DSF Q&A 21: Objekt

[skimpi]

When are we gonna hear these industrial tracks?

[Lysergic]

It's good to hear of your success at NI, I'm studying audio tech at Salford uni which primarily focusses on acoustics but I've found my real interest lies in the DSP aspect of the course and it's definitely where I see my future. I'm heading into my final year in September after failing to find any appealing work placement in the field due to confidentiality (as expected really), generally the response was get back to us once you graduate.. I took this as a polite way of saying no, so promising to hear you got in at NI with just a degree (?) since they were one of the companies I applied to. I'm pretty competent with matlab but have only touched on C/C++.. I realise I have no particular focus to this question just wanting to pick your brain a bit as someone on the 'inside'.

I'm currently thinking of doing a masters but change my mind on a monthly basis.. did you find it particularly competitive from your experience or just walk straight into the job? Also as someone that's never yet been outside the education system I find the prospect of settling into a career slightly unappealing since it's learning new stuff that keeps me interested.. so what is the work you do at NI like, particularly monotonous? I've looked into research at Aalto as a path to take since it seems like it would be more multifaceted but i really don't know.. obviously there will become the point when money is the real issue too once I'm done suckling on the government's teet. But yeah any insight you could offer would be greatly appreciated.

cheers

[Burlish]

Hi TJ,

Did you ever get round to remixing/sampling that reggae record you picked up at PST ?

lol

[dubesteppe]

Hey big ups for doing this! I've got a few questions for you.

What is your go to synth for making little blips and boops, and stabs?
Also do you have any techniques for making these?

How hard would it be in your opinion for someone to find a way to be able to load custom wavetables/ samples into massive?

Would you say your background in programming has ever lead you to do things in more "if this, then that" techniques while making music? Has it ever stifled your creativity?

[masaki]

Hey hey, big fan here, rinse your Hessle release all the time down here in Australia.

Quick question, do you use any particular compressors for getting that character in your drums?
Do you have any rough rules or techniques when using them or is it all trial and error?

THANKS!

[clairvoyeur]

how do you arrange/design your drums in ableton? impulse? drumrack?

[kultron]

Herr Hertz, your 'tunes' are pretty darn good. I have a few questions I'd be curious to see if you'd oblige to answer:

-What is your biggest non-musical inspiration?
-Do you think you'll reach a point where you quit your day job?
-Name 3-5 fairly unknown artists whose music you feel is criminally unheard of

Sincerely,
a random canadian

[garethom]

My question for you is:

Do you have any forthcoming tunes with Will.I.Am or Flo Rida? What of the rumours you were seen drinking milkshakes with Tulisa in Panorama?

If you could go b2b with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be? The guy from Babylon Zoo or the dude from Faithless? Or somebody else? Perhaps the dog from "His Master's Voice" (original selecta).

Hi TJ,

Did you ever get round to remixing/sampling that reggae record you picked up at PST ?

lol

lol

[staticcast]

In your mixes, theres a load of really raw techno and stuff yet your mixdowns are often very clean and precise, like in your fact mix when it goes from porcupine to drexciya t. Is it a conscious decision to make music which is different to the stuff you play, or is it your take on it?

actually it's just that i'm not very good at making the really raw stuff. i'm such a perfectionist that when i start out making a very raw or distorted track i always end up inadvertently cleaning it up over the course of a few weeks until it's as clean as everything else i've made. one of the reasons i haven't strayed that far from an in-the-box setup (apart from one or two synths) is that i liked the extra control - being able to automate everything and so on - and there's definitely quite a difficult tradeoff right there if you want to be making analog 90s techno. i guess that's why i've put so much effort into making things sound thicker than you might normally expect from a DAW (especially ableton, which has a reputation for somewhat thin sounding FX in the wrong hands).

What's it like to play at the berghain? (i'm assuming youve done this haha, if not tell me what its like to dance there as they wouldnt let me in )

it's great - amazing to be able to have total faith in a soundsystem and room. the booth is very comfortable but i actually didn't find it that easy acoustically... you can still hear the mains clearly enough that you really have to work with the room sound and not just crank the monitors otherwise you end up with a mess. this is something the residents have got down cold... it feels like the kind of room that you can develop a real synergy with once you know it inside out, but even after three times i'm not sure i'm at that stage yet, ha.

oh, and there's no proper backstage area, which i kinda like. just a grim concrete room behind the booth.

