Making music on Acid
Since 2014, Ben O’Connor and Jon Verde have been recording as OC & Verde, racking up releases on some of techno and house’s finest labels, including Knee Deep in Sound, Suara, Bedrock and Glasgow Underground. We caught up with them in their Lancashire studio to find out how they made their epic Solstice, which was released earlier this year on Steve Lawler’s VIVa Music.
Computer Music: Jon, what are your earliest memories of music production? JV: “Do you remember Dance eJay? I think I was about 12 or 13 when I used that, and before that it was Magix Music Maker. It was running on my Compaq computer, which had a 250MB hard drive!
“Then I used a tracker to sequence General MIDI sounds, and then Sonic Foundry Acid came out.
“In 1999 I went to Manchester MIDI School. They were using Cubase, which I didn’t really get on with. To do my final project, I used to bounce stuff in stems from Cubase, take them home and mix them in Acid! It was a long way of working, but it worked for me. And then I got into recording bands and stuff like that using Acid as well. I had a PC setup with a proper old mixing desk with the instruments going into it.”
: What kind of music were you making and recording at that time? JV: “We used to listen to a lot of trance and happy hardcore, for our sins – they were quite big in the North West. Then I moved into house and techno, though I was probably more into listening to actual bands than house music. I was into people that were sounding like 80s stuff – like Les Rhythmes Digitales’ Darkdancer – and I was doing my own thing, which was kind of electronica, I guess. Fatboy Slim mixed with Badly Drawn Boy was how someone once described it.”
: How did you get into music, Ben? OC: “When I was 13, I had a friend in school who was a bit of a DJ, I watched him and thought it was amazing! So I started collecting vinyl and I’ve been doing it ever since. We were first into hard house and happy hardcore, then I switched to more housey stuff when I discovered David Morales.”
: How did you get involved with Jon? OC: “Jon has his own design agency. He printed the flyers for the club nights that I was promoting in our local town, and we got talking about music. He had a studio and I was DJing. We made a couple of tracks and tested them out at nights I was playing at. From there, Jon taught me the ropes producing and I taught him the ropes DJing. Ten years later, OC & Verde was formed!”
“We were first into hard house and happy hardcore, then I switched to more housey stuff”
: So your first tracks were created using Acid? JV: “Yeah, and from there I got a Mac setup with Logic, which I’d used on our friend’s computer before. It was linear in the same terms as Acid, so you could see what you wanted to do – it just couldn’t loop and get audio in time as easily.
“Once we got Logic going, it all seemed to click, because Logic was like a hybrid of Acid and Cubase. Acid was never very good with MIDI; we used to record from synths via audio, and obviously you couldn’t change it after that, so it was a very long, drawn-out process. When we went to Logic, everything was done in MIDI.”
In this exclusive tutorial and video, Jon and Ben break-down their massive track Solstice in Logic Pro X for your audio-visual pleasure. OC & Verde’s new EP, Navajo, is out now on Beatport.