Although electronic music has been around for many years and there have been long been ways of making music by yourself at home, these days it is definitely much easier and much cheaper to. In this article, I'm going to take a look at how home music creation has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. The First Musical Computers Computers have been able to make sounds for a long time. However, to begin with these sounds were very simple and were certainly not considered a serious musical tool. By the time we reached the late 70’s and early 80’s though, computers became better at making music, with the invention of instruments like the Fairlight CMI and the Synclavier. The only problem with these early electronic music workstations is that they were so expensive that the average musician wasn’t able to afford them, and they remained the gadgets of top recording studios and producers. The Invention of MIDI When MIDI emerged in 1983 as the new technology in music creation, it was a fantastic tool that made electronic music much easier to make. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and is basically an electronic language that enables various electronic musical devices to talk to each other. This means you can use one keyboard to play sounds on another keyboard. Another great use for MIDI came in the form of sequencing. With a MIDI sequencer, patterns of music, or indeed even whole pieces of music, could be programmed and played back, with the sequencer using MIDI to tell the synthesizers what notes to play. Think of it as being like an electronic version of a conductor and an orchestra. Making Music on the PC Once we got well into the 1990’s, PC’s began to take over as the dominant computer standard. PC’s started to get used for sequencing, due to the progress of top quality music creation software, which started to include audio recording alongside the MIDI sequencing. This, in conjunction with the ever increasing progress of synthesizer technology, meant that creating quality music in your bedroom was becoming much more of a realistic and creatively enabling possibility. As long as you were able to afford a high-end PC, some good music software, and at least one good synthesizer, you were well on your way towards musical domination. The Rise of Soft Synths In recent years, one of the best inventions in music technology has been the software synthesizer. These programs create sound much the same as actual hardware synthesizers do, but it’s all done from within the computer, just using software. This means that you are no longer restricted by how many hardware synthesizers you are able to fit in your room. At first, these software synthesizers were mostly individual instruments, to be played by a connected MIDI keyboard. Some of them did have sequencing capabilities, such as the Rebirth software from Propellerheads, but this was still limited to just a few sounds at a time; then came VST soft synth plug-ins for sequencer programs such as Cubase VST, which enabled the use of the soft synths within the music creation software. These days, with full-blown soft synth based music creation software such as Reason, software synthesizers are combined along with a sequencer, virtual samplers, virtual effects, and a virtual mixing desk, to create the ultimate software-based music studio all inside your computer. This means that with just one piece of software (plus a MIDI keyboard to play notes) it’s now possible to create spectacular pieces of music without any other equipment at all.

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