1. Favourite knob or fader or switch on a piece of gear and why?
Roland Space Echo 201
I really like the feel of twisting the gain knob on my 1073 vintage design preamp! It has fixed gain so the little “clicks” when twisting is so satisfying. It could also be my Roland Space Echo 201. Nice big buttons.
Neve 1073 Mic Preamp
2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?
It could be many things… but i really truely love the Boss RV5 reverb unit. (I own 5 units right now…) The mod setting sounds just perfect for anything… but it would be even better with a preset button… The newer Boss reverbs doesn’t sound quite as good. In general i think the opportunity to store presets in stompboxes would be great.
Boss RV5
3. What setup do you bring on holiday or tour or commute etc.?
My jazzmaster and my pedalboard are always with me. Maybe my laptop and a midi keyboard for sketches. Sometimes I bring something like the microkorg just for fooling around.
Pedalboard and Jazzmaster
4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?
I wish that Sugarbytes Effectrix would find its way into a stompbox. That would be awesome. And the Boss RV5 should be a available as a plugin as well. It would be great if Soundtoys did a multieffect unit as hardware! The Zvex lofi junky looper would be great as a plugin as well.
5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?
I only keep gear that really makes me happy, I’m not into collecting stuff any more, so a lot of things have been in and out of the studio. I recently sold my Juno 6. I might end up regretting this… But it is about chasing sounds, and sometimes selling something, leads to buying something else.
6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?
My Gebr. Neumeyer piano or my Fender jazzmaster are my go to inspiration stations. Combined with a lot of stompboxes, they keep amazing me with fresh inspiration and sounds.
Gebr. Neumeyer piano
7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?
A jazzmaster, 10-12 stompboxes, a good microphone, laptop and interface and a midi keyboard and some speakers too.
8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?
My pedalboard. Everything runs through it, but its a never ending story, It changes from week to week and sometimes its a mess and keeps me up at night in pure frustration. But on the other hand it just keeps on giving me inspiration and the feel of twisting stompbox knobs never gets old!
Guitar Pedalboard
9. Most surprising tip or trick or technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?
The Roland MX1 is a brilliant mixer for adding fun stuff to any sound source. It has some really unique master FXs, that can do things i haven’t found anywhere else. I use it as an effects unit just before the DAW. Its a bit noisy with hiss, but to my ears it means even more grit for the source. Seriously, try it!!!
Artist or Band name?
S.Vestergaard
Genre?
Crossover / Electronic / Indie / Score music
Selfie?
Søren Vestergaard
Where are you from?
Denmark / Vordingborg
How did you get into music?
My dad and brother are musicians as well, so I grew up in a house filled with music. But I found my true call back in the 90’s listening to stuff like Portishead, Massive Attack and the entire grunge movement. Actually I discovered quite early that music production was more interesting than just playing the guitar, so I have always been a huge fan of great producers, which may be my overall lifelong inspiration.
What still drives you to make music?
Finding new sounds is what my life is all about. I love producing all kinds of music and everyday is a gift being blessed with the opportunity to work with music as a living. And of course new gear…
How do you most often start a new track?
It mostly starts as an iphone recording of me singing or trying to explain an idea. Maybe with a small piano/guitar part that supports the overall idea. Then it comes to life in the studio.
How do you know when a track is finished?
I’ve trained this thing a lot. Let it go when you are tuely proud of it. If not, keep going untill it feels right!
Show us your current studio
Sørens Studio
Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?
Stop overthinking! Its the number one creative killer. Never go down that road. Stay open, positive and focused and leave all the stupid concerns away from the studio. I have never once experienced bad energy leading to good music. Always positive!
Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link.
1. Favourite knob/fader/switch on a piece of gear and why?
Moog Cutoff filter
I really like the filter “cutoff” knob on my Minimoog Voyager. I love it because it’s so big and easy to use. It’s a pleasure to play with it anytime when you’re looking for the right filtering for your sound.
2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?
Ah… I think that easily changes over time. Hard to answer, but if I think of a “perfect effects kit” I say the trio Particle, Microcosm and Space. I’m using this combo heavily for my next record. I’m putting everything in it, from guitars to vocals and so on.
Red Panda Particle, Hologram Electronics Microcosm and Eventide Space
Many times I’ll throw in my Boss RE-20 Space Echo as well. Definitely changing over time is natural, so I would never want to have a “definitive kit”, especially when you start working on something new, changing something is a good way to be more creative.
