Making music for the fiscally challenged By Gary Walker (Defeat)

Making music for the fiscally challenged - a case for using "freebies" By Gary Walker (Defeat)

To many (i.e. most) of us electronic musicians, I suspect that cost is one of major factors that governs the gear we buy and the software and plug-ins we use.

To borrow a phrase from Family Guy's Peter Griffin, what really "grinds my gears" is that some folk out there (usually "pros" who wouldn't think twice about dropping a ton of cash for a Macbook pro or a very expensive suite of plug-ins) still think that for serious music making you need to spend serious amounts of money and use serious gear, hand-made by nymphs and delivered via unicorn.

OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but the cost of some gear is frankly beyond the reach of most of us mere mortals who have day-jobs and families to support and don't have the luxury of making a living from making music.

The point I'm trying to make is this: for a long time, I've beaten myself up that I'm not using Kontakt, Nexus, or whatever the current VST-du-jour is.

After agonizing over the fact I may not be using the "right" synth for a bass part or the wrong drum plug-in, I'm now at the point now where I actually no longer care and I tend to use free VSTs alongside those that are part of my DAW.

This is not to say I'm the modern embodiment of Ebeneezer Scrooge - far from it - I've found that ploughing my own furrow this way has allowed me to find my own sound, rather than sound like “everyone else". It has also forced me to be more creative and experiment, and I find myself creating my own sounds from scratch rather than relying on presets.

There is a lot of great free stuff out there to be found for us impoverished musicians to use, so I urge all of my fellow musicians to see what free treasures you can unearth and use on your next masterpiece - seek and ye shall find!

Thanks to Gary for his thoughts!

For those of you that haven't checked out Gary's act 'Defeat' yet, check this out!

Defeat's Outburst EP and their free to download Remix album can be found here!

Is 'Industrial' relevant?

Industrial as a 'genre' has always been problematic for me, as its always been a bit of a fluffy term.

What exactly IS Industrial?

What links VNV Nation, Combichrist, Skinny Puppy, Covenant, Hocico, Ministry and Apoptygma Bezerk so that they can exist alongside each other?

Wikipedia (the wonderfully informative and unreliable source that it is) describes Industrial Music as:

"Industrial music is a style of experimental music that draws on transgressive and provocative themes..."

and later continues:

"While the term was initially self-applied by a small coterie of groups and individuals associated with Industrial Records in the 1970s, it broadened to include artists influenced by the original movement or using an "industrial" aesthetic.^[3] These artists expanded the genre by pushing it into noisier and more electronic directions. Over time, its influence spread into and blended with styles including ambient and rock, all of which now fall under the post-industrial music label. The most notable hybrid genres were industrial rock and industrial metal, which include bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, both of which released platinum-selling albums in the 1990s. Electro-industrial music is a more recent development. These three genres are often referred to as simply industrial."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_music

Clear as mud I am sure you will agree.

So what we are left with is a music genre that is largely defined by the aesthetics and themes as opposed to the instrumentation, BPM or Rhythm..

So why persist with a genre name that is so unhelpful in encapsulating the music under its umbrella, and does the modern scene have any relevance to this genre?

Some would argue most modern Industrial music sits under the separate genres of EBM, Electro Rock/Metal, Future Pop and Hardstyle all of which regularly flirt with Dubstep, Drum and Bass, and the more mainstream electronic genres.

With established artists like Uberbyte making steps towards the more mainstream dance scene, and Combichrist reaching out to the Metal scene, perhaps things are already in motion.

I suppose time will tell as to whether Industrial will survive as a genre or be reduced to an aesthetically descriptive term only, much like Cyberpunk, Steam punk or one could argue, Goth.

I will leave you today with a little taster of a track that straddles a few different genres all at once...the beautiful, epic and majestic 'The Window' by Digital Diktator:


Available as part of a free download here:Digital Diktator - From The Edge Of The Universe