BassNectar Interview

[fv2k]

DJ/Producer Lorin Ashton, better known by his marquee moniker Bassnectar, has spent more than a decade producing independent albums and EPs, such as the recent Vava Voom, that juxtapose panicked and blissed-out time signatures, submerging audiences in a sonic bath of dubstep, drum ‘n’ bass, ragga jungle, glitch-hop, and digital hardcore; basically, anything with a breakbeat and a pulse is structurally valid. Here he takes a moment to discuss the value of ergonomic MIDI controllers and online collaborations, the best way to achieve overdrive without burnout, and how making complex sounds can be a simple process.

Over the past couple of years, the media has trumpeted the emergence of a new rave generation. Where do you see yourself in the contemporary bass-music arena?
You know, I’ve been at this for a long time . . . I don’t follow a lot of rules, and the ends justify the means for me. I’m self-taught in a lot of my musical knowledge, and I’m shamelessly into collaboration. I started to take guitar lessons when I was 12 or 13 and learned [Nirvana’s] “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” [Metallica’s] “Enter Sandman,” and [Black Sabbath’s] “Iron Man.” I stopped taking lessons after that.

I basically learned how to play “Iron Man” and then started playing it backward, and learned how to play different parts of it half as fast, double-time, and then tried to put the Nirvana riff over it. Everything I’ve done since has been some kind of mutation or remix of what I hear around me.

I allow myself to be fearless with my choices because sometimes I might choose something that isn’t impressive to geeks at all. It might be called dumb, but to me it’s just powerful or groovy. Maybe it’s just that F-note sub, but turned upside down.

What would you say is your typical workflow from concept to completion?
I truly have no format. I tour full-time; I’m probably home no more than a month out of the year. When I am at home, I usually have several computers open with several projects . . . going back into ten-year-old Reason programs, scouring through DATs that I recorded in the mid-’90s at University of California, Santa Cruz when I was there for an electronic music minor and working with full-sized E-mu synthesizers, looking for samples for remixes and my DJ sets, going through my record collection to put out an a cappella from a song and mess with it, playing with a new glitcherama plug-in someone sent me.

Tell me about the technology that has been key during your musical development.
Honestly, I wish I had immediately followed the advice of my teacher, who said once you find out a good way to make music, you should cancel your subscription to the music magazines, find what you know and don’t ever update anything, just let yourself get creative. I’ve worked with a lot of different tools over the years. I’m friends with Josh [Hinden] from Twisted Tools . . . I have a good relationship with Native Instruments . . . and I’m sure I could make amazing noises with a lot of new soft synths, but I’ve got so many noises already. I could never synthesize another song and still have albums of ideas just from the samples I’ve collected over the years . . . you could take away all the synths and I could have fun making remixes of existing material all my life.

I used Opcode [Systems] Studio Vision, and then moved into Cubase really early on, working with a Kurzweil Synthesizer and a Yamaha mixer. Then I would use the studio up at UCSC for the most insane f**king synthesizers, all patchbay galore. I don’t even remember the models, but I would record them to tape and physically cut the tape up myself, then transfer it all that to ADAT. And every record that I would buy, because I was a pretty avid record collector for ten years, I would digitize so I could sample every kick, every snare, every little breakdown, every synth stab . . . collecting sample libraries like baseball cards. Then I switched to ReWiring Reason into Cubase, and that was really the breaking point for me, being able to have everything in one piece of software. That’s where I first simplified and felt a lot of liberation by confining myself to that one program. My friends using Logic would always tease me that my stuff was too low-fi, but I just had fun doing it. I loved hitting the tab button all day, looking at the wires shake; it was just inspiring to me, being able to make things quickly manifest. Dylan [Lane, who records as ill.Gates] was the one that gave me a reason to get into Ableton Live, because he worked with me for about a month to simplify in another way, building a template based on ideas that I had for creating and DJing with clip packs.

Is this before Max for Live and other customizable environments?
They were trying to teach [Cycling ’74’s] Max to me at UCSC and I was kind of at the point of my university career where I was so sick of being in class and I just wanted to make gangster noises. I really wanted to make psytrance, and my professor wouldn’t let us make that kind of music. He wanted us to explore musique concrète and old-school electronic composition. I appreciate that now; it was the Mister Miyagi technique. Max for Live, though, it was just a reflex for me to avoid it. The nerdier it is, the more options, I just get scared. I just want to really reduce all those options if it’s possible. Even DJing, I just worked with Sixty Works Controllers to develop a simple controller for easily busting out customized live remix DJ sets [paired with ill.Gate’s modified DeeJayus Ex Machina template for Trigger Finger].


