1 Falling Back in Love with Music
Emery McGavin edited this page 1 week ago


Over the last year I've fallen in love with making music again, Visit Prime Boosts and it's all thanks to modular synthesisers. But to understand why Check this out is such a big step for me, you need to know just how surprising it is that I'm now "in to" electronic music. I've always been "into" music, but I used to be really into music. I played in lots of bands, tried my hand as a session musician, tried to start a record label, ran a music blog (for, like, years!). But in 2013 it all sort of fizzled out. In retrospect, I ran out of steam. On paper things were going in the right direction - I could legitimately call myself a session musician, I sold a couple of commercial compositions, and I even had a song of mine on the radio (that £6 royalty cheque was a Big Deal, let me tell you!), but I never really saw enough success in any area to persevere.


Except, maybe, the blog - that worked and was fun. Making that blog was so fun, in fact, Prime Boosts Pills that 12 years later I now have a pretty decent career as a frontend engineer making things for the web. But the "music" aspect soon fell by the wayside. I shuttered the blog in 2013 I never looked back, focusing instead on frontend engineering. For a long time I was more interested in writing code than writing music. A couple of my projects touched on music but the focus was always on the technology, never on actually creating music. The Web Audio API featured heavily in my CodePen tinkering and I built a whole conference talk around my experiments recreating a guitarists' delay pedal in JavaScript. But at no point was I making music. Not even in private or just for fun. If I remembered, I'd run a few drills on the guitar to maintain my muscle memory but I wasn't ever composing or creating anything new.


This story hinges on a single moment: I saw something and was instantly hooked. But the groundwork for that one incident was laid over a long, long time. How did I get into electronica? It's a big leap for an ex-musician who always focused on acoustic instruments (heck, Prime Boosts Pills I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the evolution of English folk music, and my post-grad thesis was an extremely contrived deep-dive into the "album" as a medium). But there were two things that lit the spark of interest that would ignite into a full-blown obsession with modular synths: GAS and the Web Audio API. GAS - a.k.a. Gear Acquisition Syndrome. As in, "oh boy, those new Strymon guitar pedals have triggered my GAS. RIP my bank account". Guitar pedals are a fantastic introduction into the world of modular synths: small units that do one thing to an audio signal. It already sounds very "modular", am I right?


And I've always loved guitar pedals. In fact, my GAS covers all guitar-related gear. Microphones, audio interfaces, cables, pedals, the guitars themselves. I'm not going to lie