german Archives - Martin Yam Møller

Martin Lubitz – Loop Bits

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

Of course, it’s the cutoff knob; it changes the tone so beautifully and effectively. But the decay knob is also one of my favorite knobs, because it’s the way to get beautiful pluck sounds.

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

For a long time, I thought the Sequential Prophet Rev 2 was my perfect synth, but since I got a Moog Muse, my opinion has slowly changed. It’s incredible how quickly and easily you can coax beautiful and powerful sounds out of the Muse.

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

Since I always go on vacation in a camper van, my setup has to be pretty small. Lately, I’ve been taking the Novation Peak with me on my trips. It’s an incredibly good-sounding synth and very versatile; with it, I can almost always do without additional VSTs.

Novation Peak, Arturia MicroLab and Laptop

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

I often use VST GForce Oberheim DMX as a drum kit. It would be cool to have it as hardware.

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

Most of the time, I have to sell hardware to buy new ones. But I’m slowly getting my setup together, I’ve tried a lot of things, and I’ve sold the Nord Lead and the Yamaha MODX, for example. It always takes me a while, and I end up idling around a synth, watching YouTube videos, or driving to our amazing music store in Cologne and testing it out there. Currently, I find the Vermona Performer MKII very exciting 🙂

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

The Sequential Prophet Rev 2 was always the most inspiring synth. A few years ago, I sold it to buy a Nord Lead. A big mistake… I sold the Lead and got the Rev 2 again.

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

If I had to start all over again today, the Moog Muse would be my first synth, and as soon as I have more money I would get the Rev 2.

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

I’ve had a Tascam Model 24 for a few months now. I finally have enough audio channels to keep all my synths connected at all times. This mixer is the centerpiece of my studio. I don’t know how I ever worked without it before 🙂 It’s so easy to integrate it into CUBASE and record with it.

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

I love processing my pluck sounds with reverb and echo to create a wide soundscape. I like to use Baby Audio’s Spaced Out and sync it to the MIDI clock. It can create very nice, wide sounds.

Artist or Band name?

Martin 🙂

Genre?

I actually find it very difficult to categorize my music into a genre; I don’t really think about it. I go into the studio with a certain mood in mind, and I’m usually surprised by the kind of music that emerges. I think you can hear that in my tracks on Instagram, too; they’re often very diverse.

Selfie?

Where are you from?

I am from Germany and live in a small town called Hilden near Düsseldorf.

How did you get into music?

I took my first piano lesson at the age of 6. Later, I played in many bands. Then I took a longer break and focused more on photography, which is how I earned my living. When my son showed interest in the piano at the age of 3, I was hooked again.

What still drives you to make music?

Music is my companion in all situations. Our house is usually filled with music, and I can best express my feelings with it. It often doesn’t matter whether I listen to music or make it myself.

How do you most often start a new track?

I usually do a jam session every Sunday, as I have the time and almost always feel like it. Sometimes I have a theme in mind; sometimes I spontaneously sit down at a synth and let myself be inspired. And sometimes I just sit at the piano.

For the past two years, I’ve also been doing this jam session: 31 days = 31 jams. It was very stressful on the one hand, but also very educational. There’s something really nice about spending a few hours in the studio every day.

How do you know when a track is finished?

Most of the time, I manage to finish a track for Instagram without having to keep tweaking it during mixing and mastering until it no longer sounds right. It’s a gut feeling when a track is finished.

Show us your current studio

Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?

It was especially helpful for me to keep the studio speaker volume down while recording and to listen to the finished mix on different speakers. I mostly work with my JBL speakers, even for mixing. I also have two older Kurzweil speakers, which I also want the mix to sound good on. Finally, I listen with headphones and then again really loudly with the JBLs.

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

Not the latest but one of my best jams 🙂

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CpAfo5IjYWg/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MmMxZTF4N2tzY2li

Latest jam:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKo9B_2JaAp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NDhoN2tobng2cjNv

Wolfgang Merx – Mr. X

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

Look at this great filter cutoff frequency knob on the Moog Sub 25, one of my recent additions and mainly part of my setup for gigs. I guess the resulting filter sweeps when turning this knob are the most famous synth sound!

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

This Moog Little Phatty Stage II is the first synth I ever bought and still my go-to synth when simply wanting to play or starting a session. It’s almost perfect because of its sound and the stripped-down layout, but exactly this one-knob-for-all layout has one flaw: it results in “jumping” of the values when turning the knobs after selecting a different feature. For example, you set the cutoff first and then select the resonance, but the value will jump as you move the knob. As always with synths, it is better to try and hear it than to read about it.