Currently, your primary workstation is Ableton Live and a custom MIDI controller?
The MIDI controller is strictly for live performance . . . and, since I’m not a pianist, I’ve been mousing in my MIDI notes since Cubase in the ’90s. I move really quickly like that. I just need a laptop and headphones, really. I’ve got so many of my songs and albums into Ableton that I’m able to remix and sample myself a lot, which is a massive time saver. Every year I update the Vengeance Sound kicks and snares I’m using and then use them all, the same ones, for every song. Around 2004, I started calling things “muscle beats,” and I would use their stock kicks and snares and hats and create a beat that had all the power of the frequencies I wanted. I’d cover it up with bright, sharp, high-passed tops, a bashing snare, just giving a different personality to the drum sounds but basically using the same sub with Reason and in Ableton, just a massive synth sine wave. That speeds things up immensely.

As your methods have changed how has your relationship with subbass changed?
My relationship with subbass has been transformed by several things. I don’t actually think of music competitively, but I really need tracks that can at least stand up to the previous few tracks’ drops in a DJ set, so the bass note has to be an E, an F, an #F, maybe a G. And I toured with my own sound system, which meant I get to play E notes, because few club systems could really reproduce an E. With this record, I started using D, and went down to C for the Pennywise remix just because the systems that I’m on are finally reliably able to reproduce that kind of signal.

In the past I was more worried about whether I could perform sounds, not so much how they all went together. I would just f**k around, hitting my mouse on the synth to find a note that I liked and just play it. Now I think about what I want to combine melodically into a range if I want it to be a heavy drop track. I’ll mirror my sub with a synth pop to make a cohesive bass sound where the sub is isolated just by itself in a pure sine. I’ll use 808 subs and boom kick samples when I need an atonal bass line and I’m trying to figure out the tuning of the song and how it can stay thick.

One major thing for me was learning how to use sidechain compression and properly duck my sub out by my kick, and making sure that the kick is sitting on the right frequency for the track to deliver the power that it needs without competing with the sub . . . I remember seeing Datsik, and he used to physically cut out the sub by hand everywhere the kick was. It’s funny seeing different people’s techniques for trying to get rid of the competition there. Also, duck from the snare . . . do a layered snare with kicks and midrange synths and all kinds of stuff that goes away for a perfectly tuned crunch. Having a dive on your [hit] that sits out and allows for the split-second before you drop a heavy, steady F-note covered with high-frequency and midrange synths while your beat plays, I don’t think you can really get a heavier sound than that.

But the way I work with subbass has also been transformed by mastering. I have a full-time mastering engineer for [personal label] Amorphous Music who was at first brought on just to master all my music. Lately, however, I’ve been having him remaster my old record collection because even two-year-old tracks couldn’t compete anymore. Now that I’m going back I’ve been able to re-incorporate some real gems from all genres, like Nu Skool breaks is just a goldmine. He’ll remaster a track, then I’ll highpass it and put in my own sine wave, my own kick, my own big muscle snare, and basically crash hats or something, fill in some high frequencies, and just use the original record as a midrange, almost like a lead. It’s allowed me to revitalize my own record collection and make it contemporary.

At one point, you were doing a lot of your own “remastering” of tracks for your DJ sets, just applying compressors and limiters. What would you consider your indispensable techniques?
If I’m going to drop a track in three hours, I’ll use PSP Vintage Warmer or a Waves L2 Ultramaximizer, but I’d always prefer to send it off to my mastering guy. If you have the luxury, I would always recommend that you learn your synths and dial in your samples and all of your techniques, but when it comes time to sit it all at a certain level, send it to a mastering engineer. I mix on Mackie HR824s, first mixing the kick and snares, focusing around 110 to 120Hz and making them as loud as I can stand, then working with the hat, keeping it bright, then putting in the sub before I mix everything else up as quiet as I can keep them. Then I offer it to the mastering engineer with a kind of limited sound mix: kick, sub, snare, and the rest of the track.

