WELCOME TO THE 90S SPECIAL!
It’s the Computer Music 90s special, celebrating the decade that launched a thousand genres! Read on for a glimpse back in time to the dawn of dance…
The 90s was one of the most influential decades for both music and technology. Dance music went from its exciting roots at the end of the 80s to a full-on global phenomenon, with house, acid, jungle, drum & bass, techno, hip-hop and so many more genres exploding across the globe, spawning countless sub genres along the way.
You could – and we obviously will – argue that much of this was down to the increasing availability and decreasing cost of the technology required to put a tune together. The specs of hardware and software increased exponentially as the prices decreased (a lot of the time anyway), and ground-breaking releases throughout the decade from all sorts of developers and manufacturers ensured that the growing number of producers had plenty of tools to experiment with. Which is why we’ve decided to dedicate a big chunk of this issue to the decade that delivered.
Over the next 32 pages we have tutorials on how to produce the music that defined much of the 90s, plus a modern twist on 90s music Calvin Harris style! There are interviews with Black Box who pretty much defined the decade of dance with Ride On Time; then there are roundups of some of the classic sample collections and tools to get the best 90s sounds. Time to go old skool…
The 1990s was an exciting time for the UK musically, with many scenes and genres being hugely popular and influential, both on a musical level and culturally too.
One such genre was rave music, with huge parties springing up across the UK during the early 1990s featuring thousands of people dancing until dawn to futuristic electronic music comprised of sampled breaks and stabs, alongside uplifting vocals and crazy arrangements. For a few years, rave music drew a massive following and influenced popular culture, with the clothes and logos sported by rave-goers becoming fashionable even outside of its original confines.
As rave music could be made using relatively basic computer and sampling equipment for the time, there were few barriers to entry, with bedroom producers across the UK becoming stars of the scene. The original tracks from this era from labels such as XL Recordings,
Suburban Base and Reinforced Records are now considered classics in their own right, with this particular style of music later splintering off to inspire the creation of well respected UK dance genres such as jungle/drum&bass, hardcore and new school breakbeat.
As there’s currently a massive 90s revival happening, we thought it’d be a great idea to break down how to make your own 90s-style banger. Over the next six pages, we’ll show you how to use your DAW, a selection of samples (which you can find under this issue at filesilo. co.uk) and a combination of commercial and plugins to chop and replay breaks, create rave stabs and much, much more.