I only have an Analog Four Mk1 and am finding it exhilarating that there are so many endless possibilities - yet of course it only has four tracks.
My main issue is when I see some of
my idols’ studios Thievery Corporation, Jon Hopkins, Biosphere etc their studios seem enormous with what appears thousands of pounds worth of kit. I guess I feel overwhelmed as my only ambition is to have the odd track ‘published’ or used on a DJ mix - so to do this would I need all of this bundles of equipment or could I just achieve my aims with a couple of pieces?
Use what you have until you feel you’ve exhausted the possibilities.
Push it further so that you find workarounds that fit your needs.
Finish tracks, as many as you can.
Educate yourself reading e.g. Mike Senior’s Mixing Secrets.
Get a decent pair of monitoring, know how to avoid unheard frequencies.
Treat your room.
You don’t need a wall of equipment, A4 can do plenty enough…
Best example might be @lingouf that created a whole amazing album with A4 only:
Porter Robinson and Madeon launched their careers with tracks completely entirely ITB using keyboard & mouse on a piano roll with built-in plugins in FL Studio.
You will find the more gear you acquire, the less music you make. At least that’s my experience.
The concept of The Toolbox Fallacy will explain this further.
Your monitoring system always have a limit to the low frequencies you can hear.
Using a high pass filter to remove the frequencies bellow (the one you can’t hear) has been a huge discovery, to me.
How do you approach this in practice?
I mean do you have rule of thumb for this or a plug-in to find these things out depending on the track and instrumentation in question?
I use a resonating filter, basically a sine wave, identify the lowest frequency I can hear in my room, and everything bellow gets cut. Pretty simple in reality.
A couple of years ago I bought a subwoofer to go lower in the frequencies, it’s good to have a clearer mix, I found. But the Adam A8X already go low enough to my taste.
Most started with a few pieces of gear and as their craft (fame) expanded so does the gear. Still you may find most do not use all the gear they have acquired on every release. It really depends on the project and goal. For instance Ulrich Schnauss (one of my favs) is a good example. In addition (according to interviews) he acquired many of the Analog keys when folks were dumping them for Digital. Use what you have and have fun. If you need to expand do it slowly as needed. To much to soon will generally stifle your creativity.
Wasn’t some of the best music done with very little equipment? From underground rock to Basic Channel, lots and lots of great music was done with not too much. Or as BLAWAN puts it interestingly in the great Thomann session video: the less modules he uses, the more complex his music gets.
It sounds like you are suffering from acute aspirational social media disorder. Buying more gear will likely only aggravate the symptoms. Your only option is to reduce your internet usage to 1 hour a day and to present an offering to your Brian Eno effigy (assuming you have one, if not I can provide details how to make one with discarded objects commonly found around the house) daily, something simple yet flawed, like a single slice of burnt toast or a corrupted sd card.
People who have a lot of gear doesn’t necessarily make a lot of music, and it’s the same with people who don’t have a lot.
My view is that a room full of stuff is for the people who’ve “made it” in some way, living of their music. Not using everything all the time, but having an idea of what you want to do and knowing there’s a synth or drummachine that is good for that certain thing. Kind of like plug-ins, but with a higher cost.
I can say that after getting an AR and A4, my music sounds a lot worse. I don’t like the disconnect with using OB, but that could probably be learned. So I’m actually considering selling them both to buy a better laptop, since mine really starts showing it’s age when producing.
