IN THE STUDIO WITH: Scuba

Hotflush boss Paul Rose – aka Scuba – gives us an insight into the studio essentials behind new album Caibu, his first full length under his SCB alias

Something of a dance music renaissance man, Paul Rose, burst on to the dubstep scene as Scuba in 2008 with incendiary debut album, A Mutual

Antipathy, launched via his own, Hotflush Recordings imprint. A slew of well received albums and EPs later, Rose has evolved beyond easy categorisation as witnessed on excellent new

Caibu, released under his club-focused SCB moniker, which highlights his deftness as a producer and purveyor of atmospheric electronics.

Album opener, Test Tubes, crackles into life and sets the scene for a sumptuous feast of reverbdrenched techno, compulsive beats and mesmeric synths. Having returned to London after decamping to Berlin in 2007, Rose set about accumulating some choice outboard gear to utilise his new studio space and the fruits of his endeavours are strewn all over Caibu. FM caught up with Paul in his London lair to talk hardware, internet radio and bursting free from the box.

With this being your debut album under the SCB moniker, did you set out to radically change your musical style?

“Well, I had about a year and a half where I was living in Spain, touring a lot and didn’t have a studio at all. What happened was that I moved back to London for the first time since 2007 and got myself a proper room with a vocal booth and a decent space. So, for the first time since my earliest days in music, I started investing in some actual machines! Initially, the reason I started releasing stuff as SCB was that I was just messing around with things and I wanted to do that with the pressure off slightly and fly under the radar a little with it. Because it was going back to making music in a way I hadn’t done for well over ten years, more improvisational, just hitting record and messing around with drum-machines, twiddling knobs then going back to the audio and seeing what it sounded like. It took a while, a long while, to actually get anything good. It was a lot of fun though and eventually I started to see it as a good way to present what had started to become a pretty coherent set of tracks. So, it gradually came together over the course of last year.”

So, the emphasis was more on having fun and jamming with the ideas rather than having set musical structures from the off?

“Yeah. Certainly initially. The first few Scuba releases I was using an E-MU ESI-4000, a Zip drive and one of those Yamaha 01V mixing-desks. I also had a couple of dodgy, cheapo compressors but I had no idea what I was doing with them, really. I went from that to being totally in the box. I think I made the switch in 2006, and was totally in the box until last year. It was a learning process. Not just sitting with a mouse clicking on the screen but the workflow I eventually developed was quite improvisational; what I tend to do is jam the structure of the track as a one-off… get a beat going, hit record and play around that for six minutes or whatever. That was a fast way of getting me a basic skeleton of the tune. Once I had that there was more jamming on top and messing around with synths like the Juno 60 I bought a few years back but hadn’t really used properly. One thing I bought that’s all over the new album is the Roland Space Echo, which sounds so good – it’s addictive!”

Funnily enough, one of the later questions we had was about how you got the wonderful, grainy delays on several of the tracks!

“There are some things that you can get really close to emulating with software, but I think with anything that involves a tape or a spring, they generally haven’t quite got there. The Space Echo is just fucking brilliant.”

Coming out of the box and back into a studio must’ve been a blank canvas; how did you choose what hardware gear you needed?

“I had the Juno 60 and I had a Roland SH-101, which was broken. One of the studios I had in Berlin, the bloke who had it before me left this 101 behind! It was totally knackered, but I’d never got around to getting it fixed. I finally managed to get it fixed and it’s just the best sounding synth I think I’ve ever heard. When I heard Elektron were discontinuing the original Machinedrum I got one of those just to have it. A lot of my purchases were just done on impulse, it’s not as if I was thinking ‘I’m going to build this amazing outboard studio’, it was just that I had a room for the first time and I was going to be there for a while, so I thought I’d best start accumulating some kit!

“So, I got the Machinedrum, which is great, and I got a Roland TR-8, which is obviously not the same as having an original 808 or 909 but they’re cool and if you process them in the right way they can sound great. The best solution I’ve found to treating the TR-8 is Thermionic Culture’s Culture Vulture. They’re built around valves and the one I’ve got is a little temperamental, but it’s quite cool that the left channel does a weird sort of stereo effect… sometimes it works perfectly and other times it does something different! Again, that’s the kind of random variable you don’t get with software.”

Hardware does kick up those lovely ‘happy accidents’ now and again doesn’t it?