Roland RE-20 Space Echo
3. What setup do you bring on holiday/tour/commute etc.?
During vacations I try not to think too much about music, but I always have with me my laptop with many vst, a small two octave midi keyboard by Korg and my Beyerdynamic heaadphones.
MacBook, midi keyboard and Beyerdynamic headphones
4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?
UAD Plugins
I have an Apollo rack unit from Universal Audio as my audio interface and it’s fantastic the quality of the included plug-ins, they sound so good and the sound is so hardware-like, I couldn’t ask for more in a way. Until a few days ago my dream was to get a Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII and it’s amazing that a soft-synths company called Robotic Bean has reproduced one and at such a low price, it sounds really great and I can’t wait to try it out.
4 Track Cassette Tape
I love the endless possibilities of virtual instruments and their fidelity compared to hardware, but I would still love to get a Revox B 77 MKll to record anything onto tape and to add some wow/flutter turbulence and saturation to my songs. I love that recorder and will be buying one soon!
Revox B 77 MKll
5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?
I try to have “the essentials” in the studio, having a lot of equipment would be really nice, but it would confuse me during production and take up too much space. That’s why I choose my gear carefully, but I probably regret buying the Digital Multi Echo RE-1000 by BOSS. It’s a fun and uncontrollable unit because it doesn’t have the “rate” knob, but I use it so rarely and that’s why I think I can do without it.
Boss Digital Multi Echo RE-1000
I regret selling my Roland Gaia, I didn’t love its “cold sound” but through a few pedals you could make it awesome. I miss its front panel because it was very intuitive, I had the ability to play out wacky sounds in minutes.
Roland Gaia
6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?
The equipment that has inspired me to write new music are many, but if I had to pick one I would probably say my Minimoog Voyager.
Minimoog Voyager
Currently though, I’m using the Prophet Rev2 Desktop really heavily for everything, especially on my upcoming album. I love that sound and its polyphony so much.
Prophet Rev2 Desktop
7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?
UAD Apollo Soundcard
Probably an Apollo interface. It has infinitely improved my mixes, production and recording. I realized that many times it’s just not enough to have great synths or a ’65 guitar, if you don’t have a good audio interface with high definition sound in recording and post-production.
8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?
Furman M-10x E
The “Furman M-10x E” because it is bulky and has so many cables on the back of the desk! It’s also not fun, it only has an “on/off” switch (it has 2! haha) on the front panel. The reason I can’t do without it is pretty obvious. It saves the life of all my equipment all the time and I feel safer having it. I will be getting another one soon. I’ve always had bad experiences with the unstable electricity in my town, I remember the day after I bought the Voyager, oscillator number 3 had stopped working. It was frustrating to send back and still wait for a replacement. I have since decided to get a stabilizer and “Furman” does the job just fine.
9. Most surprising tip/trick/technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?
Lately I’ve been testing a mixing technique that doesn’t require an acoustically treated room.
Just apply a VU meter to your daw’s master bus, play the kick around – 3 and gradually raise the bass until everything gets to 0, then mix everything else in. It may sound wrong but it sounds really good if you have good EQ on the low end. I also always test my mixes on a very small JBL to get a concrete reference of how the track sounds elsewhere.
Tiny JBL speaker
I’ll add that I love to dirty some parts of my songs with lots of layers of backing tracks that go into different equipment and pedal combinations to create that “dreamy” atmosphere underneath a melody for example.
Dreamy fx pedals
Artist or Band name?
Truemantic
Genre?
Alternative / Indie / Electronica
Selfie?
Toto Ronzulli aka. Truemantic
Where are you from?
Margherita di Savoia, Puglia, Italy.
How did you get into music?
I was born in a club! At the end of the 80’s my father opened one and later in the 90’s it became very influential in southern Italy. Artists like “Afrika Bambaataa” were performing. I was born in ’94 and all this pushed me towards this direction. I remember when I was 4 years old my parents bought a toy drum set and I broke it by banging on the drums! Ahahah. In the mid-nineties the club closed and reopened in 2006. All my teenage years were spent at the console with resident DJs and international guest artists like “Tony Humphries”. That’s why I started as a DJ and later as a musician, studying theory, solfeggio and practicing piano for years.
What still drives you to make music?
I realize that every time I sit in my room I feel so fascinated by the creative process. In a way I can’t describe the feeling I get, it may simply be an emotional state that drives me to create something new. Some days it’s frustrating to spend hours in the studio, other times it’s all I want. It’s like something you have inside that needs to be released!
How do you most often start a new track?
