Producer Masterclass THROTTLE

Australia’s hottest dance music export shows us how he makes big room anthems, and dispenses some tasty production tricks in the process

The up-n-coming EDM boss from down-under shows us how he built up Piñata in Ableton Live

Going in full Throttle

With millions of YouTube views and some impressive remix credits including Ed Sheeran, Aluna-George and Earth, Wind & Fire, Spinnin’ Records signee Throttle (aka Robbie Bergin) has already had an incredible career despite having his first release as recently as 2012. We met up with the rising star at Red Bull Studios Amsterdam during Amsterdam Dance Event 2017 to discuss his love of music making and find out what went into creating his hugely-popular collaboration with Niko The Kid, Piñata.

: How did you get into production? RB: I started in the DJ world as a lot of young kids do. I was 13, I started listening to dance music through Ministry of Sound CDs, and I became interested in how the music never stopped, how these compilations were one or two hours of just continuous music. I was always trying to work out where one song started and the other ended, and that kind of sparked interest in mixing, which then led to doing mash-ups and things where I could combine different songs on my computer.”

: What software did you use for those early mash-ups? RB: “When I started it was Garage-Band, which is the slowest thing ever to do mash-ups in! Then it was Virtual DJ, which is similarly slow, and then into Ableton Live eventually.”

: How long did it take you to properly get into Live? RB: “A couple of years at least. I was D-Jing house parties for about six months to a year, and that was my main focus over production. Then I switched my focus to learning production, but I probably gave up five or six times in the process of learning Live.”

: How come? RB: “Just because it’s such a steep curve – diving into production off the back of something like Virtual DJ, which is so easy to learn. It would have been a year before I actually got the basics down.”

: How did you manage to learn so quickly, and what kept you coming back? RB: “I think it was just the curiosity to create. There were a lot of young producers at the time coming up: Madeon was the main one, who was 16 at the time; he was coming up, and I was 14, I think. Just seeing that made me realise I could do it, but it was just so hard at the start – there was a lot of hesitation towards doing it. I think I’ve just always wanted to make music, and I think that kept drawing me back. The process of learning was just YouTube for me, really. I mean, I was just a kid in Australia – it wasn’t like I grew up in the Netherlands and went to dance music school! I just watched YouTube videos and bought all the music magazines, that’s how I learned.”

: Who were your influences back then, and what style of music were you making? RB: “Madeon was the biggest one as far as getting me into production. I really looked up to him as a producer, as far as the quality of his productions, and sonically a lot of the stuff he was doing I was chasing, which was quite synthesised; really nice-sounding synths. After Madeon, I was looking at guys like Daft Punk and Calvin Harris’ early stuff – both the I Created Disco and I’m Not Alone sort of sounds. So that was where I started, somewhere in between Madeon and the early pop Calvin.”

“I switched my focus to production, but I probably gave up five or six times in the process of learning Live”

: So the more commercial end of house music? RB: “Yeah, plus Porter Robinson too, and early Skrillex, so I was kind of trying to do the complextro thing – that was the first genre I tried to make: complextro, kind of in between Porter, Skrillex, Madeon and Calvin. So there was always a commercial element about my music, but also trying to push the boundaries sonically.”