Robert Henke

Christine Kakaire

I wanna give you all a warm welcome to the very first lecture of term one of Red Bull Music Academy 2018. It’s the 20th anniversary of RBMA and we’re back in Berlin where it all started, and we’re here at the Funkhaus, a really incredible and inspirational space.

Speaking of incredible and inspirational, [laughs] our very first guest is someone to whom the word genius is often applied.

Robert Henke

Eh… really?

Christine Kakaire

Yeah, truly.

Robert Henke

That scares me. [laughs] We can talk about the genius concept later.

Christine Kakaire

Ok, well, we’ll put a pin in that. I’m really, really happy to welcome Robert Henke.

Robert Henke

Hello. [applause]

Christine Kakaire

So while I was preparing for this talk, there’s a lot of ground to cover in terms of the length and breadth of your career and your art and your innovation, so I’m hoping that we can scratch the surface of this by asking a lot of ‘why’ questions as opposed to a lot of ‘how’ questions.

But I wanted to start with a piece of music which is not made by you, and I believe that you were seven or eight when it first came out, and I believe it had a particular impact on you. And it’s gonna be one of the tracks from Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygène album. So let’s have a listen and then we can talk about this album and its impact on you.

Robert Henke

Do we need to listen to all of that?

Christine Kakaire

Not all of it, not all of it, we’re just gonna listen to a little excerpt.

Robert Henke

Ok. [laughs]

(music: Jean-Michel Jarre – “Oxygène Part II”)

Christine Kakaire

So that was “Oxygène Part II” by Jean-Michel Jarre. I could feel you squirming [laughs] as it was being played.

Robert Henke

Yeah, it’s probably gonna be more painful when we start listening to my own stuff. But as an interesting historical side note, Jean-Michel Jarre, as far as I know, played all of this by hand. He doesn’t like sequencers, so he has a drum computer, and all these repetitive sequences is really him doing this by hand intentionally because he likes the groove of it.

And this was recorded without any computer help on a multi-track recorder. So, besides the cheesiness that is very obvious and becomes more obvious the more you listen to the whole album, the achievement technically is quite impressive.

So, as far as the sound design is concerned, this keeps up well. As far as the composition is concerned, there’s a lot of ‘80s stuff which sounds amazing before it becomes the main part and afterwards.

Christine Kakaire

So it’s all intros and outros.

Robert Henke

Yeah, you can probably create amazing mix CDs with just intros and outros of all these pieces.

Christine Kakaire

But I’d love to know what was it that was… That kind of gripped you when you were listening to this for the first time as a youngster?

Robert Henke

Well, the… To get an idea of the impact this had was… We talk about someone who grew up in a family of engineers with no artistic interest whatsoever and also no musical interest whatsoever. So there was no culture of listening to music in my upbringing and electronic music was nonexistenting. So the only music I had access to was pretty much the rock music my parents did listen to on the radio and a bit of stuff that I did listen on the radio, which was pretty similar to, well, normal mainstream rock, pop of this time.

And I listened to this album at a friend’s place of my parents who had a fantastic stereo system, and whilst my parents were there, this album was basically playing there from vinyl, and I still remember the loudspeakers, because I was literally standing in front of the loudspeakers and was stunned because there was no vocals, there was no… there was just this endless development, endless development of sound going on.

And the friend of my parents noticed that this did something to me and he promised to record a tape, and that’s what he did. So I had this tape with two albums from Jean-Michel Jarre at home, and I would assume I’ve been listening to this tape several hundred or thousand times. So that had quite some impact, and afterwards I started trying to figure out, pre-internet and living at the outskirts of a boring city, how to access such music and how to find more of that.

Christine Kakaire

And what were your first steps to get access to this music and also to try to tease apart how it was made or how it could be replicated in a sense?

Robert Henke

Well, I went to a mainstream music store and found a completely confused salesperson who nevertheless tried to find something for me and at some point he pointed me to Tangerine Dream, which turned out to be equally important at this time to me and, well, the rest was simple. I read a lot, so I knew what a synthesizer was, and I knew what a drum computer was, and then I went to a local music store and annoyed them because I had no money but I wanted to try everything.

And when I was a bit older, I started to earn my money by carrying out newspapers and stuff like this, and bought my first synthesizer and from there it was no turning back, and I played in a band, kind of electronic rock, really horrible, and I’m incredibly thankful for the fact that it was pre-internet. Years ago I found a tape recording we made, and I am really, really happy that this is the only recording. [laughs]

Christine Kakaire

I believe that first synthesizer of yours was a Juno-6. What world did that open up for you? Where did it take you musically?

Robert Henke

Well, so, I had a synthesizer and I had a Walkman and I had a tape deck which could record, and I built myself a cheap mixing console, console is a nice word, a bunch of wires and transistors. And so I was recording on my tape deck and then I was taking the tape out of the tape deck, put it in my Walkman, played it back. It was slightly out of tune because the speed was different.

Then I played on top of it, and then I did this again and again. After four generations it was just noise with some music in the background. But these were my first experiments into doing something by myself.

And yeah, and then playing in the band. And this was pretty much what I did until I left school and finally were able to earn more money, so I was able to buy an Atari and a reverb and started to build something like a small home studio. And then I moved to Berlin, and that changed everything.

Christine Kakaire

Actually I think at this point we can put up a photo, I believe it’s from 1993, it’s photo number six. There we go.

Robert Henke

Ah, ah.

Christine Kakaire

That is a young Robert Henke with a pretty sick mohawk standing on a rooftop in 1993. And I was really drawn to this image on your website, it kind of reminded me of this photography anthology called Berlin Wonderland which came out a few years ago, which is, for anyone that’s not aware, it’s a collection of black and white photos taken in and around Berlin in the first five years or so of the 90s. And they were all almost surreal images, really desolate backgrounds, but all focused on one kind of quirky character in the middle. And I think this really fit into that aesthetic.

So it’d be great to hear from you what Berlin was actually like at that time, if it was as wild and limitless as it seems to be.

Robert Henke

Well I mean this could of course be the beginning of a talk for the next few months. So, for me personally Berlin put two things together which turned out to be equally important.

The one thing was that I started to study computer science, and I was also connected to the electronic studio of the technical university, which was a place of very academic computer music research. Research into sound generation, exposure to serious composers of electronic and electroacoustic music, which was, again, something which I had no clue about before, so I heard [Iannis] Xenakis, I heard François Baille, [Bernard] Parmegiani, [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, all these people I had no idea about.

And at the same time Berlin to me was going to Tresor and being profoundly shocked the first night, because it was just so much more than I could handle. And I left after half an hour and I thought I will never come back. And guess what, the next day I was back.

So these two very, very different forces, the refinement and the code, and waiting one night to calculate the five seconds of sound versus insanely loud bass drum, high-hat, snare, and lots of fog and strobe and half-naked people dancing. This was something which basically shaped my whole experience.

And the situation in Berlin which made all this possible was, to condense this in a really brief history, in East Germany there was no private property, so everything was state owned. A lot of buildings in East Berlin, including a lot of small factories and manufacturing spaces were state owned. So the DDR disappeared, the system vanished, and there was still no owner. And the previous owners were either people who had to leave Germany to flee from the Nazi regime or they were killed.

So there were basically buildings where the ownership was not clear. And that meant that it was possible for artists to more or less just go in there. And the city government at some point made a very important decision to say, “OK, we have the choice, either these buildings are vandalized and empty, or these people rent out for nothing basically to artists. We don’t know exactly what they’re doing in there, but at least they keep their windows shut and the heating intact.”

So it was possible to find the most amazing industrial spaces, spaces which are similar to what you have here, on a small scale, but very similar in terms of interior, in terms of architecture, in terms of accessibility, right in the center of the city, and do something. All you had to do is go to the city government and say, “I’m an art student, I want to make an art project in there.” And opening a bar meant putting a few boxes of beer, a small PA and a turntable in it, and that’s it.

And since electronic music culture was not established as a commercial culture, no one even thought of what’s with the money they earn there, you know, no one cared. And that meant zero investment, and that meant it was possible to do all kinds of strange experiments. It didn’t matter if two people showed up for a concert because there were no costs involved. So you just met with your friends and you played some music, and some more friends came by, then some more friends, and at some point you decided, OK, maybe we need a door and we need to have a better coffee machine, and next time we bring more beer. But that was it.

And this situation allowed for two things. It allowed for musical experiments and it also allowed for a social experiment, like how can you interact with people, what is a club as a social experience, but also very important, an audiovisual experience and a spatial experience.

If you come in an empty space, you have to make a decision, where do I put my loudspeakers, where do I put the bar, where is the DJ or the live performer, where is the audience? And this led to all these nice situations of the DJ playing right in the middle of the audience, doing quadraphonic sound just to try it out, having bass bins two stories below and enjoy the fact that the bass is rumbling through the whole building before it reaches the dancefloor, all kinds of crazy shit you could just do.

And this vibe made it possible to be very naïve in a very good sense. And it didn’t matter what you tried out musically as long as someone liked it. You could try the most bizarre things. And if you listen to early techno, it’s so obvious that people just threw together whatever they had in mind. It was much more eclectic than what came out ten years later when everything became more formalized and there was already a recipe. There was no recipe at the beginning, if you listen to early KLF, or if you listen to many, many other records of that time. Someone started with a shouting sample in a track, someone else copied it and added something else, including of course horrible scenarios where there was this kind of commercial thing with barking dog voices pitched up and down. But everything was possible. And I don’t know where we started, but that’s how it was.

Christine Kakaire

I’m curious, do you believe that now that things have changed in terms of the city, perhaps in terms of the commercialization of certain types of formerly underground types of music, do you believe it is at all possible for young people coming up now to be able to replicate those conditions somehow, of being boundless and being unrestricted, or do you believe that that’s been lost?

Robert Henke

This is a difficult question to ask someone who is approaching 50, because I feel I’m not an expert in talking about what 20-year-old people should do or what they even are doing, because I know too little. But I believe there is always a way to find a creative niche, because there always was, and there is in every society and in every culture, even in the most oppressive ones, there’s always ways around the official doctrine, and I experienced two things. As far as the electronic dance music culture is concerned, obviously this type of music and this type of expression is still of interest to people in their early ‘20s, because when I perform I see people in this age who are invested and who are performing right after or before me, and I don’t feel that I don’t belong there or that there’s a huge cultural or age gap, which is super nice. But of course there’s also a lot of different ways to express yourself these days. So in a way, the internet made it possible to collaborate and exchange yourself with people all over the globe. So instead of having regional boundaries… So back in the 90s, you had regional pockets, so the Berlin scene and the Cologne scene and the Detroit scene. They were all centered around, OK, this is a regional space with all these people in here, and everyone here shares the same idea. And there’s another regional space somewhere else which shares a different idea which might be connected or not. And now you have this global onion ring scenario where all over the world you have people interested in the same electronic music, and they’re only a few people but they’re connected to a few others all around the globe. And we’re orbiting around this globe. And sometimes this is even actually strange that you go somewhere to a completely different cultural background and you go to a party and you listen to exactly the same tracks you listen to in Berlin. And sometimes I almost wish that, I go, just making something up, I go to an amoeba and experience a completely different type of electronic music at the places where I have access to. I say the last sentence because, who knows, perhaps there is something going on which is just not in my onion ring, and therefore it’s happening right below or above me and I have no clue.