Do you pitch your tracks up or do you play lot's of older stuff as well? There's so little 132+ BPM Techno being made these days that it seems rather hard to me to play a set full of more recent 132+ stuff.

i play a lot of older stuff... but there's plenty of faster techno being made today dude. i do pitch a lot of it up though, as long as it works (it doesn't always!).

How do you compose your atmospherics and incidentals?

you mean how do i make the sounds, or how do i arrange them?

Both. I'm fascinated by ambiences. How do you set up the mood for a track?

Thanks for answering, btw! big up.

incidentals are often bloops recorded specially off the JP6 and heavily timestretched and glitched in ableton, or little samples from whatever library happens to be around... but almost always timestretched beyond recognition, automated, effected, reversed, etc.

ambiences are most often long reverb tails, resampled, timestretched, put through more processing (heavy compression, eq, delay, bitcrushing, more eq, more delay + reverb, etc), resampled again, automated, sometimes lightly sidechained (don't go over the top, just give it a little movement).

arrangement of the above - see the link in an above post to a thread i made ages ago about writing down your workflow

ever used max msp?

not yet. only reaktor

given this is dubstepforum - what relationship do you feel you have with the genre? how do you see yourself as fitting into the dubstep scene? and do you still listen to much dubstep in its more traditional forms, and if so, which artists?

massive big ups for all your work - needless to say i am a huge fan

thanks!

these days i don't really have a relationship with dubstep to be honest. i was never really one of the "heads", i just checked out some of the deeper and weirder end of it in the past, and hung out on DSF because it was one of the more active producer communities on the net. but i don't listen to much of it anymore. of course there are dubstep influences in some of the music that i make, but i think these have now been pushed quite far back in my brain and act subconsciously rather than as me trying to sound like loefah or whatever.

First of all, since I got into dubstep in 2005, you are my favourite producer by a wide margin, and 'Unglued' is literally a masterpiece.

...anyway

You mentioned Reaktor, layering up drum samples and processing them. When you're working on sounds, how do you push beyond something being 'good enough' without going too far and getting bogged down with the intricacies? And how long do you work on a track (from inception to completion)?
I actually stopped using Reaktor because I ended up just making instruments and sounds instead of music!

thank you

i'm not really sure what you're asking re: reaktor. i use it for synths and effects that i've already built - the sound design process is then not much different as it would be with any other synth. the key is to separate the instrument design from the music making. don't start trying to build a synth in the middle of a session.

i spend AGES on a track. months. but then i also have a day job and quite a few gigs. i suppose on average, if i were to work 8 hours a day on a track, it would probably take me 3 weeks or so, but that's not counting the many, many failed attempts.

what's it like in berlin is there a lot of techno is that why you make techno

<3

how do you make your drums and sub sit so well together? (Goose that got away)

pick the right kick for the right sub line. sidechain the sub quickly and subtly off the kick. that's basically it

do you make any other types of music? drone stuff, drum and bass autonomic type stuff

i've been toying around with some drone tracks. also some more industrial stuff (as in actual industrial not industrial techno). a few more IDMish bits at various tempos. nothing really finished though.

Yo Objekt, big fan over here

Saw you play not too long ago in manchester and your set was epic (from what i remember)!
On the subject of playing live what are you favourite tunes to play out at the moment? Do you have any go-to stompers which you find yourself playing in every set? I remember there was one banging techno tune with like some cheesy vocal chants in it, can't explain it any better but i was loving it.
Also, when you dropped cactus the second drop blew me away, had so much weight. Any tips on replicating that low-end power which really sets it apart on a club system?

thank you

lol that was probably nitzer ebb. i have loads of records which never leave the bag. that nitzer ebb 12 was one of them for a long time but i'm trying to wean myself off now. my set actually develops quite slowly because i don't really care about playing unreleased material, so records i buy are on rotation for quite a long time.

i can't remember the last show i did where i didn't play genetic code by clatterbox

Favourite drummers? I see you've already mentioned Steve Gadd.

