Chasing the perfect setup
When we last interviewed Jeroen in
238, he excitedly revealed his plans to build a custom Amsterdam studio. Fastforward ten issues later, and he invited us back to the ‘Dam to check out his purpose-built room in the flesh.
: You’re obviously a big fan of outboard and modular gear. What is it about a modular synth setup that appeals to you as a techno producer? JV: It’s three and a half years since I started modular. I was still searching for a replacement for the Kurzweil K2500 – it can sample, has synthesis, has filters, envelopes, LFOs, all of which I can control and make a little bit of chaos out of. If you work in the software environment, there are so many possibilities that you never really finish anything – you always think, ‘But I can do this as well and I can do that as well!’
“I have a West Coast modular system with a sequencer, and I wondered if they had a sampler – I’m really a sampling kind of guy. I like to have the richness of the sample to start off with, but I like to deform the samples so you can’t hear where they’ve come from. When I saw you could get a modular sampler, I realised that modular was completely my thing! I finally got interested in ‘real’ hardware, after 24 years!”
: How does Bitwig Studio 2 fit into the picture? JV: Bitwig came along in that same period, so it was like a combined interest in Bitwig and modular. Christian Vogel did a package that you can download for Bitwig; his presets showed where you can go, and how deep you can go with that program. Everything fell into place.
“I’ve always wanted to have a Roland SH-101, and when I needed something to control my modular, I decided it was the time. From there, the Elektron Analog Rytm came along, and I started dusting off some stuff that I had from before, like a Casio RZ1… but the setup is still quite small.
“I was always using this Allen & Heath ZED-R16 as my console, so I could always run external gear through it, but I’m still searching for something to play live with comfortably.”
: What would a piece of hardware have to have to make it something that you would use in your live set? JV: “Endless encoders! What happens with the [Yamaha] SU700 – which is what I have used in the past – is that the filter will take off wherever you left it. In software, the filter takes off where the actual MIDI controller is positioned. I want an endless encoder which starts where the actual filter is, and not where my knob is. This communication is still almost impossible. I wanted to use Samsung Galaxy TabPro tablets, because they have a quad core processor and Windows 10. I imagined I’d just run two copies of Bitwig Studio with a controller, but I haven’t really got into it yet.”
: Did Maschine not give you exactly what you wanted? JV: “With Bitwig and the Maschine Jam, I was this close to having the SU700 feeling. I would run the sound from Maschine, and use the Jam to control it, but then I would switch to controlling Bitwig and use the filter in that, and they would go from where I touched the strip on the Jam, so that was really close to what I had with the SU700. It’s not quite the same, but you need to know what you’re doing anyway!”
: Do you think do you think you might go with the tablet approach at some point in the future? JV: “Yeah. I’m thinking about combining it together with the SU700. Bitwig now also has MIDI slave, so then I will probably connect the Arturia BeatStep Pro to Bitwig and also connect it to the SU700 because it has a drums channel. Then I can run a second row of samples from the BeatStep Pro to the SU700. I’m having so much fun with all this stuff at the moment, it’s unbelievable!”
“I’m having so much fun with all this stuff at the moment, it’s unbelievable!”