youANDme

youANDme – My Studio

Welcome to my little studio. You can see the acoustic treatment is not perfect but I know the shortcomings of my room and I have learnt to work with it.

Hardware

The use of hardware has been a big part of my productions. I can build tracks much quicker and I like the direct interaction with the machines. I use the PC mostly to record the separate tracks from my machines and to do edits on the final arrangement.

Urei 1178 and Electrodyne 511

Here you can see the heart of my sound. I love the Urei 1178 compressor because it taught me everything I know about compression. It’s my favourite snare and clap compressor, and it also works great on bass, kicks and vocals.

The Electrodyne 511 is a two-band equaliser using late 60s design technology. These circuits come directly from the Motown console and they sound every bit as fantastic as you would imagine.

Synths: Moog Voyager, Roland Jupiter-6 & DSI Prophet-12

Here you can see three of my synths. I use the the Moog Voyager for almost all my bass and lead sounds. When I produced my track ‘Quince’ for the 15 Years Of Poker Flat compilation I did every single sound just with the Moog. Listen here:

The Roland Jupiter-6 is a bit more dirty and aggressive than the Jupiter-8, and I love to make chords and strings with it. I used it a lot on my album Behind and for example all synth sounds on my track ‘Drift’ are created with the JP-6. Listen here:

Many people don’t like the Prophet-12 but if you dive a bit deeper you can do really complex sounds. It’s the modern synth in my collection and when I did the remix for Steve Bug I used it to do all the pads, toms and FX sounds. Listen here:

Modded Roland TR-505

Here you can see one of my secret weapons (now not so secret anymore). It’s a handmade modification of the Roland TR-505 by my friend Michal aka The Analog Roland Orchestra.

Each TR-505 Jammod drum machine is modified with 24 additional potentiometers controlling level (distortion), pitch and decay for each of the eight drum groups. Furthermore an 18-slot patchbay is installed to dive even deeper into the digital sea of 12 bits.

I used it to do the tom sounds for my new Rhythm Cult record ‘PPPPP’, which you can hear here:

And you can hear much crazier examples of how far you can go with it here.

Ursa Major Space Station SST-206

The Ursa Major Space Station SST-206 emulates the echo and reverb effects of the legendary Space Station from 1977 but also features a new algorithm called ‘room’. It has no MIDI, no displays, no presets – just a few parameters. The sound of the SST-206 is impressive, both in the original ‘vintage’ mode and with the full bandwidth and dynamic range. I use it on my send/return channel and there is a reason why they called it Space Station.

Tape Echoes

You can see my two tape echoes: a Roland Space Echo RE-201 and a not-so-well-known Evans Super Echo ES-5. I tried all the different VST emulations and some of them are really nice but nothing can beat a real tape echo. There’s a kind of magic and deepness which you can’t emulate. Maybe it’s because the incoming audio is recorded to a loop of real tape with all the little noises and mistakes. One trick which makes it really magic to me is to send the tape signal into the Roland Dimension D and back to the computer to control the room with the UAD Precision K-Stereo plugin.

Modular System

For a long time, I tried not to dive into the deep sea of modular systems, but at one point your friend starts with it and you hear all these great sounds and possibilities. That’s the moment where you can’t win the inner battle and also start to buy it. I have a really simple setup but just with this limited stuff you can do crazy sounds really quickly. I start a new series where I do live jams with this modular stuff and one or two drum machines. The first three jams will be released soon on O L G A Recordings, the label of the Brazilian club D-Edge.

Mask

It’s all about instruments and records in my studio. The least musical item is a mask which I bought on my last Asia tour in Bali. It’s a nice memory and it should give the owner inspiration and keep bad spirits away.