Militant _ Interview with REALMZ

Will you tell us a little about the mix and whether there was any specific aim with the choice of tracks?

The mix was done digitally using Traktor with a crappy controller.  Most of the tracks are my own or collaborations. Some new, others as much as six years old or more.  I think the mix is a bit unorthodox in some ways from the typical techno set.  Being a podcast I felt more like creating a slightly different mix of material.  I intended for it to be listened to very loud.

haha – Cool. We will. So whats your production set-up like? Would you mind talking a little about that?

My production set up is a mix of hard and software.  In the rack is a Yamaha TG77, Roland JD-990, Yamaha  A5000, Emu E4XT.  Other pieces include the Ensoniq SQ-80, Ensoniq Fizmo, Kurzweil K2000, Access Virus Indigo, and Roland Alpha Juno 1.  Also have a couple hardware effects boxes.  I’ve definitely built it up over  time.  Started off messing around on a couple different friends gear, eventually got a sampler and Atari 1040st to sequence with.  By 2002 when software was starting to blow up I dove into that pretty heavily.  I use the computer for all of the arranging/sequencing, running Nuendo or Ableton though I’ve scaled back to only using a handful of plug ins.  I have no set way of working- sometimes it’s all software, other times it’s a combination.  I started collecting some pieces of hardware for when I want a break from the computer to just dig into one box for while and see what sounds I can coax out of it.  One of the first things that drew me to want to make electronic music in the first place was the sound design aspect of it so I try to explore some different angles.  Everything has it’s sound so you just have to experiment until you find the set of tools or palette that works best for you.  I do believe to a degree that one gets better results from having less and at times even the amount of stuff I have is overwhelming – as each piece of gear or software has a lot of depth to it so I purposely limit myself to only a couple things at a time on any given piece of music. I’ll probably sell a couple things soon as well to help put money toward a much needed new computer and interface.  Here’s a bit of advice; there’s a lot of really great stuff out there for under $400. Most of the synths I have were picked up within the last few years at pretty affordable prices. Synths that where well over $2000 new can now be got for a couple hundred so look into some of that stuff, do some research, listen to demos, etc..If you can afford a decent analog synth go ahead and get it.  I personally can’t afford a lot of stuff I would like to have and feel like I have more than enough as it is.  A computer with some choice pieces of software can really be enough to create endless amounts of music and sounds.

Yeah the production side of things is a pretty big part of what we do on subsekt Rob, so that’s valuable advice. Any chance that you could give us a little insight into some of your non classified production techniques?

I like experimenting with different techniques and approaches to keep myself interested, entertained and amused if nothing else.  Other times I have a concept and a pretty good idea of how I’m going to get the sound so I just go for it.  Sometimes something else emerges altogether and you might decide that you must explore that further.  One thing is that I tend to work more as a samplist, I think that from my background of seeing people making music with samplers rather than lots of synthesizers whether it was hip hop or some of the industrial I was in to as well as drum & bass which was made almost exclusively with just a sampler and a computer.  I tend to work in a similar way a lot of times where I’ll come up with some sounds that I’m feeling on a synth then make them into samples which can then perhaps be further manipulated, shaped, effected, layered, chopped, sequenced to create something new or just used straight up the way they were recorded.