Getting tooled-up

What do I have?

A laptop (HP Pavilion g6 Notebook). A phone (Samsung mini something or other). A wifi connection. A couple of blues harps (one in C, one in D). A tambourine. A pair of maracas. Various leads and jack-plug adapters.

And, as of yesterday, I have a DAW: Reaper. They give you a 60 day free trial, which should be plenty of time to work out whether it's worth the candle, and even after that it's only about £40. Obviously, it's not going to be top quality, but that fits my approach down to the ground. Part of what I'm trying to achieve here is a victory over the fetishization of sound. The less potent your ideas, the more you fixate on sound quality as a kind of ersatz substitute. You end up like one of those dreary wine buffs who bollocks on for hours about highlights and notes. The quality of the actual music gets pushed aside by a neurotic obsession with the depth and clarity. That's a marked feature of modern music – especially electronic music, where it's almost taken for granted that the songs themselves will be formulaic and banal. It's all about that bass. At the same time, I must be on my guard against inverted snobbery; just because a song is ramshackle that doesn't make it meaningful or profound. Indie music is ample proof of that. The sound quality should be sufficient to do justice to the idea, but without taking centre-stage. So I will be an avant garde Aristotle, ever striving for the golden mean.

Anyway, Reaper comes with a rather basic soft-synth, to which I've already added an organ and a piano (both free downloads). More will follow once I've got a better grasp of how to integrate them with the workstation. As for Reaper itself, I've fiddled about with it for a few hours, watched a few tutorials on YouTube and managed to get about twenty seconds of midi music out of it. It's frustrating to be back near the bottom of the hill. My previous stint of home recording involved Cakewalk, and by the end I could do some fairly sophisticated things with it. I'm not sure yet whether Reaper is better or worse than Cakewalk from a technical point of view, but it certainly seems less intuitive to use. Perhaps that's just a matter of getting used to it. Really powerful software programs often have a steep learning curve but then again so do quite a few shit ones.

What I will need to get – recording

Obviously an audio interface and a condenser mic – and so, obviously, the audio interface will have to be able to accommodate a condenser mic. The interface will be new territory for me as previously I've used a portastudio for live recording and final mixing. I only used Cakewalk on my laptop for midi and drum tracks which were then transferred to the portastudio (via a simple line out). Man, I loved the “make do” feel of that. It was like I was in Abbey Road in 1966.

I'll also probably need an external hard drive and some extra memory, though neither of those are particularly pressing at the moment. But what I'll certainly need is a decent field recorder. I'm thinking of a Tascam Dr-22wl, but the Zoom equivalent would probably do just as well. The ability to record reasonable quality material outside of my flat is absolutely vital to my project. You see, a huge drawback to home recording is that if you don't watch out it becomes isolating. In that respect it's part of a wider social trend: technology isolates. But you can also use it as a means to defeat its own end, and the modern field recorder is a good example of that. It allows you to get out and record things with other people at the drop of a hat. Those recordings can then be weaved into the larger tapestry of your design, and you can make them available to the others involved so that they too can use it if they wish, but whatever is done with it after the fact, it will retain a moment of human cooperation. That is, or ought to be, at least an aspect of all recorded music.

What I will need to get – performance

Obviously I'm going to need some musical instruments, but I'm fighting shy of getting a guitar. I've played guitar for nearly forty years now, and there's just too much baggage comes with it. As soon as I pick one up my mind starts to run on rails: it's this chord sequence, that riff, that scale, this trick, and so on. I'll get one eventually, I suppose, but I'd quite like to avoid composing on the guitar as far as possible. It's strangely liberating to write a song on an instrument you can't really play. You make connections you wouldn't normally make and hear the world differently. So my wish list (it's literally an Amazon Christmas wish list) contains almost everything except a guitar: violin, clarinet (how I regret getting rid of my old one!), glockenspiel, keyboard, cheap analogue synths, mandolin, Tibetan singing bowl, a recorder, bongos, ukulele – basically, anything that's not a guitar (although I don't want a saxophone either, as that's the sound of Satan farting). I'd get a trombone, but I reckon even my mild-mannered neighbours would be after my blood.

I suppose I'll also need a midi controller keyboard, but my heart sinks slightly at the prospect. For one thing, I enjoy composing straight onto the midi piano roll, like Stravinsky (amongst others) used to with the pianola.