There's a joke in the title. Working only with hardware is not the easy way to make electronic music. It takes up space, needs cables, costs money, and something will eventually break. There's also a serious reason behind it. Hardware isn't the foundation of this studio because software can't sound good — it's the foundation because it gave the music a workflow, and a character, that software never quite did.
This is the story of how the studio ended up this way.
Where it started: Komplete 2
More than twenty years ago, as a student, Tom bought his first production bundle — Native Instruments Komplete 2. That was the start of experimenting with software instruments and effects. Not long after, a job at Amtech, then the Belgian distributor for Native Instruments, Moog, Waves, Soundtoys and Universal Audio, put an enormous range of gear within reach. Synths, drum machines, processors, plugins — all of it, tested and compared, year after year.
Learning what doesn't last
A studio slowly took shape. Some equipment got bought, tried, and sold again. Other pieces stayed for years and became essential. But the cracks in a software-based studio kept showing up. A new laptop, an OS update, a discontinued plugin — any of it could break something that used to just work. When certain Native Instruments products were discontinued, that became impossible to ignore. The music hadn't changed. The technical ground underneath it had.
From plugins to a system that just switches on
That was reason enough to move toward hardware. Over time the studio became synthesizers, drum machines, MIDI interfaces and patchbays — a system that could simply be switched on and used, with no worrying about whether an old plugin would survive the next update. Hardware breaks too, but once it's repaired, it keeps working for decades without asking for an upgrade.
The other reason: the sound
The bigger reason is the sound itself. The music leans hard on the electronic character of the 1990s, and getting that right is more than finding a plugin that claims to emulate it. The studio holds a considerable collection of rack synthesizers from that era — rackmount gear also just makes sense, fitting a lot of instruments into very little space. The drum machines include a Roland TR-909, a TR-808, and a German 909-style clone from Jomox.
Hands on the sound
The difference isn't only sonic — it's in how the sound gets made. There's a particular joy in picking a preset, turning a few knobs, and hearing the result immediately. No screen, no mouse. A filter opens, an envelope shifts, a resonance gets pushed, all while listening to how it develops. That direct line between hands, instrument and sound is a real part of the process. The goal was never to reproduce a preset exactly — it's a starting point, shaped until it fits the track. Fewer options than an infinite software environment, but that limitation makes decisions faster and keeps the focus on the music.
A stable setup
About ninety percent of the gear in the studio actually ends up on record. It's not shelves of equipment that never gets switched on — most of it has a job. The setup has reached a point of quiet stability. A few pieces are still on the wish list, but there's no longer a constant need to replace or upgrade anything. The instruments are familiar, the sounds are familiar, and the workflow doesn't require thinking about anymore.
The sound, in short
This is the approach behind Same Same, But Different, the upcoming album on We Play House Recordings — made entirely on hardware, aside from a few plugins used at the mixing stage for EQ and compression. The sound creation itself runs through synthesizers, drum machines and analog processors, including a bank of filters — an Akai MFC42, an Electrix Filter Factory, a Zero Gravity from the Belgian brand, and two Sherman Rodec Restylers — that add movement to sounds that would otherwise sit too clean and static.
None of this is an argument that hardware beats software. Software synths are powerful, convenient, and capable of great music — for a lot of producers, they're exactly right. What matters is a setup that gets out of the way of the music instead of getting in front of it. For Tom, that turned out to be physical instruments and familiar knobs, until software instruments quietly disappeared from the process — not because they stopped being useful, but because they stopped being missed.
So maybe the title isn't entirely a joke. Hardware takes space, needs cables, and breaks down. But it's a small price for a workflow that's this enjoyable — and for this sound, the inconvenience isn't a drawback. It's part of the reason the music sounds the way it does.
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