially when you’re at the thirty-year mark of your career! With that in mind, let’s rewind to April 2020 when I started to realize I had time on my hands and an important decision to make.
I knew that I wanted to immerse myself in the studio and use this time to find a new creative process. Although my first instinct was to plug in all the latest hardware devices and continue with all the Eurorack modules from the CLOSE live show, I decided I needed to go in a different direction.
For the first 8 weeks I actually did build an intricate setup of hardware, experimenting with AD/DA conversions, midi, sync & gate timing options and all the latest (and vintage) components. However, this was more to remind myself of what I liked (and disliked) about this type of sound & workflow. The actual goal of this exercise was to take all these insights and bring them successfully into a fully digital setup.
Of course I had used digital setups before as @plastikman CLOSER had been mixed inside of
@avid.protools and EX within
@ableton - However, I never felt like I had found the right environment for me to take things further digitally. That changed this past year as I dedicated a lot of time to learning
@bitwig - An intuitive DAW that goes beyond everything else in the depth of its built-in modulation routings and access to the Grid, where you can interact with the fundamental components of the Bitwig architecture.
This is NOT a paid promotion for Bitwig, just an update with what I’ve personally discovered after a year long investigation into what works for me. As I’ve said many times before, a fundamental part of making electronic music is developing your own setup, one that allows you to be yourself, to create, to be spontaneous and to capture your own unique style.