So as far as I know there is a lot of interesting things going on, and it’s probably wrong to look at exactly a specific type of electronic dance music for innovation, because if the music ends up in a shoe store for selling expensive shoes, you know that it can’t be underground anymore in the same way it was 25 years ago. But I assume there’s different scenes, there’s different things going on which might just emerge right now, and which might not even be connected to purely listening to music. I’m only very vaguely familiar with for instance what’s going on in game engine development and what people do with game engines these days. Who knows what comes up as great art forms using game engines in a few years, where people do the most amazing virtual reality experiences that of course include electronic music. So who knows what’s happening.

Christine Kakaire

I mean you seem to be somebody who is always… There’s always a sense of forward momentum in what you’re doing, going from studying computer music, making music, using hardware instruments, creating software to be able to revolutionize the way that you’re performing those instruments and so on and so forth.

I mean, is the future of gaming and VR, is that something that you could see yourself developing an interest in in the future? Because you always seem to be a step ahead of where you are.

Robert Henke

In my own personal view of myself, I’m not a step ahead, I’m actually a very conservative person in my usage of technology for instance. So I need to separate a little bit what I attempt to contribute with my colleagues at Ableton, where of course the question always is how does the world musically look like in five years or ten, because we have to find answers to that, and we’re working on this of course. And this is one part. And the other part is my artistic life. And in my artistic life, I reached a stage where I’d rather like to refine and explore all these loose threads that accumulated over the last 30 years of my life rather than throwing myself into something new. So I feel that I need to spend more time in the studio working on just electronic music, because I have so many ideas that I’d like to explore that are informed by the things I’m doing currently. But for those ideas, I don’t need new instruments, I don’t need new software, I don’t need new hardware, I just need time. And the same goes for my installation works, I’m not working with the latest technology, and I never did in a way. And I’d rather like to refine all these ideas which I have in my mind.

So I don’t think that necessarily if I would try to learn… Let’s say programming Unity or whatever is the en vogue game engine these days would solve any artistic question. It would rather take all my time to learn the platform, and the same is true for buying new equipment. Of course I’m tempted to buy equipment because I like machines, I find synthesizers and reverb units and all these kind of things really sexy. There’s some things that are insanely beautiful, they’re engineering highlights, and I love them, but let’s say if I buy another digital synthesizer from the early 80s, it wouldn’t solve any artistic question at all. It wouldn’t make my compositions just one notch better, nothing, because I have more sounds in my library than I can ever use for the next 500 years, so the last thing I should spend my time with is looking on eBay if someone sells “insert great synthesizer here,” because it’s pointless. I still do sometimes, and afterwards I think, OK, now I spent an insane amount of money for this vintage reverb, but to be honest, this plugin which I recently got for free from this friend of mine is actually better. So I think I should not focus on new technologies, I should focus on new ways of expressing myself within my framework.

Christine Kakaire

I think that’s something we’re gonna come back to in a moment, but you mentioned Ableton, so I feel like this is probably a good time to introduce the background and your involvement in the development of Ableton Live. If we could look at photo number seven, please. Another one from the vault.

Robert Henke

Ah, this is…

Christine Kakaire

Can you describe what’s happening here?

Robert Henke

Well, this is me, I can clearly see that, it looks similar, yeah. And this other guy here is Mr. Gerhard Behles. I have been telling this story for so often that I won’t repeat it, I didn’t like this guy at all when I met him in Munich. I went to Berlin to start a new life, and guess who was in my first lecture in university? This guy. We became best friends, we started making music together, like here, and this guy at some point decided after finishing studying that a software company for music software would be the thing to do. He founded Ableton, he knocked on the door and said, “Robert, we need you.” I joined and, well, the rest you know.

So what you see here is Mr. Gerhard Behles and myself playing a very conceptual concert. The synthesizer here, the Yamaha SY77, is a very complex machine which you can program in such a way that if you press down a few keys, there’s a lot of looping envelopes going on inside that create some very complex, long drone-y sounds that changes over time, and our conceptual idea was that we both start with the same sound, we press down on the same keys, use matches to keep them pressed down, and then we together start editing the sound. Every one, just in any way we wanted. So we get this different types of drone-y structures going on that grow further and further apart, or met again, and after half an hour, or whenever we felt like it’s enough, we went through all the parameters and made them the same again so that we ended at the same sound again. So after half an hour of playing, I said, “Operator one, release rate 15.” Gerhard, [mimics pressing buttons] clack, clack, clack, clack. Operator two, attack rate 12.” And I [mimics pressing buttons] clack, clack, clack, clack. Until we were back to the same sound again. And then we finished. So this was called the symmetrical concert, and we played it, as I said on the website, in front of audience as big as five people, and… Maybe this was ten here. And yeah, so much to this poster photo. And I guess the question was more about Ableton, right?

Christine Kakaire

Yeah, but we can go there in stages. I’m gonna bring up another photo, which is number 17, please.

Robert Henke

Ah.

Christine Kakaire

Yeah.

Robert Henke

Oh, you did your homework.

Christine Kakaire

I deep dived into your website.

Robert Henke

Is this online?

Christine Kakaire

Yeah, it is, it is. Oh, actually that wasn’t on your website, I found it somewhere else. But this is the PX18 sequencer. I’d love it if you could explain what is happening on this screen and how you developed this together with Gerhard.

Robert Henke

Okay, so this is a Max patch which Gerhard and me used for creating music both on stage and in the studio. And, let’s walk a little bit [gets up and walks over to the screen], so obviously this is one bar of music and velocities, and, this looked better when it was opened in Max 4. In Max 4 this whole thing didn’t look so strange. This photo was taken using the same Max patch in a later Max version which had a different graphic, so it’s a bit fucked up. So this is one, let’s call it clip, which has velocities and pitch and durations, and all kinds of things. This is 15 tracks or 16… No, 12 actually. And each track could play a different clip, quantized, and there’s an overall groove editor and there is some crazy shit which actually is not part of Live unfortunately, which allows to scramble the time. And there is something that allows to switch the patterns of each of these tracks in a timeline. So let’s call this the arranger. And so that’s a very basic step sequencer which we used to perform with. And it ran on a laptop and it had MIDI out, and the media went to synthesizer racks and stuff like that. And some of those ideas, in particular the idea that every single pattern can be switched at any time and that they can all switch together, found its way into Live. And so parts of the inspiration for Live came from trying out these things before.

Christine Kakaire

And also at this time that you were developing this step sequencer, you and Gerhard were also creating and performing music as well.

Robert Henke

Yes.

Christine Kakaire

As Monolake.

Robert Henke

That’s true.

Christine Kakaire

That is true. So I think that this is a good point to perhaps listen to something from that era, I believe it’s between like mid ‘90s to very early 2000s, where this PX18 step sequencer was really integral in the performance of your music. So let’s have a listen to, I believe it was your first EP, Cyan.

Robert Henke

Oh, sweet.

Christine Kakaire

Yeah. So let’s have a listen to Cyan I, and then we can resume…

Robert Henke

So I think I have probably not listened to this track for 15 years, so let’s…

Christine Kakaire

Let’s see if it stands up.

Robert Henke

But actually this track is older than this here. [points to PX18 on screen]

(music: Monolake – “Cyan I”)

Christine Kakaire

Just to remind everyone what that was, that was “Cyan I” by Monolake from their first EP in 1997.

Robert Henke

So there’s a few comments to make on that track. The first one is, it is very obvious if you listen to this all these years later, that at this time there was a different idea of time in the type of music which was made in Berlin. This idea of an endless state was very predominant, because the first impulse when I listen to this now is, god, this is so slow. But after listening to it for a while, I get back in the mental state which was happening during this time and the fact that things changed so slow was actually welcome because it was a very definite statement against a three minute pop track. So, to wait til the change happens in your brain before it happens in the music, and, of course, if you listen to this whilst you’re being stoned it’s a different experience anyway. And that played a role at this time, undeniably. This track is also a great showcase of Gerhard performing the arpeggiator of the Juno-6 and this weird [makes mosquito noise] bassline is actually a mosquito. I made a recording of some flies for something and I just had this floppy with the mosquito in my sampler and we just transposed it down and suddenly this [makes low buzzing sound] showed up, and the bassline was there. This is the kind of experimentation which came very natural at this time. The byproduct was that there was all this annoying other birds in the background, which to me, from a 2018 sound perspective, are way too much in the foreground. But this was the trade off, either having this mosquito bassline plus the birds in the background or having not the mosquito bassline and the decision was clear, let’s just accept the birds.

And yeah, so much about this track. The funny thing is that this track led to our first release on Chain Reaction simply because we were never intending to release this. We just played it to friends because we made tracks for ourselves for fun, for showing our friends, and one of our friends said, “Hey, did you play this to Mark [Ernestus] and Moritz [von Oswald]?” “No. Should we?” “Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you should.” And then I did, and I gave the DAT tape to Mark, and I was expecting him to listen to it immediately, and it was kind of… Mark just put it in his bag. Oh, OK. And then nothing happened, and I forgot about it, and a few weeks later, Mark just called me on my landline, because that was what we had at this time and said, “What’s the name of your project?” And I said, “Huh? Sorry, what?” Yeah, the DAT you gave me, what’s the name of the project? And I was conferencing with Gerhard and we have been on a kind of holiday trip together through the US, and we went from San Francisco to Las Vegas, and we passed a sign to a lake, but we didn’t have time to see the lake, and this was a lake called Mono Lake. And we thought, ah, it’s not interesting, and we just moved on. And then I went to a gas station and I saw a postcard of Mono Lake and I bought the postcard and went to Gerhard look and said, “Shit, look what we missed.” And so when Mark asked us what the name of the project is, I look at Gerhard and Gerhard looks at me and we say “Monolake.” And so the lake we never saw. And so that’s how that happened.

Christine Kakaire

And it’s definitely worth clarifying who Mark and Moritz are. Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald.

Robert Henke

OK, yeah. Sorry, yeah. So, a small scene at this time, everyone knew everyone. Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald founded the Basic Channel label and Chain Reaction, which was the offspring label which became the home of many of our friends and us. And this is how things happened. And this just shows how small everything was. That was very… Not driven by big money, not driven by the idea of selling lots of copies and not much marketing effort. Actually, no marketing at all, just the fact that it was existing and word of mouth was enough to keep this running.

Christine Kakaire

I’m also curious to know, at this time, late ‘90s Berlin, when Basic Channel, Chain Reaction, putting out these seminal releases. What was your experience of performing around the city? What kind of spaces were you moving within? Because I feel like later on in your career, the idea of factoring in spaces becomes one of the big tent poles of your approach to your work. So I’m curious to know what kind of spaces you were moving in at that time.

Robert Henke

That’s a good question. At this time, when performing spaces were not my main concern, I was way too occupied with the fact that suddenly I… Or we at the beginning have to perform somewhere. So we just, whenever someone asked us, we went there and it was just the usual setup, some dudes onstage in a club. There were some exceptions where we played different scenarios with multiple speakers and things like this. But this was… It was not my main focus at this time. My interest in performing multichannel and finding a different perspective came later when… No, came later, period. Yeah.

Christine Kakaire

OK. Well, let’s talk a little bit further about the development of Ableton Live. We’ve got another image.

Robert Henke

I’m so curious what comes now because I have a few suspicions of which kind of images.

Christine Kakaire

So we’re gonna look at number… No, we’ve lost it. Sorry everyone. Let’s look at number eight please.

Robert Henke

Ah.

Christine Kakaire

Yes.

