Martin Yam Møller

Peter Griffiths – Yunome

1.Favourite knob or fader or switch on a piece of gear and why?

The Multimode Filter knob with its flashing lights and the red LFO Filter knob on the modified KNAS Ekdahl Moisturizer Spring reverb makes me smile when I feed it noises which can often become thunderous, scary sounds, and this unit is an instrument in its own right with a preamp, a multimode filter and an LFO. Sorry, that was two knobs! Oh, and don’t get me started on the switches on this thing 😉

2.Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?

I have a thing for hardware delay pedals, and I love the Erica Synths Zen Delay; it’s almost perfect; it would have been nice to have software control or an app to have deeper controls/options like the new software version, which has bit depth and sample rate controls.

3.What setup do you bring on holiday or tour or commute etc.?

I have taken the 1010 Music Nanoboxes, Lemondrop and Razzmatazz, as they are mighty and creative little machines. Usually, I take one FX pedal, such as the Chase Bliss Habit, and it all gets recorded into the Tascam Portacapture X-8.

4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?

I got my wish recently when Erica Synths made a software version of the Zen Delay, so that’s pretty cool!

5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?

I haven’t regretted selling any hardware to date. Once I decide it’s going, it’s because it isn’t making sense in my current setup. My worst purchase was the Roland TR-8.

6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?

The Pulsar-23 is a drum synth on steroids with 23 independent modules, I use it to synthesise drums and rhythms, bass and melodic lines, effects and sound landscapes, and it’s a crazy source of control voltage and a decent analogue FX processor all in one unit.

7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?

Any Soma Laboratory gear. The Rumble of Ancient Times is a clever little deep and gnarly synth with a Chaos button to randomise and shake things up.

Soma Laboratory – Rumble of Ancient Times

8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?

Not so much annoying, but my trusty old Erica Synths Fusion Mixer I use for spicing up drums or synths. It’s only irritating because it’s in euro rack format and is one of only two modules that survived my euro rack cull. So I had to buy a wee case for them.

9. Most surprising tip or trick or technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?

Not input mixing (no external input) This is routing the output back to one of your inputs on your mixing desk and using gain and EQ to create different tones/noises/synth-like sounds internally, call it a feedback loop. You can spice up your feedback loop by adding FX into the signal chain, and then you have infinite sonic possibilities.

Artist or Band name?

YUNOME, aka Pete Samplers and 12modes.

Genre?

Dancing across experimental electronica, house, techno and breakbeat

Selfie?

Peter Griffiths – YUNOME, aka Pete Samplers and 12modes.

Where are you from?

I am from the Wirral, a little Peninsula in the North West of the United Kingdom close to Liverpool.

How did you get into music?

One chance gig at my local youth club when I was 13, and I was hooked on Electronic music. I was lucky to grow up close to Liverpool and Manchester, which had great music scenes back in the 90s. I spent most of my teenage years in record shops and clubs there.

What still drives you to make music?

My deep curiosity for how music makes people feel and my need to make sound with whatever I can get my hands on. My wife says I am a much better human when I make music.

How do you most often start a new track?

It can be many ways, but it usually starts with me seeing or reading something that inspires me, then that gets interpreted as a synth line, or I program some drums and riff off of that.

Chase Bliss Habit, Boss DS-1 Distortion, Zen Delay, Eventide H9, Source Audio SA 263 Collider Delay+ Reverb

How do you know when a track is finished?

When I am not fussing around it anymore, once it gets to the stage where adding anything else will ruin the vibe and simplicity of the arrangement, it is time to park it.
It is always best to return to it later with a bit of distance; then, you can see with rested ears and a fresh perspective.

Show us your current studio

Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?

Press record! Said my friend and fellow producer, Euan Murchie.

I often jam for hours and sometimes cannot re-create some of the things that happened during some sessions when I wanted to translate some stuff into arrangements, so having the record button armed is an obvious solution.

Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link.

There are two 12modes tracks on my Bandcamp right now.

A YUNOME album which will drop in the autumn.

[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]

Dean Fuller – The Washington Monument Amb

1. Favourite knob or fader or switch on a piece of gear and why?

You want a gateway to all possible multiverses of music? The RANDOMISE button on the Korg Opsix will take you there.

Maybe you just want to go to the universe next door. Korg has got you covered: You can set the level of randomisation, giving you everywhere from the tiniest variation on your current sound too.

2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?

