It’s easy to get lost in all of today’s flashy gear and high-budget promos, but just a few years ago, the only way to get our tools to have some of the features a lot of us of us currently take for granted was to build your own gear.

Even so, there were a good number of awesome tools coming out even back in 2008, and their potential could only be shown by genuinely creative people doing genuinely mind-blowing stuff with them. This article is dedicated to showing off four demo videos that helped get me into making electronic music.

For any demo video, it’s very hard to strike a balance between making the video/routine spectacular enough to be exciting and also showing off the features of what you’re promoting in a practical way. Get it wrong, and your promo is either perfectly informative but boring, or trying too hard. Then again, there are those promos that are just plain bad. However, the following videos are anything but that:

4. Gundy Keller’s Boss RC-50 Demo

Not a lot of views, but back when I was playing guitar in metal bands, seeing this video absolutely blew my mind. It’s the first proof I ever got that I could make music on my own and have it sound good, too. Gundy Keller is the unsung hero of guitar and guitar pedal demos, and this is the best Boss-sponsored demo of the RC-50, in my honest opinion (and yes, I did count the Dub Fx one, too).

3. Computer Music’s Monome Demo

So you’re saying I can make sounds by playing glowing buttons? Oh. My. God.

Te monome was the first ever button grid controller and there couldn’t have been a better video to go with its perfection-striving and minimalistic approach to design, promotion and sound (no matter how many people are now using it to play electro, I see a monome and I think tehn, stretta and Daedalus).

2. Jeremy Ellis on the Maschine

Yes, I know this doesn’t show off a lot of the features, but the message on this one is clear: if this absolute virtuoso of a finger drummer finds this piece of gear attractive, then it must be really good. This video is also responsible for introducing the mind-numbing Jeremy Ellis to a much wider audience, and that fact alone gets it a spot on my Favorites list.

1. The Novation Launchpad Promo Video

Novation’s Matt Derbyshire a.k.a. KillTheRobot is the absolute king of gear demo videos. All of his stuff on Youtube is absolutely and irrefutably awesome, and although some of his music is a tiny bit cheesy, it’s worth mentioning that thanks to the video below, I learned Ableton just so that I could play the Launchpad. All hail!