Robert Henke

This was actually functional. It doesn’t look like this, but it worked. So this is how a very, very early pre-version one release version of Live looked like. And the funny thing is, if you look at this now, you notice that the basic concept still looks very familiar and I find this kind of cute. And with a version that only looks slightly better than this one, we went to the first NAMM show, which is the most important trade show for electronic music instruments, and showed this software. Yeah, I could talk a lot about this trade show and the reactions of the people to what they saw there. I don’t know how much time we have.

Christine Kakaire

I think it’d be great to share it because now obviously NAMM is… It’s a hugely important location and event for acoustic, but also electronic instruments. What was it like taking this new technology and presenting it to that kind of…

Robert Henke

Just a question. Do you also intend to show this fantastic photo of Gerhard and me after the trade show?

Christine Kakaire

No, I didn’t know it existed.

Robert Henke

Oh, too bad. Because there’s a really hilarious photo of us, but if you don’t have it, OK, even better. So we went to NAMM show, and if you have not much money then you are having a really small booth, like the size of that space. [delineates a small space next to the couch] Pretty much the screen here in a smaller version and the little thing to put a laptop and show this and two loudspeakers, and not many people showed up at our place because we were at the very end, and next to us were some company who sold some really bad notation software and some strange company selling something else strange, which I forgot. And we showed this strange software which looked very different from anything people knew at this time. This was the time when Reason just came out with these dangling cables and photorealistic renderings and three-dimensional stuff. And this was the opposite. What happened was that people from other companies came by and said, “Sorry, what? This is a software you want to use on a laptop on stage? You guys are nuts.” Laptop on stage, ha ha. [laughs sarcastically] And they left.

Then other company guys came and said, “Oh, this interface looks horrible. Can’t you hire a graphics designer?” And they left. Well, we were confident enough to survive that because at some point… First of all, we knew that laptops on stage worked because we have been doing this. You have to imagine, just to give a context of the time, the typical advertisement for music software at this time looked like this. You have a full color photo page in Keyboard magazine with a photo of one of those studio mixing desks, which goes basically from this end of the room [motions from one side of the room to the other] to that end. So you’ll see this photo and leather and all very nice. I’m not making this up, I have this photo right in my memory, and the Porsche car key on the desk. This was the advertisement for Logic at this time. So the image they wanted to convey for their software, this is professional software for the successful professional producer and the professional producer is a Porsche driver with a big console and a big studio. So something that is on a laptop on stage for techno nerds doesn’t fit in this image is obvious. And this was our great chance because these customers were not recognized, this concept of performing wasn’t recognized, this idea of actually making music as performance was not recognized. So we were the freaks and in our niche we were happy.

When we started Ableton, we kind of knew that we will sell enough copies that a small company can survive because we knew that our friends would be interested and that there’s friends of friends of friends out there who share similar ideas. So we kind of knew that something like this fulfils a desire of people who try to make electronic music and who couldn’t do it the same way before. So we took that for granted. But what we didn’t anticipate was that the market could be much larger. And what happened, and I think it happened on the second day of the first NAMM show, was some guy came by, a little bit older than us, and the usual LA style, black suit and everything in black and glasses, perhaps. I don’t know. I can’t remember that. And he was followed by maybe five, six significantly younger people also looking like the classical LA composers, also in black. Imagine Nine Inch Nails all over the place. And this guy said, “So what is this, what do you have here?” And I say, “Yeah, well this is software for performing on stage and I can put in a loop here and I can change the tempo without changing the pitch and I can add a second loop and it runs in sync. He interrupts me and says, “So you can change the tempo without changing the pitch? So you can do this without steps in between? So I can maybe ramp up the tempo from, let’s say, 110 BPM to 200 BPM continuously over two minutes?” I said, “Yeah, sure. I can show you.” Clack, clack, clack, clack. And I did from 30 BPM to 999. And he says, “Oh, this is pretty cool. You can’t, by any chance, combine this with Pro Tools?” And the funny thing is, we kind of, in a very smart move from the very beginning, implemented a protocol called Rewire, and Rewire allows you to do exactly that, that you can connect any piece of software to Pro Tools and run it as a slave. So I just said, “Yeah, sure we can. It has Rewire.” “Oh, it has Rewire. Nice.”

It was also, I believe, the first music software that came out to run under OS X. So there were a lot of points for this person to be happy. And then this person left, and I was very occupied with explaining this software to him so I didn’t really look at his name tag. Everyone has a name tag on the trade show. So I had my exhibitor trade name tag and this guy had his name tag with ‘Visitor.’ And right before he left, I looked at his name tag, ‘Hans Zimmer.’ And so I thought, oh, OK. Well…

So half an hour later, someone came by, said, “Hey, I heard you have something interesting. Hans sent me.” 35 minutes later, another person came by and said, “Hi, hello. Can you tell me what you’re selling here? What is this software?” And so basically, Hans Zimmer was really impressed, and if Hans Zimmer is impressed and excited about something, he shares it with his other people. And the other people say, “Hans saw something exciting there at the very end, this green little box there. You have to check it out.” So suddenly all these people showed up and we thought, hm, maybe this thing we are doing here could also be interesting for people who are outside our primary focus. That was one of the first points where we got an idea that perhaps we’re doing something that is a bit larger than what we anticipated. And then it grew like this over the years. And our biggest surprise for the first four or five releases was always that we were, every single time we went a trade show, we thought, OK, now one of the big companies must have a product which is a perfect copy of that but better. Because we were a small company with maybe ten developers at the beginning, and a company like Apple or Steinberg, or Yamaha, or whoever, any of the big companies could just say, OK, Department X, build a copy of that, but better. And this would have been the end of Ableton because with the marketing power and the customer base of one of the big hard or software players, they could just exceed what we have done by far. But they didn’t because they still didn’t see that this is a market. And at the point when they really realized it, it was too late because we were so established that everyone wanted to use Live. And so that’s the story.

Christine Kakaire

That’s a great story. So we’re now at version 10 of Live. What has your involvement been in the development of these different iterations of it? Because I know that you have stepped back from direct involvement with Ableton. So like what has been your involvement through these various phases?

Robert Henke

Multiple. I’m kind of… Let’s start with my current involvement because that’s easier to explain. I’m in a very luxurious position. Officially, I have the role of an external advisor, which means everything and nothing. But practically, I’m occupying myself with some details I find interesting or really important to focus on. Some of the stuff which has to do with everything related to sound processing, sound generation. I was involved in the wavetable synthesizer, I was involved with a few other improvements of the effects. This was always kind of my main domain, officially. But I basically look at every single aspect of the software and talk with people about what I think is a good thing to improve, what I believe is going in the wrong direction, and basically try to put in my experience as someone who is using the software all the time and who’s talking with millions of people… I’m exaggerating, 20 people about this software and observing how other people use it and where people fail, and try to get this knowledge from the outside into the company and trying to, on the level of small details, try to improve things. And the other thing is that I’m, of course, part of this group who really thinks about what do we do for next release, what do we do for the next five years? So I’m always kind of navigating myself from the tiny detail of implementation of parameter ranges, of colors, of really anal detail because I’m one of those, to the great picture of saying we need to do more for people who want to do stuff that is not metric in music. I’d like Live to be able to handle odd rhythms and polymetric, polyrhythmic stuff better than it does at the moment. Is there anyone who is with me in this regard and can we allocate resources for that? Stuff like this.

Christine Kakaire

As Live has grown in popularity and become almost ubiquitous, I suppose, in certain parts of electronic music, how has it sat with you, this idea of the ‘Abletonification’ of electronic music? The idea that it has… Let me put it this way. It sounds like the initial impetus and the catalyst to develop these tools was to really revolutionize the idea of performance, but I feel like Ableton, in certain quarters, has received criticism for restricting performance to a very standardized, I suppose, type of expression. How does that sit with you?

Robert Henke

Well, it’s of course true, simply due to the fact that every instrument has a character. And it has to have a character because there is no such thing as a neutral instrument. And it makes a few things very easy to do, and it makes other things impossible or very hard to achieve. And it’s in the very nature of people using instruments that the things which are easy and obvious are the things people do. If you play a guitar, it’s far easier to play the chord progressions which are easy for your fingers than coming up with the most bizarre Flamenco or whatever. I’m sorry, I’m not a guitar player. But it doesn’t keep anyone from moving far, far away from what you do if you play guitar for a year. And I think electronic music software and hardware in general made it very, very easy to achieve the standard because it took away a lot of the pain we had in the beginning. The interesting question now is, if the computer makes all these things easy, what do we do as an artist? And the one solution is, let’s make the same track everyone else made in five minutes, or, I still spend four weeks or longer on a track and try to make something that is different despite the fact that the basics are simple. And there’s people doing it, and it’s obvious. So I think I never heard a serious composer I admire complaining about the simplicity of tools because they are happy that basic things are simple and then they find ways to express themselves.

Of course, it became much easier to have two loops running in sync together, but everyone now knows that having two beat loops running in sync is easy. So if you’re listening to a piece of music that contains two beat loops running in sync, you’re not freaking out about the fact that they’re in sync because you know that this is simple. We got used to it. So we’re expecting something more engaging, more interesting. In a way, compare it to photography. A long time ago, it was much harder to make photos that had fantastic colors because it’s a magical chemical process to make good color prints. Nowadays, with state-of-the-art CCD sensor chips in a cheap camera, no one is amazed anymore by photos with nice colors. It’s just photos with nice colors. The internet is full of them. Still, people can make really, really interesting photos. You just need to find your own expression. And I see the same thing with Live. There’s no shortage of using Live in the most bizarre ways to create your own musicality. I mean, the funny thing is, in general, what I have personal problems with is when I look at the synthesizer plugin and I play one note and this plays back this whole complex series of things going on, I feel lost as an artist. Because if I play a note and it’s like, [makes crazy synthesizer noises] and there’s a whole Richard Devine track coming out of one single note, where does this leave me with my inspiration? So I’m rather happy if I play a note and there’s a sine wave, and I need to play 500 notes to make something complicated.

But of course, then you enter the realm of professional music production. A lot of the music which is made and a lot of the software which is sold, and the hardware, is sold to people who make music for a living for commercials or whatever. And if you make a commercial and the director is sitting behind you and says, “I want this,” [makes crazy synthesizer noises] you’re not starting to say, “OK, let me combine this sample of a pen falling down and let me put this in the key mode to time stretch it and, oh, we are already at the next queue. Sorry. How about…” [makes crazy synthesizer noises] “That’s great, we take it.”

This is the reality of music production for a lot of people. So there is a feedback between the products which are offered and the demands of the market. So there is a market for creating instant amazing results, and this was the case when the first synthesizer came out with presets. People didn’t buy the DX7 because the synthesis algorithm was so amazing and everyone wanted to dive deep into the magic of FM synthesis. They bought the DX7 because, hey, you turn it on and here is my Rhodes, and here is my flute, and here is my tubular bells. That’s why they bought it. The fact that, probably, you could have sold 95% of the DX7s without any capability of programming anything whatsoever, because people just use the thing which is right there. It’s only the few freaks who are trying to dive deep into their own expression.

Christine Kakaire

I’m wondering, maybe this will be a nice segway into the next topic I want to talk about, this idea of perhaps challenging yourself and challenging your modes of expression, to not take the path most traveled. If we can talk about your work with audiovisual installations and also with lasers. I mean, generally speaking, are these types of ventures things that you’ve undertaken because it does present extra elements of needing to engage your engineer brain to solve these problems of how to express something artistically?

