Sound Design practices
When it comes to choosing your sounds, and your synth patches, how much sound design do you get into?
“It changes, you know. There’s some synthesisers that I just don’t understand. Sometimes I wish I did, and sometimes I think it doesn’t really matter. For whatever reason, I just don’t have the interest or the attention span to really dive in and get to know something. Particularly something that has a lot of menu diving. I can’t get excited about that. The Blofeld’s a bit like that. We got a Juno-60 really, really cheap, early on, when we were doing the band. It’s so easy to do stuff with that, to make something straightaway. I really appreciated that, so I use the Arturia version quite a lot now.
“I did a remix for an act called TVAM last year, and I had just got the latest Arturia collection. I opened up the Juno and I was just like: ‘presets, what we got?!’. And it just instantly sounded good. Within that, I then sort of play around with it. I really go in with a specific idea of what I want it to sound like. Sometimes I’ll hear something on a record and go, ‘how do I get that?’. Something like the CS-80, or that Moog Modular plugin, I can spend hours just trying to follow the patching on those and not really understand how it works.
“I mean, I’ve got an MS-20 Mini at home, I barely understand how that’s put together, you know? Even though it’s written on it what each thing is. It really depends. Sometimes, if I’m really into it, I’ll sit there and really work on something until I get it sounding right. But most of the time I’ll approximate it and then
I’ll play with it later if it doesn’t do what I want it to.
“Using softsynths, you’re always looking to other plugins to do the thing that makes it sound big. The reason people love using hardware, a lot of the time, is because it just sounds good straightaway. You plug it in, and it’s got a sound. But with softsynths and software, often you’re compensating for the fact that the initial sound isn’t as good as you want it to be. So you’re having to add a ton of saturation or width or whatever it is, to try and make it sound good. I’m sure for the purists out there, I’ve just massively minimised how difficult it is to make something sound good in the hardware world. But that seems to be my perception of it.”