At Ears To The House, we never claim to speak on behalf of our readership – we say what we think and you can decide for yourselves – but even we suspect some of you might also be wondering why so much stuff costs more than it used to. The cost of living crisis, as it’s called, seems to disproportionately affect the poorest in society.
One group which appears to date to be immune to the rising costs of life are the editors and management of Resident Advisor. What else could possibly explain their most recent article called “10 Affordable Music-Making Tools to Get You Started”? To purchase all ten items listed would cost a whooping £766.50 – and that only includes the first month’s subscription to Splice.
For his perspective on this, we decided to go to none other than… our own editor. He used to produce house music under what he called the “moderately successful Amateur At Play name” – but after becoming increasingly disillusioned with the way the dance music world operated, he ventured out to create what is now known as Ears To The House.
We asked how much it cost him to get into music production, and he said “Not a lot. I started making tracks in late 2015. I saw little point spending a fortune, at least when starting out. My DAW was Cockos Reaper, which is free at the start. I used Reaper to do most of my mixing and learned most of what I knew from Danny J Lewis tutorials on YouTube. I downloaded a bunch of free VST synths and paid around £50 for the software version of the Korg M1. I also had an Akai sampler with a few keys on it – and I bought three or four old sample packs in a bundle.”
“It cost no more than £100 for me to start up, and I saved a fortune by learning how to use Reaper’s many in-the-box features. The narrative you need loads of equipment to get started is tired old rubbish – so it’s no surprise to see Resident Advisor peddling it. It’s worth investing some money once you get going, but when you’re starting out, it’s just stupidity.”.
As we said before, you can make your own minds up on this one. Few debates evoke stronger reactions amongst music producers themselves…