Robert Henke

Well, there is some truth in this assumption. First of all, I was always interested also in the visual side of artistic expression. Same time, I discovered Jean-Michel Jarre I was also running around in museums and I always was looking at abstract painting, 20th century stuff, Dan Flavin. You know, all kinds of things that were really simple, abstract, and powerful. And when I started becoming part of the Berlin club scene I spent equal time working on the decoration and illumination of the places which we explored. So the visual side was always an interest, it just never occurred to me until very late in my career that I could see myself as an audiovisual artist. It sounds strange in retrospective that I didn’t see that. But I just couldn’t see that being an artist, that calling myself an artist, would be an option. That’s a really, really funny thing. If you had asked me ten years ago what I am, I would always say I’m an engineer. I would never say I’m an artist. Yeah, I make music, yeah, sure. And I sell records, yeah sure. And I perform live, yes. But artist, no. This is a kind of result of maybe an upbringing, result of education, result of lack of self-confidence, all these kinds of things. Anyway, at some point in my career, I decided that I needed to provide visuals to my music, mainly due to the fact that if I didn’t, other people did, and the result was not good. I remember that something like in the early 2000s, it started with this VJ culture at clubs and festivals, and I was always allocated some random VJ when I was performing. So I was performing my music and at some point I looked behind me and I thought, what is that?

Architecture mirrored, OK. Color circles mirrored, porn slash architecture again. This has nothing to do with my music. This is arbitrary. So my solution was, I wrote a little Max patch to draw simple geometric shapes, so at least I understood that this is not cool, but it was at least better than having the randomness behind me. That was kind of a first attempt to do audiovisual things, but without any intention to turn this into an art form. This was more an avoidance strategy. Then it happened that I ran into Tarik Barri, because I looked for a programmer to help me with things, and he offered me some help. It didn’t work out, but he sent me some visual things he did at this time, this was something like maybe 10 years ago. I thought, hey, I shouldn’t make videos, he should make videos for me. So I knocked at his door and said, “Hey, do you like to go on tour with me?” He said, “Yeah, sure, why not.” So I gave away my visual aspirations to Tarik, who is a genius. And completely independent from that, at some point I got asked to do something for a gallery. I did sound installations before, multichannel stuff, which just run forever. This is something I did already in the early ‘90s, because I like this idea of music as an infinite continuum, where you enter a space, and music is running, and you leave the space, and it’s still running. In a way, sound installation and Berghain is the same, and club culture in general. This is the idea of an endless state, which you immerse yourself in as long as you want. In this regard, I perceived, for instance, going to Berghain not so much going to a concert, but rather visiting an installation. That’s a nice art installation, and I’m participating in that. So I got asked for a gallery to do some audiovisual stuff, and it just happened to me that I thought, why not working with a laser? I know how it works technically, due to my technical curiosity, so I had an understanding what I could do in theory. Long story short, it didn’t work out with this gallery. But this idea was seeded in my brain to work with lasers. It was an interesting idea in that way, that when you were Googling ‘laser show’ at this time, all you saw was a really, really horrible thing. Like green tunnels, really cheesy animations of company logos and colors turning around. Nothing was precise, nothing was clear, nothing was structured, nothing had rhythm. Everything was not what I wanted. That opened the door for me to say, “OK, let’s see if I can turn this into something different.” Then I kind of got hooked on this medium, because it’s so limited.

The interesting thing with, and also the fact is… There’s so much excellence out there in the audiovisual domain especially when it comes to doing video, pixel-based graphics. There’s people doing amazing stuff. If I just think about what Tarik Barri does, what Johnny Lamaze does, what millions of… Billions of billions, what a lot of other people do out there. I thought it’s pointless for me to try to compete with them, because that’s not my main expertise. But if I use a very limited medium, which forces me to think of the core of rhythm and structure, then I have a chance to apply my ideas of composition to the audiovisual world. That’s why I decided that lasers are interesting. And all I do with my lasers is either try to explore the generation of shapes at the edge of what the medium is capable of doing, or exploring rhythmical successions of simple things, and both are very close to how I think about music. So in a way, working with my lasers is exactly the same type of thinking as composing music. As a matter of fact, everything is driven by Max patches, so it’s even the same technological background.

To give you an idea about why working with lasers is such a puzzle, such a difficult thing to do, how it works is you have one laser source, which is just a super sharp beam of light, and you have two tiny mechanical mirrors, and one mirror moves the beam up and down and the other mirror moves the beam left and right. Then of course, you can turn on and off the laser, and if you have three different colors, then you can mix the colors, but that’s basically it. It’s all mechanical. It’s really archaic. And if you want to draw a line, well, you just move one mirror back and forth, back and forth, and you get a line, if you do this fast enough. If you want to have a circle, you move the two mirrors, one with a sine wave, the other with a cosine wave, and you get a circle. You do this 20 or 30 times, or 100 times per second, and your eye is so slow that you see a nice circle, and not one beam moving around. Drawing one circle is very simple. Drawing two circles is a completely different issue, because you draw one circle, and you stop, and you turn the laser beam off. Then you move whilst the laser beam is off, with the mirror to one point in the second circle. Then you turn the laser back on. Then you start drawing the second circle, then you turn the laser back off. You go back to somewhere in the first circle, you repeat this. And you do this constantly, nonstop. And that means the mathematics behind that for two circles, is significantly more complex than for one circle, and if you want to do this with six circles moving around you get all kinds of complexities going on. So everything is a challenge when working with lasers, and everything is difficult. That means you start really embracing simple shapes, and you start thinking about timing a lot. Square, square, square, darkness, [long pause] square. [laughter] This becomes satisfying. You would never do this with video, because it wouldn’t feel right, because it would feel too simple, but with these intense bright laser beams, these things become meaningful. And so I use a simple medium and try to do something meaningful with it. Also in times where electronic music is so full of abundance I can choose between millions of sounds all the time, I can layer 10,000 sounds on my laptop. Working with a medium where everything is tedious clears my head because there is no sense of yeah, I just add five more circles. No, you can’t. You work with this single line of light until it feels right, and this is a great exercise in simplification and in rhythm and in shapes.

Christine Kakaire

I think we should definitely take a look at some of this work that you’ve been talking about. What we’re going to play is video number two, and I chose this one… This is a work of yours called Fragile Territories…

Robert Henke

Ah. Nice.

Christine Kakaire

…which I believe is from 2012, and the reason I chose it is because a year, or two years ago, here, at the Funkhaus during Loop festival it was installed in a room upstairs, so I thought that that would be a really nice kind of tie in.

Robert Henke

Fantastic.

Christine Kakaire

So if you could play a little bit of that now.

Robert Henke

So, all you see now, that’s four beams of light. All the shapes you see are just four lasers moving around. This piece is nice because it only works due to the imperfections of the technology, which is always an interesting thing to explore. And this is something no professional laser show would do, because this is where the professional laser show would always say you can’t do this with these machines, and if I write my own software, I can say I embrace the fact that there’s problems. So what you’re going to see is vertical and horizontal lines. These are programed. All the lines which are not exactly vertical and horizontal are the results of the mechanical mirrors moving the shortest possible path from one step to another. These are the things which normally, in the professional laser show, you would turn off the laser beam. But I’m not turning them off, I expose them and well, you will see what happens.

Christine Kakaire

That was Fragile Territories.

Robert Henke

Would it be possible to have a still of this displayed? [points to screen]

Christine Kakaire

Let’s see.

Robert Henke

Challenging the technical people. Ah, fantastic, cool. A few things I’d like to add if you have time for this.

Christine Kakaire

Sure.

Robert Henke

The one thing is that this is huge, which is a property of lasers which makes them a lot of fun. I can draw this as large as I want. A person would be that, [walks over to screen to illustrate scale] so my hand is a person. This is pitch black, because unlike video, there’s just no beam of light. So this is pitch black, and this can be really, really bright. This is something that of course in a video, doesn’t show like this. Here, I did something that I came up with for accident. This is an orange laser beam. Basically, the laser beam moves here, and at some point, defined by some mathematical function, I turn on a second laser beam, inside the laser, which is orange. I superimpose this orange line here, so this is all black and white, and there’s one orange thing moving around, which I found kind of cute. It’s a purely aesthetic decision, it has no further meaning apart from the fact that I liked it. You saw this black shadow moving there, and that’s an interesting one because as I told you, this is basically four lasers doing stuff and they overlap, because unlike video, with lasers, you never have a defined… Well, you have a defined size, but with video, it’s very clear. Here’s a pixel, here’s a pixel. This is the end of the screen. [points to the corners of the screen]

You would not draw something on the screen that is only this size, [spreads fingers over middle of screen] because that would be a waste, and you can certainly not draw anything here. [moves hand beyond the edge of the screen] With lasers, it’s always a negotiation between speed of drawing and size. And that means I can deliberately draw, for instance, larger than a screen, or I can get very small. And what happens here with those four lasers is that one important aspect of this work was that I wanted to deliberately hide the fact that this is four lasers, so that they are all communicating with each other in such a way that this becomes one unified shape, which is technically a challenge. And as a first test, to see if this can work at all, I created this simple blanking pattern, where I’m just turning the lasers on and off, step by step, basically, as a test to see if they run in sync. So I programmed an earlier version of this and then I added this black shadow just as a test signal. And at some point after a lot of adjustment, it felt really like this one black shadow moving was through, and then I was happy, test achieved, and I turned it off. And then something interesting happened psychologically. I thought, hm, it looks flat. It looked far cooler with the shadow. So I understood that the shadow is an important part of the work, It just happened via experimentation. So I gave the shadow a mass, and I gave it a mass by applying this [makes wooshing noise] sound. This has eight channels of sound, so when the shadow moves here, [gestures across the screen from left to right] this low noise follows the shadow. So If you’re standing here [points at the audience] and the installation is here, [points at the wall] you really have the sound following the shadow, like the sound of a black blade actually going in front. And again, unlike video, if this black shadow moves here, [gestures across the screen from left to right] it’s really pitch black. You can’t distinguish it from someone actually manually blocking the beam. So people really believed that someone is manually blocking the beams. And I did some other interesting detail there. You hear these high pitched sounds, and they’re also distributed all over the installation, and whenever the black shadow comes, I’m slightly removing the high frequencies, just as if someone is standing in front of the speakers, [moves in front of one of the speakers] the high frequencies are gone, and I do the same thing with the black shadow. This makes this black shadow even more physical. So the experience is there’s an evil black object in front of that, and, well, that’s kind of how it happened.

The other thing is that when I do such things, time becomes a very important point. I spend a lot of time inside my installations, which are all running on Max patches, and fine tune the change over time. How long can something be static? When does it need to change? You can’t test this really on a small screen, or in a small setup in an atelier space, you have to test it in a large space. So I’m sitting there, and I observe how long can one situation stay? When is it too long? When does it needs to change. Then I adjust it till it feels right in a specific space. And then the next day when the opening is, I observe the people, and I check it again with the people, and then I might even fine tune it again. All this work always gets its final shape in collaboration with the audience, in a way. It’s pretty much like when you make music, and you almost finish a track, and then you play it to your best friends, and you notice, ah, this part here, this is too short, this part is too long, and you change it. And I do the same with those installations, so they are always finished basically the next day, after the opening, before I leave. [returns to the couch]

Christine Kakaire

Thank you for that. That was a fantastic explanation. I’m going to show a couple more photos. If we can have a look at number 15. Any moment now. Looks like this is in a studio, and I believe that this is working on the laser installation for the From Within show.