I hum and record with my smartphone a melody I have in my mind. Next, I sit in the studio and try to develop the theme. I think a film or book can influence my stylistic choices, but I also think the production is more of a “try and try again” in my studio.
How do you know when a track is finished?
When I add final texture elements and not additional “tool track”.
Show us your current studio
Truemantic studio
It’s not a real studio really, but something like a room.
Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?
Create your own sound! It doesn’t matter how… Just do it!
Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link
My last two releases were 4 years ago and a lot has changed since then, from production to my setup! My first album ‘Truemantic’ came out in 2018 and my single ‘Destruction’ came out a year later. I’m currently working on my new album, concretely for about a year. There are so many amazing collaborations on it! I can’t wait to share it and play it live. I hope to stop by Copenhagen too!
1. Favourite knob/fader/switch on a piece of gear and why?
Sequential Mopho X4
My favorite knob is actually a combination of knobs; cutoff frequency (LPF in particular) and Resonance. Coming from a jazz saxophonist background, I did not have any interest in gear until my mid 20’s when I was at a music store with a good friend of mine. We sat down at the synths, found my way to a Microkorg XL, again with no real interest in them, and then I somehow managed to play around with the filter knob. I was mind-blown how cool sweeping a filter was! It was so space-sounding and magical and a sound I didn’t expect to find. I sat there for 30 minutes just playing a chord, letting it sustain while I swept the filter/resonance to get the dreamy space sound. The picture is of my Mopho x4, which has a stunning LPF Cutoff and Resonance combo.
2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?
Pedalboard
I love my pedalboard! Again, as a saxophonist, there was no clear tutorial I could find on YouTube to figure out how to get the sounds I wanted to now achieve using a saxophone. I started experimenting with pedals in 2017, and have found a great balance between in-home solo ambient jamming and live performance utility. At home and by yourself, you can try any pedal/combination for anything, but playing with a live band, especially in a jazz setting, it becomes difficult to find the right pedals. The saxophone is a very difficult instrument to use with pedals live because most of the sound still will come acoustically. Therefore, I had to choose effects that would compliment my sound rather than change it. Looping makes a cool background in live settings, delay/reverb always nice because it lingers in the spaces of your playing, and the right kind of pitch shifting will add depth to your playing. No dirt here because it doesn’t really work well live because you’ll basically only hear the acoustic sound.
3. What setup do you bring on holiday/tour/commute etc.?
Recording setup – saxophone with pedals
With the pandemic going on, there has not been much opportunity to travel for musical reasons however, I was able to go and record my dream album in Washington D.C. back in December. It is an all-original music album of mine where I utilize the same pedalboard in the picture above in combination with my saxophone. When traveling home for holidays, I usually only bring the saxophone. I don’t end up playing much but will sometimes get some practicing/noodling in to try and stay in shape. The picture is of my set up from the album recording back in December
4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?
To be honest, I don’t use too much software as far as instruments/effects are concerned. I mostly just use Ableton to record my solo-ambient music and lightly mix/master it there. I prefer the hardware due to my tactile way of approaching music. I learn best through my sense of touch and it is crucial for me when playing/writing music. This is probably why I am so bad at vocals, but also why “button” oriented instruments like saxophone, piano/synth, pedals are my instruments that I use the most.
5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?
Earthquaker Devices Avalanche Run and Meris Hedra
There is nothing that I regret buying. I take a very long time thinking about what gear I want and why I want it so I never really have impulse purchases that I regret later. I do have a few pedals that I don’t often use; for example, the Avalanche Run and Hedra. However, they are not regrets as I still will pull them out from time to time to create a song or two. They are just not as crucial for most of the things I do with my music. I also have never sold a piece of gear so I can’t really say I regret selling anything, ha!
6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?
Meris Polymoon
Finally, an easy question to answer! The Polymoon by Meris is ABSOLUTELY 100% the gear that has inspired me to produce the most music. It has so much to offer, especially when you run it at the end of your chain. It can do the simple delay stuff, but also has a gorgeous phaser-verb when you crank the dimension. Putting it 100% wet mix will give what I consider the most beautiful sound a piece of gear can offer to this day. Not only that, but it has a wealth of modulation options that I use in so much of my music. Most notably, the octave up/down pitch shifted delays add such a beautiful space-cruising sound to your song. Being in the end of the chain, after my loopers and everything else, you can manipulate your loops by doing any of those things mentioned above and it will really dynamically change your composition/jam.
7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?
