Seiji and Steinski

Seiji

I think it would be better that we talk about technical things, rather than embarrass ourselves in the studio, when I’m sure that probably most of you can use Reason. I think people are surprised when they find out I made the majority of my music on just the Cubase Atari, the MIDI and the Commodore 64 [computer] for producing all the sounds. Including all of the synth sounds, chopping up the vocals, putting on samples, all those kinds of things. Whereas Steve has got everything on ProTools, obviously. And the common theme we both agreed on was that there seems to be a sort of obsession with gear and technology, which neither of us seem to feel the same way about, I think.

Steinski

One of the things that happened with me working in the New York metropolitan area with a lot of guys that have grown up in a world of technical music making and working in the studio, is that I grabbed onto ProTools and learned how to use it. And now I have a ProTools 5.1 system with a whole lot of plug-ins and that’s fine, works great for me. Of course now, I’m constantly meeting guys who say, “You're going to be getting Protools HD, right?!” Well, no. There is really no reason for me to be sampling at 196k – you know, dogs can’t hear that – why do I want to spend another $25,000 on a box that allows me to do that? And then there are other people saying, “Protools 6 is out now, you're going to get OSX 10?” And I'm like, well, no, because then I’d have to reinvest in all the plug-ins and I also have to learn the OSX. And I am not going to get a G5 and all of the other things. But I work with people to whom this is the logical next step. You must have that. Fact of the matter is that I don’t really think you must have that. Not at all. Because no one who’s buying your record or who isn’t buying your record, is not going to buy it because... “Oh man, listen to that, he didn’t sample at a 196k! Poo! What else you got here?” This is not logical, this is not sensible. It’s a consumerist attitude towards it. It’s like if you’re playing a guitar, you need to learn how to play the guitar. Having a better guitar is not going to help you to learn it better necessarily. If the strings are closer to the fretboard, it might be a little easier to learn some of the changes and the things you need to do. But for the most part, you just need to practice, you need to learn, you need to know it thoroughly. So that’s one thing that seems to be a good area to chat about, is the urge to upgrade, the urge to move on to the next version and it becomes an end in itself. Like I said, I think it's a very consumerist attitude. You can get completely lost in this and really end up only end up skimming the surface of the capability of the software that you are talking about or the music you are trying to make, because you are really more caught up with the wrong aspects. You are not sitting there thinking, “Great, this is how I can use this to make a better beat or make the vocal more sinuous or whatever you would like to do.” It simplifies everything to “I got to have the new thing.”

Seiji

I think it becomes a distraction. Especially if you’re not so confident in terms of production... Because it’s easier to get distracted by that, than to actually...

Steinski

The belief is that the newer thing will help you get over the problem you are confronting, which – at least in my case – I have found to be relatively rare. The new thing doesn’t help me get over it, it generally presents half a dozen problems, which are good distractions from the thing you were trying to solve in the first place. You know, “It doesn’t do that, the book said it should do that, why doesn’t it do that? There must be some preset because it's not working correctly, blah blah blah.” And four hours later you’ve lost whatever idea you were originally trying to go for and you are just caught up in the back alleys of the software. So that’s a point we wanted to make, and is what we would like to address.

Seiji

For me, I’ve actually found upgrading to new equipment has presented problems for me. I feel like I lost my way a little bit in the last year, struggling to get used to the new technology. Being a bit useless on computers generally, I’ve really been struggling with Logic, so I could maybe do with coming to the Red Bull Academy and taking some courses or something. Moving to Logic was... I don't know, I regret having to leave the Atari behind, just because it’s becoming obsolete. But that it was a tactile, easy-to-use software. Now that I'm using Logic, I find myself stuck with these intellectual problems I have to overcome, and I feel further away from being able to instantly make music. Actually, over the next couple of years I will be looking to buy as many Ataris as I can find, get them all in good working order and have them stored, so that as they break down, I can put the next one into use again. Also, on the sampling side, I did experiment with trying to use things like the EXS 24 and Battery and stuff like that. But again, I found not being able to have my hands on the instrument and not having the audition buttons going click, click, click and feel like I am somehow in touch with the sound that I am making...that really didn’t work well for me, as was using Recycle to chop everything up for me. That was a laziness thing. But I've found that when I'm a bit more diligent and I chop everything by hand, that’s where a lot of my creativity comes from. In my creative process where I'm chopping something up by hand and as a result accidents happen or I hear things in the break or I hear things in the sample that I wouldn’t hear if I just put it through Recycle and got it to chop it up for me. So there’s definitely a lot to be said for the old school methods of working.