The techniques that I would say have been crucial in the last record are more in the earlier stages, when I think about what I’m putting on top of the sine wave in each song. Like, in “Butterfly,” there’s a churning reese [bass synth sound] and it’s the same I used in the [Ellie Goulding] “Lights” remix but there’s three of them. On one of them, I’m holding down a slow-motion wobble, and it’s got the highpass cut at probably 400Hz, and it’s basically like a ghost. You mute the sub and it sounds like this thin, frail synth track. Then there’s this thing I call “the dog,” because it makes a “woof” sound. It’s what would have been a wobble bass in [Native Instruments] Massive but with the resonance turned up so high it’s basically just the sound of resonance on the filter. Talk about positive distortion; the sound has been so overly processed by Ableton’s compressor that it gives the 200Hz frequency to the “bass line.” And then there is a key-tuned saw wave with a little bit of motion; you can do it in the Voicing tab in Massive, where you can control the stereo presence. I love turning on the Pan Position and f**king with the spectrum fader, going into the Unisono Spread and taking it up. I’ll have that be the third component in the top notches on the sub, to give it a prickly little feeling to the ears even though what listeners are probably hearing most is that low-pass, high-pass, midrange chunk and then that woof, which pops through all of the different speakers even when the sub isn’t there; it’s kind of the “ghost” sub. [Techniques] like that are how I make a strong reinforcement rhythm section. On that track, there’s like six drum groups and an insane bass group with so many stacks to get that sound.

But then using that same exact kick, that same exact snare, I can make a song like “What,” which is a totally different song, with its own balls-out, laser-y, dubstep drop. The rhythm section is identical to “Butterfly,” but what’s happening on top is totally different. Something like “Vava Voom,” that dubstep drop at the end there is the same exact sine patch, using one of these three kicks, and one of three snares, but then just masked by a whole different texture on top.

Letting myself dial in the rhythm section and then keep the same rhythm “guitarist” for every song as I play different leads on top of it is what allows my mastering to go so quickly. There’s no real mystery; there’s always that same perfectly tuned and thick gelled-together rhythm section. And there’s a parameter in the compressor in Ableton when you activate the sidechain called the Model FF1, FF2, or FB, and it opens up to FF2 by default. But I think it just sounds better on FF1 when you’re doing sidechaining. There’s a lot less rubbing, so I use that and a hella-fast attack, a hella-fast release, a pretty aggressive threshold and ratio. I set up two different devices to duck the sub from the kick and a little less from the snare.

What would be your number one pointer for developing a custom sound?
I really advocate simplicity. Pick your five kicks, pick your five snares, pick whatever your subbass signal is gonna be. Pick a couple of atonal dives. Create them in Massive or pull them out of a sample kit, put ’em in a drum rack, save that drum rack. Save a channel strip. Pick one synth. Then just try to make a couple songs, whether it’s Massive, [Tone 2’s] Gladiator, [Rob Papen’s] SubBoomBass, or Albino, just pick one sampler. Pick just one folder of samples. Then box yourself in with one sequencer and just work for a while. You don’t need to worry about constantly updating, constantly upgrading, constantly getting the newest, latest thing, because if you do that, it’s blindingly possible that you may never get a single song written because you’re so busy trying to keep everything updated. That may fly in the face of your magazine, but I believe it to be true.

[blinx]

nice to finally hear lorin discuss his "tech" in more detail. Thanks for the post!

[alphacat]

Where's this from?

[fv2k]

http://www.emusician.com/artists/0767/bassnectar/148981

[blinx]

i found some extra stuff, from the interview on the same site:

Finding simplicity in re-imagining, remixing, and remastering music




by Tony Ware





Read our extended interview with Bassnectar.






I’ve been thinking a lot about Nirvana and Metallica lately, watching Netflix documentaries and shit. I’ve started to meet some of my heroes, like hanging out with Dave Grohl in Brazil, and Les Claypool [from Primus] asking me to remix a track … and there’s just this joy I’m feeling from getting to engage people I listened to and supported when I was wearing a flannel around my waist 20 years ago. That feeling is what I consider the real spirit of music; it’s not geeky and it’s not technical, and that is the role of the artist: to channel emotional and inspiring whether you’re John Lennon or Mozart or Jimi Hendrix or Ice Cube or Dr. Dre or a DJ. Like, it’s so easy to tease a DJ because for all you know they’re just standing up there with a click track playing, but in reality having the musical taste to select songs that can bring 10,000 people on a journey, seamlessly weave together songs that were created other people into a cohesive blend, that is an art. It’s one of many arts that to me are really fun to explore even though there’s a lot of people doing it. I think what I would encourage people to do today is to get personal, to get creative and not so much focus on perfectly replicating the techniques you need to make yet another laserstep, dubstep or trance track, or whatever. As an individual, I am really responsive to shit that I hear that feels like there’s heart and vision behind it even if it’s not as well produced.