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

Mobile Modular Euro Rack — Mobile Modular Rack

This is my Mobile Modular Rack which I use for gigs because it has many essential modules and offers five or six separate voices, depending on the patch (details are available here: https://modulargrid.net/e/racks/view/1933212). I use an Arturia Keystep Pro with this rack.

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

No idea. I rely on hardware, but I use Ableton for mixing. I still added a picture of my Arturia Minifreak because they added a VST along with the hardware synth. I think this is a very good idea of combining both worlds (despite the VST having its flaws).

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

No regrets! I take a lot of time before buying or selling anything. Planning my setup before buying anything is crucial to me.

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

I must get back to the Little Phatty again. The classic Moog sound is what made me want to make music in the first place. Of course it is monophonic, but melodies which sound good on this synth will certainly have more to offer when you add more instruments and introduce polyphony and harmonies.

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

Despite loving synths, I would get a Nord keyboard like the Nord Electro 5D. It is the most versatile instrument in my setup and covers a lot of ground.

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

I had a Model D, the MiniMoog clone by Behringer, but it suffered from pitch drift in such a severe way that I couldn’t use it for performances anymore unless I wanted to tune every 30 minutes. This was a problem with the early runs of that model. It was long out of warranty, but to my surprise somebody bought it from me. Still, I bought another model because I need that sound in my setup. The pitch is stable so far.

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

I don’t know whether this is a trick or not, but I like to combine multimode filters and two crossfaders to create a pseudo-stereo sound. The Doepfer A-121-3 multimode filter offers four filter types: low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and notch. You can pair them and send those outputs to the crossfaders. When the crossfaders and the filter module are modulated, you can create constantly evolving soundscapes with these few modules already. This works in a similar way with the Nonlinear Circuits Feague which is a filter module and a quadrature VCO. It has four outputs: two low-pass and two band-pass.

Artist or Band name?

Wolfgang Merx a.k.a. Mr. X.

Genre?

Berlin School, Kosmische Musik, Ambient, Synthwave and a bit of Funk.

Selfie?

Where are you from?

Bedburg, Germany, close to Cologne and Düsseldorf.

How did you get into music?

I started listening to hard rock and prog rock when I was a teenager. The most important band that started my interest in synths and making music is Emerson Lake & Palmer. Hearing the sounds that Keith Emerson made with his famous and enormous Moog modular has been mind-blowing and very inspiring, even to this day. Klaus Schulze is my other major influence, along with Tangerine Dream which I discovered a few years later. Schulze’s spacy and dream-like music is amazing and shows what one person can do …with a lot of synths and keyboards. Tangerine Dream, being a band, expanded this idea in their unique way, adding a sense for fantastic group improvisations.

What still drives you to make music?

Listening to other people’s music and hearing sounds, for example in nature or in everyday life.

How do you most often start a new track?

Most of the time by either improvising a soundscape with pads or Mellotron sounds or by improvising a synth sequence.

How do you know when a track is finished?

I think that music is never finished if it is performed. But when I record music for a future release, I simply feel when the music calms down and a jam is coming to an end.

Show us your current studio

Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?

Miles Davis once said: “Don’t play the butter notes.”

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

This is my latest album „Time Stands Still”, available on most platforms and Bandcamp, of course: https://wolfgangmerx.bandcamp.com/album/time-stands-still

Sascha Haber – Northern Light Modular

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

That one is easy… the knobs on my Tegeler Audio Manufaktur Schwerkraftmaschine.

I don’t have much outboard gear, but the Tegeler gear is simply outstanding.

They spend a good amount of practical engineering on those motorised pots and switches and seeing them turn while using the plugin is just magic.

And then you touch them during a session and they do not resist, but instead write the automation…

Wonderful german engineering 🙂

Tegeler Audio Manufaktur Schwerkraftmaschine insides

2. What bit of music gear are you particularly proud of?

That is my TTSH/1601 combo… the piece of gear that started my soldering career i would say.
I always dreamt of owning and playing with an ARP 2600, and 6 or 7 years back there was no re-issues like today.

But then I hear about this swedish project that was around for a while and ordered a kit from Jon. Little did I knew what it takes to build an instrument! It took like 3 months and occupied most of the living room space all the time.

