I've decided to break this down into sections.

Beginners
1. How to make Industrial music for free.
2. How to make Industrial music for next to nothing.
2A. You're all spoiled.

Advanced
3. Advice for Industrial bands playing out. You must read this.

Preface: This page has a slant towards PC for two reasons. One, it's the only system I know. Two, it's cheaper to get a sampling soundcard for the PC then the Mac. I'm not gonna argue which is better. Neither is. It's just a damn tool.

2. How to make Industrial music for next to nothing.

Get a SoundBlaster Live value or Audigy for your PC for 50 bucks from pricewatch. You now have a synth/sampler with resonant filter, multitrack hard drive recorder, and a midi interface. This is everything you'll need to make your first demo. (well if your gonna have vocals you'll need a mic). Download a copy of Cool Edit or Soundforge. You will use this edit your samples and audio tracks. You'll also need a sequencer, you want one that can also record audio tracks. I recommend Cubase, Logic Audio Platinum or Sonar. They cost about $300-$400 bucks. You can download demo versions off the net. Some people download pirated copies off binary newsgroups for alt.binary.sound utilities. That's illegal. If you post programs there, you're likely to get sued/arrested. They can't track what you download, but pirated software is still illegal.

Don't forget you can design passes and demo covers with your computer as well. You're computer is also your promoting machine. Use it to join email lists and rec.music.industrial to promote your work once it's done.

To play out you'll need more than a computer. But that's not the point. The point is you first need to write 30 minutes worth of songs. That'll take a while, a LONG while. During that time, equipment will get cheaper and better. Write the songs first. 85% of bands don't get past this point so wait. You have what you need to make demo or even final versions of your songs. Your SBlive is a sampler. You can do anything with a sampler. (almost) The SBlive is more powerful than the samplers many industrial bands were using 10 years ago, so no excuses. Don't blame equipment, work harder and the results will come. You can make great industrial music with just a sampler. The trick is, don't use prefabricated music loops. Just use the sampler for instruments. It's really all you need. Your sampler is your drum machine. Your sampler is all you need for all your sounds. I have heard amazing songs done with just what I've listed above.

2A. Let's talk about the gear bug. If you start making electronic music, after a while you're going to want to spend tons of money on lots of gear. I'd like to give you a little perspective on gear. It's too easy to blame the gear, to say "Well I could really make something if only I had (insert gear here)"

Old gear had such limitations that to make the kind of Phase 3 Industrial you hear today, you had to have a fair amount of gear. A lot of gear was just great at what it did. For example, an old Moog synth, which could make maybe 6 sounds at a time, made those sounds very well. But it's hard to make a band sound completely full, with just 6 notes polyphony. Moogs are great, but if you had to choose one keyboard for your band, would it be a great sounding 6 note moog, or a 128 note polyphony, synth sampler sequencer like the Yamaha EX5? Back then you didn't have much of a choice, if you wanted more sounds and more polyphony, you bought more keyboards. Today that's not really necessary. I have a lot of gear. That's because a lot of my old gear is VERY limited. It was cutting edge at the time, I bought it, but by todays standards much of it is very limited. In 1992 I would have traded all my gear for what an old Pentium 166 with 8 meg soundblaster 32 could do. In 1986 most Industrial bands woulda sold their left nut for it too. Anyway this is why old Industrial bands have gear lists that are a page long, and today's bands often don't.

Today some Industrial bands that haven't been around as long have very small gear lists? Why? Because you don't really need a lot of gear to do it well anymore. Example: Haujobb. Most of Haujobb comes out of an Akai s2800 which can be bought for about $400 bucks. They sequence on a Korg 01/wfd keyboard, and use a emu morphues for additional sounds. That's really about it, and I know that some of their albums are just the Akai.
What does this mean for you and why should you care? It means you have very powerful gear, even if it's not a k2600 or the max of today's standards, it enough to get started. Having great gear does make things easier, but nothing is ever going to replace work. I did a song for a radio commercial with just my old soundblaster 32. It was broadcast on 4 major radio stations. Do you think anyone could tell? No. Don't blame the gear. Work on your samples, your sequencing and your mixing. I have heard great work done on just an old soundblaster, and I mean better than Leatherstrip and old Front Line Assembly. In a sense, a sampler is a sampler is sampler. (so work on your sample sets.) This isn't completely true, but it's fairly close. You can always dump your samples into an expensive keyboard later when you get one, but you can do all your writing right now. If you're working in the MOD format, you can always convert those samples into something you can playback on your sampler as well. Software samplers are coming into their own, so you can cut cost there and use software as well. My only advice there, is to avoid gigasampler, because it is a system crash in a box. I've never personally met anyone running gigasampler that didn't complain of crashes.

You know what else? Hard drive recording is so great, if you had given it to me for what it cost now, six years ago, I would have just cried. In the early nineties if you had no money, your band recorded on a 4 track cassette that cost between 400-1000 and if you were unlucky enough to get a tascam, then the sound quality really sucked. It was noisy and it terribly screwed up your eq, it muffled and muddied everything together, so that no matter how great what went in was, what came out was simply craptastic. I've heard decent demo's that came out of Yamaha 4 tracks, but they still sound like demos.
Hard drive recording is so much quieter than these old beasts, the eq is truer, it makes me glad to be alive today. Sometimes I wish I could have been doing this when Industrial was bigger, but I'm glad I'm doing it now, when powerful, professional quality equipment is affordable. I believe an Industrial album released on Gashed recently was recorded from and utilizing the sampler from an SB AWE64. (not even an sb that I recommend) We're just so damn lucky today.

