Producer Masterclass

WILKINSON

The DnB hitmaker shows you his track-building techniques on video

Wilkinson’s word

From filthy club bangers such as Moonwalker to catchy radio jams including the Top Ten smash hit Afterglow and his recent collaboration with Sub Focus, Take It Up, Mark Wilkinson knows how to make drum ’n’ bass productions that push all the right buttons. We caught up with him at his studio in leafy south-west London to find out how he creates his massive tracks, and hear about his unexpected signing to Ram Records.

: What are your first memories of getting interested in making music? MW: “I got into the idea of playing the drums when I was a kid. I just loved the idea of that instrument in a band: you just hit stuff and it makes a really loud, offensive noise! I started playing around with stuff like Pringles cans and things like that, and after a while my parents got me a drum kit, which was great.

“I joined my local community band, which allowed me to learn a little bit more. I was having drum lessons and learning about performing music. We’d do little shows with the band, and my mate Tom was involved too. He played guitar, and, funnily enough, now he plays guitar in my live shows, which is cool. We used to do loads of weird gigs, local fairs – anything that was put on by the local council. I really got into it, and when I reached my teenage years, I discovered electronic music. I was listening to a lot of hip-hop and I was always quite keen to figure out how people made songs. I discovered the sort of hip-hop I was listening to was using a lot of funk samples, and when I found out about breakbeats, I was like, ‘This is cool. What happens if I try and make something with that break?’”

: So how did that experimentation with breaks start to happen? MW: “At school, they said, ‘Does anyone want to do this thing? It’s called music technology, and basically you’re going to go to this college after school to learn how to do it’. I was like, ‘This sounds terrible… going to learn more after school?’ But it actually looked pretty cool, so I went, but it was so basic. It was on Cubase and it had these really basic piano sounds. Then you’d have a drum machine that wasn’t really even a 909 or an 808. We’d just try to make beats, and it fascinated me – you’re trying to route things in certain ways and trying to just make it work. We’d sit there for hours trying to make some tunes. It sparked something in me that made me want to pursue it a little bit more in my own time and get a computer.

“[Propellerhead] Reason came out and it looked really cool: it had all these cables you’d pull in and out of the back, so I bought it and was sticking cables in different places – I didn’t know what I was doing! – and made some ‘sounds’. So I got a drum loop and tried to make DnB, which was more like 150bpm jungle.

“I was getting breakbeats and looping them up. Then you could wire a breakbeat into a distortion effect. I was losing hours of my day fully engrossed in it – I got really

“I got into the idea of playing the drums when I was a kid. I just loved the idea of that instrument”

addicted to it and really wanted to be good at it.”

: What prompted the move away from Reason to Logic and Live? MW: “I was constantly looking up what producers used. I saw people using Ableton and started playing around with that. Then I was like, ‘Well, these DnB guys, some of them use Cubase and Logic’, so I thought I’d better get myself a Mac. So I saved up while working in a garden centre seven days a week and bought a Mac with Logic.”