I recommend working with other people for a lot of reasons, including being able to save your ears from unnecessary destruction. For example, I have someone else master tracks because I’m already spending two-and-a-half hours a night on these stages with concert-level systems where the bass is rattling my eyeballs and I’m doing it 16 nights in 19 days straight. It’s very dangerous to my ears. So any time I can not spend doing the technical side of final mastering, the better. Especially taking into account that I want to master basically every record in my collection and every record that comes in and that I’m on airplanes and at hotels, having someone at home who can just say “Yep, bass has been checked,” it’s been the most liberating shortcut. Normally I can do it myself, but at the cost of my ears and having enough time to do it. I would recommend that artists allow themselves to be as creative as they want, but when they have their song totally finished, mix it down without the kick and without the sub and send it off as those separate parts … and you can only do this if you know the mastering engineer and you have a serious relationship with this person, because you don’t want them making any mix changes or any creative interference. This is the full technical surgery. Having those separate components allows the proper ducking system to be controlled and properly tested at all the right levels of volume to compete on a laptop, headphones, on a club system, on a concert system.

The whole trick is you’re trying to maximize your weight, your volume, your evenness of volume, and looking for anywhere that you can carve away once you get into that final limiting. Every one of the songs that you hear on my final releases it’s the 49th or 50th go, because you’ll go through several dozen options at the very end just trying to get rid of that final bit of burnt overdrive on certain frequencies without losing any power. It changed my life when I decided to bring in someone full-time who could provide another head and ears so I could be more productive creatively. If someone’s trying to do it all themselves, it’s like when are you going to stop? Are you going to market it, distribute it, drive the truck? At some point you have to say, “Here it is, here’s what I’m going to do, here’s my art,” and then know when and to who to turn it over.

If you want to be doing everything and you don’t want to collaborate with someone, even if you want to be mastering it yourself, you need to approach it like playing the different roles as a different human. Play the role of the rhythm section as the drummer, and then put on your rhythm guitarist hat and then your lead guitarist hat.

Sometimes I miss being in bands, I miss the personal and interpersonal resonance of crafting with someone else. Collaborating with someone like ill.Gates is like working with yourself but there’s two of you, because we’re really similar, stylistically, similar skill sets. Shit gets done really quickly, literally in one day a lot of the time. I can just take my files over we can quickly get a song fucked up and retuned. Collaborating with Mimi Page, though, she’s doing things that I simply can’t do. She sings and plays the piano. She’s a musical genius and her theory is incredible. I sent her old material of mine, and asked what her thoughts were, to just send me back something. And she did, and then I took the piano part and transposed it into MIDI and played it kind of differently and sent it back to her and had her do a version of it. So, we got that, made a bassline to it, filled the beat around it, sent it her back to her as a song that’s basically this crude bass beat with her piano, she sang over it, then we retuned her vocals and had three bars, four bars of her vocal and cut the third bar. I used some plug-ins on her vocal to give her an idea of where I wanted the melody to go; it didn’t sound good in quality, but got the idea across because I couldn’t sing over the phone to her. We worked on that song for two months, back and forth like that, and made like four different songs. I kept changing my mind, she kept getting new ideas. And in the end we made this one song and it was just such a sexy make-out song. I almost thought it was R&B, and there was no place on my current record for it, but it was a natural flow. So from that we opened up all kinds of potential areas to explore later, which I love.

When I first started I had to prove I could do everything in a song and make everything. I even mastered some of the songs like “Blow.” If you hear it you can tell that I mastered it myself because it sucks. I don’t know what year that was, maybe 2003 or 2004. It was important for me to prove to myself I could do everything. Now that it’s proven, I’m over it. I don’t care what part I play in song creation, I just want to see the music created. I think more in terms of filmmaking. If this is a film, I wanna be the director more than the actor. I wanna be the Dr. Dre more than I want to be the studio engineer who’s recording a band. I’ve done it, I’ve had patch cables flung over my shoulder and producing the electric signal of the most insane rip-off of R2D2 or whatever alien sound direction you wanna go. At this point – partly because so many of the sounds have already be created and you can buy This Is Dubstep Vol. 3 sample and patch collection to make and emulate any sound you want – I’m more interested in reworking my old ideas or inventing new takes on the idea of other people by collaborating with them or having someone remix me or remixing someone else. I feel like that’s where a lot of the future of music’s gonna go because so many of us are control freaks that we wind up all by ourselves in this lonely universe where we get to make every decision and control the song from beginning to end. While that’s cool, that’s probably why I’m not hearing the same energy in music that I did in 1992. There’s less cooperation, there’s less cohesion in the process of multiple individuals excelling at what they do, what they’re most excited to do. Still, I admit pretty much every collaboration I’ve done over the past year has been over the Internet, almost half of them without meeting the other person in person, because the timing is just so tough with my touring schedule.