Robert Henke

OK. [moves back to the screen] So, no lasers this time, this is just a bunch of LEDs, and this is my atelier space, which I have since half a year, and which makes it possible for me to try large scale things without turning my living room into a workspace. Sometimes it’s funny how long it takes from an idea to reality. I’m working with lasers since 10 years, and since half a year, I have a space which actually allows me to do it. Before that, I did it in my living room. Don’t ask me why I didn’t get a space earlier. Anyway, so, this is LED sticks, which is again, a very limited technology. This is 85 pixels, 48 sticks in one row, and two times 24 sticks in another row, and this is part of the stage design for the From Within concert, which will happen on Thursday, which is a collaboration between me and a composer called Marko Nikodijevic, who is writing for ensemble and does things I have no clue about, and I learn a lot from him every single day. And yeah, those LED sticks are in use as a visual component together with the composition. There are a few things here which are kind of important to mention. The spacing of these LED sticks is a random spacing, because I deliberately didn’t want to have a regular grid like everyone, because everyone is doing regular grids. So I thought let’s do something irregular. But of course, the software completely knows the placement of every stick. So even when the spacing is irregular, I can do regular movements within these spacings, but the visual appearance is different. There is some interesting rhythm going on here just because of the spacing of the LEDs, and it’s very low resolution, so it’s the opposite of high resolution video screen. And it’s RGB and it can do different colors. This is Selma, an intern at this time who is a pretty good touch designer programmer and helped me a lot. This is Ableton Live running on one computer, this is Max running on a different one. This is a so-called email client. [laughter] And, yeah, that’s it. [returns to couch]

Christine Kakaire

Well, the next photo which is number 16, which is seeing this LED construction in action.

Robert Henke

Unfortunately not, this is a mock up.

Christine Kakaire

Oh, is it?

Robert Henke

Yeah. But the reality does, slightly, look similar. This is in my dream world how it’s supposed to look like. But, wait a minute, there’s something more to talk about. [moves back to the screen] So these are actually the real musicians, these faces you will see on Thursday. This part here, this black monolith here, [points to a large, suspended row of speakers above the musicians] is 48 nice little loud speakers, and usually, the scenario for concerts is you have a line array, a lot of speakers here on the right and a lot of speakers here on the left. The problem is, if you really like the sound of these 30 people performing, the sound from the cello comes from here, [points to the cellist in the image] and it has a specific radiation pattern, and the sound from these gongs come from here [points to the percussionist in the image] and have a different pattern, and every musician has a place on stage. And then comes some electronic sound, and it comes from here blasting and from here. [points to the edges of the image] It’s completely disconnected. And what happens very often is in such events, that you put microphones on all the musicians, so that the musicians come also from here, [points again to the edges of the image] which effectively kills all the spatial placement of the orchestra, and turns the orchestra into a recording of an orchestra. So, if you really don’t want to do this, and you say, I want to experience a world-famous orchestra just as it was experienced 100 years ago, or as it can be experienced with any composition that involves no electronics, you can’t just have two speakers left and right. And this is when I thought how about having 48 speakers and using… [laughter] Yeah, we'll come to how I managed that in a second. Sometimes having an idea and making it happen works out. So, 48 speakers here and a technology called wave field synthesis, which I don’t want to go into detail. The main point of it is you can use this technique to create some really strange sound effects inside the audience, and you can use this technique to get a very convincing, very deep sound field that makes you forget about the fact that there are speakers. Plus, of course, it looks cool. It looks kind of monolith, 2001-ish. I had this idea that I would like to do that, and of course, this is way too expensive. It just happened that I had an interview with someone who is doing marketing for a loud speaker manufacturer I really admire, d&b Audiotechnik, near Stuttgart. They build some of the best PA systems on this planet, and I just called this guy and said, “We had this nice talk recently, and I have a completely crazy idea. I just want to share this idea with you. Maybe d&b has… Can help me a little bit.” And to my great surprise, they said, “Well, this sounds really cool. We’re working on a new processor for controlling a lot of speakers at the same time. That would be a perfect test case for that.” So, it happened that they offered to provide this speaker system for the premiere in Paris, and for this event here in Berlin, basically for free. This is something that made me pretty speechless, and I found it very remarkable [returns to the couch] because this is really something that is not justified by marketing efforts. This is really something that people do because they are genuinely interested in making this happen.

We had some tests at their facility, and especially the test, we have these virtual sound sources in front of the speakers, and the person who was mainly responsible for this sponsoring was just standing there and said, “This is unbelievable. [laughter] This is, it, it really works.” He was just like a little boy and was fascinated by that. These are the moments where I’m extremely happy about what I can do, because very often, I’m in a situation where I meet people who have the same excitement, who do the things they do because of the love for what they’re doing, and not because someone told them to do, or because they think about a big investment. Of course, at some point, you think about what does it cost, can we do it, but very, very often, the motivation for doing things is, I have a great idea, let’s see how we can make it happen. This general attitude is what I experience very, very often when working with people in the field of electronic music, in this type of audiovisual festivals. There’s a spirit here that is driven by, and still is, after all these years, by the desire to make something cool happen. So I hope this is going to be cool in Berlin. We’re still working on it. It’s an enormous amount of effort, and there were elements of the premiere in Paris which we were not happy with because it would need much more time than we had. It’s always like this, never is there enough time but you need deadlines anyways, so it’s kind of always a fight. We had a similar fight and still have for Berlin. Right after this talk here and after my interviews, I go back and continue working, and then I continue working tomorrow and then we setup and we will see how far we go with that. But there’s also moments in it where I feel a sense of achievement. And a last note about Marko. Marko is a composer. OK, I never obviously learned composition. I’m completely self-taught, and I know synthesis inside out. My musical skills came from listening and from trying things out. I have a tiny little bit of music theory background, but everyone who has just basically one music theory lesson will beat me in that. Marko is a classically trained composer who started to study composition when he was 15. He’s 38 now, and this is what he makes his living off, and working together with someone with that background, who at the same time goes to Berghain and has a profound knowledge about Ableton Live, is a blessing, because working with him over the last year or so, very much changed my perspective on essential musical aspects like form, like reason for things. It’s not so much about writing for a cello or a flute or extended playing techniques for oboe, it is about why is this note at this position in time, and why is this phrase repeating for four bars, this should be five bars. And then he can explain why. You listen to the explanation, and it makes sense. This is something that very much changed my perspective on music, and very much changed my perspective on how I will compose in the future. So for me, the outcome of this specific collaboration is two sides. The one is the actual concert, where I hope that we will be satisfied, but I’m not 100% convinced, simply because of the difficulty of it and the lack of time, and the other thing is that this whole collaboration changed my perception of my own work in such a way that I profoundly believe that I will make different types of music afterwards. So it will still be my music, of course, and it will still be my ideas of sounds and of rhythm and of shapes. But I will much more focus on overall form, and on overall reasoning between this block comes here, and then this block there, and this block there, and why is there repetition and why is there a change here.

This is the part which I tremendously enjoy about collaboration, that you suddenly are confronted with a person who has profound knowledge about something you have no knowledge about and at the end of the day, you learn something, and the other person learns something too and you come up with something that, ideally, is bigger than what every person can do by themselves.

This brings me back to the very beginning. The reason why my friendship with Gerhard Behles is so important is because we’re so different. Gerhard very often thinks exactly the opposite of what I do, and then we need to discuss. Once we come to agreement, we can be quite certain that we’re on the right track. This is why I didn’t like this guy at the beginning in Munich, when I met him first, and this is why I tremendously enjoy every moment I can have with him these days, because he’s not a person who always says, “Oh, yes, that’s a great idea.” But who’s really questioning my input, and at the same time, finds it equally important that I question his input. Because, also interesting, he says, “The problem is, if you’re in a certain position, like the CEO of a company, it’s far too likely that people don’t question your things, because, hey, he’s the CEO.” And I’m in a position where I can and I am allowed to say, “Are we really sure that this is a good idea?” So that was the circuit to the beginning of this Ableton thing.

Christine Kakaire

Well, I think speaking of collaboration, this is probably a nice moment to play one last track, from this record called P A N. I was going to play “Nmos,” but I think we should flip it over and play the track that you co-produced with Electric Indigo.

Robert Henke

But “Nmos” is actually the track I like more.

Christine Kakaire

OK, well let’s play that.

Robert Henke

I mean, it’s already…

Christine Kakaire

It’s queued up, it’s already on 45, so.

Robert Henke

Funny thing is, on my early records, there was never a hint if it’s 33 or 45, because the whole philosophy was, well, whatever works for you works. I experienced a few times that I went to a place and they played the track with the wrong speed, and my first attempt, my first initial impulse is going to the DJ and say, “It is 33.” My second impulse is, “Sounds good this way.”

I like the idea that the concept of a track is something that is made for people to play with. [puts the needle on the record] This is a Technics Quartz SL-1200 limited, in gold. Feels pretty much the same as the normal one, but it’s gold.

(music: Monolake – “Nmos”)

Christine Kakaire

So that was “Nmos” by Monolake.

Robert Henke

So that’s a funny experience listening to this one, because I perform the material of this track very often live. I haven’t heard through this track since basically I did it, and since when I perform live I always change things, this now is in a completely different state. It still has the same sounds, but the structure and the mix and everything is far, far away from that, and I would never edit it like this anymore after playing it for one-and-a-half years. The thing which I still like on this one is there’s the synthetic kind of voice saying something like, “sin” or “Sid” or whatever this is. This is a spoken word, indeed the word “sin,” re-synthesized on a historical piece of equipment, the Synclavier, which once was the most expensive machine money could buy, and is a technological masterpiece and milestone of the early 1980s. Due to the fact that in the early 2000s no one was interested anymore in digital hardware synthesizers, people threw away a lot of fantastic digital equipment for almost nothing because they believed that computers can do everything, and I got my hands on one of those nice machines for a very low price and then I spent a lot of money to actually get it working. But a lot of the sounds on this record have been made with this machine, and the interesting part for me about this machine is that it combines a very rough type of synthesis that sounds very outdated with something that still feels futuristic, and I have a nice, kind of personal relationship to this whole system. It’s a true music computer from a different era. It’s a big rack which only contains the computer system. It has an external computer screen, green on blue, and a keyboard and everything is super slow and it feels like the future of 30 years before. And when I work with this machine I have to get used to the pace of it. So all these operations are slow. You type in a command, you see the text building up again, then you type the other command and you see the text building up again. So it kind of enforces a certain mental state, and to me, this mental state is something I really enjoy when working with it because every single result I get becomes, again, important. So I create some variation, I type in a few numbers, and I get a new sound, and instead of immediately deleting it, I listen to it a few times because maybe it is good. Yeah, so much about this.

Christine Kakaire

I think as a final question before we open it up to the floor, it’s interesting hearing you talk about this and talking about your work with lasers, and I’m interested in this concept of you working in situations where there are limits, where it’s not just like a boundless plane of experimentation, where you’re kind of giving yourself restrictions and giving yourself limits, and I watched a talk that you did where it was literally called Give Me Limits. I think it might be really interesting for the participants here to hear from somebody who has your long history as an artist, as an engineer, as a technologist, also as an academic, about, perhaps, the benefits of enforcing limits or including limits in your creative process.

Robert Henke

Well, I guess most of it, at least in between the lines I mentioned already… Whenever you want to create something, the process of creation is a process of exclusion. You exclude ideas. So you have 88 keys on a piano, you choose a scale. You remove some keys. You have only maybe ten fingers, so you don’t play more than a few notes at the same time. You have a limit of the speed of your fingers, so you play only a limited number of notes over a period of time.

