Why you should start with hardware

Quote: HaveItAll Originally Posted by The first toe in the water for anyone perhaps should be low cost software. See if you like creating music. Once you start buying hardware you commit down a road of purchase mistakes, all the additional purchases for a working setup and perhaps a slap in the face about your actual creative abilities. All while draining your wallet. And still has nothing to do with whether you are having fun with the toys.

Oh, I strongly disagree (and this is a more general point than specific pieces of hardware). Certainly you can try some software to get your feet wet - there's lots of free or 90-day trial stuff around, or if you have an iPad as so many people do nowadays there are many great selections there too (plus a few on Android, notably Caustic). And course there are lots of good MIDI controllers available that come with Live Lite and a selection of loops to get going. These too are very capable and affordable approaches.But there's one key problem with software, and it's why I prefer working OTB these days even though it's not always as productive: the feeling - heavily promoted by manufacturers - that Everything Is Possible. And in many ways, that's a fair claim to make; while Live Lite or Reason Essentials or Veggie Loops won't auto-generate the massive EDM drops you know you craveeven the starter software available these days is generally more powerful than the state of the art of 10-15 years ago; you no longer need to waste time on things like matching loop BPMs and the a typical laptop CPU won't start to overheat when you have more than 5 or 6 tracks going. Just grab a copy of 'Well Hard DubTrap Stepper loops,' tune your kicks, and you too can be the next Monapello, with young things of your preferred gender and sexual orientation writhing at your feet while delighted promoters shower you with wads of hot sticky cash.I'm not having a go at the state of EDM here; well OK a little bit, but my point is that if you do have a good feel for what people want to dance to then turning your musical concept into a releasable track is more achievable than it's ever been and the only limiting factors are your ability and the time you want to put in. There are great free softsynths and tools, and if you don't get the particular sound you want immediately then you can certainly do so by layering things. Indeed, if you know what you want then too deep a knowledge of synthesis can be a disadvantage, because synthesis is all about noodling around exploring parameter space rather than cranking out the tunes. And you don't mind working with somewhat-limited software because what itdo is so amazing these days that you don't miss the Super-Duper-Algorithms that come with the Pro version because you never had them.However, if you don't know exactly what you want, then you can get a bit lost in All! The! Amazing! Possibilities! Because when you have infinite tracks in your DAW etc. etc., there's a mental cost in trying decide which of the zillion options to select and how many different patterns your track needs to have and so on. This is often referred to as the 'Tyranny of Choice' and well summed up in this article , which I strongly recommend reading. In the terminology of the article, some of us are 'maximizers' who want to achieve the best-sounding result, others are 'satisfiers' who are quite content with something that's 'good enough' and want to get on with their lives. I'm a maximizer by nature, and so are a lot of other gear sluts. If you are the sort of person who obsesses over specs and lies awake at night trying to decide between the polyphony of synth X vs. the number of synthesis parameters on synth Y, then so are you. Satisfiers, on the other hand, are those people who put out records that 'you could have done yourself' and which don't sound especially remarkable, but which nevertheless got finished and released while you were inching towards perfection and never being satisfied with what you were working on. A lot of classic dance tracks were put out by Satisfiers who found a nice groove on some cheap gear and just hit record on everything. a contemporary example is Perc - see this interview and observe his extremely basic gear setup and correspondingly straightforward-but-actually-released-unlike-your-stuff music.This si why the limitations of hardware often serve as a spur to creativity - you can't do everything, and many of your decisions are heavily constrained by the limitations that you're working within. Where are limits, you are much more inclined to push up against them or subvert them or exploit them for aesthetic effect; where there are none, you risk falling into a perpetual state of mild dissatisfaction...because when you can do 'anything,' you're continually second-guessing your own creative decisions. Thus, I think that working with simple affordable hardware boxes is a far better way to get started, because there is not too much to learn and you can focus on making simpler aesthetic decisions. I do not agree about 'going down a road of purchase mistakes.' I have not liked every piece of hardware I have ever bought or necessarily seen a productivity improvement, but I would not class many of them as 'purchase mistakes' - I had a reason for making the purchase and I learned something through doing so. I can only think of one purchase I ever really regretted out of some 50ish audio equipment purchases over the years, and I brought that back to the store within a couple of days and went for something better.The other thing about buying hardware near the outset is that you also start making decisions about where and how you use it in a way that you don't with software. If you buy a Korg Volca or something, the technical shortcomings are more than offset by the fact that you can use it on the bus, at the beach, or wherever you like to go. Likewise communing with a Minibrute or something is a wholly different experience from loading up a plugin that's orders of magnitude more 'powerful.' If you don't have the capability or inclination to multitrack recordings and build up your arrangement in a DAW, you can explore a very different but equally valid approach to mixing and composition by having your gear plugged into a single mixer (or different pieces of gear plugged into each other) and just recording a stereo copy of whatever is coming through your monitors. Yes, you need some extra stuff, starting with audio and possibly MIDI cables! But figuring out the physical connections is the best way to understand the signal flowyour gear.It won't always be plain sailing. When I got my first piece of hardware, a Yamaha CS1x, the maual was not that great and some of the concepts were not very obvious. I remember sitting on my floor literally crying with frustration at my inability to figure out LFOs and how to make the sound 'move.'But the great thing about the current crop of small analogs and analog-styled machines like the Roland Aira range is that while they're limited in terms of digital features, pattern storage, and in-depth programmability, you'll learn an awful lot faster by exploring the healthy variety of knobs on their front panels, rather than digging into menus or only changing one parameter at a time on screen with a mouse.Buy the first piece of affordable gear that you try in a store and makes you feel excited - go for it. And when you run against it's limitations, fight them, because you can always make it do more. But that feeling of excitement can't easily be replaced. Don't worry about making the best possible choice - trust your instincts, because they are the root of your creativity.