Chase Bliss Dark World. It’s an ugly/beautiful reverb that makes anything sound cool. But … I want it in stereo.
DARK on the left. WORLD on the right. Let ‘em twist and twirl together. Let them have babies with two heads and two dark hearts . I digress…

PS. An adjustable loop length on the Chase Bliss Habit would be dope too…

3. What setup do you bring on holiday or tour or commute etc.?

If I need to be agile/mobile/hostile I stick with this: Korg Volca Keys paired with a Zoom G1 Four. The Keys was my first synth, and it was cheap. The Zoom has pretty much every standard effect under the sun – and a 30 second looper. I’ve recently added the Arturia Keystep as a keyboard, because the patented Volca keyboard is a flaming trash heap.

Korg Volca Keys paired with a Zoom G1 Four and Arturia Keystep

Give it another couple of weeks and it might be the Volca FM2 instead though…

4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?

If Puremagnetik’s Driftmaker delay was a pedal I’d pay a ridiculous amount of money for it without a second thought. It adds such a gritty, messed up ambience to whatever it touches. Blankfor.ms had a hand in it, so you know the lofi is legit.

I don’t wish any of my hardware was a software plugin* This is not to say that I’m dismissing the digital side of music making in any way, shape or form. Plenty of great artists use it to great effect.
I don’t use these tools because I just don’t have much time to play music.

Booting up a computer, opening up Ableton, selecting one of an infinite array of software synths, worrying about CPU usage or RAM – all of this takes time and energy to deal with. I ain’t in a headspace (or a techspace) where I can do any of that quickly or efficiently currently.

My hardware setup can go from POWER OFF to ready to play in about 10 seconds. Maybe a minute if I’ve got some super crazy stereo stuff I want to dial in.

If I had a small, always on computer with enormous processing power next to my synth setup, then I’d definitely be integrating more.

*although I am intrigued by plugins that work in tandem with my hardware pedals. When I have world enough, and time, I’ll be doing some weird n’ wild stuff with the Chase Bliss Plugin for Gen Loss 2 , as well as a user created plugin for HABIT…

5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?

Moog Mavis is the perennial underdog of my setup. Don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful as a single module in a larger modular setup. Oora Music gets a ton of mileage out of it as part of his suitcase of modules. On its own… you don’t have much to work with and I’m not fully ready to commit to it.
In retrospect, I wish I’d saved an extra couple of weeks and grabbed a Make Noise Strega instead. Alas, currently Mavis is a humble lowpass filter for my drum machine.

6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?

I refuse to read the manual for Matt Bradshaw’s Drumkid because I wanna believe that it has a mind of its own. Sure, it’s supremely limited, but everything it does it nails. I randomise a drum pattern, and now I have a drummer that will flick in a little something extra from time to time. It’s a true collaborator – spitting its endless rhythmic ideas my way to play off. I need a good collaborator with an excellent brain to get my fingers working. Drumkid is both.

Heck, a lot of the time I mute the drum channel – all I need is the groove that the Drumkid thoughtfully provides.

7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?

I started off many a year ago with just a Korg Volca Keys and nothing else for like 5 years. Please note that the Keys sounds like a squealing pig until you grease it with heavy reverb.

Can you blame me? I was seduced by that wonderful word: ANALOG.

Now I just want a usable sound that I can dial in quickly.

If I could turn back time I’d grab a Volca FM instead and have every DX7 preset ever made loaded onto it. Who needs to properly learn FM synthesis if you’ve got some great presets, right?

Also I’d get a MIDI keyboard for the thing because no-one deserves to be punished with the standard Volca ribbon keyboard.

8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?

I love the Chase Bliss Mood. I still don’t know what I’m doing with it half the time. I just did a session where it seemed like all the settings were reversed and maybe the thing is trying to gaslight me. I dunno man…

But when it hits, it breaks through the fabric of reality. Even that basic reverb sounds so weird and warped and wonderful. To say nothing of its DELAY or SLIP modes.

9. The Most surprising tip or trick or technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?

Treat it right and Chase Bliss Habit can be a mono synth.
Firstly you need:
⦁ A constant(ish) sound source/tone.
⦁ Chase Bliss Habit.

Here’s how you do it:

⦁ Set the MODIFY switches to A1. You are now in pitch delay mood. Twisting between 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock will pitch your echoes down. Twisting it further either side will pitch your echoes up to the heavens.
⦁ Set the DRY KILL dipswitch up to ON. Now you have no dry signal. This is very important.
⦁ Set SIZE and SPREAD to minimum.
⦁ Set LEVEL to maximum.
⦁ Run your signal through HABIT.
⦁ I like dragging my input cable over a surface for extra loftiness. Radio static is also cool.
⦁ Twist the MODIFY knob to get your note of choice.