Features INTERVIEW
Camo & Krooked talk Bitwig Studio at ADE 2018
Austrian DJ/production duo Reinhard ‘Camo’ Reitsch and Markus ‘Krooked’ Wagner have shaped a unique sound within the drum ’n’ bass scene by incorporating house, minimal techno, electro and disco influences into the 170bpm framework.
At Amsterdam Dance Event 2018, Reinhard and Markus presented an hour-long Studio XL masterclass, showcasing their new-found passion for Bitwig Studio 2 and its place in their studio and stage setups. caught up with the duo after their presentation to discuss their love for all things Bitwig, and get the lowdown on their live show.
Computer Music: You guys have fully switched to Bitwig Studio 2, then? Reinhard Reitsch:
“We have! It was an almost endless search for the right program. We tried Bitwig four years ago and it seemed… well, all right, but wasn’t quite there for us, as it’d only just been released.”
: So version 2 was the real game-changer? Markus Wagner:
“So much, seriously. Though if there was one more thing I wish for, it’d be the online collaboration feature they said they’re going to build in at some point – then it’ll be next-level. Once we can work on one project at the same time from our two different studios… that’ll be the biggest game-changer for us!”
: Tell us about the custom MIDI controller you use for your live shows. RR:
“We needed a centrepiece – something to make our live show stand out from others. We’re really inspired by all those techno guys like Stephan Bodzin, who have these amazing MIDI controllers that carry their whole show. So our main pieces of kit are the Moog Sub 37 synth and this custom-made MIDI controller.”
: Who built the controller? RR:
“I built it in SketchUp first. We tried to figure out what we need on there, because once it’s built, you can’t go back! You don’t want to be like, ‘Oh no, it’s missing this or that.’ So we’d rather have too much on there than not enough. A friend of mine has this little synth shop in Vienna; a pop-up modular synth shop. He said, ‘You know what? I’m really into the idea, and I think I can do it for you guys’. So he built it exactly the way we wanted it, and he did a really good job. That was the first time he’d made a MIDI controller, so that was a new experience for him as well. It’s pretty epic, I have to say! We’re actually in touch with the guy who made Bodzin’s MIDI controller, and he was like, ‘Holy s**t! Your controller is f**king epic!’ But that guy’s on a different level – he works for Bosch.”
MW: “The main problem is always transportability. If it’s not built exactly right, it’s fragile. You don’t want to step up on stage and then some knobs are not working, or broken or twisted. There’s so much that can go wrong, but luckily, it’s great – it works every single time.”
: For your live show, do you run MIDI live as you play? Are you dropping in other people’s tunes as well? RR:
“No, it’s all our own tunes. That was our idea: to only perform our own music, so we can do our own thing.”
MW: “Yeah, all the synths are triggered via MIDI from the computer. Otherwise we have 20 different synths running, and it wouldn’t work. We stem out parts from our tracks – drums, mids, synths, etc – then we play missing elements over the top. So for example, if the backing track is only drums, then we play bass and mids on top. Often, we modulate synth parameters in real time. Other times, we play in melodics with a keyboard. And for other tunes in the set, when there are no drums happening, we play in the kick and clap on the SPD-SX, and some percussion. So it depends on the tune, but the main idea was to get that live, techno feel by modulating synths and building them up until
the drop, but then actually dropping them in quite a subtle way.”
: What about producers starting with Bitwig, or those switching from another DAW? What would your advice be? MW:
“If you’re switching from Ableton Live, you’re good to go. You’ll figure out that there’s so much you can do with it. I think it’s intuitive, because you can either work with clips like Ableton, or work in a linear arrangement, like we do – the old-school way!”
RR: “And you can use it with two screens, or use it with a touchscreen. We have it across two screens. On one screen is the mixing console, and the other one is the arrangement window – that works really well for us. I have to say, it’s super intuitive. If you’re new to making music, well, you’ll always have to learn the basics, but once you figure that out, it’s really easy to get into it. It took us about three weeks to get into it and become confident with it. Other DAWs can take half a year or more to learn!”