So everything is… Every artistic occupation in that way is limiting. Or you write a book, you find a topic. Finding a topic is not, here is the big empty void and then here’s the topic. Finding the topic is, here are all the possible topics of the world, which I ignore to use this topic. So, it’s the opposite of this idea of there’s nothing and then the artwork comes up. It’s, there’s everything and I remove and I remove and I remove and here’s the artwork. Just like the bass drum there, actually on this record. There’s too much bass drum. There needs to be a break inbetween, and the bass drum itself sometimes has too many high frequencies going on. It would be better if it would be less. So, as a matter of fact, with a distant view on my own work I would reduce it even further because I believe it would be more to the point if it’s more reduced, and then it opens up space for something else, so I could make a few elements louder, and then this whole thing would be more convincing. At least that’s my own perspective to that now, when I listen to it again.

So it’s always a process of reduction. It’s always a process of how little can you do and still be convincing. Then within this little thing, you get the… You open up the space for moving things around. It’s basically that you create space. So by removing topics, you can go deeper into one topic. By removing elements in a composition, you have more freedom to actually arrange them in time, because they’re not covered by other elements.

Just as a thought experiment, if all you have is a bass drum. Imagine you have five minutes and you have just a bass drum and nothing else. You would not do for five minutes, “Bong, bong, bong, bong,” because you have to be creative with that. So you start thinking about every possible combination of rhythmical things you can do with this bass drum. It’s a fantastic exercise, actually, if you think about it. Five minutes, just a bass drum, make a song. Of course, if you have a huge song then you can have for five minutes a bass drum going straight four-to-the-floor because there’s all the other elements. So, the more of it you remove, the more every single element becomes a challenge. And that’s kind of cool.

Another exercise which I gave my students when I was teaching, and got some amazing results, was… So I was teaching at a department which was also concerned with audiovisual stuff. Imagine you make a movie and you have 25 pixels. So every single frame has 25 pixels, and you only have 25 frames. So your whole movie is 25 things of 25 pixels, and each pixel can only be on and off. This is extremely limited. But, actually, you can arrange these 25 pixels in any way you want. So you can make one line of 25 pixels. You can have five to five pixels. Students were able, within these 25 frames, so you can draw this movie on a sketchbook in lunch break, you can make a whole story of the creation of the world, and love and hate, with nothing but 25 blocks of black and white stones. This is really cool, to figure out that you can be super emotional, even, with something as limited like this. So imagine there’s one black dot showing up on the first frame on the first, on the left. There’s another frame, another black dot showing up on the right. They move towards each other. At some point, when the first one moves two steps at some point, the other one steps back to the very end. You’re at the beginning of a story. These are two things which interact with each other, and they can meet, and suddenly everything can become flickery. That could be interpreted as whatever you want, you know? You can tell stories, and I find this really fascinating, how you can become creative with the least amount of elements, and if you go back to electronic music, where you have the ability to shape every single one of these elements to be the most beautiful, shiny element ever, so… Going back to the bass drum example, if you really want to have this one bass drum for five minutes, there’s nothing wrong with shaping this bass drum for two days until it’s the perfect sounding bass drum which actually you enjoy listening to over small speakers, big speakers, gigantic speakers, and in a way, I try to keep this thinking alive that I try to achieve something with very limited amounts and not get caught up by this very easy route of just adding more to feel comfortable. So reduction is the most difficult thing to achieve, I guess.

Christine Kakaire

Well, I hope we’ve managed to achieve scratching the surface. Thank you so much for being here. Please, everybody, give Robert Henke a huge thank you. [applause]

So at this point we’re going to open up questions, don’t be shy, put your hand up. Yeah, we’ve got one over here already.

Audience Member

Hello. Oh, that’s so loud. OK, first of all, thank you very much for sharing the whole experience. I mean, I find it very, very inspiring how passionate you are about all the stuff you talk about. It is inspiring for a lot of us who are upcoming musicians, producers, and some of us hopefully artists too.

So my question is, since you talk a lot about art and how art works and how your art works, I wanted to know your opinion about how… What do you think about art now? What do you think the state of art, what do you think about how art is now and where is it going? I just wanna know that.

Robert Henke

That seems to be a very broad thing, because I have a hard time even defining what art is, so…

Audience Member

Yeah, well, what about, for example, installation art? Just, let’s, yeah, let’s reduce the topic since we were talking about reducing it. Let’s reduce it and let’s just talk, for example, about installation art. I just meant, for example, well, probably the question is... Oh sorry, my English. Probably a little bit influenced by what I think about art nowadays, but for example, I think that some of the art is just random stuff and some others... Reducing it again, some stuff is very valuable. So I wanna know your opinion about that and, of course, about installation art because you talked a lot about it and of course it is something important in what you do, so I wanna know what you think about that.

Robert Henke

Well, I guess the whole field of these types of things I’m doing, for me the most difficult question is where do I see myself, or the value of the work I do, in a larger context? So I might take your question as a starting excursion to something that I’m occupying myself a lot with that has to do with the question of where is the art going. When I made electronic music in the early ’90s, it was very clear that this is not commercial. This is underground, which means it doesn’t take much money to do it, there is no large audience, and it has no resonance in a larger scale.

Very early then, what happened was that, for instance, with the advent of drum & bass, which I very much liked and still do, suddenly you saw drum & bass on the car commercials. Because this type of more melodic, upbeat music fit very well with this agency vibe of the future. And the same thing happens in an even faster evolution with all this digital media stuff these days. Whatever adventurous, underground idea you can come up with, how to use mapping LED pixels, lasers, video glitch, whatever it is, you are just one centimeter away from the next big agency who is doing exactly the same with the same ideas for Volkswagen, Audi, Tesla, whatever. They appropriate these ideas but with a different approach to it. The approach there, of course, is not, “This has to be meaningful, and this has to be personal,” because that’s not what the interest is. It needs to be impressive. The currency is impressiveness. It’s “Yeah, let’s cover all this building with LED screens and have something amazing, interactive going on.” It’s cool as long as it looks cool, it doesn’t have to have any meaning, it doesn’t have to have any art-historical context or it doesn’t need to point to the future. It just needs to be cool.

As someone who is working in this field, sometimes I struggle with this scenario, because on one side I’m this cool, famous person who is one of the co-inventors of Ableton Live. On the other side, I’m running a very, very small scale artistic thing where I solder my LEDs by myself and I’m happy with 8,160 RGB pixels whilst the others have a budget, ten times or 100 times higher to cover the whole room. How do I deal with that? I deal with this by trying to convince myself that the point is not having the most impact, the point is doing something that is personal, because at the end this is why I do art, because I want to express myself. So I don’t know where the general art world is going, and I don’t know who will be the upcoming star of digital media arts and whose LED sculptures will be worth ten million in five years. I’m pretty sure mine won’t, which is fine, but I don’t know about the rest of the development.

I guess the whole point is, if you are an artist, at some point you need to free yourself from caring about this too much, because at the end of the day, if you don’t do what you do because you like it and maybe your five best friends, then you are lost anyway. I find it far more important that the people who are really around me can relate to what I’m doing than this big mess. This reminds me to an experience I made a few years ago which I found, in retrospect, very important. After Gerhard stopped making music with me because he had no time anymore, I was in a position where I was very insecure. I was invited to play a show in one of the really big clubs in London, and at this time this still meant a lot to me, and I was really very, very, nervous about that. I thought, “This kind of music which I do is strange anyway,” so I tried to deliver a set that was a little bit more upfront.

I had my best intentions. My best intentions was, “It’s a Saturday night, and I need to deliver.” I played the set which was, well, a bit more techno and more mainstream than what I would do usually. The people were dancing and the organizer was happy, so everything was cool. The next day, I read on a message board of a forum I was reading, “I was so incredibly disappointed by the Monolake show yesterday. If I want to hear boring, generic techno I can go anywhere. I wanted to listen to a Monolake show. This was completely bullshit.”

I was reading this, and it hit me really right in there. [points to his heart] Because I knew immediately that this person was right. I kind of tried to sell my soul out of insecurity, and probably if I had done just playing back what I would usually do for my friends, maybe not 95% of the drunk people there who wouldn’t care about the music would have been that happy, but these 5% or 10%, or who knows, 30% of the people who deliberately came to see me would have been much, much more happy. That was a big lesson I learned there, and since that time I really try always just to do what I can do best and focus on that, even when I risk sometimes that the majority of the audience might not appreciate it.

I mean, it happens sometimes that you are booked to a place and you know beforehand or you know at the moment you arrive that you’re gonna have a tough night here because the promoter obviously didn’t listen to what you’re doing and the audience will not like it. What you do in such a moment is you look out for the five people in the audience you assume who will like it, and you focus on them. The moment you start playing, you look in their eyes, and you smile at them, and you wait for them to smile back at you, and the whole concert you deliver to them. This always works, because they will immediately notice that this is happening for them right now, and then don’t care about everyone else. Even if everyone else afterwards will go away and will not be appreciative of what you’re doing, these five people will come to you at the bar and say, “Thank you, man,” and you’re good. So that’s the thing to take home.

Christine Kakaire

Any more questions?

Audience Member

Hey. I had a question regarding Ableton. I guess it kinda concerns the creativity and limitations idea that you were talking about as well. I’m an Ableton user, I have a friend who’s also a producer and he’s a Logic user, and we have constant, endless debates that are really fun, about the differences between those and the different capabilities of each. I was just wondering, what are... ’cause obviously there’s a huge amount that Ableton that can do that other DAWs can’t, and there’s some things other DAWs can do that Ableton can’t. So what are the influences, what makes you kinda make the decision, “We’re going to be able to do this and we’re gonna focus on this and we’re not gonna have...” Is it that you don’t wanna be... Ableton isn’t really concerned with being one particular thing and you have an idea of what exactly you wanted it to be? Is it like that, or is it just...?

Robert Henke

This is a very, very difficult question. Since the company is now quite matured and old and also reasonably large, there is a lot of people discussing these topics. It’s not this super hierarchical top-down thing. You also learn that you do some marketing research and you talk to people, and you talk to people from different cultural background, from different musical backgrounds, and you try to boil all these external influences and your own ideas into a meaningful guideline of what to do next. So it’s always a mix of listening to your customers, listening to other customers who don’t like your product, that’s equally important, and listening to your own ideas and try to come up with conclusions. At the beginning, the answer was simple. We did something where we had experience in. So we knew how to make a software that works for people who want to make the type of music we like, so the decisions were easy. None of us could read a score, so the idea of implementing musical notation was very far out. That’s the simple, most basic reason why in Live there’s no musical notation. No one has a clue. Nowadays things are, of course, different. But the question is, how many of our users would rely on musical notation and how many other users of us would actually rely on other things which we can improve? There is no shortage of ideas, there’s no shortage of wishes, internally. There’s tons of pages of things which we’d like to do. There’s a severe limitation of, actually, development time. So as a matter of fact, if someone watching this now on YouTube, and you are a C++ developer, and you want to relocate to Berlin and work for a really nice company with a lot of cool people and shaping the music software of the future, write us an email. [laughter] So, commercial end. I’m serious about this. We could do a lot more with more developers, but everyone needs developers so they are really rare, and we compete with companies like Google who can pay a s---load more and offer a lot of things a company even of the size of Ableton can’t.

