If you look at the music technology press, or listen to the many music tech influencers on Instagram and YouTube, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s impossible to make good music without having all the latest expensive gear in your studio.
But the reality is that good music comes from great ideas, not from having your pick of the current crop of flash gear and instruments.
That’s a concept that I’m keen to promote with the release of ‘Techno Relics’, my new album on Bandcamp.
From hardware heaven to iPad music
Back in the 90s and early noughties, I had a modest hardware music studio set-up.
My room was full of computers, hardware samplers, synths, drum machines, reverb units and effects pedals, all joined together with an increasing tangle of wires, chargers and power supplies.
That set-up made some great sounds, and it was the studio I used when partnering with Black Dog Productions on their ‘Unsavoury Products’ album with Black Sifichi.
These hardware tools gave me the foundations for creating some amazing tracks, using Cubase on a rather underpowered PC to run the software side of things. But having a bedroom full of wires and outboard gear eventually became less of a priority and most of it was sold, lent or discarded over the years.
Fast forward to 2014 and I’ve got a ‘proper job’ as a content writer, and have very little musical gear at all. But I do have an iPad and in February of this year the Japanese musical instrument manufacturer, Korg, brings out Gadget.
Gadget is an iPad app that has a huge choice of different software ‘instruments’, allowing you to create an entire hardware-style studio set-up, but all within your iPad. So, instead of having a room entirely full of boxes and cables, I now can make music with just a tablet. Pretty cool, at the time – and having the Gadget app allowed me to tinker with musical ideas whenever I had a spare bit of downtime.
So, I tinkered and tweaked and played around with Gadget and tried to master it’s somewhat clunky song mode. And, eventually, I managed to create entire compositions just with Gadget, without a patch cable or bulky power supply in sight!
Techno Relics: collecting together those Gadget tracks
Fast forward again to 2024…I’ve just created my first Bandcamp page and have released an album of instrumental electronica and laidback techno called ‘Ultra Communication’ – this time made almost exclusively with the sounds from GarageBand and Arturia’s Analog Lab soft synth.
That’s when I remember all the unrecorded and unreleased Gadget tracks and decide it’s high time that they saw the light of day. So, ‘Techno Relics’ is created, collecting together all the best iPad tracks I wrote and recorded between 2014 and 2024.
It’s a mix of uptempo electronica, Berlin techno, chilled ambient techno and four-on-the-floor dancefloor fillers. And, I don’t think you’d ever know the entire album was produced using just Gadget and an iPad.
I may not have had a huge studio of analog gear, brand-new digital keyboards and high-end software tools. But I did have some ideas and the musical know-how I picked up back in the 90s and noughties when struggling with Cubase and a load of tweakable hardware synths and samplers.
So, if you like your music electronic, experimental, melodic and chilled out, take a listen to Techno Relics. It’s not the most polished album in the world, but I think it has a charm of its own due to those humble iPad beginnings.
Listen to Techno Relics on Bandcamp
Dip into Techno Relics and let me know your favourite tracks in the comments
Please do follow me on Bandcamp, so you get to hear about my new releases. And if you like the album, I’d love you to buy it and get a full digital download and unlimited streaming of all the tracks.
Enjoy!
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