The FIVE DOLLAR Studio (How to create music on the cheap!)

[wub]

http://bassadelic.com/2013/03/23/the-fi ... the-cheap/

Yes, the “Five Dollar” Studio… How to create an electronic music studio setup on the CHEAAAP, and look like a champion while doing it.

Here’s a fun motto: if it can plug in, you can play it. All I need is something with buttons and a USB chord, and I don’t even have to re-engineer it!

So, before I get into this article, I would like to point out a couple of things – first of all, yes, five dollars for an entire studio might be a bit of an understatement – but, not necessarily. And also, it might help to have a computer or a laptop to start out – but, again, it’s not completely necessary. It IS possible to build a somewhat decent music-making set up on the cheap! There are many different avenues to explore for setting up a recession-era music factory, and I’ll explain some of the ways this is possible. There have been articles written about setting up cheap studios in the past, but I thought I would expand on this idea, and put all the techniques I could think of into one article.

1.) Gameboys & Chiptune


If you’re so inclined, you might take a look at some of the many fine chiptune songs that are out there. I remember going to an underground club in Lansing, Michigan, that my homie, Angryrancor, told me about. He said the dude was playing a Gameboy, and I was like, “Oh… well, alright…” and he reassured me that, “Actually, it’s really cool, man!”

I was skeptical until the show started and I saw a guy on stage rocking out with his Gameboy plugged in to a sound system – and goddamn! – it was actually really well done and enjoyable. Sequencing was done entirely on a cartridge that he did beforehand, and he had put in that cartridge in the back of his Gameboy and played it out live, improving as he went along. I’d always heard about that kind of music, and I’d listened to songs made that way before, but until I saw it live – and saw how it could truly rock the club – I didn’t really think it was worth its salt. But it IS.

It’s a great example of how you can make music on the cheap – because tons of folks have old Gameboys lying around their house (or their parent’s houses?) and borrowing one, or even buying one, isn’t as expensive as it would have been fifteen or twenty years ago, that’s for sure. There’s even a cartridge for Gameboy specifically designed for music sequencing. You definitely want to get something like that – though that might be a bit pricier to track down – but, you can always get an emulator for your computer, if all else fails.

2.) Keyboards

So, every year, new keyboards are created, and sell for hundreds of dollars. Yet, at the same time, there are tons of keyboards sold for next to nothing, all the time, too.

A used keyboard, bought at a thrift store or a yard sale, can be cheap as hell. With most of ‘em, however, you still get a range of different instrument settings with most of them, and hey – if it looks really beaten up and shitty (which would actually give it more of a vintage/indie look) you can always just cover it with stickers, and make it your own.

Keyboards really range in price, and it depends on who’s selling it to you, how old it is, how good it is, and how badly they want to get rid of it. If you look around with patience and diligence, you can usually find one extremely cheap.

3.) Electronic Toys

I’m not going to get into circuit-bending (though that’s something else that you could do, and a quick google search will give you help there) but even just having some old Spell’n’Speak, or whatever that thing is called, can work. Almost everyone has some old toys somewhere in their house or in their parent’s house – the possibilities with this are endless. Remember those old toys with the string in the back? You can pull it back at varying speeds, and try to ‘improvize’ with that for a little while, providing any tune with some real novelty. It’s actually a lot of fun to mess around with some old toys. All the 90s-Kids have grown up, and we all love being reminded of our childhood by seeing someone whip out an old Bop-It, or one of those infuriating Simon-Says machines with the colorful and huge buttons.

Also, with enough tinkering, you could turn one of those into a fun little midi pad, though it would take a bit more work than the following example of home-made-midi-controllers:

4.) The Number-Pad Midi-Drum

I have one of these, it was given to me for free (my dad had some leftover computer equipment from the last couple decades) and I’ve seen them at thrift stores for extremely cheap “we-have-to-sell-it-for-SOMETHING” – type of prices. Again, like the keyboards, you could put all sorts of stickers on it, if you want to.
Personally, I LOVE it. I don’t know why, but I do. I link it to ableton and trigger a bass kick to one of the buttons, a snare to another button, and a hi-hat to another button, and I can just sit there and make my own grooves, automagically. It’s not as if I’ve never went out and bought an actual midi-trigger before, because I have – but this little thing is still just so fun to have around! It’s got around twenty different buttons, so I can put a whole drum rack on it if I need. You can get these from thrift stores, friends with a lot of excess computer equipment, friends with dads with a lot of excess computer equipment, etc. There’s something extremely novel and fun about having a tiny little midi drum at your disposal.

