The music-makers

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy

I have posted previously on the subject of songwriting, in the course of which ramblings I have made reference to my ‘home studio’. There was a point at which this facility took the form of a separate room filled with an accumulation of arcane items of musical and recording equipment acquired over several decades. All that remains now is a single keyboard and a computer tucked away in the corner of a bedroom – though you will not be surprised to hear that in power and capability this humble setup outperforms its predecessors many times over.

The keyboard – the only item that remains from the studio’s previous incarnation – is the venerable and iconic Korg M1, one of the very first Music Workstations. Featuring the now almost ubiquitous ‘sampling and synthesis’ sound generation technique to create a high quality audio palette the likes of which had not previously been heard, the Korg M1 was only produced for a 6 year period from 1988 to 1994, but examples of the breed can still be seen – and heard – in use throughout the music business. In one of those ‘eureka’ moments I heard a demo sequence being played on one of these beasts in a music shop one day in the summer of 1988. I had to have one!

By modern standards – of course – the M1 seems somewhat crude and limited. It could, for example, play only 16 concurrent notes – and considerably less if these featured layered or complex sounds. I now use the M1 purely as a keyboard controller to input notes to the computer. The sounds themselves live on, however, since both the M1 and its successor – the Korg Wavestation – along with all of the additional sounds originally found on extension cards, are available as a ‘virtual instrument’ software package for the computer.

The computer itself is the motivation for this post – or to be more accurate, the software that runs on it is such. Back in the 1970s when I was playing in bands the only way to create a permanent record of a song was to hire a studio – by the hour – for as long as it took to get the piece down on tape. As we had very little money and studio time was not cheap we became accustomed to working quickly and dirtily. When the first relatively inexpensive 4 track cassette recorder – the Portastudio – became available in 1979 I was one of the first in the queue. This little device revolutionised home recording and – though the quality was average at best and deteriorated rapidly if tracks were ‘bounced down’ to create more space – I used it extensively for the next two decades.

When, however – following the dictat of Moore’s Law – home computers finally became powerful enough to handle digital recording I quite naturally hurried to investigate the emerging software packages that would turn the machine into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). Over the years since I have tried most of the leading contenders but was not – until relatively recently – content that I had found a package that had been truly designed with the musician in mind rather than the computer geek! The solution on which I finally settled in 2007 – Tracktion – has one of the simplest and most intuitive interfaces I have encountered, based on a workflow that mirrors the way that I record music.

Almost inevitably things turned out not to be quite as straightforward as I would have hoped.

Tracktion was designed and created by an English developer, but had been taken up and marketed by a large American musical equipment manufacturer. Around the time that I purchased my copy this manufacturer lost interest in the product, suspended further development and stopped fixing bugs and responding to customer support requests. The software still worked – of course – but would clearly become more and more outdated as time passed. Faced with the prospect of having to start all over again – and probably of having to settle for something I considered inferior – I decided to grit my teeth and to stick with the package anyway. Regardless of these limitations the software has since served me well.

I don’t know what induced me, then – just the other day – to browse the InterWebNet for titbits on my favourite music production software, but I was in for a most pleasant surprise. The original developer- Julian Storer – had set up a new company, purchased back the rights to his creation and re-commenced development work after a 6 year lull. Hooray! Naturally I immediately upgraded my setup to the new version.

This news fills me with a warm glow and I wish the company every success. It is good to have them back.