Favourite drums in a tune? How about favourite drums in a non-electronic piece of music?

ooft. hmmm. steve gadd. elvin jones. carla azar from autolux.

favourite drums... lemme get back to you on that one. 50 ways to leave your lover springs to mind. fenix funk by afx. i'm terrible at this kind of question though

1. Do you feel it to be essential to have certain equipment when producing tunes e.g. do you find having decent monitors essential or dual screens (all the basics you see studios having etc...)

2. Continuing from that, what piece of equipment could you not work without (apart from obviously a computer/software)

3. Do you produce your beats off-grid/hand play them in anyway, the beat in Cactus always gets me doing this odd shoulder shuffle in clubs where I can't quite pick up on where its hitting hahah

1/2. i think you need to be able to work efficiently, and each person has different requirements. my very basic requirements are my laptop with all the software i use, decent monitors, and a room that doesn't completely suck. a big screen, keyboard and mouse definitely make my life easier.

other people make great music on computer speakers. i don't think i could. but if you can, more power to you

3. i rarely play beats in but very often move stuff off grid. cactus is full of off-grid triplets

Only a couple of questions: Cactus was a fucking awesome, unique and incredibly strange tune - one of my favourites - so I'm wondering how long did it take to get such a complex rhythm sounding so perfect?

thanks!

not that long actually. the rhythm itself came together in a day. i finished the track in another month or two and then went over it again about 18 months later shortly before its release.

Also, if you had to choose between (electronic) German music and UK music which one would you choose?

i like apples

as i recall you mentioned that you worked alongside emika at NI at one point. Did you guys ever feed off each other for sound design ideas or collab in an advice sense?

actually no, we rarely saw each other.

also where is the best place to start learning how to do plugin programming and audio algorithms? always been fascinated with that stuff and never looked into in spite of being a coding geek for longer than i've been making music.

searching through the KVR developer forum is probably a good place to start when it comes to plugin APIs and so on. for DSP there are a bunch of resources on the net, some much more mathy than others. i learned all the maths at university so i'm not really sure where to direct you if you're looking for signal processing theory from first principles. i think i've commented on this before on DSF so maybe have a search and see if you can find anything... i'm pretty sure i did at some stage post some links but i don't really have any idea what they would have been, sorry.

how do you feel about vinyl culture? do you think it's important to release on that medium? what do you think about very limited releases? do you think exclusivity adds something special or that it's better to give more people an opportunity to own the music?

i think vinyl is more special and gives more weight to the music-purchasing experience, which is one of the main reasons i buy lots of it.

as for exclusivity, i used to think limited pressings were cool but am now gravitating towards your latter point of view. if you're in the luxurious position of running a label whose records are wanted by thousands, you may as well support the rest of the struggling vinyl industry by pressing to meet demand. objekt #1 was repressed and #2 is coming soon, though i did wait a year as a nod to anyone who did buy into the exclusivity factor by paying silly money on discogs (sorry guys).

people in münster definetly are into faster (and harder/darker) stuff lately, we have a lot more CLR type stuff going on since the last year or so. i kinda like it but its not something i can take for a whole night especially when they start playing 'pure' hardtechno. thats music made purely for your legs, not your head.

yeah... listen to too much straight workhorse techno and it starts sounding like aerobics music or something. i'm not so into that kind of CLR "muscle techno", at least not over long stretches. not much sexiness to it. too much stomp.

didnt know you made the tape saturation in kontakt, been using that just a couple days ago!
though to be honest i have no idea what tape saturation is actually used for by professionals i just use it to catch harsh transients and make stuff sound a bit more fuzzy.

that's exactly what it's used for. the classic application is live drums, which have really strong peaks. tape can soften these peaks without pumping like a compressor. if you saturate a bit more heavily and then bring out the peaks again afterwards with a compressor (or use a transient designer) you'll find they've been thickened up quite a bit.

i don't often use tape for heavy saturation... it's usually a subtle thickening tool in conjunction with post-compression.

When are we gonna hear these industrial tracks?

