electronic music without the computer
DAWless Blog
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DAWless Setup for Beginners
Are you intrigued about making music without staring at a computer screen? Maybe you read about “dawless” setups or watched clips on youtube of folks pushing buttons and twisting knobs to make a sound that you would like to recreate? So how do you begin? Thats what this guide is for! What Exactly is a…
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Drumbrute Impact Review
Legacy The Arturia Drumbrute Impact is a popular and affordable analog drum machine. A while back I had the larger original Arturia Drumbrute, it was easy to use and tons of outputs, but it had a large footprint and most importantly I did not like the sounds all that much that it produced. Here is…
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The Data Lakes New Album
Hope Breaks is the new album released this week by The Data Lakes. Some folks use DAWless to make entire albums, and in the past, I made a few EPs Treading Water and One Up that were about 90% DAWless. This collection of tunes though were mostly produced within Ableton, however there are a few…
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PreSonus Eris 3.5 Review
Until recently I was using an old Denon Hifi as my main monitoring solution in my home studio alongside a variety of headphones. The system was proving unreliable, so I looked around for a compact and budget monitor speaker solution, and the name PreSonus Eris 3.5 kept coming up in the searches. I knew that…
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Roland J-6 Review
The Roland J-6 Chord Synth is part of the AIRA Compact series, a line of portable and powerful instruments designed to bring classic Roland sounds to the modern musician. You can check out our reviews of other synths in the series like the Roland Aira T-8 Review. Quality Sound The J-6 delivers rich, warm sounds…
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Roland S-1 MIDI Control
The Roland S-1 is a tiny 4 note poly synthesizer, that has a great deal of functionality packed into it. Straight away the demos on the device sound impressive and hint at what is to come. Trying to unlock that power and actually use the thing to create new sounds I like, I found to…
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What is a DAWless Jam?
The term DAWless Jam refers to making electronic music without using a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). So, instead of relying on computer software like Ableton Live or Logic Pro, we use hardware such as drum machines, synthesizers and sequencers to create and perform the music in real-time. This means mistakes might creep into the performance,…
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Analog Cravings with the Behringer Crave
The Behringer Crave is a semi-modular analog synth that offers a wealth of sound-shaping possibilities for a very affordable price – currently retailing around £140/$165. Although this synth is inspired by the classic Moog Mother-32, it brings some unique features to the party too. You will often find it has a central role to play…
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Roland T-8 with a MIDI Controller
The MIDI implementation chart on the Roland Aira T-8 is quite limited, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I setup the T-8 with an Arturia Minilab 3 MIDI controller to see what works and what doesn’t and finish with a jam. The MIDI implementation of the device is shown at the back of the T-8…
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Roland Aira Compact Cheat Sheets
The Roland Airas Compact series pack tons of functionality into tiny boxes. This usually means that many of the advanced functions are buried in the menus. Compounding this with the incredibly cryptic and unnecessarily retro 4 digit LED display can then make desiphering these functions difficult. Therefore several users have put together Cheat Sheets, that…
The Data Lakes – Hope Breaks
Hope Breaks, the first full length album by The Data Lakes out now!