Sebastian Niessen
Sebastian Niessen was the synthesizer engineer for Kraftwerk, playing an integral part in crafting the sounds that became an influence on the hip-hop and dance music you hear today. After Kraftwerk, Sebastian continued to work as a sound engineer, moving to New York City in 1984, where he worked on soundtracks for Raising Arizona and Barton Fink. As he explains during this lecture at the 2003 Red Bull Music Academy, he continues to design instruments and modify synthesizers and has helped many of today’s most forward-thinking artists, from Robert Hood and Peter Kruder to Aphex Twin, Richie Hawtin, Basic Channel and the Modernist.
Hosted by Patrick Pulsinger Our guest today is Sebastian Niessen from Germany, from Munich more specific. He is a constructor of electronic instruments, as well as a musician. He played with a couple of people performing his own equipment and other equipment that he modified on various records and releases. And he also goes on tour with his stuff to back up some artists when they do live acts - the synths and sequencers and stuff. He selected a couple of tunes from the history of electronic equipment, and he picked out a couple of people who were, I think, most influential to his work as well. Sebastian Niessen Whenever somebody gets involved in electronic music the first and major difference to play an acoustic instrument is that you have the opportunity of choosing your equipment more than just saying: “OK, I want the Steinway piano rather than a Bösendorfer or I want a Gibson guitar rather than a Fender.” Which are about the choices that you have, if you play a guitar or if you play a piano. That’s pretty much all you can do about your instruments. In electronic music it’s totally different. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to build instruments, certainly not, but it means that everybody that is somewhat serious about electronic music, any aspect of electronic music, even say, related to DJing, it’s true, but certainly it’s true related to producing, making tracks, making electronic music. Part of your training and your growing in into being an electronic musician is choosing what instruments you use because I am sure everybody knows, there is zillions of tools around by now. Software, hardware, all kinds of strange, more or less strange things and you can’t use them all. Life is too short for that. By now there is there is probably, I don’t know how many programs and how many different pieces of hardware, it’s into the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, different pieces of equipment or software that you could possibly use trying to express yourself in electronic music. Obviously, you can’t use them all. So you have to make some choices what you use. And in order to make these choices you have to know a little about the possibilities, the limitations... the strengths and the weaknesses of these various instruments. As I said, you can’t know them all, which is why it is always interesting to understand an abstract concept, before actually getting into learning a program or learning a machine. Most of you people have started being interested in electronic music at a time where a lot of possibilities already existed and were commonplace or are commonplace. If you look back at the history of electronic music, people that started with electronic music a little earlier, by force had to design or at least have somebody design it for them their own equipment, because simply there was no equipment. There was no stores that you could go to and say: “Hey, I need the hippest sampler and the hardest drum machine and I am in business,” that didn’t exist. So all pioneers of electronic music designed their own instruments, simply out of necessity. There just wasn’t anything around. And before I get into detail about my own work, I would like to talk about two pioneers of electronic music, which are particularly influential to electronic music in general and my own work in particular. One of them is an American guy named Raymond Scott, you might have heard about. The other one is a German guy named Oskar Sala. Let’s start out with a short track by Raymond Scott, recorded in 1930s, purely acoustical. (music: Raymond Scott Quintette – “Microphone Music”) Sebastian Niessen There is no cuts, no splicing, nothing. It was played like this from beginning to end and the guy who brought this quintet to life, Raymond Scott, started out as a swing bandleader and very early on he tried some techniques that there was no equipment available to do them, but he nevertheless tried to do them and his techniques were very modern. They were very remixer-like and very much an attitude that a DJ today would have. What he did was, he would record any rehearsal of his band onto a record—they didn’t have tape recorders at the time,they would cut a record for every rehearsal—he would take all these records back home and sit there with like five gramophone record players and do needle-dropping. Just listening to various parts of various tracks that he rehearsed with the band and since there was no technical way of splicing, he would write down, “OK, I like bar one to seventeen from that track, I liked bar five to nine from that track,” and then go back to the next rehearsal and have his band play that. And that’s how a track like this came about. He was pretty successful with this quintet and he made quite a lot of money in the ’30s before the war. And actually, one of the ways that he made a lot of money was that Walt Disney licensed some of his tracks to be used as soundtracks for cartoons. Making this money allowed him to pursue his other major interest beside from music, which were electronics. And he started to try and build, and design, and construct instruments that would allow him to go beyond the possibilities of an acoustic swing quintet, basically. And so most of the war years and afterwards he spent no longer rehearsing with this quintet or playing swing music, but just sitting at home soldering. The reason why I picked him as one of the sort