: )

It's good to hear of your success at NI, I'm studying audio tech at Salford uni which primarily focusses on acoustics but I've found my real interest lies in the DSP aspect of the course and it's definitely where I see my future. I'm heading into my final year in September after failing to find any appealing work placement in the field due to confidentiality (as expected really), generally the response was get back to us once you graduate.. I took this as a polite way of saying no, so promising to hear you got in at NI with just a degree (?) since they were one of the companies I applied to. I'm pretty competent with matlab but have only touched on C/C++.. I realise I have no particular focus to this question just wanting to pick your brain a bit as someone on the 'inside'.

I'm currently thinking of doing a masters but change my mind on a monthly basis.. did you find it particularly competitive from your experience or just walk straight into the job? Also as someone that's never yet been outside the education system I find the prospect of settling into a career slightly unappealing since it's learning new stuff that keeps me interested.. so what is the work you do at NI like, particularly monotonous? I've looked into research at Aalto as a path to take since it seems like it would be more multifaceted but i really don't know.. obviously there will become the point when money is the real issue too once I'm done suckling on the government's teet. But yeah any insight you could offer would be greatly appreciated.

i can only speak for NI, but i've found the work here really fascinating, largely because the small (7-8) DSP team are shared out between whatever projects need us, so i've worked on many different technologies in the past 3 years (effect emulation, synth design, traktor timecode, hardware gain staging, etc) rather than just one product. the learning curve is long and steep (and we're all still on it) but it's very rewarding.

as far as i know, all the DSP crew at NI have a masters. applications for DSP jobs can get pretty competitive, but i don't know what the usual level of qualification is. aalto has a very good reputation along with various others (CCRMA, ircam etc). again, i can only speak for NI, but i think for them it's more important that you have a strong background in the maths behind signal processing and the structure of various FX, and that you're keen to learn as quickly as possible, than that you're a C++ whiz. at least that was the case when i joined. the programming - what you need as a DSP dev anyway - is much easier to learn than the maths.

in general it can be difficult to find internships and placements in DSP as a student since there's really not so much "DSP donkey work" that employers can offload onto you - even graduates need time on the learning curve. therefore, most of the placements are actually research projects - e.g. spend 6 months at NI emulating a piece of hardware or working on a certain technology - but we've had the issue before where we've taken on masters students for research projects and have had to invest so much time supervising them that we may as well have just done the research ourselves.

Did you ever get round to remixing/sampling that reggae record you picked up at PST ?

lol, no; i did play it at a dinner party the other week though

[dublerium]

What's your top 3 plugins and top 3 pieces of hardware and why?

How long have you been producing for and what's your favourite part of it?

Bump in case you missed these.

Got another one too... What's your workflow like in Ableton generally, do you start in session view, how to you arrange your percussion etc etc ?

[deadly_habit]

oh i wanted to ask did you initially do the objekt pressings di or via a p&d deal?
they had a diy feel to em which was always an extra appeal to me

[Aufnahmewindwuschel]

augustiner.

[anfs]

hey man,first i have to say that i believe you and blawan are the best young producers in this techno scene,secondly thanks for doing this as many people in this scene even some close friends of mine that releasing stuff on some labels dont tell their tricks,so my questions are
1. whats the best plugins in your opinion you are using ??
2.which reverb plugins do you prefer ??
3.whats the best way making hihats sound groovy and not loopy'
4.you mentioned in an interview that you can't make a techno loop without going crazy ,so have you figured out how not to go crazy???

ps:i really enjoy that unlike many vinyl djs you re playing a lot of different stuff inside your sets ,suchs us surgeon drexiya,dj boss,dettmann,chemical brothers
nice perspective

[half_wsr]

Hi there,

First of all, thank you for doing this, I've always been thinking about those precious and mind-opening interviews that you can find on sound on sound and other sound engineering magazines and about the fact that you can very rarely find anything this way within the electronic music world, really thank you for your time.

My questions are:

1- What do you think about ableton library's drum machine sounds? how often do you use them and how do you process them? Do you think that sometimes looking for a well recorded 909 kick (for example) could really make the difference?

2- What is your opinion about ableton's reverb? I've been trying out several reverb plugin and I've noticed that this one doesn't have one of (in my opinion) the most important parameters that a good (or better saying, "realistic") reverb should have, which is absorption, and the fact that you can just quickly filter out the high frequencies with the built-in filter is the cause of its "coldness", but i've recently found out that you can use it for different purposes like granular synthesis (home made, with extremely fast looping sampler + extremely long reverb), to "craft" a sound, rather than an environment. any suggestions about good reverbs?