MW: “We’re faster now, because we know our way around. When you try out all the DAWs, they’re hard, and you just figure it out – everything is kind of the same, just with a different vision.”
: So when playing live, you guys load in all your instruments and devices, then flip between chains on the fly? RR:
“Yeah, the Instrument and Effect Selectors are one of the coolest things about Bitwig Studio 2, especially for our live show. In other DAWs, the plugins you’re not using will still eat your processing power, but with this feature, you can have 20 huge chains ready to go, switch through them, and only the active one will use CPU. Plus, say you have a chain containing a synth, and then you have some reverbs and delays in the chain, the tail of the reverb and delay will carry over, and Bitwig will only turn off everything once the sound has ended – even if it’s on the same track, the tails won’t cut off. That’s why we can add three times the amount of plugins in Bitwig than we can in another DAW, because it stores them in a kind of ‘hiatus’ until the sound gets through it again. It’s really cool!”
: You mentioned your musical output. You say you don’t release as many records as other producers, and spend more time on each track? MR:
“Yeah. Our sound is very polished. I think a lot of artists today will release music every week, and hope one of every five tunes they release will resonate with fans. We don’t like that – we want to be 100% happy about everything that we put out. We have really high standards when it comes to ideas and sounds. I think that’s the reason why we don’t make that much music – we’re like, ‘OK, we’ve done that in the past, and it’s been done to death, so we need to do something fresh’. It’s hard to reinvent our sound all the time and still maintain a high standard.”
: So how do you not get bored of making tracks if you spend a longer period of time on each? What do you do in order to keep the process fresh? RR:
“We always try a different approach for each record. And we don’t listen to drum ’n’ bass at home; I think that’s the most important thing for us. We get inspired by everything outside the DnB realm: techno, ‘sophisticated’ electronic music… anything, really.”
MW: Sometimes a studio session doesn’t work out, so you just have to scrap everything – but you’ll still learn something while you’re there, and can save individual ideas out for later use. It helps us a lot, because if you’ve created something that might not work in that particular project, you can just drag it straight over into another session. It can feel like a ‘modular’ way of putting a tune together. Now I’m like, ‘I made a snare two days ago; I’ll just try it’ – even if it’s some little change-up or fill for the end of the eighth- or 16th-bar, you just drag it in and it’s there. And we really hate bouncing stuff to audio!
: Yes, there wasn’t a lot of audio in the project you demoed – mainly lots of live MIDI. RR:
“We want to be as flexible as possible until the very end of the process. That’s really important to us. However, there are those times when you don’t need to change anything anymore, and you’re happy with it – then you bounce it.”
: The C&K sound has evolved over the years. Where will you be heading next, musically speaking? MW:
“Whatever makes us happy in the studio, really. We’ve always made a little bit of everything, because that’s what we want to do. People think we went ‘minimal’, but we always made bangers on the side, too. When we think we want to go ‘soft’, we then get the urge to make something a little bit harder; something more banging.”
RR: “It always depends on what we’re inspired by in the moment. One day we wake up and we’re like, ‘I really feel like doing this,’ and the next day we have the complete opposite feeling! It’s always hard to tell, but I think we found our sound that we can apply to a lot of subgenres, and it still sounds like Camo & Krooked. I think that’s the key about doing what we like: just applying our touch to everything. That’s why we did the Mefjus remix – we thought we could add our touch to it, and it’s worked out really well. That’s something that we wouldn’t have done if it was an original track of ours; since it’s a remix, it gave us the freedom to add the C&K magic. We never know where music will take us!” Mefjus – Pivot (Camo & Krooked Remix) is out now on Vision Recordings soundcloud.com/camokrooked facebook.com/CamoKrooked twitter.com/CamoKrooked
“We always try a different approach for each record”