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Go Make Your Music

There is nothing stopping you. Pick up a stick and a rock, howl or chant, whatever. Music has been made in some form or another for far longer than any one of us could remember and long before electronic instruments or recordings. It's not what you're working with as much as the ideas that keep you moving. Your audience is out there waiting to hear your music. Your music is worth hearing, it is easier than ever to make music and get it out there.

When trying to start, the first large source of discouragement is the price of gear and recording equipment. A good thing to note is that you don't need a 5000 dollar guitar/amp setup to make decent music. All you really need is ideas and some soul. It's true some of the high end guitars sound different but that doesn't mean your music is any worse if it's made with pawn shop equipment and thrift store keyboards (also good spots for enchanted gear, more on that later).

No budget music is totally possible. Freeware to make music exists in plethora but finding them can be a bit tricky. Two that come to mind are FL Studio (a tracking program built around user customization and plugins) and Audacity (a fairly simple audio recorder/editor, you can use it to multi-track and it generates sounds by itself so the savvy can make music entirely through editing samples generated by audacity). For the more traditional among us, it is also totally viable to ask friends or family if they have musical equipment you could borrow. Even five minutes toying around with your friend's Ibanez can prove invaluable if inspiration decides to strike.

Recording on a tight budget can lead to some odd places. Hole in the wall studios where you can reserve time for cheap are more common than you might think. This comes with the obvious drawback of being limited by their setup. If you are twin hurdy gurdy players looking to record broke baroque disco, make sure to find a studio that can accommodate you before losing your money. If this all sounds like entirely too much hassle, home recording options are available as well. Record from your phone, if you have one. If not, get the plugs and adapters to hook your instruments up through your computer and record it straight into Audacity. You can also look in to home multi-track equipment (4 track cassette, hard disk multi-trackers, etc). These can be finicky and more expensive but worthwhile for the strange sounds.

Imbuing music with otherworldly qualities is an old and important tradition. Songs can be designed to invoke odd states of mind or made to emulate them. Specific sounds and instruments can be designed to evoke energy. Examples include drone instruments like sitars and the Foley-like experiments of Schaeffer and Henry. Enchanted gear seems to pop up in the least likely of places. If you find a working instrument on the side of the road, see if you can get it to play. You might be surprised. When faced with discouragement it is easy to quit outright. There seems to be so much pushing you away from what you want to do. It is difficult but incredibly necessary to turn this discouragement into spite and use it as fuel. Composition, recording, and production are possible from your desk chair FOR FREE. You don't have to make the fanciest stuff in the world, especially not at first. You can practice and create at the same time, that's where the humanity comes from. Any time you feel discouraged by price or quality or theory, whatever, remember that people have made more with less and just start creating.


FL Studio: https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/

Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/

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