But there I started to invest in tools like a proper DMM, my first real soldering iron and a scope. I actually managed to finish the project, got it fully working and learned so much in the process.

So I started the Facebook group called TTSH and at some point I did a group buy and talked Behringer into selling us a few thousand fader caps.

3. How do you see your gear in the landscape of music?

Very much as accessories to existing Buchla systems… like Akrapovic makes racing exhausts for Ducati, we make expansions for 4U systems.

When we started Northern Light Modular both Marc and I had a small DIY system.

Well, mine grew at that time as I built each and every kit that i could get my hands on and after a year I had a massive 24U system blinking at me.

But then we looked at things like the Ornaments and Crime, Temps Util or the offerings by Mutable Instruments at the time and thought, that kind of stuff is missing in the 4U world.

And instead of cross patching Euro to 4U we got in contact with Max, and Patrick and of course Emelie and looked into collaborations to port them into 4U.

The 2OC was our first project and at that time in 2017 very much a Euro module behind a 4U panel.

It took another year or two to adapt all the software to work properly in the 1,2V range, revert negative voltages and show proper values on the displays.

But it was a great time, 3D printers allowed us to experiment with front panels and making your own PCBs was exotic and fun.

4. What music has inspired you to produce this gear?

I am a sucker for Berlin synth school…Tangerine Dream etc.
The O_c is in my opinion the best multi tool one can add to a rack, even if it takes a bit of learning .

But once you figured out how to cascade the quantizer playing variations of simple shift register notes, it plays generative music that is not just random noise.
And I like that a lot.

5. Most surprising tip or trick or technique that you’ve discovered about your gear?

Haha… the stuff other people do with my gear compared to what I intended it to be used for always amazes me.

Like, we build this massive 3 voice oscillator, spend countless hours to make it track 8 octaves and FM in sync with each other.

Sounds like angels singing and then someone comes and cross modulates the FM with the sync and all hell breaks loose.

So I am just watching and standing in awe, one part of me wants to yank out the cables and the others is like, that is super impressive, bro.

Northern Light Modular Animated Tricillator Model 2AT

6. How did you get into music gear making?

Well, after that TTSH adventure, diverse EuroRack modules that came and went i stumbled upon the 4U crowd and how few options they had.

So we talked to Émelie Gillet (Mutable Instruments) and Max Stadler (Ornaments & Crime, Temps, Utile) about porting some of their designs and they were very helpful sharing and helping us up on the horse.

My lovely girlfriend Katrine, who built many of the SMD designs we have now, also is a wizard with the 3D printer and so we could prototype our new modules very quickly.

Like a great danish philosopher once said :
Life in plastic, it’s fantastic 🙂

7. How do you most often start a new piece of gear? Where do the ideas come from?

Necessity I want to say, but that’s not quite true.

More often it is actually artists airing out ideas, pointing me to existing gear, or just imagining things.

Though the latest thing we’re making, was born from an idea to have a multi effect that works without any cables.
I have had a handfull of different guitar pedals and it really gets out of hand at some point with power and audio and midi cables.

So I wanted to build something that works straight in the Music Easel and can use its modulation.

We made a Kickstarter to found the project, I learned to program with Max/MSP at Notam/Oslo over winter and BLAM!… we had a multi effect.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nlm/model-cardme-a-multi-effect-slot-card-for-the-buchla-208

Northern Light Modular – mobile effect engine

8. How do you know when a piece of gear is finished?

Is it ever ?

Most of our modules evolve constantly… either we fix small things here and there or sometimes, when they need a bigger change we made a V2 or V3 like with the Ornaments.
The latest version has input and output attenuators and LEDs indicate the actual level produced…
I think no other O-c in the market has that… and the software still works with that added hardware part.

Every year we also do special edition that we auction off for a good cause, and last year we made one for the international trans fund.

Northern Light Modular – Dual CV Polymorpher

9. What is the best creative or production advice that you’ve ever heard?

Go with the flow !

Turn off Facebook, put the phone on silent and jam… just record what you are doing, maybe you strike gold, maybe not 🙂

Selfie

Where are you from? Where are you based?

From Germany…the south…and based in Copenhagen since 2006 and Northern Light Modular has been operating since may of 2017, for six years now.

Show us your current studio/workshop!

Sascha Haber studio — Sascha Habers Studio

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

Northern Light Modular – http://northernlightmodular.com/
Modular Grid – https://bit.ly/2No5sus