Back in 1997 I was in a band called IndusTree, we worked with Impulse Tracker, which was a very cool way to make music, it looks very retro and matrix-y, but I just couldn’t get the hang of it. My bandmate Kasper was the one who primarily programmed the tracks. And boy was he amazing at it! We had a lot of fun for a couple of years making music, me sitting next to Kasper and saying, maybe this sound there and maybe a swell here…
A few years passed, I’d gotten out of music for a while. When I got serious about making music again in 2005, I started with an early version of FL Studio. I didn’t have any hardware back then, so FL was a great way to be able to create music, using vst’s and samples.
I think I worked with FL for about a year or two, when I started my deleterious and expensive relationship with the dangerous hard drug called hardware.
My first machine was a Creamware (software company) MiniMax ASB, quickly followed by a Roland TR-707 and a KORG Poly-61. I tried to sequence these with FL Studio, and tried to just play them without sync, but I found it all very limiting.
Here are some photos of the earliest incarnations of the CausaliDox Studio and the gear I used:
So I started to read about studio techniques, MIDI, sequencing, etc. etc. And soon the word “Cubase” (from Steinberg) would appear more often and often on the pages of the sites and forums I’d visit in search of the sacred knowledge.
Thus I “acquired”() Cubase SX 3 and started learning. I spent the next 5 or 6 years working with Cubase (I purchased C6 and subsequent updates), sequencing and mixing many many tracks.
Thing is, about 3, 4 years ago, I got incredibly frustrated with sequencing my hardware with a DAW: a screen, a keyboard and mouse. I would start to shun my studio, feeling frustrated and depressed, the hardware just sitting there, gathering dust.
By the end of that period I had a brief, dark, low moment when I contemplated just selling it all.
Then I rediscovered hardware sequencing. I had worked once for a short period of time with the Yamaha RM1x, but it was too complicated for me at that stage.
Yamaha RM1x
Now I felt that I was ready for it, so I went out and bought its’ bigger brother the Yamaha Rs7000. I felt the joy come surging back into my life and studio as I discovered the pleasures of not pawing a mouse, no! But turning knobs and pushing buttons, just like on the synths and drumcomputers, but now on the machine that would make the other machines sing! The RS7000 is bulky. It’s a big machine. Also, it’s old. It was produced in 2001, so there were some limitations to it. I could live with those and I had a lot of fun with it, but the size and the workflow were things I couldn’t get used to.
Yamaha RS7000
It was time to step it up. I’d heard of some mythical sequencers, like the Colin Fraser-built Sequentix P3 or the legendary genoQs Octopus, but they were out of my price range and I was a bit scared of those to be honest.
Sequentix P3
Genoqs Octopus
The top dog at the time (and for a reasonable price) seemed to be the Elektron Octatrack. But it was notorious. People would buy it, work with it for a couple of months, weeks, but mostly days, decide that they would be frustrated and feel stupid forever, never again making any music and sell the infernal black box to an unsuspecting or naive musician. The internet was full of horror stories. I decided I needed to be brave and buy one. To my complete surprise I found the machine not at all hard to work with and have enjoyed the last year and a half putting the Octatrack to use.
Elektron Octatrack
Since I have a lot of hardware, I need a sequencer that can handle all those machines. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry, it’s only interesting to nerds! For those that do know what I’m talking about, I just recently bought a midi thru box with 25 outputs, that should tell you something!
All of this to say I started to run into the limits of my Octatrack. So now, I’m on the waiting list for the Cirklon by Sequentix GmbH. Hand built, specced out to the max and just fucking awesome and cool. And expensive. But worth it. I hope to be a proud owner sometime this summer.
Sequentix Cirklon
Cubase is still an important part of my studio, but no longer as my main sequencer. Nowadays I have a fully paid-for Cubase 6 installed, but I use it only to record my tracks and do a tiny bit of processing before exporting.
I sometimes am drawn by the DAW way of sequencing and I will give in to it, and I’m grateful that I can, but sitting behind a screen with a mouse and keyboard is something that for me just doesn’t compare to the satisfaction of using a hardware sequencer.