of influential designers, constructors, inventors of electronic music, is because he was very fascinated with sequencing early on. He was the first one to actually think about sequencing in another way than, say, a player piano is a sequencer. What Raymond Scott was trying to do was really to build machines that allowed him to compose music beyond the capabilities of human players and beyond the capabilities of normal acoustic music. And he actually started building a machine, which was basically a sequencer built out of relays, electromechanical switches. It took him about 20 years or so, and it turned into a wall of racks that was literally about 15 meters (45 feet) long. Two-meter high, 19-inch racks, about 15 meters long. “The Wall of Sound” is what they called it at those times and... Patrick Pulsinger So, he actually did a lot of stuff for IBM at that time and also stuff like spark plugs, I think even like, a medicine for... Sebastian Niessen ...cough medicine. Patrick Pulsinger Cough medicine, stuff like this. Everything that is related to science or chemistry or physics. People would get him to actually underlay their commercials with electronic music and we can play one, which I really love. It is for spark plugs, for cars and listen to the sound that he chose to make in order to visualize the spark plug, you know, what a spark does in a car and it’s a spark plug commercial. I think it is from around 1960. Sebastian Niessen Probably somewhere late ’50s. Patrick Pulsinger Late ’50s, early ’60s and it’s a Autolite spark plug commercial. (music: Raymond Scott & the Manhattan Research – “Autolite: Spark Plugs”) Patrick Pulsinger So he used this equipment, actually, to make the sound of a spark plug, actually doing a spark like tzzz, tzzz you heard the sound so... At that time, I mean, you could not just like go to anyone say: “Yeah, can you make me a sound of a spark plug?” I mean, you had to find those people and, actually, he was probably the only one in America at that time, who was actually capable of producing an electronic sound at the time. Sebastian Niessen And that was probably the first example where you can hear that he was not only interested in creating electronic sounds, but he was also, as I said, interested in sequencing. It may sound a little stupid to call this bipibip bipibip of a spark plug sound a sequence, but that’s in fact what it is. And he tried to somewhat automate the process of creating electronic music by means of what we today call sequencers, basically. And that is sort of one of the very first examples where he would actually use this. And I would like to play you another one. Of course, there is a lot of talking going on upfront. Don’t listen to the voiceover so much but listen to what is in the background. It’s an IBM commercial also from probably about 1960, ’61, something like that. (music: Raymond Scott & the Manhattan Research – “IBM MT/ST: The Paperwork Explosion”) Sebastian Niessen Check out the sequence in the background. I think we all would agree, that if we had just the music without the voiceover, any one of you would make a really cool dance remix just out of the loops that you heard in the background, right? And, as I said, it’s a commercial. It wasn’t intended for any club use or anything. It was made for something completely different, but some of the things that we consider very hip, very modern, whatever, have been around for a while. And even the aesthetics have been around for a while, yeah. His particular interest was to really program music, in a sense that all of us do today on a computer. Because there were no computers around... He was looking for machines that would allow him to compose music that couldn’t be composed before. He wasn’t interested in using synthesizers to, or... it wasn’t even called synthesizer at the time, but let’s use the term anyway. He wasn’t looking for machines that would imitate something or that would sound like a violin. He was trying to make sounds and to make music that couldn’t be done before. And, as I said in the beginning, the only way he could do that was to get into electronics, to get the soldering iron and to really develop, and design, and build his own stuff. I would quickly like to change over to the other pioneer that I wanted to introduce to you, which is a German guy called Oskar Sala. He is also born around the same time as Raymond Scott, early 20th century. Raymond Scott was born 1908, I think Sala, 1907... I am not sure. And his approach was a little bit different. He had been a music student in Berlin in the ’30s and he played the piano and studied composition, classical composition, with a classic composer or modern classic composer that some of you might know about, who is called Hindemith. A German-Jewish composer who later emigrated to the United States for obvious reasons. And around this bunch of people there was also a physics professor from Berlin University called Trautwein. This is what these guys had built for themselves in the 1930s and it’s the exact opposite of what Raymond Scott was trying to do. Raymond Scott was trying to do, as I said, to pre-program, to automate music. Meanwhile Oskar Sala was interested in creating an electronic instrument that should be played physically, just as you did a lot of bodywork involved in playing a guitar or playing a piano or anything like that. So, he definitely is up a different alley than Raymond Scott. And he was never interested in pre-programming in any sequencers or anything like that. He was interested in finding or building or designing an instrument that was as expressive... (video: Oskar Sala playing the trautonium) Patrick Pulsinger I think we have a second movie... Sebastian Niessen ...Where where he plays a sort of modernized version of this instrument, which he had built for himself in the ’60s. And basically, it’s the same technical concept... (video: Oskar Sala - Unknown) Sebastian Niessen It’s just a wire spanning across a metal rod. And depending on the position that he hits, he can control the pitch. That’s fairly