hutyluty wrote:I'll get the obvious ones out the way..
What's your set up like- hardware and software?
macbook pro (with a big monitor and keyboard etc), ableton suite, KRK VXT8, RME fireface 400, roland jupiter 6, waldorf pulse, revox b77. a bunch of mics (SM57/58, D112, D6 and a couple of others) which i rarely use except for a pair of cheap MXL condensers. a beautiful old sonor rosewood drum kit from the 70s which i also sadly rarely get a chance to play these days. ummm... a fender strat and jazz bass, which actually found its way onto the radiohead remix but otherwise don't see much use these days. some very old sennheiser headphones (hd580 ovation i think?) which i use a lot. i've got a couple of controllers which i use occasionally but not that often (maschine, bcr2000, launchpad).
the synths were acquired pretty recently - the first two objekt 12s were all in the box i think. almost all of that was ableton, but i made a tape emulation for NI which i used a lot. there's also a minimoog clone in some of the more recent stuff.
hutyluty wrote:What is your musical background?
i started on piano aged 5 or 6, took up drums around 11 and gave up piano not long after. i used to play in bands (mostly drums but sometimes bass and guitar). range of stuff from post-punk and noisy scuzzy rock to jazz (i used to do quite a lot of small-group gigging as well as playing for a couple of big bands, though in general i find big band jazz a bit bait).
started recording my own (and friends') bands around 15 or so... my mum was a composer so she had a little bit of gear (a MIDI home studio with an atari ST, a few samplers, a multitracker and a soundcraft desk). the rest i borrowed, or saved up birthday money etc and bought. i made coffee and lugged flightcases around at a couple of studios and read loads of good and bad advice on the internet, back when usenet was still a thing.
caught the dance music bug around 18 and started DJing and producing around 19 i guess (i'm 25 now). i gave up being in bands around the same time. went to uni and studied engineering (not audio engineering) so i guess you could say i'm self-taught as far as production is concerned, albeit with a very mathy background.
hutyluty wrote:Favourite dance move?
handstand
wub wrote:Your drums have a lot of character, particularly recent like your Radiohead remix. Is this a case of careful sample selection, processing (i.e. overdriving through some sort of analogue desk to get some character), or layering with additional sounds to get that top end crunch to them?
almost everything is layered. in some cases, individual drums are like a collage - the first 10ms "tock" of a 707, the boom of a resampled reverbed 909, a sine sub underneath, the pre-attack of a very fast 606 hat... the difficult bit is knowing how best to arrange them. layering has to be done right otherwise you'll end up worse off than when you started. you need to know exactly what it is you want to add to a certain sound, and whether the sound you intend to layer will work at all.
sample selection is obviously key, but it also helps to learn how to tell whether or not a sample could be useful as a layer even if it's not adequate on its own.
processing wise, i'll invariably process each layer separately. different envelopes, different EQ (sometimes drastic filtering), compressing if necessary, often adding (or subtracting) a delay offset. i can't imagine doing this effectively in any DAW other than ableton because its instrument racks are so powerful and fast to work with. racks inside racks inside racks inside racks.
subtle tape saturation (has to be quite accurate rather than the fake "compression"/"warmth"/"squash" style plugins) followed by slow attack compression is really nice for gritting things up a bit
quite a bit of subtle bitcrushing - not really bitcrushing per se (as in bit reduction) but more like sample rate reduction ("soft" mode in ableton redux). it's nasty if you overuse it but great for very subtle crunch.
important: know when less is more. sometimes all you need is a 606 snare, compressed and EQed, bam.
wub wrote:When starting a tune, do you have a premise thought out first then work towards that end or do you start the tune without a plan then have it grow in to itself?
any given track of mine will have been through at least 20-30 saved versions. over the course of these versions it will probably have passed through at least 2 or 3 completely different tracks. most of the detailing, the incidentals and the "bits and pieces" in my tracks come from what's left over from previous versions - a lead synth in version 7 might have been resampled and end up as nothing more than a little squelch in version 30.
so i guess in the end it doesn't really matter what my initial idea was, since i rarely stick to it. still, from a workflow point of view it is always good to have a sense of direction.
wub wrote:Given the influence in your tunes, how do you feel modern day 'techno' holds up against earlier Underground Resistance style tracks?
ooft. loaded question. it's hit or miss. i think 90s revivalism has to be approached carefully - for example, not enough people bear in mind that one of the great things about old acid tracks was the rawness that came with using certain bits of gear outside their ideal operating range. in that sense, a lot of what's being made now is just a blander version of what came before. on the flip side of the coin, there are people now doing things which would have been totally impossible 15 years ago. or you get people like surgeon, whose productions have always been raw as fuck AND totally at the knife-edge of technical possibility.
hasezwei wrote:favorite 303 pattern?
haha. god. so many. off the top of my head, three o three by public energy
hasezwei wrote:whats your workflow when writing techno? jamming patterns and kinda dubbing them with lotsa sends and riding the faders, or is everything pre-written/automated?
definitely closer to the latter. sometimes i'll play patterns in and then edit them heavily, but not much is "live" apart from occasional filter/effect automation. i'm a keyboard and mouse warrior, for better or for worse
hasezwei wrote:since you work at NI (jesus that used to be dream of mine), do you use reaktor and if yes how do you incorporate it into your DAW?
i didn't until recently, but i do a lot now, usually for instruments and effects rather than all the crazy sequencer shit. i ALWAYS separate programming (which i generally get to do during working hours, which is nice) from music making. the two are totally incompatible workflow-wise.
usually i'll save a completed ensemble, load it into an instrument rack and then assign all the parameters to macros in ableton so i can control it without opening the reaktor GUI. then i'll save the instrument rack for future use.
hasezwei wrote:pick one of the following: autechre, the flashbulb, venetian snares
ae
hasezwei wrote:ever been to münster?
yep. a friend of mine runs schaltkreis - i played there a couple of times as tj hertz.
hasezwei wrote:favorite beer? (inb4becks)
i'm not really a beer snob but if the späti's got em i'll usually go for a tannenzäpfle or augustiner.