Making music for the fiscally challenged By Gary Walker (Defeat)

Making music for the fiscally challenged - a case for using "freebies" By Gary Walker (Defeat)

To many (i.e. most) of us electronic musicians, I suspect that cost is one of major factors that governs the gear we buy and the software and plug-ins we use.

To borrow a phrase from Family Guy's Peter Griffin, what really "grinds my gears" is that some folk out there (usually "pros" who wouldn't think twice about dropping a ton of cash for a Macbook pro or a very expensive suite of plug-ins) still think that for serious music making you need to spend serious amounts of money and use serious gear, hand-made by nymphs and delivered via unicorn.

OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but the cost of some gear is frankly beyond the reach of most of us mere mortals who have day-jobs and families to support and don't have the luxury of making a living from making music.

The point I'm trying to make is this: for a long time, I've beaten myself up that I'm not using Kontakt, Nexus, or whatever the current VST-du-jour is.

After agonizing over the fact I may not be using the "right" synth for a bass part or the wrong drum plug-in, I'm now at the point now where I actually no longer care and I tend to use free VSTs alongside those that are part of my DAW.

This is not to say I'm the modern embodiment of Ebeneezer Scrooge - far from it - I've found that ploughing my own furrow this way has allowed me to find my own sound, rather than sound like “everyone else". It has also forced me to be more creative and experiment, and I find myself creating my own sounds from scratch rather than relying on presets.

There is a lot of great free stuff out there to be found for us impoverished musicians to use, so I urge all of my fellow musicians to see what free treasures you can unearth and use on your next masterpiece - seek and ye shall find!

Thanks to Gary for his thoughts!

For those of you that haven't checked out Gary's act 'Defeat' yet, check this out!

Defeat's Outburst EP and their free to download Remix album can be found here!