simple, and since then there’s been Bob Moog and lots of other people building controllers that we know as ribbon controllers, which allow you to do that. One of their advantages and disadvantages at the same time is you have to learn to play them. You have to learn like on a fretless bass or on a violin you have to learn to hit the right notes, which isn’t so easy. But once you do that, you can do things that you can’t do on a normal keyboard. You can play vibrato by just moving around. You can play glissandos by just sliding up and down on the thing, which you can’t do on a regular keyboard. Also, you can play—some of you may have enough musical training to hear it—the stuff that we just heard was just intoned. It wasn’t equal-tempered. That's a big difference... That’s why some of the intervals sounded a little strange to our ear today because we are so used to listening to equal-tempered music. Because all electronic keyboards that you can buy today basically are equal-tempered. He started, as I said, in the ’30s, to play on this kind of instrument and it did take him years and probably decades even, to master this instrument. Because not only can you control the pitch very subtly and musically, but you can also control the volume very subtly and musically, by... You may have seen that the rod that he pushes the wire against moves downwards. How can I say it... It’s probably one of the strangest designs or mechanisms that I have ever seen in music. Patrick Pulsinger Did you try it out, did you play yourself? Sebastian Niessen Yeah, yeah, of course, but you look like a fool. (sitting in the audience) There are some Swedish folk instruments where there is basically a string and you are actually playing on the string and it seems that you can kind of... Sebastian Niessen But you plucking the string or...? Erlend Øye: Yeah, you are plucking the string. I mean, of course you can also hit it harder. And like this really old grand piano-like instruments, from the, what you call it... spinet or whatever it is? Is it like this, or what’s the difference between this and that? Sebastian Niessen No, the string itself doesn’t create any sound. Erlend Øye OK. Sebastian Niessen It’s just used to control some electronic circuitry and control the pitch of the oscillators in that electronic circuitry. Erlend Øye Would it be like playing on a spinet? Is it basically the same thing happens like if you do it like, if you press it hard, there is more sound, if you press...? Sebastian Niessen Right. But that comes from this mechanism I was just mentioning that translated the pressure into some voltage that could control the volume. Erlend Øye OK. Sebastian Niessen So, in this machine not only there is no fixed frequencies, no keys, but also there is no envelopes or anything like that. So all the ways that the sound is shaped volume-wise like how it attacks, how it fades out, is all played by him. Played by the amount of pressure that he puts on this mechanism. So you really need a lot of just, rehearsal training. You have to spend years on the thing. And he did get sort of a little bit more recognition for his work only in the last few years of his life. And people would approach him and say, “Gee, it sounds so great what you are doing. Can’t you teach me, or how can I learn this and how can I get into this?” And he would say, “Well, I tell you how to built one of these instruments.” Because he considered for any electronic musician you had to have some engineering capabilities. That was definitely his intention. He said, “Well, you have to know how to work a soldering iron and know a few things about electronics if you want to be a electronic composer.” And which I am not sure, it’s not necessarily today anymore. But people would then start to sort of look at his instrument and try to figure out what he was doing. And they would quickly recognize that most of the fascination that goes out from this music is just because of the physical capabilities that this guy has developed all over 20, 30, 40 years of hacking around on this string and on this strange instrument. And so today where everybody is into instant gratification, meaning that you want to get results and you want them fast, once people found out how difficult it is and how long it would take to learn it, they said, “OK, well I’ll pass. I think I’ll go and buy a regular Roland or whatever.” Patrick Pulsinger But he was actually taking this stuff to concert halls and he would perform live with this, like a piano player would perform on a stage. He was actually doing his own compositions playing on his own instrument and he would fill like... Sebastian Niessen ...big concert halls. Patrick Pulsinger Big concert halls at that time, like in the ’60s? Sebastian Niessen Well, actually he filled concert halls already during the dark times, during the Third Reich. Since he wasn’t Jewish, he didn’t have to emigrate and he managed to continue his musical work through all the Nazi time and which is a little strange also, because it is not necessarily the kind of music that they were into. And it might well have happened that they sort of put some pressure on him to play something more German. But he managed to continue to work with this instrument throughout the war and after the war. But the fact that he ended up being the only one playing this instrument comes mostly from the fact that it is so hard to learn and it takes so much time, not just to understand the circuitry and to understand why this and that will happen, but to actually manage to play it in a musical way. He did was the sound effects for Hitchcock’s The Birds. All the sounds in the background are also produced on the exact same machine that we just saw and that we heard in the other examples. (video: Alfred Hitchcock - The Birds) Now comes the fun part. We are in the early ’60s now and other people are starting to develop instruments. Bob Moog, who was here two weeks ago, started designing some stuff. And Oskar Sala was brave enough, I would almost say, to ignore all equipment that came