Steinski

I think part of that again is you can be too efficient. The new thing can do too much. I find myself a lot with the melodic loop up here or the melodic line and the drums down on another couple of channels. And the drums sort of fit and they sort of don’t. And yeah, I suppose I could use the version of Recycle that occurs in Pro Tools – the Beat Detective – which separates everything for you like this. [snaps his finger] And I don’t like to use it for exactly the same reasons that Paul was talking about. Because as I'm sitting there cutting it up and moving it and shifting things around a little bit, there's all manner of possibilities that seem to come up. “Oh, this actually sounds better if it were a hair behind” and “Oh, I could just get rid of this and it would be fine.” It becomes part of the creative process.

Seiji

Definitely the ’80s, in soul and jazz music, a lot of it really suffered for this kind of this kind of need to upgrade to the new sound, that everyone had to be moving with the times. From having the wonderful sounds of the ’70s analog gear, we then went into the ’80s and some of our great heroes of soul started using horrible, horrible synthesizer sounds. I think the [Roland preset] Crystal Rhodes is probably the biggest offender. As a result, a whole decade of music almost became really horribly unlistenable.

Steinski

You can get caught up with the current big sound, and you go back and you listen to it a year later and go, “What was I thinking of? Oh god, it is awful!” You get in that fever, like, “Wow! It’s gonna be a hit!” and it's like, “No, no, no, it’s not that easy.”

Audience Member

So what you are saying is, it’s the painter, not the brush. Does the brush contribute? How much? Is choosing your own software still an issue?

Steinski

It’s just a matter of learning what you got. If you are comfortable with it, and if it can do in the end what you would like. There might be some extra steps involved and it’s less efficient, I think that’s fine.

Seiji

I think some really great music and innovative sounds have come out of people having to push the technology that is available to them to do what they want to do. Either back in the days when the technology wasn't that advanced, or situations where people just don’t just have the budget to do it, it means they really wanted to get this sound, but they have to do the closest approximation using the equipment they’ve got. And they end up coming up with something that is brand new, this sounds really crazy. There's something to be said for just having a big piece of gear, just working with that and pushing it as far as you can go. [Bob Moog stands up]

Steinski

Oh, Mr. Moog! What can I possibly tell you? [laughs]

Bob Moog

I wanted to comment on this painter versus brush business here. So far everything you said is... I wonder what I am going to say tomorrow. What you say is so true, even though it will put all of us engineers out of work.

Steinski

[laughs] Never, never!

Bob Moog

Yes, the brush matters, but not by itself. The brush matters to the extent that you're comfortable using it, that the ideas can flow through your brush beyond to whatever you're painting. Nobody can hold a brush up and say, “This is the brush for everybody for all painting.”

Steinski

That’s very much the case. I'm happy to be working in ProTools because there is so much at this point that I don’t know, and that in my copious spare time I can sit down and go, “Well, you know, I'm not that familiar with how he MIDI part of this works, let me hook up a couple of virtual synthesizers here and see what can get happening.” Because all of a sudden, I find, “Oh, what do you know, I can get an arpeggiated bassline here” and I can tell it what range to work in and it's like “oh, that’s smoking!” And it's okay, alright, it sounds a little mechanical, but I can then bounce it to a track and mess with it. It’s digital editing stuff. It’s wonderful because you want to keep moving to the end and you won’t ever get to the end. It keeps moving away from you a little bit, that next function. I can’t sell people on ProTools. At the same time, don’t forget that before there was software, it was just people in front of microphones with instruments. What may seem like the best and most convenient thing for you... a lot of records you like were made with no technical stuff whatsoever except a couple of microphones and a tape machine. And a really hot drummer and a really good bass player. So getting caught up in the technical aspect of things is a blind alley.

Seiji

That’s the criticism of listeners who don’t like electronic music. They were like, “Where's the human touch in this music?” Perhaps the only way to get that is to become familiar with your equipment that it really becomes like a real instrument. You can’t really do that if you're constantly changing your technology. You have to get a feeling for it, so it becomes something that you directly express through. When I started using Reason and Recycle, for instance, it was making beats, but I realized that they sounded like beats that anyone could have done and my particular signature sound had completely disappeared. Alex Phountzi from Bugz in the Attic said, “Yeah, Recycle is like having pre-chopped carrots.” [audience laughter] There's no good ingredients there!

Audience Member

I do have the feeling that too much technology can be limiting, if you’re trying to do methods that were formed in the ’70s.

Seiji

Maybe you're right. For instance, looking at kids growing up now with technology, using computers in a way I would probably never would be able to, they're doing that at the age of 6 or 7, it might be completely different. Maybe these kids are going to be so close to the technology that they are like instruments at their fingertips. And that’s fantastic for them. I can only speak for myself – I'm part of a generation that falls into a gap a bit, where computers were around me when I was growing up, but they weren’t everywhere in society and I wasn’t so interested in programming them or anything. I’m sort of caught between trying to make music in a traditional way coming from a classical background as well, playing the cello, that’s maybe how I approached making electronic music.

