The advent of cheap, powerful personal computers utterly revolutionised music making. Even as electronic music gear became more affordable on the secondhand market throughout the 1980s, the act of actually recording and releasing music still required inaccessibly expensive studio gear. Sure, the likes of Tascam’s Portastudio allowed musicians to make rough, lo-fi recordings at home, but it’s been the advancement of software DAWs and plugins that has truly made music-making accessible to DIY musicians.
That trend has really accelerated in the 21st century. On the music making front, even free or budget DAWs now contain pretty much all a budding producer needs to record, create