afterwards. From what I know, he never for a minute thought about getting a Moog or sort of keeping up with technology. And I think, personally, when I look back at all the work that he did in his life, I think that was one of the main reasons why he did develop such a mastership on this one instrument... is because he concentrated on it. And he didn’t waste time on reading manuals and buying new equipment, going to the store, bringing back some boxes that would take you a few months to find out that they weren’t what you were looking for. So he was ignoring completely all technical development that came, that started on a broader basis in the early ’60s. And I think it shows quite some character, because today a lot of people, when they get into electronic music, they sort of start to look around, “What is he using, what is he using?” And, “OK, I like the music he does, so I have to buy the equipment that he uses. And I like his music so I try to get some of his equipment.” He had found his one instrument and just like a piano player, if he likes being a piano player, won’t think about buying a guitar, there is no need for it. And that’s pretty much what his approach was. And he, I think, developed some skills that are unique on this instrument and he was capable of producing music that nobody else in the world could ever produce. And I think today with all the generic tools and toys and gadgets that we have at our disposal, if any one of you wants to be successful and happy being an electronic musician, being an electronic composer for the major part of his life, you have to develop something that is specific to you. You have to develop a style, of course, and you also have to develop a certain type of mastery of your equipment that you will never develop if you just constantly keep buying the latest stuff. The instruments that you pick and the instruments that you use will have a major influence on the music that you make. And depending on what production environment you choose to have, whether it’s just one dinky little Casio keyboard or just software or whether you inherited $2 million and you went out and bought it all, it doesn’t matter. No matter what you use, it will influence your style. So, if you want to develop a unique style, something that is unique about your music, you have to have a unique setup. It doesn’t mean that it is unique in a sense that you built it and there is no second of it in the world. But it means that... Usually today, we don’t use just one instrument, we use a whole lot of boxes and the combination of these boxes and the way that you use these boxes has to, at some point, become unique. Otherwise you’ll just be one of these “Me-too” people for the rest of your life. So it’s tempting in the beginning to just go out and do copies of the software that your friends have and start working with it. You can do that, but you should do this in order to find the few tools, whether it’s software or hardware that are appealing to you, for whatever reason. These reasons don’t have to be rational. I mean, I for instance, like certain synthesizers because the way they look, I like certain synthesizers because the way they feel, because the way the knobs feel when you touch them and dislike others for the same reasons... they look shitty or they don’t feel good. Which are not necessarily musical reasons and I would say, why would the look of an instrument matter once you have a finished track and you don’t see the instruments anymore? But making music is something irrational. And that’s a big problem with computers. Computers are rational. And computers always force you to at least be rational every ten seconds or every twenty seconds because you have to think about in what menu you will find certain options. And I think that making music and making electronic music as well is a non-rational thing. And it should stay that way. Good, if you want to be a real musician in the sense of the word, making music is something irrational. There is no rational reasons. You can’t eat it, it doesn’t keep you warm, but obviously there is a need for it. But obviously, there is a need for listening to music and I suppose that most of you people are here because you feel a need of making music. The engineer looks at a certain piece of equipment and says, “OK, it’s done this and that way. And then there is these and those problems and you can do it cheaper or you can do it better.” And the businessman says, “OK, we can sell so and so many thousands of them.” That’s not what you should be concerned about when you make music, electronic music. You should be concerned about finding tools that allow you to become intuitive and it’s very difficult to become intuitive on a computer. I've seen people do it. I am not saying that computers are the wrong way. What I am saying is that if you only use computers, the tendency will be that your music will not be very emotional or very intuitive, because as I said, you have constantly to switch back into the rational mode in order to find the right menu and submenu and this and that. Audience Member But if you are composing well, it’s a totally different story because... Sebastian Niessen No, I wouldn’t say it’s a totally different story, because in classical music there may be enough well-trained people that are capable of imagining, saying a string quartet playing some score without actually hearing them. At least, if you have a good training as a classical composer, you can anticipate what it will sound like. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, in electronic music it is not the case. Even if you know a lot about synthesizers and equipment, it’s very hard to anticipate what a sound will be like until you program it or until you tweak the knobs and listen to it. So to me making electronic music is always some sort of conversation, some sort of dialogue between the machinery and you. And to me, good and interesting equipment for electronic music is equipment that talks to you. And by talking to you I mean, that it does things that are unexpected.