1. Favourite knob/fader/switch on a piece of gear and why?
Moog Mother-32
I guess Vcf mod amount from Mother 32. They allow you to make some good movement with this juicy Moog filter.
2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?
The combo DFAM and mother 32. The only think I would change it’s maybe put them all in eurorack case with some effect and output mixer.
Moog DFAM and Mother 32
3. What setup do you bring on holiday/tour/commute etc.?
My three tier rack Moog with Mother 32, DFAM, Malekko voltage block and the Lyra 8 !
Moog and cables
4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?
I learned how use tracker with Renoise two years ago, it was really fun and now Polyend or Nerdseq is here as hardware. I really hope to integrate this kind of sequencer in my set up one day, but actually I don’t really need them now.
Meris Polymin, Zvex Instant Loop Junky and Earthquaker Devices Afterneath
For software I don’t really use a lot, except plugins for effect and mixing. I recently bought a Polymoon by Meris, very fun. Maybe having Polymoon or Mercury 7 as a plug would be very cool, for use as send effect or something like this.
5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?
I miss my Moog Minitaur and my Digitakt, but sometimes you have to make choices…
Elektron Digitakt
6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?
Always DFAM and Mother 32. But Soma Lyra 8 can offer you lot of weird and limitless possibilities, and I really like to use it’s external input for other gear, it’s very exiting.
Soma Lyra 8
7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?
I bought the Arturia Beatstep Pro a few days ago, and I guess if I have to start over I go directly to my Beatstep Pro and control everything in a eurorack system with it. Two voice synth with complex oscillators for example, drums and lot of cool stuff.
8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without
Maybe my Minilogue, because I don’t really use a lot actually, but sometimes I just plug it into an effect pedal, play with my own hand and I can trip out for a long time. So I keep it…
9. Most surprising tip/trick/technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?
Yeah, I have a some good patches, I used this for my video BuGzZ. It’s on the Mother 32:
noise out in vco lin fm.
Lfo tri out in mix 2
Pitch out (DFAM) in mix 1
KB out in vc mix ctrl
And vc mix out in vcf cut off.
Recently I also used pitch output of DFAM to control Lyra 8 hold gate input. It’s mad!
Artist or Band name?
Stufflandsounds
Genre?
Electronic, experimental, happymess.
Selfie?
Jeremy Hernandez
Where are you from?
From France, in a little countryside town around Tarbes and Lourdes. I live in Bordeaux now.
How did you get into music?
I guess it was when I was child, I took headphones of my uncle to listen some CDs, and I found in his room the album Bjork Homogenic, Massive Attack Mezzanine, MTV Unplugged Nirvana. My mind blow up !
What still drives you to make music?
She always opens my mind to a new infinite world and it’s about shared creativity with other people. I can’t do without, even just listening music.
How do you most often start a new track?
Most of time, I’m thinking in my room, I see my gear, and I feel when it’s a good moment to have fun with it.
How do you know when a track is finished?
I never know… haha.
Filming can help me to say « it’s done », and next I keep my project to have some post production, edit, mixing, etc.
Show us your current studio
jeremy Hernandez’s Studio
Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?
Stay yourself, stay daydreamer.
Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link.
1. Favourite knob/fader/switch on a piece of gear and why?
Novation Summit Noise and Frequency
One of my favorite knobs is without a doubt the Summit cutoff combined with the noise knob that always adds a lot of depth to the sound. Other knobs that I find very interesting are the branches and mutation on the Qu-Bit Bloom, which makes any patch generative and potentially infinite. Sometimes when I’m in the studio (which is also my home) and I’m doing something other than producing music I create a random patch and totally open both knobs, it’s fun.
Branches and Mutation on the Qu-Bit
2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?
I’m not a pianist even though I studied it a bit during my studies in classical music at the Conservatory. I think that among all the instruments I own, my grandfather’s piano is my perfect one. Both for an affective value and for the harmonic completeness, it has always been the instrument that allows me to create more, I just sit there and throw down some ideas and then go down to the studio and develop them on my modular system.
Piano
3. What setup do you bring on holiday/tour/commute etc.?
Modular (although it’s starting to become huge, in fact I think I will shrink it with a Palette case from Intellijel) headphones and zoom recorder for holidays. But when I have to play live I don’t care too much about comfort and I carry everything and more, including the Summit (my back doesn’t thank me).
Intellijel Palette
4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?
All Felt instruments plugins on eurorack format would be great, as well as a hardwere version of Ableton, would probably make live performances much more interesting
Felt VSTs and Ableton
5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?