“Absolutely. With the SH-101 I bought one of those Doepfer Dark Time sequencers, which is a brilliant bit of kit and, again, facilitates a completely different workflow than you have when you’re hunched over your laptop. You just find yourself flicking switches and twiddling knobs and before you know it, weird sounds are coming out. That was quite a key element in the album as well. I should also mention the cool spring reverb I got, which sounds totally different to the spring reverb on the Space Echo. It’s an old Japanese reverb called the Hawk HR-101 and that’s all over the album. It’s a proper spring but it’s

really clean whereas the spring on the Space Echo is dirty as hell, which is great for lots of things but then again sometimes you want things to sound just a little bit crisper.”

When you’re jamming out an idea with all of your vintage kit, what would you run it into?

“I recorded most of the stuff through a Thermionic Rooster preamp, which has a similar distortion capability as the Culture Vulture, but it’s dialled down a bit. You can add a bit of crunch to the signal but it’s significantly more restrained. Equally, you can get things sounding quite nice and smooth too, so everything is recorded through that into the box, where I mixed it with the help of various Universal Audio plugins.”

Are you running Ableton Live?

“No, I’ve always been a Cubase man. I dabble in Ableton and I admire the simplicity of it and the user-interface that’s intuitive in a way that Cubase sometimes isn’t, but when you’re used to working with something it’s hard to make that switch. With DAWs you can literally do everything with all of them, so it’s got to be down to what you’re most used to. The more barriers you put up for yourself, the less effective you’re likely to be.”

So, you’ve been using Cubase right from the word go?

“In around 2002 I had the E-MU sampler and the mixing desk with an ancient PC running Windows 95 and Cakewalk V4. Cakewalk being the predecessor to Sonar. I wasn’t really doing anything with it other than MIDI sequencing.”

…and now you’ve gone hardware again for your sequencing needs?

“With the Dark Time, I find as soon as you’re away from your computer screen then your brain just seems to work in a slightly different way and you go for things that you might not necessarily go for with a MIDI sequencer. The problem with a mouse or even if you’re using a controller keyboard is that you fall into patterns and it’s difficult to break out and do something new. When you introduce a random element or that element of chance and let your ears judge whether it’s good or not, that can really be the key sometimes.”

You’ve always struck us as someone who likes to push themselves into new directions, is that fair to say?

“Well, I do get restless quite quickly, so I do like to do different stuff. I think that at the start of last year I hadn’t really done any music for the best part of 18 months, so I was ready to do something that didn’t involve just sitting down hacking away at a MIDI keyboard and a mouse.”

The mouse remains an important but far from ideal way of inputting music, isn’t it?

“Absolutely… (laughs) it’s almost the exact wrong way to do it! It’s perfectly possible to do it well with a mouse but I think if you were going to design a way of making music then that wouldn’t be the way.”

Cutting back to your DAW, which version of Cubase are you on now?

“Since I’ve finished the album I’ve not upgraded to V9.5 but I was using V8 to do the album. I wasn’t really doing that much with it, just the occasional bit of MIDI triggering and, when I was mixing, it’s all audio, so I was adding the odd plugin and EQing mainly. The other thing I bought towards the end of the album, which I spent more money on than anything previously, was a Chandler Curve Bender, which immediately fell into the Juno 60 category of ‘gear I never want to get rid of’! I got it just before Christmas and it’s basically a mastering EQ so you’re not surgical and you’re not going in there to correct tiny little glitches but the broad-brush strokes you can make with it can just put a little something extra on everything.”

So, that was a timely purchase for the mixing process then?

“Totally. I actually had 20 tracks for the album when I initially sat down to mix and I EQ’d every single stem through the Curve Bender. It took almost a week (laughs) just to fucking EQ! By the end of it I felt like I never wanted to EQ anything again! When I listened to it all though it did sound good.”

Not everyone realises that exercising attention to detail with a good EQ can bring so much to electronic music?

“Absolutely. With digital sources even more so. That

“I hadn’t really done any music for the best part of 18 months, so I was ready”

said, the Chandler isn’t an easy bit of kit to put in your studio but I’m not going to make any apologies for buying it as I fucking love it!”

One of the many things FM loves about Caibu are the atmospheric sounds in the background of several tracks. How did you create those?

“There are no samples on the album so lots of those sounds came from the Juno 60 just using the Noise oscillator. Again, going through the Culture Vulture and the Space Echo. When I first started messing around with the tracks I was obsessed with everything being in mono and very into the mono reverb thing, which is a completely different sound to working with stereo reverb plugins and the width they give you. So, I liked the concept of everything being narrow, but I did move past that as the album advanced. What I found was that the combination of really narrow and really wide can get that nice effect, so you get a good contrast between the two extremes. With the Culture Vulture I’d have radically different settings for each channel, so you’d start off with something really narrow but it’s treated differently to give it a crazy, wide stereo image.”

