Mumbai inspiration

Red Bull have run a series of videos and podcasts where high profile musicians from around the world – including, coincidentally, Bomba Estéreo (also in this issue) – capture local sounds and talk about their influences. Sandunes was asked to do one in her native Mumbai and to ‘take the chaotic sounds of the metropolis and meld them into a cohesive soundscape’. So impressive are the results that you can download a free sample pack of the experience from the Ableton website, as well as watching the full episode at Red Bull’s – both of which are fascinating insights into the Sandunes world and the Mumbai cityscape itself.

Sanaya told Ableton: “I’ve never really made a piece of music entirely from found sound, so this was definitely a new process. I expected to gather a lot of different textural and rhythmic information but I didn’t quite expect it to all be so usable or musical! The process of actually looking for sound in a relatively ‘normal’ environment has definitely changed the way I hear things in my city. I feel like my listening has gotten re-activated in a way that I didn’t foresee.”

stabiliser as we’ve been working out of spaces with super frequent power outages.”

To the software…

And as eclectic as that list of hardware is,

Sanaya is just as passionate about her plugins, revealing a varied set of top used apps on the Sandunes drive.

“I tend to use Soundtoys Little AlterBoy on things other than voice,” she begins, “and I find the results are almost always pleasantly surprising. On Nowhere To Stand, I wound up creating vocal samples from my collaborators in almost every song, tweaking the pitch and formant controls on Little AlterBoy for some great results.”

There are a couple of favourite – and possibly over-used synths too. “I use Live 11 and these days my template for writing has several instances of Arturia’s Prophet V in it. I find it is a great starting point as the way it emulates the actual instrument is super inspiring, especially for laying down chords. I’ve even found myself swapping actual horn samples for the brassy sounding patches on it! I’d recommend it for anyone that plays synths and needs to work in the box.”

“Then there’s TAL-U-NO-LX,” Sanaya adds. “For a while it was my workhorse but I’ve only just stopped using it, for fear of overuse! I’m a huge fan of the Juno-60, and while this doesn’t really come close, it has a quality that seems to sit nicely in a mix with some saturation, usually by way of Soundtoys Decapitator.”

Back to effects and Valhalla’s VintageVerb is the Sandunes go-to reverb… for now: “I have it set up as the first send on my template. I love the plates on it, especially the 1980’s colour. I will usually route synths, vocals and even drums to it. More recently though, I have started to swap it out for FabFIlter’s Pro R.”

And FabFIlter get another inclusion with Saturn as Sanaya explains: “As a producer, I have only recently gotten into distortion in a big way and Saturn has a lot to do with it! An extremely versatile workhorse and a powerful sonic