It’s really a pleasure to be one of the pilot members of Noisepages.com. When I first spoke with Peter Kirn about the core ideas around the site I was sold on it immediately. Being a musician (first) and an internet marketer (second) I’ve always felt the need for a truly useful community driven site around digital music-making and I really believe this could be it.
As far as the topics of my future posts, I will be writing about my neverending quest for the perfect digital music creation setup. I say it’s neverending because as an ADD-stricken musician living in this day in time it is nearly impossible to maintian a consistent rig without wondering how to improve it. With new plugins, sequencers, controllers, interfaces, etc, etc being introduced every day it can be overwhelming to take it all in. And incorporating these things into a setup in a way that is actually playable and useful can be a full time job.
I hope that my constant research and trial and error will lead readers to an improved workflow and better music – that’s the goal here after all!
FYI here is a list of all the pieces that make up my digital music creation setup. My posts will mention specific pieces of hardware or software, but the principals can apply to most setups
Hardware
- MacBook – 2ghz Dual Core, Leopard. A relatively new convert from the PC world. I’m really loving my MAC for music making but it is still not without its share of issues
- MOTU Traveler – used a ton of interfaces over the years, think this is one I’m actually going to stick with
- Korg Padkontrol – my wannabe MPC controller
- Emu X-board – 49 key keyboard controller
- Behringer FCB1010 – handy footpedal controller
- Behringer BCR2000 – a newer addition but probably my most used controller. Best $120 ever spent
Software
- Ableton Live – I’ve gone through almost every other sequencer over the years (Cubase, Logic, Pro Tools, N-Track, Acid Pro) and have found this to be the simplest and most conducive to making music easliy. Also I’ve been slowly dropping all my 3rd party plugins and using almost all Ableton fx. Runs so smooth and it’s much easier to midi-map them
- Midipipe – to route all my midi controllers, easier than programming the hardware every time I want to make a change to a MIDI message
- Kontakt 2 – I’ve been between this and Live’s drum rack as my go-to sampler
- Reaktor – I love the synth sounds on this. Super flexible. Like having 1,000 plugins
- Various other plugins – I’m always experimenting with misc other plugins. I’ll get into this in the blog posts