So, the interesting results from your Culture Vulture and Chandler Curve Bender might’ve been because they weren’t initially intended for electronic music?

“There might be something in that, yeah. With the Culture Vulture, certainly, at the more extreme settings it does sound really off the wall. Like I said, when you start messing around with not duplicating the channels or getting the noise right up so it’s crunchy and crackly then it can sound cool. Again, in a way that might be much more difficult to achieve in the box.”

Do you have a desk anywhere in your workflow these days?

“Didn’t use a desk, no. What I’ve got is a Prism Sound Orpheus interface, which is great, and it’s got the preamps for recording in. For mixing, it was purely Cubase. I’ve been messing around with 9 and, to be honest, a lot of the new features won’t fit immediately into my workflow but things like the Sampler Track are very cool. That’s an easy, labour-saving device, and you wonder why it’s taken someone so long to think of it. The new layout looks pretty cool too. I’m not someone who goes massively deep on DAW features but the changes they’ve made seems to make a lot of sense.”

Does having your SCB Radio show give you a chance to test out new material?

“Not so much on the radio but DJing has always been a great way to try new things out. I was thinking about this the other day as I DJed less last year and a lot less this year just because I’ve done 10 years of hardcore travelling with it and I want to ease up. I was thinking about what not DJing at all would mean for me making music and it would be difficult. Not seeing and hearing my music in its proper context and taking it out in front of an audience would make it harder. Most people who are making music will maybe have a small number of trusted sources who they feel they can get honest feedback from but with an audience, there’s nowhere to hide. If you stick a new track on next to a track that you already know goes down well and it works, then you know you’re OK.”

What are the pros and cons of being a solo artist, do you find?

“That’s the good thing about having a decent studio space where you can invite people in. For the first time, last year, I spent a few days working with different people. Having never done it, it’s a really different thing to get your head around. I’ve thought about it a lot, as I do think you can get so much out of collaboration, especially collaborating in person. The collaborations I’ve done so far have all been done remotely by sending stems back and forth. But when you’re sitting down next to someone, it’s a different thing altogether. It’s almost analogous to the audience as when you’re jamming around with something on your own, it’s very easy to be extraordinarily self-indulgent but when there’s someone else there it focuses the mind, I’ve found it can lead you into places you might not have ordinarily gone. It’s definitely something I want to do more of, for sure.”

Similar question for your Hotflush imprint: what are the pros and cons of having your own label?

“Well, for me, it’s a very good thing as I don’t react well to being told what to do (laughs). Funnily

“There are no samples on the album, the atmospheric sounds came from the Juno”

enough, I was reading about various artists complaining about the lack of control they have, and the perceived bad behaviour of record labels and it just got me thinking. The idea has generally been that if you sign to an indie label you’ll get a lot more control than if you sign to a major label but obviously it doesn’t always work like that. A record label is a business, which is trying to make money and ultimately you don’t have creative control if someone at the label doesn’t think you’re going to make them money.

“So, really, the only way to guarantee yourself creative control, whoever you are, is by not signing a record deal. I don’t think there’s any way around that. There was a time, a few years back, where I was considering signing a deal and I’m really glad that I didn’t. Going forward I don’t see how doing that would be good for me. If anything, I feel it would be bad for me in terms of the creative process.”

Do you want to mention any bits of hardware or software that you used on the album that we haven’t touched on yet?

“I’m just having a look around the studio. I did use an old Korg MiniPops drum-machine. I had a lot of fun going from the MiniPops, into the Space Echo then into the Culture Vulture. With two of the tracks on the album, the initial jamming to get the structure of the song, was just done with that. The MiniPops just sounds amazing. And I love the fact you can’t change the beat (laughs). Now that’s what you call freedom!”

Any other choice hardware currently on the wish-list?

“The problem with buying gear is that the project is never done! There’s never enough money and never enough rack space. What I didn’t have is a really good outboard compressor. I considered several different options for that and the reason I ended up not getting one was that I was saturating everything so much going in that when I was mixing, I needed the flexibility you get from plugin compressors as it’s all so fluid. So, the compressor I ended up using most was the new Universal Audio EL8 Distressor, which is excellent. I’ve used the UA Studer A800 on everything since about 2011 as it’s great too. So, next on the kit-list is an eye-wateringly expensive hardware compressor, I guess! (Laughs). Hopefully this album does well so I can afford one.”

Will all the vintage synths and hardware be going out live with you if you tour Caibu?

“I’ve been in the process of planning a live show for this for ages and it keeps changing! I love the idea of doing it, but when confronted with the practicalities, I get cold feet and change my mind again.”