The decision making process these days becomes also more complicated due to the fact that the whole market situation is changing a lot. For 20 years, we could rely on... 20? Almost 20. For almost 20 years, you could rely on the laptop is the thing. Nowadays, you already notice that there’s a whole generation of people who think, “Laptop? That’s the stuff my parents are using. Here’s my iPhone, show me something that I can do with my iPhone.” Every software company, not only music software, but of course also music software, has to face the fact that these things are the stuff the parents are using. So a lot of development resources already have to go into thinking about what products do you offer when the laptop is not hip anymore? This alone takes an enormous amount of resources. You see that in general people who years ago abandoned hardware to do it all on the computer screen are suddenly buying all these little boxes which do cool stuff. So there is another change where people like hardware, and where people expect that hardware is doing a lot of their cool work.

Then you have things like mastering services, which means you don’t need to go to a mastering studio anymore. The next step in this thought chain is, perhaps the classical way of mixing tracks is also, at some point, a thing of the past. If an algorithm is better at mixing my tracks, then I don’t need to mix tracks anymore. But maybe, this even would imply the classical idea of tracks is not existing anymore.

So you can start thinking in a lot of ways that seem to be completely from a different planet, from a 2018 perspective. But maybe from a 2025 perspective looks like, the way you make music in 2025, if you are state of the art, has nothing to do anymore with this concept of, “This is my bass drum track, this is my hi-hat track.” Who knows? I’m not saying that this will be the case, I’m just saying that this is something to think about now, because if you think about it in five years, it’s too late.

So if you think about all these questions, and on top of the question of just making sure the software does all these little improvements which you want to have, the list is endless. People love the comping feature in Logic. Live has no nice comping. It’s something I personally don’t care a lot, but there’s a lot of producers who do classical music production, classical pop production, who really require that feature to happen. So you have to allocate resources to this.

Then we have some crazy ideas what we can do in the reality of something more with the session view which is beyond what’s possible now. So there’s all kinds of ideas. Really, the big difficulty is figuring out which of these ideas can realistically be included in an upcoming release. You always have to make a balance between, you need to deliver something that people really want to get their work done. So that’s the bread and butter stuff. If you don’t, if you make a big release and you don’t offer an improvement on the basics, people will be really angry. At the same time, people also expect that they get something that is inspiring. That needs to be something that is not perceived as, “Ugh, finally Ableton has this feature,” but, “Huh, this is interesting.” But if you only do this, then the people will say, “Guys, you don’t even have comping. Why should I care about feature ‘X’?” So you see that the decision making there is a really complicated science, and no one can guarantee that we make the right decisions there, we just try our best to come up with something that at the end of the day makes a lot of users happy. I tend to make long answers to short questions. [laughter]

Audience Member

Thanks.

Christine Kakaire

Are there any other questions from our participants? Oh, there’s somebody at the back.

Robert Henke

Doesn’t matter. Question is a question. Was there a question from you? No.

Christine Kakaire

Yeah, in the back.

Robert Henke

Oh, OK.

Audience Member

Hey.

Robert Henke

Then I got this gentleman, and then here I think, and then...

Audience Member

Hopefully a quick one. David, part of the studio team. I follow your Facebook page and the other day I seem to remember you were having a bit of a discussion about design, especially regarding modern plugins and stuff, and in the studios we’re running a lot of the UAD emulations of classic machines, which I think you might’ve had, maybe not issue with, but you had some things to discuss, which I thought if your viewpoint is still the same, might be quite interesting to share with a couple of people.

Robert Henke

I assume you refer to the discussion I had about the UI of the Synclavier plugin.

Audience Member

I can’t remember the specific example, but in general...

Robert Henke

So, because normally I don’t care. As a matter of fact, I think UAD does a fantastic job with... DSP-wise their stuff is insane. If you had asked me a few years ago, I would be a strong opponent against this photorealistic, kind of having hardware in software approach. Nowadays I’m old and mild, and I say, “It sounds great and it looks familiar. I wouldn’t know how else to do it, so I’m fine with that.”

The specific case where I was annoyed was if a design tries to provoke the feeling of the real old stuff, and I just happen to love and know the real old stuff inside out, then within the design there is these odd inconsistencies that throw me out of my dream. It’s kind of, you know you’re in a movie... You go in the movie and you want to experience this movie and you’re willing to accept that this is science fiction and you’re in the year 2200, and your willing to accept that everyone can just teleport, it’s all cool. And then there comes a commercial in between and brings you back to, actually, you’re sitting in a cinema watching a movie. And in a way, the specific plugin, to me, felt like this. Everything on the surface felt like, “Yeah, I’m back in the 1980s and I’m operating this vintage machine and I forget that I’m using a plugin,” because it sounds really great. It does. And I’m within this machine, then I go to another page and the design has nothing to do anymore with this old machine. And on top of it, in my personal opinion, and I’m very opinionated about those topics, I’m a pain in the ass inside the company, they did a lousy job. This was what frustrated me and this what caused my rant. Because, I thought in this specific case, there’s probably only one chance for a manufacturer to bring this old classic back to life, because it’s a lot of work to code this, so it was quite some effort. If you have this unique chance to put a historical piece of music technology history into the 21st century and make it accessible to a new generation, you do this once. And if there’s one company has been doing it, it is very, very unlikely that another company will take the same effort to do it again. So, for the rest of the time, all these upcoming generations which will never have the beauty of wasting one kilowatt of electricity for booting a crazy, old tower of electronics, experience this machine, is something, that in my opinion, is not nearly as cool as it could be. And that made me angry.

So this is a type of anal focus on detail that sometimes keeps me from making music. But this was a specific moment. There’s other moments, where as I said, I used plugins that looked like that and I even discovered myself smiling at the fact that they look like the hardware.

A plugin which also looks ridiculously close to the original hardware is... I think Softube released the Weiss EQ1, which is a fantastic... DS1, the compressor. This is a very expensive mastering compressor, which I used when I was still cutting vinyl records in my past life. And I really like this compressor. It’s totally out of reach financially for normal people, and suddenly there’s a plugin, which looks exactly like the hardware. And in comparison, it’s still out of reach for a lot of people, but it’s in comparison, only 10% of the former out of reach. And there I loved the fact that it looks so much like the old thing. So, there the familiarity affect of, “Ha ha, there’s an LCD screen on a display on a computer screen, which is itself a LCD screen,” kind of was cute.

Audience Member

Hello. Very nice and spacey, deep and minimal sound you have. Wanted to ask you, how are you able to make it as an artist, making a sound that is niche, because I feel like the whole world is changing because of the type of sound that people are producing now in the mainstream. So how are you able to make it on the underground space? And how does your day in studio look like in terms of making minimal and spacey sounds?

Robert Henke

OK, this is a few questions so I try to answer them one by another. The question of how I’m capable of doing this. In one way, being there early and having insanely great luck. So, the fact that I was able to make records and the fact that I met people who released my music was just a nice coincidence. It was certainly much easier in the early ’90s because the scene was so small. So, that’s the good luck of having been in Berlin at the right time, and it wouldn’t have happened if I were somewhere else.

Unfortunately, a lot of things in life that are really important are just random, both in good ways or in really bad ways and there is nothing you can do, or not much you can do to avoid the one thing and to achieve the other. You can just try to do your best always and see where you end.

The other question is easy to answer. My studio life is very limited these days, because due to my... Since I can think, my problem is that I’m interested in too many things. So I made this big fuss about reducing options, and at the same time I feel like I tried to become the da Vinci of my own brand, which knows everything about everything, which is a concept that already in the Middle Ages didn’t work anymore. So I don’t stop working for Ableton because I feel this company is part of my personal history, but also because I really like it. So part of my brain just enjoys thinking about these technical aspects.

I make music stilll because when I’m in the studio and I listen to sounds and I’m able to mix them, especially actually when I perform live, I have these moments where I feel severe happiness. Where I think, “Wow, this now is really coming together nicely, and this could go on forever.” And sometimes I have this also when I go somewhere and listen to music. So I need to continue doing this simply because it’s so satisfying. It’s also satisfying to work with my lasers because I’m interested in this, so I also need to do it. If someone would tell me, “OK, you have to decide between you only do Ableton, you only do music, and you only do installations,” I would have a hard time to say what I would do. My first guess is that I could easiest go away without Ableton, but I’m not sure if on a second guessing this would still be true. But to make a decision between I only make music or I only work on my installations, that’s impossible. I have no idea what I would prefer. So, as a result, I try to find a very strict time-management regime where I say, “OK, I need to work on new music. This week I try to not do office work, I try not to do emails. I just go in the studio.” But, unfortunately it rarely works like this. So I need to force myself to spend time in the studio. On a very practical level, what I did is I was reducing the amount of equipment I have, so that I don’t spend too much time thinking about, “Do I use this synthesizer, or this, or this, or do I use that plugin or that?” And I say “OK, If I want something that makes nice string sound, I use this one machine, which I have been using since the mid-’90s to do that, and that’s it.” And I don’t need to buy another synthesizer for the same job. Because instead of thinking about, “This sound is nice, but perhaps this one is better, or that one, ah it’s not connected. Ah, damn it’s not connected. This is channel 17. This is... Ah the cable’s too short.” You know, you spend easy an afternoon to get this one synthesizer to work, and then you figure out at the end that this chord doesn’t need to be in the track at all, instead of making music.

I try to have a very strict regime there where I try to focus on things. One work recipe I figured out in the last years which helped me, is that sometimes I’m not really in the mood to make music, but I’m in the mood to create sounds. So I just record sounds. I play with my machine and say “Ah this is an interesting bass sound,” or, “This is a cool percussion sound.” I record this, I give it a nice name and I put it in my sound library. And then when I’m in the mood of making music, I don’t need to spend so much time making sounds. I just think, “Ah I had this great snare with this long reverb tail,” and I just find it and I put it in, and if I have good luck, it’s right there. And then I move on. Part of my strategy to achieve the sound I achieve is by spending a lot of time making sounds and then just using them. And I guess this is pretty much everything I can contribute. Apart from that, there’s always too much reverb on everything.

Christine Kakaire

Is there anybody else? Oh. You’ve got a mic over there.

Audience Member

Hey Robert, how you doing, man? Since I’m on the production team here with the Red Bull, the purpose of this is to make these guys better producers. And I asked a couple of the students to ask you this, but they scared. So I’m gonna ask you. By you cutting records and me owning Ryan’s old lathe, I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of these digital productions that’s really smashed out, incorrect levels, I don’t even call it a square wave at the top, I don’t know what it is. It’s a razorback. Can you help them out and explain at what level should they be recording at to get the best outta Ableton? So it sound like what you was just playing.

Robert Henke

Well, I can not recommend anyone to make something that sounds like my stuff because I’m personally not entirely satisfied with that sound. So, please if you try to record something, make something that sounds significantly better. That’s not fishing for compliments, I find it really painful to listen to my own stuff because I only listen to the mistakes. That’s a personal flaw, which is within me since I exist. And this won’t go away, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, the answer to the question is really difficult.

Audience Member

Well I want you to kick it with them why the dithering switch is on there for.

Robert Henke

Sorry. What?.

Audience Member

Dithering. Dither. Dither. D-I-T-H-E-R.

