When considering electronic music, people who are not keen listeners, may envisage the repetitive beats and driving bass that characterises club music. This kind of electronic music began to emerge from the 1970s onwards. Before this electronic instrument were used to create melodic sounds either in imitation of other instruments or for their own merit and originality. An excellent guide to the development of various forms of modern electronic music can be found at: http://www.di.fm/edmguide/edmguide.html you can listen to examples of all different kinds of music. The creator of this website has clear musical tastes which I do not necessarily agree with!

Music styles such as ‘Trance’, ‘House’, ‘Drum and Bass’ and ‘Ambient’ all may use a combination of samplers, sequencers, synthesizers, live instruments and computers to create their sounds.

A synthesizer (or a ‘synth’) is a device that can create sounds of other instruments through the modification and combination of different-shaped sound waves. The basic shapes are ‘square’ (imagine the crenulations on the top of a castle’s tower); ‘sawtooth’ or ‘triangle’ and ‘sine’ (imagine a gently undulating line – the stereotypical image of a wave).

A sampler is a device that can take a recording such as the sound of a drum, someone talking or a note from an instrument and modify the sound (sample) in terms of pitch, volume and sometimes apply special effects such as reverbs (imagine a sound in a big empty stone room), delays (like an echo) or distortion (like guitars in many heavy metal bands). In terms of instrument noises, pitch controls can effectively turn a single recorded note (say, of a xylophone) into a keyboard instrument allowing a sample to be played at multiple pitches.

A sequencer is a device that (in very basic terms) when attached to a sampler by a MIDI interface ‘tells’ the sampler to play specific samples stored in its memory at specific intervals. MIDI stands for ‘Musical Instrument Digital Interface’ and is kind of like when you network two computers together or when you transfer information from the internet to your computer. Some samplers have built in sequencers allowing repeating patterns (sequences) of sounds to be easily created.

Computer programs such as Cubase or Logic allow compositions to be modified part by part (i.e. the sequence of notes a specific sound is programmed to play) or sound by sound (i.e. the quality/tone/effect of specific samples or synthesised sounds) after they have been recorded and saved to a hard disc.

As well as these items musicians can purchase a wide range of fine-tuned modules for making detailed special effects and special synthesizer add-ons for making unusual or particularly realistic sounds.

Hallucinogen (Simon Posford), a contemporary electronic musician making psychedelic trance, lists his studio contents online: http://www.shpongle.com/hallucinogen/frame-main.htm

When electronic musicians play live they can either bring the devices they use and create the music – altering and ‘bringing in’ parts as they play, use a multi-track recorder to fade parts in and out or simply play their records over a loudspeaker system. This last option is DJing and should not be confused with the actual creation of electronic music!

Although you can buy some equipment quite cheaply, many individual bits of equipment start at around the £400 – 500 mark and you can probably expect to spend in excess of £1000 if you want to be able to make a range of sounds close to any music you may have listened to. Some companies make grooveboxes, devices that combine the capabilities of samplers, synthesizers and sequencers allowing users to make whole compositions. These can be a little cheaper but are oriented towards the dance/club scene so only the more expensive ones can make more realistic sounding noises (at least in terms of instruments).