THE TRACK: Reset Robot, Guitar Man
The UK tech-house producer breaks down his melodic track in Reason
Truesoul, 2014
With a hundreds of production credits dating back to the early noughties, Dave Robertson is a bona fide house music veteran. Since 2009, he’s been working under the guise of Reset Robot, delivering a slew of slamming tech-house bangers released on labels such as Suara, Truesoul and Excentric Muzik. We caught up with Dave in his Southsea studio to find out how he created the epic, atmospheric Guitar Man from his 2014 album Let Your Soul Outside.
What was the initial idea behind Guitar Man?
“It’s difficult to say what the idea behind it was. I don’t think I necessarily start with a clear vision. Once the FM organ sound was in there, things started to move quite quickly. The final version was version seven. It went through an evolution – I normally sort of change the kick drum about fifteen times and stuff like that.”
You use a sample of a child’s xylophone on the track, and it sounds great!
“I just wanted to try and get something a bit more natural going on on top of those synthesized bells. It’s so easy to open up another synth, but with sampling a real instrument, you’re always going to get something a little bit different, it’s not in tune properly at all! I was hitting it with a bit of a stick out of the kitchen or something. So yeah, you’re always going to get a bit of texture in there that makes it sound a little bit different.”
There’s also a long breakbeat section where the track crescendos. That’s pretty different for tech-house too.
“I don’t know what made me search for those breaks. I think I just wanted something different in that end section that made it stand out a little bit, and kind of flipped the track on its head. I could have maybe programmed a breakbeat with the house drums, but I don’t think it would have had the same effect. If you just heard that section, you’d probably have no idea that it had been a tech-house track!”
Were you not tempted to make it a little more DJ-friendly?
“There were already five or six standard club tracks on the album, so I was able to just go ‘Right, well this one’s not going to have a mixable end on it’, and that was fine because I wanted to experiment a little more.”
Did you find that the unorthodox arrangement made it difficult to get support from other DJs?
“I think it just got support from different people, and a lot of my friends really like that track, and they wouldn’t normally listen to my music!”
Did you make any changes to it after you’d played it out for the first time?
“Definitely, yeah. I changed the kick drum and developed those synthesized bells a lot more, added a few more layers in because I initially only had one layer, and I just felt that it needed more depth. It needed to sound quite mellow, but still big.”
The track was all made in your home studio?
“I just moved into this studio recently – before that I was in a shed in the garden, and that’s where I did Guitar Man. I’ve only been in
“There were already five or six standard club tracks on the album, so I was able to just go, ‘Right, well this one’s not going to have a mixable end on it’, and that was fine because I wanted to experiment a little bit more.”
this new studio for about four weeks. I was in that shed for eight years, so I knew the sound of it like the back of my hand. I’m still getting to grips with the new room, and now I’ve got to battle with myself because I’m hearing frequencies that I didn’t hear before in the tracks!”
Reason seems to be a more unusual choice these days.
“That’s just what I started using, and I didn’t ever feel like I needed to do anything else. I just like the way it works, the way it looks, and the interface is nice and easy to use.”
Where do you get your sounds from?
“I use a lot of samples, a lot of these bog standard sample packs that are around, but I cut them up and use little hits out of them and stuff. A guy that’s making really good ones runs a website called Raw Loops. I use those packs on a daily basis because I engineer for a lot of people as well. People want quick results, they want a finish track at the end of the day, so to have access to these really good quality sounds is priceless for me.” Thanks Dave! Reset Robot’s latest release The Mask of Sanity is out now on Truesoul.