Steinski

One other thing... the idea of having lots of technology around you in order to make music is easy. Unless you have an extremely strong vision of what you are going to do and you really understand the stuff that you have available, it’s very easy to become bogged down in the choices. We could do this and that and so often one ends up doing nothing under those circumstances. Nothing happens, because you take a tentative step and if we're doing that then we're not really doing that... One of the better exercises that I did with a friend of mine was, we would get together every week and we each bring about six samples of anything. And we said, we're going to make a song out of this this afternoon. It wasn’t always great. But just saying, “This is all we have,” it was liberating in fact. We didn't have to worry about, “Let’s get another snare sound, that's not the right snare sound.” No, we have to work with what we have here, what are we gonna do? It was great. It was really the right thing to do. Like I said, it doesn’t necessarily turn into great work, but it’s an exercise. It’s like doing scales. Figuring out how to use what you got in front of you.

Seiji

I feel the same way. It’s really what I found out with remixing. When I started remixing, I found it really easy because there was already a limit to what I could use. You're not getting lost in endlessly searching for the next sample – this is what you've got to work with, you've got to make the best of that. It’s kind of similar if you are limited to one piece of gear and you get the most of that piece of gear, it’s like working with a set range of samples. If you get the most out of your samples, you got to push them and milk them for everything you can.

Steinski

Which is kind of what makes remixing fun. I’ve done a couple of remixes too, and it is wonderful for that. Here is the piece of the melodic line that they want you to use and to me the hard work is already done then. You don’t have to come up with the grand concept, it's sort of done.

Seiji

There is a creative seed already.

Bob Moog:

[standing up] I’d like everybody to know here that you are extremely unlikely to read anything like this in a magazine. The simple reason is that the magazines exist to serve their advertisers, not the readers. They serve the advertisers because they are the ones who pay the bills. If there was something in it that suggested, that we don’t need the latest whizzbang of any of the advertisers, that’s a good way to lose an advertiser. And any magazine, even the really good ones, will think twice before they do that. I can’t remember ever reading the kind of wisdom that you guys are according this afternoon. And that worries me that that's the state of the musicians’ press today.

Audience Member

Getting back to the case of working with technology... if someone listens to you guys today, it might look like you are knocking down technology, and I don’t think that you meant that. Because sometimes upgrading your software and finding out that you don’t need all that stuff, sort of upgrades that older software that you got and you feel more assured about what you are doing, right?

Seiji

I don’t feel one way or the other, I must say. I don't worship technology and I don’t hate it. It’s just what I use, what is available to me to make music in a context I make it. When I was younger, what I had in my hand was a cello. And then when I got to a certain age – and because of the culture and the social situation I was involved in and the music that was surrounding me – then what I had to make music was technology. It’s not really a good thing, or a bad thing. I don’t have emotional feelings towards technology either way.

Audience Member

But it's a good attitude to at least know technology, to know what's going on, not necessarily to buy it or achieve it.

Seiji

I don’t know. There is amazing music made by people who locked themselves in studios and haven’t seen the outside world for five years. I don’t think that you really have to keep up with the latest thing. You even don’t have to know technology to make good music. I was saying to Steve earlier that you almost get to a situation now where everyone is using digital equipment, everyone's using Logic and plug-ins and swapping cracked plug-ins, like, “Yeah I got this great plug-in and it sounds just like...” a certain piece of analog gear that is still available for absolutely next to nothing if you go and look on eBay. So it seems a bit back to front. Like, why don't you go and get that bit of gear, hook it up, sample it, or even just use it! It just seems really ridiculous, and a really long-winded way of going around getting the valve compressor sound. I know they're a bit expensive but you can make them, actually. So why not use a real one?

Audience Member

Sometimes the emulation is the only thing you got access to. Because you’re talking from England. In Portugal, if I had a Mellotron, oh I’d be happy!

Seiji

OK, fair enough, you are right. When it comes to classic bits of kit, fair enough. But then again, you hear fantastic tracks – Madlib for instance, he's using a bit of kit that's so obsolete, I don’t even know what it is. It's some Emu sampler he takes on the road with him that he says is worth about $300. And if you listen to his music, you’ll agree it's neither here nor there. The quality of sound is not really the thing. Some of his productions sound awful in terms of the mixdown and if you were analyzing the frequencies that were going on in there, but there's such a heavy vibe on there it doesn’t really matter, does it?