Getting Into The Groove

During my high-school years I got pretty obsessed with a type of music that, in the 70s, didn't quite have a name yet. Musicians like Mike Oldfield (who used multi-track recording equipment to play every instrument on his albums himself) and Jean-Michel Jarre (with his analog synths at the time) captured my imagination and fed my fascination at the intersection of technology and art. Other such artists followed and I drank at that fountain, slowly realising not all of it was necessarily good, but also that it slowly became more common, and easy, to produce music alone, in one's bedroom, with some computer equipment and a MIDI-equipped keyboard.

Fast forward to today and it's amazing what one can achieve with a very limited budget and some curiosity. Talent is of course not a given, but that's less important if all you're looking for is scratching an itch rather than getting famous.

My own "gateway drug" into this world (other than many years ago starting to play with the free and very capable Garageband on MacOS and iOS) was Native Instruments' Komplete Kontrol M32 (approx €129/$120). With such a tool and any somewhat up to date computer running Windows or Mac, the sky is the limit....well, your talent is your limit. But as I said, I'm only scratching an itch here, so for now, I'll just enjoy the "scratching" and I promise not to foist (too much of) it on the outside world

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