Attack Highlights of 2012

To round off the festive season we quickly recap some of the highlights of Attack in 2012.

A launch year is always going to be special for a new website, but 2012 surprised even us. We’re delighted that so many of you immediately understood what we’re trying to do with Attack – bridging the gap between technical and non-technical electronic music magazines.

You, the readers, help make all of this possible. We’re delighted to have you on board and hope you’ll stay with us as we grow over the coming years. For now, forgive us a little self indulgence as we draw your attention to some of our personal highlights of the articles we published in 2012. We’re proud of what we’ve created so far and we don’t want you to miss any of our favourites!

Features

Our interview with Kerri Chandler back in July really set a high standard for future interviews to live up to. Kerri fully justified his reputation as one of the nicest men in music, happily chatting for nearly five hours about life, love, music and gear despite the fact that he’d had very little sleep after a seven hour DJ set. Did we mention that a communication breakdown meant he didn’t even know we were arriving to interview him until we called his hotel room and woke him up? The fact that he dragged himself out of bed to talk to us was generous enough in itself, but he even insisted on paying our taxi fare home after we chatted for so long that we missed the last train. A true gentleman. Respect.

Similarly, we thought our interviews with Shadow Dancer in August and Matthew Dear in November really summed up what Attack is all about. Why should interviews with producers always be about EQ settings and favourite compression ratios? Electronic music is a rich, firmly established and varied culture. We can nerd out with the best of them, but we’re just as happy to discuss the true meaning of the term ‘techno’ or how our favourite artists first discovered club culture.

The big interviews are always the most fun to conduct and the most revealing, but let’s not forget the quick-fire Q&As and Top Tracks selections, which often reveal more about the personalities and tastes of their subjects than more in-depth discussions. We don’t necessarily agree with Ben Sims’ no-nonsense description of Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’, but it had us in fits of laughter in the office when he emailed his Top Tracks selection to us. And who knew that Dimitri From Paris was such a gastronome?

Technique

In our technique section, we were particularly pleased with the response to our Passing Notes and Breakdown features. It’s always a bit risky talking about music theory, and we honestly didn’t know whether half of you would switch off as soon as we even contemplated mentioning minor thirds and semiquavers. We don’t want to alienate anyone by getting too intense with the theory jargon, but we believe that music production is just as much about music as it is about production, so we’re really happy that Attack readers seem open to analysing electronic music in theoretical terms. No one wants to get bogged down in theory, but we hope the tips we offer help you with your own tracks.

Your comments and emails on features including the Passing Notes on deep house chords and contrary motion reassured us that we’re all on the same wavelength. Likewise we had a very positive response to the first Breakdown features on Julio Bashmore’s ‘Au Seve’ and Tensnake’s ‘Coma Cat’. There’s a lot more to come from both these features in coming months.

We also received a lot of great feedback on our walkthroughs – especially the recent tutorial on EQing a mix – and we’ve been amazed by the response to our Beat Dissected drum programming tutorials. We’ll be covering as many subjects and musical styles as possible as those features continue over the next year. Let us know what you’d like to see us feature in our technique articles and we’ll do our best to fit everything in.

Thanks for joining us on the journey so far. We’re very excited about what we’ve got in store for 2013…