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Making Music At Home - Why It's Much Easier Nowadays

Although people have made music at home for along time, the advancements in music technology over the years have made it easier and easier to go it alone in the music creation process. This article will take a look through the progress that music technology has made over the years.

Author: George Dauberman
Date: Dec 7, 2010 - 11:49:08 AM

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Although people have made music at home for along time, the advancements in music technology over the years have made it easier and easier to go it alone in the music creation process. This article will take a look through the progress that music technology has made over the years.

The Early Days of Musical Computers

Although computers have been able to make sounds for many years, at first they were not considered a serious way of making music. However, by the late 70's and early 80's, a number of musicians and composers began using a new generation of musical computers such as the Fairlight CMI and the Synclavier. Although this was a huge leap forward in terms of musical technology, it still remained elusive to the average person, as these early musical computers were extremely expensive and so were mainly owned by very rich musicians, producers and recording studios.

MIDI

When MIDI emerged in 1983 as the new technology in music creation, it was a fantastic tool that made electronic music much easier to make. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and is basically an electronic language that enables various electronic musical devices to talk to each other. This means you can use one keyboard to play sounds on another keyboard.

This also gave way to the emergence of MIDI sequencers, devices that could be programmed to play a musical sequence on any MIDI keyboard or synthesizer. This meant it was becoming easier for people to create music at home by themselves. You could even use a cheap family computer such as the Atari ST as a MIDI sequencer to create music on your MIDI keyboard.

Musical PC’s

Once the 1990’s were well under way, the PC was becoming the overall computer standard. The great thing was, they were starting to be used for music as well. With better and better MIDI sequencing software available for PC, along with ever more spectacular synthesizers available, PC music creation was becoming very much a standard approach, especially for musicians who like to compose on their own rather than with a band. Once these music programs also began to include audio recording as well as the MIDI sequencing, computer music creation had started to become a real option even for people who couldn’t afford very expensive gear.

Soft Synths

Recently, the newest and most creatively versatile addition to music has been the invention of software synthesizers. These are software programs that create sounds in the same kind of ways as hardware synthesizers. The great thing about them though, is that you are not restricted by what hardware you can fit in your room. All the sounds are created using software, so it really expands the possibilities.

To begin with, these soft synths were more stand-alone programs which you could play using a keyboard, or they were plug-in style programs that could be used within compatible sequencer software such as Cubase VST.  

These days, software synthesizers have gone even further, and you can now get music software which consists entirely of software synthesizers integrated together with sequencers, samplers, software effects devices, into an all-round virtual synthesizer studio. This is where the future of music creation lies. When you have easy access to almost any sound possible, there's almost nothing you can't do. The rest is then down to your creativity and talent.

To hear some great homemade electronic music, visit Laughing at the Sky. Alternatively, if you  would prefer to read some more interesting articles, go to The Information Zone

View all articles by George Dauberman

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