3- I'm really getting into sample-based processing techniques to craft my sounds recently, and I've found out that every single DAW has slightly different ways to manage samples, especially in pitch and stretching algorithms (i suppose). For example, I really like Logic ones, but I'm literally addicted to ableton and I use this feature so much that I can't even imagine changing daw every time i need to pitch or stretch something, so I'm currently trying to use all ableton's options best as I can (complex pro on top of all of them) , but I still think that there must be something much more powerful (I was really impressed by Amon Tobins sampling but I've never got even close to those kind of pitch prodigies), I've tried out Kontakt but it didn't really catch me (I was probably doing it wrong..) any suggestions?

4- What do you think about ableton dynamics? I've recently started using Waves c1, api2500 (for sidechaining) and L3 Multimaximizer, but I very often still use ableton's compressor (but not the limiter) because is much simpler and quicker and I like how it sounds, most of the times. How much do you think a good vst compressor affects the sound of productions nowdays?

5- Do you know any good pitch shift vst to work in real time? (live situation) I've done hours of research to find one that I needed to perform a track in a live set and It was really disappointing that I didn't find any good pitcher/octaver/voice transformer that would not do its job without some delay time (unavoidable, not even changing the buffer size).

6- What is your opinion about the electronic music sound, related to the real world? This topic is quite wide actually, I've been thinking about it under several aspects, like how live-performed drums sound more "nice" to the human ear than mouse written patterns (if you don't use swing or off-grid tricks, that are indeed to create a "live" feeling), or how important is to create a fake "environment" with sends and reverb to give depth to a track, or (on top of all probably) how the sampling from the real world affects the feeling of a computer-made track. Do you think is all a matter of taste or that there's something more underneath all this? Do you think cold is sometimes better than warm and realistic?

Thank you again, really.

PS: Kudos for Cactus, one of the biggest dancefloor killers I've heard so far, as smart as violent.

[3za]

Hey,

How do you approach doing a remix?

What freeware (vst/ensemble/standalone) is essential to your production?

Have you ever watched My little Pony Friendship Is Magic?

Thanks

[drdeft]

Thanks for doing that !


How many headroom do you leave when producing ? ( what is the average Db of Kick and bass )

[idontreallygiveashit]

I genuinely cant think of anything to ask, but i thought i'd just mention that i adore your stuff. Keep up the great work

[jrisreal]

How's yer toilet?

[staticcast]

Hey big ups for doing this! I've got a few questions for you.

What is your go to synth for making little blips and boops, and stabs?

currently, the jp6 and minimoog for bleeps and squelches. stabs i guess i'd use the jp6 or ableton analog or samples, but they're usually heavily filtered and layered.

ableton timestretching as mentioned.

Also do you have any techniques for making these?

dick around with a synth i guess? bleeps are eeeeeasy.

it helps if you have an analog synth with a very resonant filter and a good (fast/audio rate) LFO that can do ZOH patterns.

How hard would it be in your opinion for someone to find a way to be able to load custom wavetables/ samples into massive?

basically impossible

Would you say your background in programming has ever lead you to do things in more "if this, then that" techniques while making music? Has it ever stifled your creativity?

i'm not sure what you mean by "if this, then that". i guess i maybe make fewer stabs in the dark than many people, yeah. in a sense that might decrease the number of happy accidents, but i think this is compensated for in the time i save.

that said, i've always been meaning to buy another atari/8-track setup and make something totally lo-fi. i've never got around to it though.

Hey hey, big fan here, rinse your Hessle release all the time down here in Australia.

Quick question, do you use any particular compressors for getting that character in your drums?
Do you have any rough rules or techniques when using them or is it all trial and error?

THANKS!

thank you!

99.999999% ableton compressor. i use it because it fits neatly into the ableton GUI.

the same rough rules and techniques that apply to almost any compressor. open the attack to bring out the attack, reduce the release to bring out the sustain. use a compressor like a sculptor's knife, not a steam press.

how do you arrange/design your drums in ableton? impulse? drumrack?

it varies. usually individual channels. often i start with a drum rack because it's the easiest way to write MIDI clips, and then separate out the stems later on. sometimes i'll group channels and then process the group. i never use impulse.

lots of layering. think i covered this in a previous reply.