I’m not a person who sells a lot, but I recently sold my digitakt two days before its new update – that’s all I’ll say. Joking aside I must say that in the eurorack world there is a lot of buying and selling and you can never lose anything or have too many regrets for having sold something.
Smokin’ hot Elektron Digitakt
6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?
As I said before certainly the piano is always my starting point for composition, but in the end my main tool today is the modular system, which constantly offers a continuous sound research avenues and new ways to create sounds from scratch, even using a few modules and always trying to study them in depth. The great thing is that it can be an instrument in continuous evolution and change and the perfect medium to express ourselves even with our personal changes.
Idra’s Eurorack
7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?
I think I would do the exact same path again that led me to be who I am today. I don’t know if everyone knows this, but I start my music journey as a classical trumpet player. Classical music and its study has definitely helped me both in technical knowledge but especially in maximum attention to listening. A sensitivity to sounds and sonorities, I would say. So if I had to start again, I would start with the trumpet again.
Trumpet
8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?
Endless cables
Cables… nicely organized
9. Most surprising tip/trick/technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?
One of the tricks I use the most is after watching a video of Ricky Tinez based on understanding how to manipulate LFO phase points and make them free and random in independent points of time. I highly recommend it, especially to create movement and use LFOs in new ways. Another “trick” that I often use is to stop listening to an album that is almost finished for a while before putting the finishing touches on it.
Artist or Band name?
IDRA
Genre?
Ambient
Selfie?
Idra
Where are you from?
Milan, Italy
How did you get into music?
I started playing trumpet when I was nine years old, graduating in classical trumpet. For a few years I got into jazz and world music, but it was electronic music that I fell in love with and where I found my own spot in the world.
What still drives you to make music?
The sense of freedom and the need to communicate something first to myself and then to others, is a refuge and a medicine that keeps me alive and allows me to express myself in the most creative way I can know
How do you most often start a new track?
Whenever I feel the need to enclose and let out my feelings and sensations. I often have very profitable moments of production, but I also often need silence, I do not follow a precise path, every time I turn on the machines in the studio and I feel that something beautiful comes out, it can become a track or simply my soundtrack of the day.
How do you know when a track is finished?
When it makes me smile and gives me a clear picture in my mind, I would say the moment I think of a title the track is over.
Show us your current studio
Idra Studio
Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?
Don’t be afraid to listen to advice and always be open to change. But the best will always be: keep things simple.
Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link
[Editor: I remember listening to The Golden Morning Breaks back in the mid 00’s and being completely mesmerized. It was and is for me personally an album that influenced me greatly and expanded the landscape of my musical interests. Therefore it’s with great, great pleasure that I can present this nerdy and odd interview with the artist Colleen]
1. Favourite knob/fader/switch on a piece of gear and why?
Moogerfooger MF104M – Photo: Cecile Schott
This is a really tough one. I love switching in rhythm the short/long switch of the Moogeerfooger MF-104M analog delay, as it produces a change in tone (darker on the long setting, brighter on the short one) which can really sound amazing (you can hear this effect very clearly on my song “Holding Horses” from my album Captain of None).
Moogerfooger Grandmother – Photo: Cecile Schott
But I am also madly in love with opening and closing the cutoff knob on the filter of both the Moogerfooger Lowpass Filter and the Moog Grandmother: I love that this can be the subtlest, slowest rise to build tension and suspense (“Hidden in the Current” on my last album The Tunnel and the Clearing) or totally wild and angry (middle section of “Implosion-Explosion”, also on my last album). The expressive capacity of the Moog filters really leaves me speechless.
Moogerfooger MF 101 – Cecile Schott
2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?
Roland Space Echo Re201 and furry buddy – Cecile Schott
The Roland RE-201 Space Echo transforms sound in a truly magical way (when I first started using mine in December 2019, two images came to my mind: sending the sound on a space rocket into outer space, or having stardust sprinkled on the sounds). If it could magically be made to be 100% reliable for years without the need for revision, that would be incredible – then again, it goes against the very nature of its mechanism, so I know that this is a bit like asking for the weather to be perfect all the time: not possible.
3. What setup do you bring on holiday/tour/commute etc.
Concert in Chiquita Room 23 May 2021 – Photo LiLINTERNA
Since I have decided to stop playing live for the foreseeable future and have only one last show planned abroad (Kingsplace, London), I will not have to think too much – except for that one show – about the conundrum of travelling internationally with heavy, fragile, vintage – and even super rare in the case of the Elka Drummer One – gear. Fully-working Drummer Ones for sale are so rare that you need to be on a waiting list if you are hoping to buy one, so if your unit is damaged, delayed, lost or stolen during travel, it would be impossible to find a replacement (in fact, had I decided to go on tour for this album, my plan was to order a digital custom replica of the Drummer One – which would also have been its own challenge to make).
