The Nextmen talk tech
When it comes to the gear side of things, Rudeboy draws on a spectacular mash-up of digital and analogue effects. With Nextman Brad having edited the audio tracks into shape, Toby took the at-thatpoint-entirely-in-the-box project to the studio of revered Brit dub producer Mike Pelanconi – aka Prince Fatty – and pushed everything through his enviable collection of vintage outboard, with the aim of hybridising the sound. The results were unexpected, as Brad and Dom explain… BB: “We ended up running it through Prince Fatty’s SSL console and all his old analogue stuff, and it just didn’t sound as good as in the box. So all we used from those sessions were the effects – his spring, his tape delays, etc. We wanted to sum it through his console and use various bits of compression and stuff to see if it would give it an edge, but that didn’t happen – this has the edge; the UAD stuff sounded better.” DS: “All of it was in the box, mixed at Brad’s place. He’d been getting a really good mix sound for a while using Logic, Apollo interfaces and Adam monitors. He was sending these great mixes back. There’s a real depth to the mix, really strong; Brad was really concentrating on it.” : What are your go-to UAD plugins? BB: “On this project, mainly the Galaxy Tape Echo, just for the spring reverb, the 1176 suite, the EMT140 plate… just very standard bits. The 1176 is absolutely invaluable – the newer one, although even the legacy one is still really good for certain things. I find for backing vocals, the original UAD 1176 is still really good. I run out of DSP really quickly, though, cos the technology’s old… it’s annoying. But for me, those plugins make the difference.” DS: “I think there’s a psychological thing with them as well, cos they have the real names. It’s a bit like FIFA, the football game, where you get the real players, vs Pro Evo, where you don’t. Pro Evo might be just as good a game, but most people want to play with Ronaldo and the big names. You can actually say with UAD, ‘I’m going to put a Teletronix on it’. You’re not doing it but you can say you are, cos it says it on the plugin. I think there’s a bit of business psychology going on there.” BB: “I’ll put the UAD 1176 on a vocal, then I’ll try the Slate Digital one, then maybe a CLA one from Waves or whatever, and I’ll end up using the one that sounds best. Sometimes that isn’t the UAD one – it depends on the source material. But quite often, I’ll go for the UAD one. I want to have all of them, though, so that when I use different ones in different parts of a mix, it just sounds better – different tones.” DS: “There are some manufacturers who have reached the same heights, like FabFilter. You talk to producers generally, and they really like UAD, particularly for vocals, and then they always say FabFilter second, and Soundtoys.” BB: “You have to have Soundtoys.” DS: “And Logic’s own stuff! It’s a bit heavyhanded, but their new reverb, ChromaVerb, is incredible. Stupidly good! As soon as I switched it on, I started going through the vintage presets, and was like, ‘You what?!’ It was like ValhallaVerb – that moment. Everyone uses that, too, don’t they? Things have really come on in the box. There’s always that argument about splitting things up, headroom and stuff, but I don’t give a s**t any more: if it’s in the box and it sounds good, it sounds good.
“And the time thing, especially when you’re jobbing producers like us, working across so many things. You don’t want to be recalling a desk. We used to work on an Yamaha O2R. Everyone used to slag it off, but we actually loved it, because you could save everything.”
: You’re both Logic users… DS: “Yep, Logic does absolutely everything for me. It doesn’t feel like it’s missing anything. I think Ableton [Live] looks incredible, but I just haven’t sat down for long enough with it. When I do, I don’t know what’s going on, because it’s such a different way of working with the clips and stuff. I’m very born of a live direction, really, but I really want to get into it, because I know it’s a very fast workflow that people talk about all the time, and that they love. I’ve been in sessions with producers who are using Ableton, and it’s been so fast.
“Let’s be honest: anything that gets out of the way of your workflow is a good thing! Plugins used to be behemoths – and a lot of them still are – but then there’s the rise of this ‘one-knob’ stuff, and they’re brilliant. That’s what we want, isn’t it? I want something that does one job really well, and I trust it and I know exactly what it’s going to do. I don’t want to have to do an A-level in the algebraic way that something works.