Afterneath by Earthquaker Devices
If I had to start over… this is a tough question to answer. My first purchase was the Afterneath by Earthquaker Devices, and it was probably the best thing I could buy to get into this stuff. I really wanted to find a way to stack multiple notes on saxophone as it is a monophonic instrument. Afterneath having the capabilities of having a really long/pronounced sustain, it was perfect for what I was trying to do. The only issue I ran into was when I would stack a chord of some sort, playing over the top of it would get added into the Afterneath. So going back, I would probably get the NS-2 by Boss and run it in conjunction with it. That way, I could stack my chords, then essentially mute my microphone so I could, acoustically, improvise/play over the top of my new chord. Also, I would buy a phaser, because as Stefan from the Pedal Zone has shown, running a phaser after the Afterneath is just beautiful and has that sweeping motion that first got me hooked in the first place.
8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?
Boss NS-2
I don’t know if I would call it annoying per say, but I have found that the NS-2 by boss is absolutely necessary for probably any player who relies mostly on their acoustic sound. When playing live with a band, especially the louder bands, your microphone is going to bleed in all those drums, guitars, whatever. The NS-2 is SO useful with its gate function so it will only pick up whatever is directly in front of the mic. Not only that, but it cancels any feedback that I would get in those live settings which playing with a microphone will almost always give you (especially when using noisy effects). The only reason I would consider it slightly annoying is that because it takes up real estate (in my pedalboard picture you can see that I taped it to the side of the board) for something that I use basically as a one-trick always-on effect. However, it must be said that the NS-2 is a live-setting modified saxophonist’s biggest buddy.
9. Most surprising tip/trick/technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?
I think the best trick I have learned about gear in terms of using gear as part of the compositional process is to experiment with your signal path and definitely put effects AFTER your loops. For example, having the Polymoon after my looper lets me change the composition so drastically that you almost wouldn’t believe it’s the same exact loop if I showed them separately. That is a very powerful thing to have at your disposal for those live gigs when a solo interlude to start the second set is warranted. Another idea is to put a pitch shifter after your loops so you can modulate to a different chord/key center to give you something new to play over the top of (this might require more parallel signal paths but I have done before and is very cool).
Artist Name
Tyler Cassidy (studbagl on youtube, Instagram, etc)
Genre
Adventure music, jazz, ambient.
Selfie
Tyler Cassidy
Where are you from?
I am originally from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, now living in Boston, Massachusetts.
How did you get into music
I played saxophone in middle school and was very neutral about it; it wasn’t fun or boring. But then my first day in high school in 2006, my grandad picked me up, who was the only other musician in the family. He had the music of Richie Cole and Charlie Parker playing on his CD’s and I couldn’t believe my ears. I didn’t know these things were possible on a saxophone. So when I got home, I opened up YouTube and listened to everything I could. It all spiraled from there.
What still drives you to make music?
I love writing music! As I said previously, I wrote an album and got to record it with a bunch of my friends and some new people back in December. The feeling of writing songs and then having them come to life is nothing less than fulfilling; you feel proud, happy, and satisfied all at the same time. This particular album was special for me because I got the chance to record live with a huge band. It was 10 people, myself on saxophone/effects, an electric guitarist, nylon/steel-string/electric guitarist, pianist, bassist, drummer, string trio and person conducting the string trio. It was magical and I can’t wait to write more and bring them to life.
How do you know when a track is finished?
So this question is better answered for my solo ambient stuff. Being a live-oriented musician, I usually one-take all of my compositions. So whatever you are listening to was all done live and in one track. It basically boils down to if I was satisfied with it or not and that’s how I will know if it is finished. Most of these compositions are live jams, some have a little more planning, but never usually that much.
Show us your current studio
I call it the LazerMaze
Tyler’s home studio
Best creative advice I have ever heard?
Trust your ears. If your ears say it’s good, it is good. Sometimes it’s easy to let your brain get in the way when it says, “No, this definitely shouldn’t work” or “This wouldn’t make sense to go from this chord to this chord”. Your ears should always be trust! We are musicians after all.
Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link.
The latest thing I have out is “Gentle Shore” which is a solo ambient album of mine. On my studbagl.bandcamp.com you can find 3 of my solo ambient albums as well as an album I did as a bandleader back in 2017 in Washington D.C. Definitely want to look out for the new album coming out in summer 2021 that I just recorded though; it blends all the jazz, ambient, post-rock, romantic adventure music that makes up my imagination into one.
[Editor: Do you have a favorite tip, trick or way of working with any of the gear from this interview? Then throw us a comment below…]