-What is your biggest non-musical inspiration?

lack of sleep. my friends

-Do you think you'll reach a point where you quit your day job?

currently i think i would already get by on gigging alone, but i like my job. even if it's difficult to find enough days in the month to fit everything in, i'm not sure i could deal with the pressure of forcing myself to create for a living.

-Name 3-5 fairly unknown artists whose music you feel is criminally unheard of

call super. bintus. clatterbox.

My question for you is:
If you could go b2b with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be? The guy from Babylon Zoo or the dude from Faithless? Or somebody else? Perhaps the dog from "His Master's Voice" (original selecta).

kim jong-il

oh i wanted to ask did you initially do the objekt pressings di or via a p&d deal?
they had a diy feel to em which was always an extra appeal to me

p&d. i'd never have done it had jack(master) from rubadub not persuaded me. i'm not sure i'd ever recommend DIY vinyl distro to anyone unless you had MAD faith in your own music. far too much time and money to lose.

Bump in case you missed these.

What's your top 3 plugins and top 3 pieces of hardware and why?

i only use about 3 plugins and i've already mentioned them all, haha

How long have you been producing for and what's your favourite part of it?

already answered the first bit. not sure i have an answer to the second

Got another one too... What's your workflow like in Ableton generally, do you start in session view, how to you arrange your percussion etc etc ?

no, always arrangement view.

drums are generally in their own tracks, though sometimes i'll group certain bits of percussion (closed/open hats etc) into drum racks.

hey man,first i have to say that i believe you and blawan are the best young producers in this techno scene,secondly thanks for doing this as many people in this scene even some close friends of mine that releasing stuff on some labels dont tell their tricks,so my questions are
1. whats the best plugins in your opinion you are using ??
2.which reverb plugins do you prefer ??
3.whats the best way making hihats sound groovy and not loopy'
4.you mentioned in an interview that you can't make a techno loop without going crazy ,so have you figured out how not to go crazy???

ps:i really enjoy that unlike many vinyl djs you re playing a lot of different stuff inside your sets ,suchs us surgeon drexiya,dj boss,dettmann,chemical brothers
nice perspective

thank you!

none of this is particularly innovative, or some kind of trade secret. it's just part of the learning curve.

1. already answered

2. i only ever use the ableton reverb, the guitar rig spring reverb and space echo reverb, and (rarely) NI reflektor. not because they're the best, but because i got em free (and they're pretty good)

3.
- learn to play the drums
- write note velocity into your patterns as a drummer would play the loops (often i find it helps to only use two velocity levels, "high" and "low", otherwise your pattern starts to sound indistinct)
- very subtly assign certain parameters to velocity, e.g. volume (obviously), LPF cutoff, decay (harder vel = longer decay)
- if you want to get really geeky then you can use multiple samples of the same drum on rotation. for example, no 606 hat is the same, because the oscillators in a 606 are free-running and not retriggered every sample. therefore, a good 606 kit should have a load of different hat samples, loaded into a sampler capable of playing them on "round robin" basis. kontakt can do this. i never bother.
- gently compress and EQ, ideally after some kind of gentle tape saturation, with a long attack

4. no

ps. thanks! haha, i only ever played the one chemical brothers track. and only once. (maybe twice)

[Hircine]

3.
- learn to play the drums
- write note velocity into your patterns as a drummer would play the loops (often i find it helps to only use two velocity levels, "high" and "low", otherwise your pattern starts to sound indistinct)
- very subtly assign certain parameters to velocity, e.g. volume (obviously), LPF cutoff, decay (harder vel = longer decay)
- if you want to get really geeky then you can use multiple samples of the same drum on rotation. for example, no 606 hat is the same, because the oscillators in a 606 are free-running and not retriggered every sample. therefore, a good 606 kit should have a load of different hat samples, loaded into a sampler capable of playing them on "round robin" basis. kontakt can do this. i never bother.
- gently compress and EQ, ideally after some kind of gentle tape saturation, with a long attack

This, round robin and stick hit intensity simulation. This man speaks wisdom, big up.