IF punk rock introduced a DIY ethic to the music industry, dance music had a much more seismic impact when it arrived in the late 1980s.
It began with Tim Simenon and Beat Dis going to Number One, proving that not only could anyone be a DJ (if they had two turntables, two records and one mixer) but anyone could produce chart topping dance tracks and have change left out of £250.
OK, so it may not be quite that simple, but the availability of competitively priced studio equipment, the rise and rise of sampler culture and such records as M/A/R/R/S and Pump Up The Volume persuaded many to turn their bedroom into a mini studio.
For some, it began with the purchase of a pair of Technics 1210 turntables and a Kam mixer (to hone up on DJing skills) and a progression to producing their own essential selections.
For others, crossing over from the more traditional rock world, it was a chance to produce tracks which were significantly more challenging than those of your typical four square guitar band.
For classical pianist Alex Lennon and former skateboard exhibitor John Averill, the term bedroom studio is something of an understatement for their labour of love. What began as a borrowed Technics keyboard and a dodgy 386 PC has expanded into a well stocked home studio in an anonymous suburban house. So well stocked, in fact, that Alex's first comment when the interview begins is "whatever you do, don't mention our address".
Alex and John are collectively known as Flux, an act that is gaining quite a reputation for its freestyle techno sound. Besides several interested independent dance labels sniffing around, rem ix work and commissioned music for adverts are also on the horizon.
The tracks were created and recorded on the equipment in their front room, proving that you don't have to reside in a state of the art studio to get results.
Alex says it has taken them two years to get this far. "At the start, I didn't own any of the stuff you see here. The only thing I owned was the computer. Anything I needed, I borrowed from friends. As I got money together, I started to build up the studio equipment bit by bit".
The only reminder of the old days is the computer and the vital Cakewalk software. "It basically runs everything and lets you edit the track onscreen, change frequencies, program sequences, the lot," Alex says. "But it's still got its drawbacks, mostly because we could do with a 486.
"I've used Cubase and really, one [program] is as good as the other. I find it much easier to get around Cakewalk because I've been using it for around four years, it's much smoother and it's got some funky features that Cubase doesn't have.
The beauty of software such as Cakewalk is that you can edit and build up your tracks on screen, and manipulate them in so many ways. If you put in a chord with three notes and you want E to be a higher velocity than the other two notes, you can do it through Cakewalk. You can even insert notes via the computer keyboard, though I prefer to play it out directly," Alex says.
Next on the shopping list were the keyboards - one digital Kawi K4 and two analogue ones. "This Kawi 101 synth is incredible. We can't run it through MIDI so we just sample sounds off it. Real spacey Moog and Star Wars sounds. As soon as we get more money, we want to get more of these old analogue keyboards - the sounds you can get from them are just so good. Anyway, the old stuff is so much better You can get away with an awful lot if you have a good effects unit."
In the Flux set up, the effects unit is an Alesis MIDI Verb 4. "We have only one effects unit, ideally we would have about three. It basically adds effects like flange or delay to the keyboard sounds via the desk. It can affect just one channel or all channels depending on your requirements. There's also a really old effects pedal which we use from time to time - brilliant sounds," Alex says.
He refers to their Akai sampler as "our baby. It has a 16 meg board and eight outputs. Would we exist without it? It's pretty important, but the music is just as important. It does give us quite an amount of possibilities, it can take up to five minutes of samples which we can trigger when we need to. The eight outputs mean you can have four different stereo outputs going into your desk for vocals, drums, whatever. This set us back £31,850 and yeah, it was worth it.
Two more essential purchases were the Bass Station rack unit and a Boss drum machine. "The Bass Station gives us some more really cool analogue noises. We use it to trigger the 101 through the MIDI. It's a bit tacky but if you take your time, you can get good sounds from it. You can recognise the sound right away because so many people use it. It only cost us £320 plus a trade in on a 303 emulator called Deep Space 9 that we found we didn't need."
At the heart of the operation is the mixing desk, a compact 16 channel Soundcraft SX: "12 mono tracks, four stereo tracks which we use if we're putting down extra keyboards, or effects. If we're using six outputs from the sampler, that's 12 tracks because it's in stereo. If we were using a PatchBay, we could have cut down on the number of channels on the desk. Unfortunately, our money had run out by then."
Add in an old Yamaha tape machine ("great for sampling old sounds from tapes or videos"), a good pair of speakers and some other hi fi equipment, and you've a total bill of around £38,000.
"We always want more but we're getting there. It's no longer Just a bedroom studio we have over the line, we're able to record good quality stuff. We'd rent out a few extra bits or pieces like another effects unit or a keyboard with a good piano sound but we have the basics here. We'd be quite happy to let people hear tracks we have recorded here."
The Flux set up shows what can be achieved when you decide to get serious about recording. Of course, as Alex and John note, the more you get, the more you want...