Power up your electronic music for less than £500!

Building your studio to cater for the dancefloor – or headphone-based connoiseur – is easy

In recent years, the term electronic actually encompasses all manner of genres, approaches and subcultures. Starting a studio (or switching up your existing one) with this type of music in mind is perhaps the most plainly cost-effective way to get started. After all, we’re predominantly working within the realms of synthesis, drum machines, samples and processed vocals – all of which can be easily realised in the box. We’re keeping things under £500 here, and with that budget in mind, we’ve carefully chosen where you should be spending money, and what you can afford to lose.

With any genre, you’ll need a solid foundation for working, and for electronic musicians there’s no finer DAW than Ableton Live – the Intro iteration of which can be picked up for £69. With 16 audio tracks and 16 scenes to play with, it’s the most stable bedrock on which to build your EDM-floorfiller, with a super powerful sampling instrument built-in. A set of studio monitors we can hand-on-heart recommend doesn’t really come cheap, but we’ve determined the best solid budget-minded pair from M-Audio that will more than step up to the job.

At the core of most EDM comes synthesis, from dirty, pounding bass to wiry leads. Affordable, multi-faceted solutions abound from Arturia’s complex quad-engine Pigments (£83), to BLEASS’s virtual FM synth Omega (£57), but we’d implore you to fork out just a little more here and pick up Native Instruments’ beloved Massive synth (£129). Regarded as ‘the synth that defined bass music’, it’s well worth the purchase even if it is on the pricier side, and will grant you access to boundless sonic avenues.

It’s not all about sampling and synthesis, you’re going to need some suitable compression to fatten up your tracks, and some entrancing delay. We’ve got you covered on that front, with a fine option from the mighty Waves. Lastly, it’d be remiss of us not to throw in an item from our free CM plugin suite. In this case, we’ve elected to include Thenatan Trax CM, our free version of a superb sample-based drum machine, loaded with 20 solid preset kits.