Time flies, but issue 201 taught us how to manage it
We pondered the rise of DIY music production gear, which jibed with a hands-on trend…
A new year always makes us dwell on the passage of time. We recall vividly the feeling of being fresh out of school and eager to take on the world. All too soon we began noticing those little grey hairs sprouting in all the wrong places, started struggling with aching backs and became increasingly baffled by younger people. Ten years ago, we had similar time-based preoccupations. But, rather than moping about time’s inevitable march, our less wrinkled selves were instead concerned with how to use it with regards to rhythmbuilding, syncopation, weird time signature setting and beat-based bolstering. Our ‘Radical Rhythms’ feature explored how to go off-grid and mess up timing conventions to create unusual percussive landscapes that you’d never get close to making via traditional routes. Elsewhere in that issue, we pondered the rise of DIY music production gear, which seemed to jibe with a growing trend away from the screen-based and back to more hands-on fare. Hand-built MIDI controllers were particularly intriguing to us, and we imagined a future where more and more people were able to tailor-make their own customised tech. Over the next decade, companies of varying sizes pushed the modularity game on further. Most recently, Ableton’s Push 3 invited users to manually tinker and add a processor, battery and hard drive. They know their audience well…