Studio and cat buddy – Still from forthcoming documentary – Photo: Luis Torroja
For the last two albums, I had found a sweet spot in terms of making albums that were voluntarily restricted in terms of gear, but didn’t feel restrictive at all in terms of musical and sound possibilities, which meant I could go on tour on my own with all the necessary gear and play the albums live (something that was much harder to do, or even impossible, for my earlier work).
For Captain of None: treble viola da gamba + an array of various looping, delay and octaver pedals.
For A Flame my Love, a Frequency: 2 Critter and Guitari synth + 2 Moogerfoogers + Soundcraft mixing desk. However, that was hard to do physically, with me carrying more than half of my body weight across the world, and you’re never safe from delayed luggage, failing gear, etc.
4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?
Assembly in the DAW – Acid. Still from forthcoming documentary – Photo: Luis Torroja
Not really a software person myself: I must be one of very few professional musicians who are still using the Acid software to record their music, and these days I am using it purely as a recording and mixing device. On the last album I don’t use a single plugin, everything is played and recorded live through either my Soundcraft mixing desk or my Scarlett 18i20 Focusrite soundcard or both, with only a couple of minor edits where takes needed to be joined. The only exception to this very pure recording process is vocals, where I still need to join takes.
5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?
Not really: I always think and research for a really long time before buying anything, so usually I don’t have any bad surprises, and the opposite even happens: I’m so happy with my purchase that I wonder why I thought about it for so long! And because of this I usually don’t have to sell anything.
6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?
Impossible for me to reply to that, as truly every album I’ve made has been so different in terms of instrumentation. My 3rd and 4th album couldn’t have existed without my bass viola da gamba, my 4th and 5th without my treble viola da gamba. The Moogerfooger pedals – which I started to add from Captain of None onwards – were a real game changer for me, and in terms of electronics were my introduction to analogue gear, and that was a game changer.
7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?
I started making music with a simple classical guitar, and honestly, if I were to start over, I probably wouldn’t change anything: there is something humble and honest about an acoustic guitar that still resonates with me, even if I haven’t played one in years. It’s also beautiful that it doesn’t need electricity: should the planet get even worse than it is right now, I think that acoustic instruments and the human voice would play a great role in maintaining music-making alive.
8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?
Can’t think of any annoying piece of gear of mine, I love them all.
9. Most surprising tip/trick/technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?
Not sure if it’s “surprising” as such, but Soundgas – from whom I bought both my Elka Drummer One and my Space Echo – give this tip of inserting a blank plug in the “from PA” input on the Space Echo in order to get a 100% wet signal, and that is so much better than just getting the mixed mono output, since you can then play with panning between your original dry sound source and the 100% wet signal, giving you a beautiful stereo field.
Elka Drummer One and Roland Space Echo – Still from forthcoming documentary – Photo Luis Torroja
Artist or Band name?
Colleen
Genre?
Proudly genreless. I honestly have no clue what my music is supposed to be called. It’s too pop to be experimental, too experimental to be pop; when I used only acoustic instruments but processed them, it was labelled “electronica”, but now that I truly make electronic music, I still think what I do doesn’t sound especially like “electronic music”. One thing I do know is that I make songs. So sometimes I just say “I make weird songs”.
Selfie?
Thanks but no thanks.
Workshop in Chiquita Room 23 May 2021 – Photo: LiLINTERNA
Where are you from?
Montargis, small French town 100 km south of Paris.
How did you get into music?
The Beatles’ “A day in the life” changed my life forever. I was about 13.
What still drives you to make music?
Undying love for it. The desire to see if I can still surprise myself. The desire to learn. Feeling like I actually contribute something useful to people other than myself, even if music is not really recognized as socially useful (I think that’s a mistake, and that music globally contributes to our mental health).
How do you most often start a new track?
Putting my hands on the instruments or gear.
Moogerfoogers – Photo: Cecile Schott
How do you know when a track is finished?
A combination of 3 inputs: one that is purely musical, the other two are: intellectual and emotional.
Show us your current studio
Colleen Studio – Photo: Cecile Schott
Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?
Not creative advice as such, but more an analysis of the difficulties faced by artists, this 1927 quote by Brancusi: “It is not the work itself, it is to keep oneself in condition to do it, that is difficult.” So true at every level: emotional, physical, mental.
Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link.
[Editor: There are affiliate links to the relevant gear throughout the articles. It helps to support this blog. In fact, should you be needing some patch cables or guitar strings. Then clicking on one of the above links and buying any product that you prefer, will help the blog… doesn’t even have to be the ones in the link. Thx]]
