Machinedrum: Planting Seeds

I don't know if anything’s been lost because there’s an abundance of ways to connect with musicians around the world, but it can feel a little overwhelming compared to back then. It wasn't like IRC was the most elegant-looking platform for communicating; you had to connect to a server and figure out how to join rooms because there was no room list. Basically, you’d just type in whatever interest you had and hope that someone was in there. I guess the closest comparison today would be Discord, and a lot of the same people I talked to on IRC still have their own Discord servers.

Want to 1 2? was 50% Ableton, 50% Impulse Tracker and the Sepalcure stuff was the first 100% Ableton music that I made. With Rooms(s), I would write a couple of melodic sequences in Impulse Tracker, bounce and bring them back into Ableton, but that was definitely the last whisper of Impulse Tracker in my music up until this last album.

I don't know if it was a conscious decision. I just reached a point where I was building a new project while simultaneously doing sessions with vocalists and it felt like a separation was building. When you're working with a vocalist, it's a totally different mindset because they have a certain expectation that their vocal will sit in a specific space in the mix, which leads you to clear out space so there's not too much going on.

Being connected to different vocalists was a no-brainer at the time, but it started to plant seeds in my head about which direction to take, and there was definitely a psychological thing going on there until I started to amass material where those external voices were removed.

How I organise things has changed in terms of building sound libraries with intention and gathering samples and organising them in a way that makes them very easy to use to get ideas started quickly. Then, once Max for Live was introduced, being able to use Ableton in a modular way really changed my creative choices and approach to coming up with ideas.

The Human Energy album was when I first decided I should have a template set with all my tools ready to go in order to create a sound that I could instantly tap into. And that's more or less become my approach to making albums ever since because I started to realise that through the creation of a template, the songs had a certain vibe or sound world.

For me, ‘seeds’ is more of a conceptual description for taking an idea that could really go anywhere and seeing what it grows into. That could be a simple drum loop that you've started, or even a sound that you found in a library that you throw into a session to see if it can spark some kind of inspiration.

There's a conceptual aspect to that, but there's a more literal meaning too. With hocketing, for example, I can essentially take notes from a chord, split them across different instruments and have them grow into an ever-evolving sequence where different notes are being played at different times. I was already experimenting with this approach when making Human Energy, but I've figured out quicker ways to do it because different devices help me achieve this more easily.

When I made Human Energy, it was very tedious to take a chord progression, scrape all of the different notes and move them into different tracks, whereas now there's a Max for Live hocket device that I use alongside an instrument I built with my friend Ben Bromley. It basically consists of a simple knob macro that switches between different instruments and makes the whole process so much easier.

Hocketing is actually a classical term that’s used a lot in choral work, but can apply to anything as long as you have more than one instrument. Essentially, you have a melodic phrase and instead of it belonging to one instrument, each note is assigned to a different one. So instead of playing a whole piano sequence, you're assigning each note of that sequence to different instruments.

I didn't realise that I was already kind of doing that until my friend Lane Barrington, who used to play drums on tour with me, informed me and I started to dig a little deeper. He's the one who put me on to the Max for Live hocket device.

It works like this: you have one master sequence, and every time a different note hits, a number on the device ticks up. Then you put a receiver Max for Live device on each of your other instruments - assign one to number 1, another to number 2, another to number 3, and so on. As the master sequence steps through, it's essentially cycling through those numbers in turn, and each instrument only fires when its number comes up.

I've got to say that I felt this way 20 years ago. There was a certain point with the IDM genre where it felt like we’d explored it all and there was nothing else we could do because music was just getting crazier and crazier. Breakcore and all these different subgenres were really trying to push the limits and make sounds that you’d never heard before, but if anything I became more attracted to music that didn't go all the way but toyed with or implemented those approaches in a less show-offy way.

Even compared to then, there are so many options now when it comes to experimenting with sounds, but it’s not only the tools, it’s the access to education that we now have through YouTube tutorials and such. The downside is that there can be this obsession with learning new approaches, until you realise there's always another tool to get lost in.

I think it's important to comprehend when you're burning out on certain processes and recognise resonance. In other words, if you're watching a tutorial on someone breaking down a new cool plugin, it’s maybe better to recognise whether it truly offers a moment of inspiration or excitement in order to approach creativity in a more organic way.

It's a complicated subject, but without getting too deep into it, yes I do use AI tools in ways that can inspire ideas, or in other very utilitarian ways. For the most part, the only way I'm using it in my workflow is for stem splitting, or sometimes I’ll use AI music-generating software to create a drum pattern, reverse engineer it and replace the sounds with my own in the same way that I often do when working with breakbeats or samples from actual drummers.

Basically, I'll bring those breaks into Ableton, study the pocket of that drummer and swap out the sounds with my own. And then I'm using AI a lot for web coding when building assets for my projects. I don’t have the budget for all of that and I'm basically a novice when it comes to coding, so AI’s useful when it comes to creating a website or Python script to make something easier to do.

To be honest, I don't really do any kind of arrangement in Ableton Note. I’ll maybe build two or three variations of a loop, but generally I'm going into Ableton with maybe four or five instruments from Ableton Note and one clip per instrument.

When I'm working on music and starting ideas in Ableton, it’s often the same approach - I’ll have a handful of instruments, build a very rich-sounding loop and the arrangement process starts from there. Ableton Note is limited in that you can't add hundreds of tracks, but I think that’s a good thing because self-imposed limitations definitely breed more creativity in me.

I wouldn't say that the ideas are necessarily better, but they're definitely different and my environment can definitely influence things leading up to the moment I open Ableton Note. For example, the track Fade Away on BL00MS started on Ableton Note when I was in a shuttle van leaving a festival that I didn't want to leave.

I arrived right before my set and had to leave directly after because I had a very early flight, but I still had this energy or adrenaline rush from being at the festival. I opened up a song that I’d already started on Note, which had more of a dub techno groove, but I was still feeling the dubstep energy of this festival. I basically remixed the track on-the-fly, but that song would never have existed were it not for those little moments.

What was really interesting about this track in particular is that I have an approach to mixing that has become part of my arrangement. In other words, once I have a drum idea ready in terms of the rhythms and sounds, I’ll quickly move to making them sound loud, mixed and present as if they’re going to be the final product, because that informs all of the other decisions I make around sound choices.

If I need to add something else, I’ll use my own devices and third-party plugins, but knowing that I was going to make this session available for the public and therefore wouldn't be able to do that, I had to spend a good day or two trying to reverse engineer sounds and find their counterparts in Ableton.

I just did a lot of A/B testing to make sure I could remake sounds as accurately as possible. For example, I have a room verb kind of thing that I usually put on my drum bus to add a little pre-delay and create an extra dimension so they don't sound too dry. I'm usually using ValhallaRoom for that kind of stuff and using a dialled-in preset, but then I thought, okay, I guess I’ll have to figure out how to do this with Ableton's reverb instead.

There was a lot of trial and error and I was using the standard reverb for a while, but it wasn't really doing the trick. Eventually I brought in Ableton’s Hybrid Reverb, used a room algorithm that was similar to the Valhalla one and dialled in the parameters until they were the same. That way, I could still use the effects rack that I always put on my drum bus.

Honestly? It was a genuine learning process in creating the same sounds and effects with other plug-ins, which is especially useful when I’m collaborating and have to pass sessions back and forth with other people who use Ableton, because you have to commit to audio in case they don't have all the same plugins that you do. In the end, I saved a lot of the new racks I’d made just for that very purpose.