My advice to anyone who’s producing music who cares what I think is really simple advice: have fun, get creative, take chances, try things. When I was working on “Ugly” with Amp Live, we made an agreement that every single moment we reached a crossroads, going left or right, we’d ask ourselves “what are we more likely to do” and then we’d go the other way. With a track I’m making right now with ill.Gates … we always started off, since the beginning, with the drum beat. These days, as a rule, I force myself to make the song first before I add drums or bass, then go back and play the bassline along to it, and then go back and play the drums along to it. It’s just a new approach and makes a more melodic personality, not just a videogame composition of explosion and laser. For me that’s important because it’s something I never did. If that’s been your approach all along, try starting off making a drumbeat. In some way, get creative. Play outside the box. Collaborate with other people because they’re always gonna have weird ideas and help keep you in check if you get stuck in some random loop. I feel like, go back to the mentality of slapping a guitar over and over and standing there awkwardly in a room while your friend is just starting to learn drums and you’re in your parents’ garage and just 1, 2, 3, 4. Play music. Don’t just reproduce the same thing that you’re hearing. I mean, I think it’s healthy to learn from what you’re hearing, just don’t stop at the first level. I remember reading an interview with James Hetfield and he’s talking about his influences. At that time I expected him to say Slayer and Megadeath and Pantera. Other than Black Sabbath all the bands he listed were bands I had never heard of or bands that, off the cuff, I didn’t care about or didn’t like. I didn’t understand for a long time that that is the meaning of influences. It’s something that influences you to make something new. I can tell these days when a producer has been influenced by dubstep, I can hear that. Whereas when I was making dubstep I was influenced by doom metal and black metal and ’90s electronica and the downtempo room and acid jazz and drum ‘n’ bass and ragga jungle and Aphex Twin and Squarepusher and on and on and on; all these influences that I don’t necessarily sound like, but that influenced me. I’m not making dubstep because I’m listening to someone like Excision, because I was making dubstep before I even met or heard Excision, before Excision was making dubstep. His dubstep, I assume, was heavily influenced by drum ‘n’ bass, videogames, and whatever else was influencing him. He has a very distinct noise and made it before anyone else made it. It’s not a replication, it’s an influence. Creativity can be really choked if you emulate and don’t push the emulation part of it into some kind of mutant form. Which is why I don’t want to say, “Here’s how to make a standard dubstep track.” I’d rather encourage creativity.

I don’t want dubstep to becomes too strict on itself. There was a point where it defined itself too specifically and rejected anything that didn’t follow or adhere to the direct rules. The only things that were celebrated and accepted were the same things and same rules by a few select producers. One way you can talk about drum ‘n’ bass is BPM, that range of 170 BPM give or take. If it’s 130 BPM it’s not drum ‘n’ bass; it’s specific to tempo. I remember before I even heard the word dubstep, not its 2002 incarnation but the second wave in 2005, Dubstep 2.0, well before that I was trying to contact drum ‘n’ bass producers to request that they either move their snare off the 2 and the 4 and put it right on the 3 or let me do that. Can I remix your track but just move the snare? I want one snare in a bar, not two, I don’t want to be on a fucking treadmill. And overcompress your rise and your hat so it starts rushing [makes noise] and send it back to me so I can play it. Of course, not a single one wrote back. I wanted to hear the drum ‘n’ bass that I loved so much but in an alternate way. Same tempo, same force, double-time bassline, half-time drums, full power. That was before I heard the word dubstep and well before drumstep. It was a creative idea. Do your thing but tweak this rule. I felt the same thing when I heard dubstep. All the drum ‘n’ bass producers made dubstep. Why don’t you guys just make this music at half time, 87 or 88 BPM. It was like pulling teeth. Years would pass before they considered it. By the time they were onto drumstep I was sick of that as an idea and already made “Bass Head” and “Teleport Massive” and all this shit. The reason that all this happened is a lack of interest in pushing the boundaries and thinking outside the box and being open to new ideas. I don’t think dubstep is going to have that problem, however. People compare dubstep to drum ‘n’ bass because of the intensity, but it’s too wide-spectrum now. There’s the gentlest and the most creative and the most stock and standard and the most robotic … I think that we’ve overcome the tempo hurdle and we’ve overcome all the hurdles that at the time drum ‘n’ bass couldn’t overcome. Now, drum ‘n’ bass is still one of my favorite genres. I make it and play it. Producers that I used to love their drum ‘n’ bass are now making all different kinds of genres. I don’t think that dubstep or music in general is at that risk. Collaborations and thinking outside the box and prioritizing creativity are going to ensure that continues.

[skills4kills]

cool insight thanks mate

[Brendon77]

I am looking for this mix music.

www.howtomakeslime.org/
http://howtocookbutternutsquash.org/