ALBERT NEVE
Watch him deconstruct a track in his ultra-modern Barcelona studio
“They said music made with computers wasn’t interesting! That was a long time ago”
His tunes are caned by everyone from Roger Sanchez to Hardwell, he’s remixed the likes of Joachim Garraud and David Guetta, and he’s recently scored an enormous club smash with close friend Abel Ramos in Let The Bass Be Louder on Spinnin’ Records’ Music Freedom imprint. We hooked up with Albert in beautiful Barcelona to check out his slick studio, and discovered that he’s a veteran of entirely computer-based production.
“I started DJing when I was fifteen years old,” Albert reminisces. “I was in love with everything related to DJs – from the booths to the clubs. I was very skilled with computers, and when I was sixteen I started to make music with them. All the music I was producing was terrible shit, but that helped me to learn about everything. I never took music lessons, so I had to discover everything on my own. A friend of mine and I really wanted to make a track together, and it took us three years to make our first track in OctaMED on an Amiga.”
It might seem strange now, but in the dark ages of the 90s, in-the-box production was a new phenomenon that caused suspicion amongst the old guard.
“We wanted to release the track on the most important independent label here in Spain, Max Music, but they refused our demos for a long time. They said music made with computers wasn’t interesting! That was a long time ago, and all the other musicians were producing with hardware synthesisers and samplers. Two young guys making music with just a computer was something strange for them, so they didn’t want to release anything. Then one day we brought them a track they found interesting for the label. It was 100% OctaMED in eight track mode, which had low audio quality compared to four track mode. When we brought the track to be mixed in their studios we had to record all the tracks separately in four-track mode onto a tape machine! We had to re-arrange the project in the studio so that we could record anything. It was a fun process and the first time they did that kind of work with computers, so it was fun for both sides.”
OctaMED’s relatively limited trackerbased capabilities, compared with the hardware available at the time, meant that Albert had a strong incentive to upgrade. “I was looking for a more powerful machine, so the alternative was the Macintosh – they were brilliant for audio, and they were used in all the studios that I was visiting at that time. That machine made it possible to produce in a different way. I was on Cubase, which was the first proper sequencer I ever used, and I began to produce with MIDI using all the external stuff I had, and with the possibility to record audio as well – not just little samples, but full tracks. There was a problem with Cubase on a Mac at that time: it was unstable, and would freeze all the time. So I decided to move to Logic, because it had been recommended to me by friends. It took me a few weeks to get used to it, but in the end they’re sequencers and they work the same way.”
Albert is still on Logic today, but maintains a healthy fascination with new software. “I’m always trying to discover different new plugins, even if I’m not using them the right way – that’s the way to learn! We don’t mix how we used to mix ten or twenty years ago… you have to keep on learning all the time!”