Feature | Lose the laptop
Computers are brilliant creative tools, but there can be real freedom found in stepping away from the screen. This issue, let’s explore the hows and whys of creating a production setup that puts less emphasis on a traditional DAW…
The advent of cheap, powerful personal computers utterly revolutionised music making. Even as electronic music gear became more affordable on the secondhand market throughout the 1980s, the act of actually recording and releasing music still required inaccessibly expensive studio gear. Sure, the likes of Tascam’s Portastudio allowed musicians to make rough, lo-fi recordings at home, but it’s been the advancement of software DAWs and plugins that has truly made music-making accessible to DIY musicians.
That trend has really accelerated in the 21st century. On the music making front, even free or budget DAWs now contain pretty much all a budding producer needs to record, create and mix full tracks, and a mid-spec laptop can emulate the capabilities of a fully-equipped pro studio. What’s more, music making software has escaped the confines of computers to sit on portable devices like phones and tablets, allowing truly go-anywhere creativity.
Interestingly though, all of this advancement has also led to a trend in the opposite direction, as a subset of electronic producers raised in an age of DAWs, plugins and controllers look to de-emphasise or completely remove the computer from their music making.
To see this in action, we only have to look at the changing state of Akai’s MPC line. The original MPCs of the late ’80s and ’90s were the quintessential hands-on production tools – allowing budding beatmakers to not only sample and layer a variety of sounds, but to actively play them, jamming with the hardware like a real instrument. By the late-’00s, however, the MPCs were looking outdated, and were soon overshadowed by the slick, software-based setup of Native Instruments’ Maschine.
Within a decade, however – in which Akai released a number of decent, if forgettable controller versions of the MPC – the range veered back towards standalone capabilities with 2017’s MPC Live. Far from being a one off, that MPC has laid the blueprint for the whole range. Akai’s move no doubt inspired NI to develop the similarly CPUequipped Maschine+ and, most recently, Ableton has followed suit with its new standalone Push.
Simultaneously, the notably retro approach of CV-based sequencing has had a major revival, thanks to gear like Arturia’s Beat- and KeyStep lines and the abundance of modular and semi-modular gear on the modern synth market.
Taken in combination, it means that, more so than at any other time since the turn of the millenium, there are a multitude of op