I do recommend you get a keyboard. Get a cheap one as a controller for your soundcard, perhaps a Yamaha CS1x or CS2x, then you'll have a descent synth and controller for your soundcard/sampler. But do you need to spend $400 to make industrial, like I said no, it's easier to play from a keyboard, but you can do it all with your soundcard if money is tight. I've written songs at work with my sb32. I don't keep a keyboard there, so like I said, it's not required.

Now let me rub in how spoiled we are today, compared to our electronic forefathers of the last 20 years. (Front 242, Art of Noise, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly) I'm also going to touch on why these old bands have so much gear, whereas some of the new bands have very little.

In 1979 the first real musical sampler came out. It was made by a company called Fairlight. It cost between $30,000 to $60,000 dollars, and was made out of a modified obscure quasar computer. It had 8 monophonic notes of polyphony. It was 8 bit (10khz) resolution at 16kb per sample, . Your sblive is 16 bit 48 khz, with megabytes available for each sample. The Fairlight II cost $25,000 or more, and the Fairlight III started at $40,000 but often cost more than $100,000. The Series two played 8 bit sounds up to 35 khz, still maximum sample length was 16kb. If you don't know what any of this means, just know that it's all a joke compared to what you have today for $50.

Syncalvier, started making a sampler as well, they had already been making FM synths (before Yamaha), and out of competition with Fairlight added sampling capabilities as well. Their unit also cost between $30,000 and $60,000. I believe the Fairlight was 12 bit, not 16 bit like your computer sound card. (more bits is better). It had very limited ram, and a small sequencer. Synclaviers are still made today, and their sampling abilities continued to improve, so that in many ways they were superior to today's high end samplers. But that's not the point, the point is it used to cost 30-60,000 grand to buy a sampler. And that's in 1980 dollars.
1980 condominium in the Southern NY also = $60,000.
12 bit sampler, low polyphony = $60,000.
Your soundblaster = your sampler, 16 bit 44,100khz, with polyphony of = $50.
Get it?

Samplers were expensive for a long time.

Art of Noise had a Fairlight, Ministry eventually had one too, I believe Depeche Mode had one as well. Another company called EMU stepped into the fray and also made a 30,000 dollar sampler.

In 1984-85 the first affordable sampler debuted, the 12 bit Akai S612, a simple 6 note polyphony sampler. It sucked, but it changed the market towards more affordable samplers. The first decent affordable sampler came out in 1985, the Emulator II. Affordable at $7,995. (1985 dollars= a NICE car) It was 8 bit, but sounded like 14 due to clever engineering. (If you want to see in action, it's the sampler Ferris Bueller plays his coughs and vomits through when he's on the phone) It had an 8 track sequencer (your computer probably has 255 or more) and it could hold 512k to 1 meg ram. (an SBlive can hold 32 meg or more depending on configuration) The Emulator II had great filters, but that's not that point. $7,995 for a sampler is still expensive, too expensive for starving industrial artists.

Around the same time the Ensoniq Mirage came out. It cost $1695 or less and everybody got one. It was limited and hard to use, It didn't sound that great but it was only $1695. Only. Your sblive is better than this sampler, and it cost $50, not $1695. Skinny Puppy had a bunch mirages (In a 1985 interview they said they really wanted an emulator, I'll bet they got the mirages because they could afford it.) Akai soon came out with some more professional low cost samplers, the S900 and S950 and pretty much drove Fairlight out of business. (the Fairlight company was reborn and now make high end AV studio equipment)

In 1987 AudioFrame from WaveFrame Corporation came out. It was a rack-mount computer filled with specialized audio cards controlled by a PC running Microsoft Windows. A 16-voice version cost around US$45,000. It was only quality competition for the Fairlight series III. It is also a joke next to your soundblaster. In 1987 the Emax I was released. It was affordable, and very popular with Industrial musicians. Many Industrial musicians bought and still use these to this day.

In 1988 the akai S1000 was released. These 16 bit samplers, with 16 note polyphony really changed music. Almost every industrial band around at the time bought one of these, or it's competitor the Emax from EMU. The s1000 could hold up to 32 mb of samples, but I doubt any Industrial artists could afford more than 8mb. 8mb is plenty though. Both the S1000 and the Emax I&II (the emax cost $3,495 with 2 meg of ram) samplers were wildly popular with Industrial musicians, and it changed the sound of Industrial music forever.

Nowadays, all samplers blow these early samplers away, and are all affordable compared to what those limited beasts cost. Even a $50 dollar soundblaster outshines the capabilities of these older units. Why? The secret is, that soundblasters are based on technology developed by EMU, that's right, the sampler company. The soundblaster card was so popular that the company that makes the Soundblaster line, bought EMU and Ensoniq. Today soundcards and software samplers are a real threat to the hardware sampler market, due to their affordability and ease of use. This means it's cheaper and easier, to make higher audio quality Industrial, than it ever was.

I'd like to end on this note. You're reading this off the internet, and the internet has actually become a valuable musical tool for me. How? I've downloaded 26 gigabytes of samples off the Internet. I've downloaded midi files of songs I wanted to learn, I've gotten soft synths to play, and demo's of tons of great software that make my life easier. I've also learned more from reading articles off the Internet about synthesis and sampling then anywhere else. It's easier to learn all of this now.

We're all very lucky.

Now go DO IT!!!

The next cEvin Key is sitting in his/her house grounded somewhere. He or she is locked in their room, they have no money, no keyboards, but they have a computer, and they're gonna be huge someday.

Now go to here for my final bit of advice: 3. Advice for Industrial bands playing out. You must read this.