it’s the great war of modern music analog versus digital (or ‘didSHITall’ as dad says). if the idea of me going through a history of how i’ve learnt to make music bores you to tears I apologise, but recently, since I’ve had lots of time I’ve been able to work on my music a lot more and now that things are feeling more flowing, I’m finally reconciling with just how much hard work it’s been just to deal with this bloody modernisation of music (and talkingthese things out always helps me move forward).

More than any other format, music has suffered at the hand of digitisation, you’ll know this from the number of stolen MP3s in your iPod. but i’m not talking about that end, it’s the music-making end I deal with in my time off. Instruments now are more often than not born, raised and recorded within computers, they never breathe the light of day, they live in binary coding. I think this is hardest for guitarists… atleast piano players can pick up a digital synthesiser and it’s a familiar setting, but guitars will always be real living things best made with wood and strings, fed into crunchy amps that blast your ear drums so they ring for hours all the walk home from a gig.

I started out with a little Tascam 244 four track, I got it when I was 16, it has a cassette inside it and can record four things at once, so I’d do guitars, rewind, do vocals, rewind, do casio, rewind, to more vocals… you could quite easily record a song in a day on your own, write it, get out the 4 track and a mic, and record it straight away. VERY satisfying.

Of course there are problems… you have to tune your instruments to each other (easier said than done, have you tuned a synth?), you have to have relative quiet in the house, you have to have physical room to spread out your instruments and the wires between all of them.. you have to bloody FIND all the right wires hat will connect up each of your instruments, and replace the crackly ones that don’t work any more… you also have to know how to sing, and how to play in time to a beat (yeah… i’m not so good at this)… no computers to make you sound like Britney, or fix up your mistakes… it’s all LIVE, one take, beginning to end. which can be a bitch.

I built up an arsenal of instruments I could use for my recordings, Electric guitars, basses, recorders, casios, and big ol’ crunchy vintage synths. My pride and joy, and inspiration for today’s post is my Korg Poly-61. It was the very first digital synthesizer, it’s such a thick chunky bass sound, it’s easy to program but unpredictable in that, well it’s old and not feeling very well, much like most of my instruments and so it burbles and warps and god I love it! Next to my equally ancient casios (most of my instruments are circa 1980) it makes a great sound.

But it’s not MIDI. it can’t play to 120bpm, I can’t even tell it to play to a BPM i just turn a knob and hope for the best… this makes matching it to a drum beat in a computer, or even from my casiotone (which is also controlled by the randomness of a knob twisting) highly challenging and rarely successful… so my instruments don’t play together well unless you keep it real simple.

So recently I bought a little Microkorg, well, actually about 5 years ago. I promised I’d chuck out the big ol’ Poly-61, but I couldn’t, the sound just wasn’t the same, the Microkorg can at least play to a BPM, I can tell it, you will play at 130bpm and it obediently responds, it even sounds like my Poly-61, but it isn’t as beastly…

Living in this wiry jungle, of analog versus digital, might be messy and contrary, and professional muso’s scoff at me because really I should only need a laptop and a little MIDI keyboard and i’d be laughing. There’s a world of amazing sounds if I choose to learn all the software, but it’s just never been the same for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a nerd, I love sequencing out a beat step by step, but I prefer doing that for a drum beat, not for a whole song. Basically if going digital means leaving behind my casio’s, my korgs, my guitar, the sound of the room i’m in, the cricket playing quietly from the room next door, the bird chirruping outside… well I don’t want it. If going digital is all about being clever and looping rather than playing a whole song, editing out all the mistakes, having perfectly clean channels that sound like nowhere… i don’t want it.

So i continue to struggle, I spend most of my time trying to find a happy middle ground, depending on the song, depending on the instruments I want to play today. I may have left behind my cassette four track, for my iphone four track, and I may not be producing studio quality sound, but I’ve never been more productive musically. Today I woke up and without even thinking, I turned on the two Korgs and started playing and FINALLY recorded a song with the two of them together, I recorded it on my iphone’s tiny mic which sat in my lap pointing at my half dead BassKing valve amp which had both my Korg Beasties plugged into it. The mastering is terrible, the song is average, the hiss is incredible, and everything sounds like it’s dying a little bit. But the pure achievement of finding a way to work with both instruments at once is something i’ve been struggled toward for forever.

So listen to my happy struggle in synths of vintage [3mb download]