Every note on this site is made by a human, on real gear, usually late at night. Here's the proof: the machines, the messy sessions behind each track, and tips if you want to start making music too.
🥋 Proud member of the Synthwave Dojo community: a dojo where the black belts are patch cables and nobody judges your first 400 bad loops. Synthwave Dojo · YouTube
Arturia · Synthesizer
Leads, basses and the weird noises
A small synth with a big personality: digital oscillators (wavetables, physical models, noise engines and more) running through an analog filter, played on a flat touch-sensitive keyboard that feels like a 90s calculator.
Why it’s great for beginners: one knob per job. Turn the filter cutoff and you hear what a filter does. The built-in sequencer lets you make a riff without being able to play keys.
Korg · Drum synthesizer
Kicks, snares, clanks and toms
A pocket-sized drum machine that doesn’t play samples: every hit is synthesized from scratch, across six parts and a 16-step sequencer. A built-in resonator turns simple hits into metallic, bouncy, very un-boring percussion.
Why it’s great for beginners: it runs on batteries, has a speaker, and you can program a beat in about a minute by pressing step buttons.
Novation · Groovebox
The brain: sequencing, drums and sketching ideas
A battery-powered groovebox with two synth tracks, four drum tracks and two MIDI tracks that can play your other gear. The light-up grid makes patterns easy to see, which makes it a great sketchpad for ideas away from the computer.
Why it’s great for beginners: it’s a whole song-making studio in one box, and it can act as the “conductor” that keeps your other gear in time.
Native Instruments · MIDI keyboard
Playing everything that lives inside the computer
The big one at the top of the desk. It doesn’t make a sound on its own: it plays the software instruments in Ableton, with a screen and eight knobs so you can tweak sounds without squinting at the laptop. The row of lights above the keys shows things like key and scale, which is basically cheating, and I’m fine with that.
Why it’s great for beginners: with a keyboard like this, one laptop full of software instruments becomes a whole studio. Note: any cheap MIDI keyboard does the same basic job, so start small and upgrade when your fingers ask for it.
Ableton · DAW (music software)
Recording, arranging, mixing and finishing
Where the jams turn into songs. Hardware jams get recorded in, then arranged, mixed and finished. Ableton’s project files are also the best receipts that a track was made by a person: every edit, every take, every mistake.
Why it’s great for beginners: the cheaper Intro edition (and the free trial) is plenty to start, and Session View works like a giant clip launcher, close to how grooveboxes think.
The camera's charging. First making-of sessions coming soon!
Two years ago I didn't know what a filter envelope was. These are the first experiments, posted here as evidence that everyone starts somewhere and that somewhere is usually 'mostly reverb'.
How to turn an 8-bar loop you love into an actual finished song.
The four-on-the-floor starter: where to put the kick, snare and hi-hats on any 16-step drum machine.
Oscillator, filter, resonance, envelope, LFO: the five ideas behind nearly every synth sound, with the MicroFreak as the example.
Getting a groovebox, a synth and a drum machine to play in time together, without tears.
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