It’s another release day for me and I’m honored to share my new album ‘Face’ with you, brought to you by my wonderful friends at Dauw.
‘Face’ is a synthbathed meditation on age and decay, acceptance and new beginnings. It might be a tad more on the melancholic side of my sound, but it’s hard for me to tell. The album is available on vinyl, cassette and digitally, with downloads being free (name your price) for the first two weeks.
Gear wise, I used two different setups for this album. One based around the Octatrack, Waldorf M and MS20. The other made of Digitakt, Digitone and Cocoquantus. All running through OTO Bim and Bam and recorded straight to 1/4" tape in single takes.
I really hope you enjoy it and am happy to answer any questions about it.
really interested in how you use the m for this type of sound. i guess i haven’t thought hard enough about it to come up with specific questions about technique but do you have a general approach?
i guess im just interested in the entire process. what the digitakt does, whats the octatrack’s role, do you have a typical job for the dn over the m, like dn for plucks - m for chords/pads or something like that?
love this by the way. might be my favorite of yours although i do love a lot of the a4 material you’ve done
im gonna head over to your youtube channel now and see if there are any recent videos featuring this current setup
These were two different setup, so a track has either the M or the Digitone. I basically never use two digital synths at once. Same goes for the Digitakt and Octatrack, it’s either or. I can’t have too many machine active at once, as it makes me lose focus.
My approach with these two is rather different. The Digitone I know really well and kinda just dial in sounds that I want to add. While on the M it is much more about exploration for me. It’s impossible for my brain to foresee how those multi-envelopes will sound. So I just try things out until I find something I like and then I try to flesh things out.
In both setups the samplers were used tor record and loop the synths. I try to come up with something cool on the synths and play a phrase into the samplers. There I either loop it like it is or manipulates it first. And then I try to come up with another sound that fits to the first and so on. The approach is rather simple, I guess
thats a beautiful workflow. i feel the same way about the M/digitone & dt/octa but i’ve had all 4 at once during various stages in my setup
i am very inspired by the fact that you use the octa for looping to build these tracks. thats my main process too. i never found a good way to do this with the dt, or at least i dont find it as fluid and intuitive as on the octatrack, but i bet thats a very nice method for composition as well as sound design if you have a process nailed down for looping on the dt
Yeah, the Digitakt is probably my favorite sampler of all time, I prefer the super fast workflow to having more options. And I find it just sounds really good. The challenge is to come up with loops that work within the recording limit and still remain interesting.
Lately I’ve been using the SP404 MK2 which is also quite wonderful for that and different enough to the Elektron boxes to have both. I don’t even care about the effects.
