Timbre, tone, the way those move over time, the ways sound components can be modulated, unpredictability or instability of circuitry, dimensionality/body/weight, tactile feel, workflow, fun/play/exploration, intangibilities/spiritual harmonies/ecstatic experiences, different gear working together in a single ecosystem, and in what ways and how they add up to more than their individual parts when integrated, theories and principles of sound design whether arcane and exclusive to you or widely shared - to the extent that all of these are a function of “equipment”, then equipment matters. That’s not to say you have to go down a rabbithole or spend enough to mortgage a house, but if you care about sound, dynamics, song creation, or anything of the sort, or even why music is meaningful to you and what the greatest music you’ve heard does and how it does it and how to work from your inspirations, then these are things to think about
i see art (and music in particular, being the most abstract and ineffable of art forms) as basically the only credible magic in the world - no matter how much it can be explained and dissected down to its bare bones, there are still atomic elements that resist it and still make me feel like a little kid filled with wonder and awe. i’ll chase that wonder and awe whether i share my results with a single soul or not - the creation itself is a worthy thing, maybe the most worthy thing short of the biggest stuff like (speaking entirely personally here) creating a human life and raising it
from this point of view, right gear for me is underestimated gear.
like Novation Nova Laptop or Blofeld.
so people outside the western world, like me, can buy it for reasonable prices )
Because we change.
As does the music and the culture.
And one more thing.
No offence but the fact that there are so many instruments already mass-produced does not say anything about the quality of these instruments. Nor about finding a creative connection with one of these.
Processes matter. Things do not. A piece of equipment, as a thing by itself, doesn’t matter at all - unless its subsumed by a process; then it assumes some importance, but really it’s the process that counts.
Never heard these before. Thanks for sharing. Usually I’m slightly ambivalent about Autechre, especially their more experimental works, but these are more accessible and f’ing gorgeous to me. Only the RY30… damn.
oh, i suspected that you’re talking about using cubase 1 on atari.
i see i was right
actually, early versions of cubase were superior. (not used 1 or 2 myself, i started with 3.0).
anyway, i dislike generic operating systems for realtime application. all of them are unreliable. that’s why i prefer hardware solutions (i mean, with specialized OSes inside).
because maintaining my own linux distro (yes, i’ve built one for using on stage) is time consuming, and it’s still not that rock solid as specialised OSes. so i’d better spend this time jamming, drumming, etc.
(yes, really) to run some abandonware.
and in Logic.