5.) Turntables

The number of people who have a turntable might surprise you. What might surprise you even more is how quickly you can destroy a record needle by scratching. Sure, the Qbert’s and DJ Babu’s of the world might use some real high tech turntables that were designed to be durable and hold up against any hip hop improvisation, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with an old record player until you accidentally break it, right?
For real though, it is really easy to break those needles. Just remember that…

The “Scrape Table Geniuses” broke a needle after just an hour of freestylin’ – that’s the name me and a friend of mine sarcastically gave it to our turntablist ‘group’ we started, jokingly, when we discovered it was fun to mess with our buddy’s little record player while he was at work. Well, the band was broken up after not too long, and a new needle had to be purchased.
Many old records are cheap as hell, too (or free)

6.) Boom Boxes & Tape Recorders

Mixmaster Mike originally started out making music by manipulating a tape-player stereo. With this option, it really depends on how in-depth you’re willing to go. If you spend enough time with it, you can really do some cool things. Think of it as an analog to record players. (heh, get it? Because tape players, like record players, are also really analogue? … Why isn’t anyone laughing? …Ok, sorry…)

You can use it as a sampler, you can beat juggle between two different tapes, you can even pitch bend – in fact, DJ Screw, the legendary producer who created a whole genre of a hip hop, began doing his thing by sticking a screw in the back of a boombox to slow everything down.
(Warning: though it’s probably obvious, I should point out that for all these types of technological manipulations, you’ll want to have everything unplugged FIRST before you go in and mess with the wires and bits in the back. You don’t want to challenge electricity in a way that might be physically harmful to you – and that goes double for circuit bending…)

If you have an old tape, and I want to take out a particular sample and start looping it in an authentic and analogue way, you can cut that little 4 or 5 second part of the tape (the actual tape inside the cassette) and tape the end of the sample to the beginning, cutting everything else out, and put that back onto the spindles in the cassette, and then start playing the cassette and hear a single sample, played over and over and over again!

It’s the very same technique that hip hop artists back in the 80s used to incorporate, when they weren’t relying on DJs spinning records. In fact, thousands of releases from twenty to thirty years ago relied on this very process.

Another interesting thing you could try would be to create these basic loop tapes, and have one for every note on the scale – rig ‘em up so that you have access to as many notes on the scale as you deem important for whatever track it is you’re working on, and then play them, improvisationally, behind your vocals. Cut back and forth – speed them up, here and there – tap and re-tap the pause button on rhythm; do whatever you gotta do to make something entertaining.

I always thought it would be cool to create a kind of tape-manipulated blues improv song, using this technique. Plus, if you use your numerical pad as a midi trigger to play one-shot beat drums, you could have a whole performance ready to go! Time to get wonky!

7.) Video Game Controllers & Joysticks


There’s a French glitch hop duo, MC2, that do some insanely sick things with joysticks. I couldn’t believe the level of complex and hi-fi fanfare these dudes were able to achieve with just a few devices designed for a game like Flight Simulator. Remember that motto? “If it can plug in, you can play it.” There are tons of buttons on most video game controllers these days, and many of them plug in with USB, which makes everything so much simpler! If it doesn’t have USB capabilities, you can get converters – or you could just keep looking until you find a controller that has what you need to plug it into your laptop.

Don’t forget, you can attain tons of samples for very little money too. Many samples are free (and there are links for them throughout this site – especially in the store section) and there are other samples that cost money, but if you look around, there are usually samples available that don’t cost too much (again, uh, there are links for them throughout this site – especially in the store section…)

When it comes to creating a cheap studio, it’s really about using your imagination. Entire genres have been created by manipulating old technology. That’s not an understatement, either – to put it another way: entire careers and fortunes have blossomed because of musical structures that were developed by using pre-existing technologies in ways that were not originally intended.

Acid house was created by messing with a TB303 the “wrong” way; hip hop came about by manipulating old funk records; turntablism came about by GOING EVEN FURTHER to manipulate old funk (and rap) records; chopped ‘n screwed music was developed by messing up a tape player; 8bit and chiptune were musical styles created entirely with Gameboys; grime rap is what happened when the British tried to make hip hop (I kid the British! I love grime!) but really, if you think about it, most forms of art and music come out of rearranging or reinterpreting older forms of art and music from the past.

Now, I don’t want to get into this point too much more, but I just want to point all this out, because if you really try out some of the things I’ve mentioned, maybe you’ll find some new form of music, or carve out your own creative aesthetic and give the world something truly “new,” keeping in mind that everything “new” is really just a different version of something old. Or, hell, maybe you’ll just find some entertainment with some of these musical techniques and ideas, for a few hours. That’s cool, too.

[VirtualMark]

This is all very well - but we'd still need a way to record the sounds and mix them. I suppose if you wanted to do things real cheap you could get a 90s pc from the dump, install old freeware synths and potentially make music for nothing.

[wub]

it might help to have a computer or a laptop to start out

[VirtualMark]

Lol I missed that. Hardly a $5 dollar studio tho, some headphones are also needed at least. If it's a desktop - a mouse and keyboard will cost more!

Still some interesting ideas.

I'd like to know some sound proofing ideas that are cheap, I need to get my room treated but don't want to spend a lot as I'm renting.

[wub]

Egg cartons?

[Hircine]

Egg cartons?

egg cartons, just watch out for cockroaches and beetles as those love to make their homes there.

[Brothulhu]

Egg cartons?

I know a guy with walls covered in apple trays (like these http://www.asia.ru/images/target/img/pr ... 246140.jpg ) that he just took from lidl. He says it works

[outbound]

Resisting urge to make chip tune

[alphacat]

Huh, haven't seen this site before. Cheers!