“Interestingly, it was the same back in the day, when we used hardware samplers. Even though Akais sounded so strong and so cold, I found them algebraic to use, so I was an E-mu user – we did all the early Nextmen stuff on E-mu samplers. They were warmer, and easier, and there was a waveform on the screen. What you don’t want to be doing is just looking at numbers.” TD: “We’re all doing so many different projects that we sort of had to do it like this,
“Anything that gets out of the way of your workflow is a good thing!”
but that also helped us to keep the sound in a sort of box of its own.”
cm: Do you ever miss the sound of all those old machines?
DS: “I do. I’ve got my E6400 at home, and I wired it up just before Christmas. I thought, ‘This is going to be great’, but then I realised how far we’d come in terms of ease of workflow. When you go back to that, it is slow.
“We can go back much further, in fact. The first sampler I used and made records with was the first sampler Roland ever made: the Roland S-10. It had one second of sampling time at full res, one output and four banks; so you had a second to divide up between a kick, a snare, a hi-hat and maybe some percussive element, all coming out of one output. The limitation was insane, and we had to get those sounds just right. That’s the negative of today’s situation: limitation breeds creativity. It’s a cliché, but it’s absolutely true.”
cm: True dat. As producers, we’re so overfurnished these days, with plugins getting more powerful and feature-packed by the year, that it can be hard to maintain focus on the music itself…
DS: “If in doubt, take it out. When you’re making a beat, something I always keep in my head is that 25% of the sonic is going to be taken up by a vocalist. So I can’t finish the beat and turn it into a fully-fledged instrumental, cos there’ll be no room for them. So I’m always thinking, get it 75% full. Then, ideally, what you want is a situation where the beat’s up and running and there’s not too much going on – four elements, maybe – and if you put one more thing in, it’s too much, and if you take one thing out, you’ve lost it. That’s when you’ve got that balance. It’s hard to achieve, but there are some producers out there that seem to nail it.
“Mr Bangladesh, who did Lil Wayne and Rihanna – I just don’t understand how he gets so much power out of three things in a beat. How does he do it? Producers like that get the kick and snare in, which is fairly simple, but then, rather than a hi-hat, they find something interesting to do that job: a vocal thing or something that doesn’t make sense. For me, that’s the critical difference when you’re finding your sound as a producer – it’s essentially the hi-hat. Everyone uses 808s, everyone uses claps and snaps, and once you’re using those, if you stick a hi-hat in there, it’s gonna sound like everyone else’s beat.” cm: How do The Nextmen feel about using sounds from sample libraries and the like, in general? Would you consider yourselves audio snobs?
DS: “Not at all, no. I find it really strange when you see people moaning about it. When you see someone on YouTube, going, ‘Look, I’ve found the loop that so-and-so used in their Number One hit – this is so lazy!’. No it’s not, they made a really good record out of it! The bassline from the chorus of a Plan B track I’ve done, which might be a single in the future, is from Splice. I put it in and he was like, ‘That sounds really good’. And I was like, ‘But it’s from Splice, we should probably cut it up a bit’, and he said, ‘No, no, leave it as it is’.
“I use Splice all the time now, because it’s amazing. The way you can just drag and drop into your session, I can be up and running more quickly than ever. And you can always replace sounds – I do adjust them. It’s about inspiration, isn’t it? Inspiration can come from anything.”
BB: “When you have a bit of a history of making music using samples, like we do, using Splice is just like that: it’s the new version of digging for samples.”
DS: “Some of the packs are so good, but I do try and only take one or two things from a pack, cos otherwise you’re making their beat again. And even if it sounds brilliant, I always think, ‘no, someone else is going to have done this’. But even that’s only really the same as two producers who are sampling the same 70s funk record, I suppose.”