Robert Henke

Ah. Well, dithering is, in my opinion... OK, We need to dive deep in here. So, in general, first of all, if you... There’s so many questions, I don’t even know where to start. But I try to find the most essential points. So, basically, as long as you work within something like Live, the idea of maximum level, when the meters turn red, as long as you’re inside Live, is just a convention. And this convention says this is 0dB. Technically, all this inside is floating-point mathematics, which means you put have a signal that is plus 30dB, like would be on the meter, half a meter above your screen, and it’s still a perfectly fine signal. The main point, is as soon as you are leaving your software and you go to a soundcard, you have a hard limit, and this hard limit is exactly the point where the meter turns, in Live, full red. If the meter turns full red, that means that your waveform just hits the maximum and once it would hit this maximum, it stays at this maximum. So if you imagine a nice, low, sine wave bass, boom. It’s just a sine wave decaying. It hits the maximum, so it becomes immediately flat, like if you really cut off the top of if. The main part of that is, what this does sonically is it creates an infinitely small spike in the sound, and this infinitely small spike repeats every time there is this hard edge. So, it’s at the beginning when it clips, and it’s at the end, and then it’s on the other side, and it’s again. These hard edges create additional sounds, which have no harmonic relationship to the original sound. This is just really, really unpleasant distortion. Actually, there is some harmonic relationship, I take the first thing back. But it’s still distortion. So, unlike you really aim for this harshness in your sound, you should avoid that. That’s a very simple rule. So, whenever the meters in life turn red, it’s probably a good idea to go lower.

The next interesting question is how low can you go? So, if we agree on that having everything at full level is a bad idea. Then you can say, OK, having all the faders are completely down is also a bad idea, because I don’t hear anything anymore. So, somewhere in between seems to be the truth. The thing with digital is, digital is still a relatively young technology. 20 years ago digital technology was still not nearly as good sounding as it is today, and the rule was always, you try to get as loud as possible without introducing distortion. So you try to basically ride your signal just above what is maximum, because then you had the best headroom, and you had the least noise and all these kinds of things. So this was true until maybe 10 years ago. Nowadays, technology, and especially converter technology, is so good that you can easily have a signal which has much less level, and you still have only very little noise floor. Now this old idea of every signal has to be maximized to get the best signal-to-noise ratio, is not so true anymore. So you can be a little bit more adventurous to what’s leaving more room.

But if we come from a theoretical discourse to a practical thing, the one thing that is interesting for making music, when... Let’s assume you have a sound, which has a bass drum, a snare, a hi-hat, and a bassline going on. These sounds are a bit dynamic, so sometimes some of them are louder and sometimes they are less loud. You record them in such a way that none of these sounds exceeds the limit. So everything is below the limit. So if you look at the waveform, there’s a lot of air in between.

Then this sound might not sound as powerful as a sound which is put through a compressor, where everything is really squashed, which for a lot of rhythmic music sounds more powerful. But it’s the better material to go to the mastering studio, because this is the old trick with the mastering studio. The effect of the compressor is something you need to have experienced, and you need to listen to with really good speakers in different volumes to really be able to use it in such a way that the product sounds great on a really large system, as well as on a small system. If you don’t have much experience with doing these things, it’s much better just not to do it all, and go to a good mastering place. Or, nowadays, potentially, a clever artificial-intelligence online mastering service. I never tried Landr, but a lot of research went into this. So, I wouldn’t decline the option that this might be better than a person these days. I don’t know, but it’s worth trying probably. Then at the end, having someone who has a lot of experience, either a person, or an algorithm, to do it in a way that has been proven to sound good on many systems.

So the last thing is the dither. So, sometimes the more insecure people are, the more they focus on technical details. We have lots of discussions about sound quality in Ableton Live. Everyone in the audio community knows everyone else, so every developer who is working on audio software probably met every other developer on Earth who is doing the same things. This whole myth about different audio engines sounding different, forget about it. Adding two channels in a digital work station is always an addition, like five plus seven. Five plus seven is 13 in Logic, in Cubase, in Nuendo, in every single application everyone writes. So, it’s the same.

I know that afterwards when this will be published, there will be endless discussions about this, but it’s still the same. Dithering is a process where... OK, you have 16-bit resolution on a digital analog converter. This mean you have some 65,000 individual steps, as resolution in amplitude. And if you have a very low signal that equals 96 decibel. So you have a very low signal, maybe a sine wave. And you make the sine wave less loud, and less loud, and less loud. So, if maybe the sine wave is at minus 60dB, which is pretty much inaudible in most scenarios. But for the sake of this talk, let’s assume we have a sine wave at this level. And we have a 16-bit converter, then we are 36dBs away from minimum. That means you have six-bit of resolution. So, a minus 60dB sine wave on a 16-bit converter is the same as a full scale sine wave on an eight-bit converter, which is a nice, grungy, 80s sine wave sound, and not a pure sine wave.

So, the trick to improve these very, very low sounds is you add a little amount of random noise to it. This sounds like a bad idea in theory, but in the correct theory, it’s a great idea because you can mathematically show that by adding this little noise you distribute the distortion equally, and the overall amount of distortions get less. So, you basically use noise to mask an unpleasant effect. It’s not entirely correct mathematically, but it’s the result in a way.

So, what you do is, if you’re recording something on a 16-bit file, you apply dithering at the end, there’s a check box for instance in Live, with different options. Doesn’t matter, in my opinion, because we’re discussing something that no one will ever hear. But if you want to be on the safe side go for triangular. I can spend a few hours on a board explaining why. And it will give you a tiny little bit more of fidelity if you record something that is [whispers into mic_] extremely quiet. Like a hundred times quieter than this. And that’s it.

So, in theory if you record an orchestra with enormous dynamic and you have 100 microphones and you need to render individual stems of all of them, applying dithering to each one is a good idea. Practically, you can make an experiment. You can take a bit-rate reduction plugin. You take your most favorite pop song, and you put the plugin at 12-bit. 12-bit is obviously s---. Listen to it. Then close your eyes and randomly turn on and off the plugin a few times. And then close your eyes and listen to it and try if you can listen, if the plugin is on or off. I guarantee you that under a normal listening situation, like here, with normal listening levels, you won’t hear the difference. Because that’s already... 12-bit is six, 12, 36, it’s already in the range of minus 60, minus 70dB. So, even with 12-bit, you are already on the safe side for a nice signal to be above the quantization error. Which means with 16-bit or with 24-bit, you’re way beyond that. People should not think that much about these problems. People should think about is the sound of the bass drum right? Is the decay good? Does the snare and the bass drum sound good together? That’s where you need to spend your creativity and not in levels, as long as not clipping. It’s again a long answer to a short question. I hope there’s not a long question coming, which leads to a potentially longer answer. Was this helpful a little bit?

Audience Member

Yeah. I just wanna know...

Robert Henke

Good.

Audience Member

[question is inaudible]

Robert Henke

Well, there’s one single thing... One of the producers I admire most is Mark Ernestus, of former Basic Channel and now Rhythm & Sound, and all these amazing things. And I always thought, because this stuff of them, especially the early stuff, is really deep. And you always think, they must use tons of compressors. And I had the chance to work in his studio once and I was surprised because I didn’t find a single compressor in there. I said, “Hey Mark, where are your compressors?” And Mark told me, “I really don’t know how to work with compressors. Nothing here is compressed.”

So he’s super about mixing, about spending half a day to decide that this needs to be half a dB louder. And he’s doing a perfect mix, and no compression. And to me this was really a surprise. Because I felt I’m not the only person on the planet who has trouble with compression. Everyone tells you, “Yeah, you need to compress that.” And I try it and it sounds squashed. And then I turn the compressor off and I’m happier again. The only thing where I figured out after years of being the first member of the anti-compression league, [laughter] was that when I perform club stuff live, then having a compressor is sometimes helpful because on a smaller PA you just get more the feeling of intensity.

So, my pro tip for performing live is add a compressor at the end of your output signal and have a slider mapped to the threshold. So, the Monolake secret-sauce tip is, set the ratio to one to two, very fast attack, medium-fast decay, and put a fader on the threshold, and map it inversely so that when the fader is all down, this threshold is at 0dB. And when the fader is all up, it’s at minus 25dB. With this strategy... And have make up gain turned on. So, in this scenario, if the fader is all down, your compressor as transparent, and the further you move the fader up, the more compression in your signal you get. And that’s a great thing to play with when you perform club music live. [laughter / applause]

Christine Kakaire

Anymore short or long questions? From the room. No?

Robert Henke

Good. We squashed them.

Christine Kakaire

Here we go.

Audience Member

Hello, Mr, Henke. Thanks for making my life much easier.

Robert Henke

Good to know.

Audience Member

I’m specifically talking about repitch warping. I have here, perhaps an innocent question, I’m just curious where does the word Ableton come from?

Robert Henke

Good one. That’s the only one.

Audience Member

I have more, but yeah.

Robert Henke

So when you found a company, you need a name. Sometimes you have good luck, you have a name that just works like Siemens Group or something like this.

Christine Kakaire

Or Monolake.

Robert Henke

Well, that’s a lake and not a name. So, you found a company, and you don’t want to call it the Behles company because it’s kind of childish. And as more people than Gerhard Behles are involved, so anyway. The first thing you do is you think, “Hmm, it’s needs to be a name that describes the product, right? It has to be a name that is something related to sound.” So, I mean we’re talking about early internet. But internet search was already existing. So, you think, “Ah yeah, let’s call it, I make this up, Electronic Wave. electronicwave.com. You Google it, gone. You try any other combination of anything that is sound, wave, pulse. You know, all these kinds of names that in some way seem to be related to what you’re doing. And every possible combination of names is already given.

Then you think “OK, let’s be a bit more floral.” You know, you try to come up with some name that is sounding nice like, Onyx, or Rose. Again, I make these things up, but this was the thinking process. So you type in all those names in the search engine. You know, waverose.com. I bet that’s existing. So you gave up on all these names. And then you end up with thinking, “OK, let’s just throw letters together.” So that’s what we did. We just wrote random names on... I remember sitting in the conference room. Really, this is funny. It comes back to my memory. We were sitting here, maybe five people, on a table with pens and paper, and we just randomly scribbled some names. And one of those Ableton. And there was even a question if it has an ‘e’ or not. And it was really just... I don’t even know who came up with this name. We had tons of names on the list and we put them all on the wall and we looked at them.

So, the funny thing about Ableton was that I said, “I like this because it sounds slightly like a British high-end manufacturer. [speaks in British accent] Oh, wow, this is an Ableton L15, nice.” So, I liked this. And then there was a question if there should be an ‘e’, like tone, you know. Able to produce a tone, Abletone. And then someone said, “Ah, the ‘e’, Abletone, nah. I mean Ableton is good, yeah. Tone is German for... Tone is a German company... Ton. Ableton. Able, ability, that’s kind of nice, yeah. Ableton. Hmm, Ableton. Let’s think about it. What do you think about Ableton? Ableton. Ableton. Ableton. Ableton. Sounds like s--- in German. Ableton. Ableton. I like it. Yeah it grows on me. Ableton. Ableton. Let’s write it down. How does it look when it’s written down. Make it all capitals. No.” I guess is when every company tries to come up with a name. Long story short, Ableton. So. [laughter / applause]

And, of course, www.ableton.com. Website now available. “Yeah! It’s free, it’s free. Register.”

Christine Kakaire

Anybody else?

Robert Henke

I think we need to stop now anyway because I believe I’m way over my schedule with a lot of other stuff which was...

Christine Kakaire

OK, OK. Well, let’s Robert get back to his studio. Thank you, once again.

Robert Henke

No, no. I have more stuff here.

Christine Kakaire

Oh here. Oh yes, the radio. Yes, yes radio. Thank you again for being here.