[drake89]

Lol I missed that. Hardly a $5 dollar studio tho, some headphones are also needed at least. If it's a desktop - a mouse and keyboard will cost more!

Still some interesting ideas.

I'd like to know some sound proofing ideas that are cheap, I need to get my room treated but don't want to spend a lot as I'm renting.

been dying to make diffusor panels out of dowels - that tek is up on gearslutz.

[sunny_b_uk]

look on ebay for a long ass time. i got my dual core laptop for 18 quid, just had to put a spare HDD in.
for a free DAW i really like LMMS but it doesn't let you commercially sell your music when using it.

[VirtualMark]

Yeah I read up on the egg cartons a while back, apparently it's a myth. It might darken a room a bit, but it wouldn't do much for the mids and lows. What I really need are some bass traps to dampen the standing waves.

[hifi]

circuit bending gameboy light now actually

[futures_untold]

Freecycle might be a source of a free computer just in case anyone needed one. It may take a while, but computers do crop up on there all the time.

[wub]

look on ebay for a long ass time. i got my dual core laptop for 18 quid, just had to put a spare HDD in.
for a free DAW i really like LMMS but it doesn't let you commercially sell your music when using it.

That's a fucking good shout, fair play

Freecycle might be a source of a free computer just in case anyone needed one. It may take a while, but computers do crop up on there all the time.

As is this...Freecycle is pretty badman if you spend some time digging.

[inDistinkt]

Got a couple questions on recording thru a tape deck. Just got an old deck from my grandfathers and I'd like to incorporate it into my projects. I'll be getting an interface within the next few weeks but for now I'd just have my laptops line-out (2008 mbook pro, not sure if its a legitimate line-out) feeding into the tape decks rca inputs using an aux-to-rca cable. I also have a yamaha receiver for my HT system.

Atm I have the tape decks output (line-out) running into the receiver so I can listen to music with it. But I'm wondering, to use for recording, should I output the deck directly to my laptop line-in? Or should I run it from the receivers output? Would either way even make a difference? Especially as I dont have an interface right now, could the receiver possibly work as a sort of pre-amp or something?

And one other question, kind of a dumb one. Does tape need to be recording to allow a signal to run thru it? Like can I just put a blank tape in, play my sound source, press play on the tape, and have the signal run thru it and back into my laptop to record in logic, all live? Or do I need to actually record on the tape deck in order to allow the signal thru the circuit, and back into my DAW?

[alphacat]

...Atm I have the tape decks output (line-out) running into the receiver so I can listen to music with it. But I'm wondering, to use for recording, should I output the deck directly to my laptop line-in? Or should I run it from the receivers output? Would either way even make a difference? Especially as I dont have an interface right now, could the receiver possibly work as a sort of pre-amp or something?

And one other question, kind of a dumb one. Does tape need to be recording to allow a signal to run thru it? Like can I just put a blank tape in, play my sound source, press play on the tape, and have the signal run thru it and back into my laptop to record in logic, all live? Or do I need to actually record on the tape deck in order to allow the signal thru the circuit, and back into my DAW?

There's a good chance that the adding the extra step of running through the receiver will introduce more noise to the signal; you wouldn't want to do that UNLESS the amps in the receiver "color" the sound in a pleasing way. FYI, a pre-amp takes input whose existing levels are not "hot" enough and boosts them, while alternatively a DI box corrects impedance & balanced signal offsets; there's a chance that the latter may be more called for here, based on the respective output & input impedances of unbalanced cabling & jacks.

re: Playback needed during recording - not as dumb a question as you'd think, but if I understand it right I think the answer would be No, because it is the actual process of the tapehead writing to tape that renders all of the desirable sonic qualities, like saturation and compression. Might be do-able on short delay though, not sure. What kind of tape deck we talking about?

[inDistinkt]

^
Sony tcfx600 cassette deck. I don't know much about tape recording, but it says it has a laser amorphous head. Has settings for different tape materials and a few other dolby settings so I'll mess around with them and see how it sounds.
I actually got an old Ampex reel to reel from from him too. Ampex 934 from the early 60s. Was placed neatly in the box as if it hadn't been opened in decades. Unfortunately I looked it up and it was for playback only, no recording capabilities, so I'm not sure if I'd even be able to use it for anything. Gonna need to take some time to learn more about how these older machines worked before I start messing with it.

Nice read in OP, thanks wub. I'm prob going to spend all day tomorrow looking for my old gameboy now. I'm finally starting to get a grasp of the endless amount of possibilities there are, when it comes to producing music.

[_TraX_]

If anyone has an iPad and wants to make beats, get Tabletop if you haven't already heard of it. it gives you a grid where you can place sequencers, mixers, keyboards and do all the routing yourself. There's a shit ton of gear you can buy, but it comes equipped with some sweet stuff, i haven't even bought anything yet. ALSO, I bought the iMPC app before Tabletop, and it's completely compatible, i dragged it straight into the tabletop interface.

http://retronyms.com/overview.html