Till von Sein & Tigerskin
Watch as the German producers break down the creation of their track Dance
Between them, German producers Till von Sein and Tigerskin (aka Alexander Krüger, also known under the alias Dub Taylor) have amassed an impressive back catalogue of classically-minded House releases. Dance, taken from the pair’s Arkansas EP, which was released at the end of last year, is the latest in a line of drum-machine driven collaborative cuts from the two artists. We caught up with the pair at Krüger’s hardware-stuffed studio in Berlin
to find out how the track came together.
Classic foundations
Till von Sein: “When we did this early last year, everything I listened to on Beatport was going in pretty much the same direction. It was all Hip-Hop samples with weird basslines on top that don’t even fit, plus everything was super clean and polished. So I thought, let’s just do an EP which is the total opposite. Dirty, raw, kind of classic House music. That’s where we both match – old House music.”
Tigerskin: “That’s what we usually do when we start working on something new like an EP – we just look at what nobody is doing. It’s pretty boring if you just do what everybody else does. So we look for something that we could do that we both like, that nobody else does at the moment.”
Synths and samples
TvS: “I did the bassline with the Moog plug-in, and bounced the audio file. That’s how the track started. It’s super simple.”
TS: “He came with the bassline then we just thought, let’s put 909s and 707s over it and distort everything. We found a sample, I don’t even know where we took it from, some Hip-Hop track probably…” TvS: “I can tell you, it’s Rakim; nobody else has a voice like him.” TS: “It was in a folder I got from a friend. That’s the vocal; we just put it on the keyboard and transposed it a little bit. I use Kontakt a lot for samples. I use basically only Native Instruments plug-ins when it comes to synthesizers and samplers because, Reaktor, for instance, you can load all sorts of stuff into it – reverbs, synthesizers, whatever. You can build your own stuff or get stuff from the library where everybody puts their stuff. So you’ve got everything there, every sound you can possibly imagine – except good drums, I still can’t find any good drums in there.”
Less is more
TS: “If I take the bassline, vocal and cowbell out, there’s not really that much left except drums. It’s very basic. If you listen to old school Chicago House it’s usually just a bassline, a string on top and a vocal sample or something, and that’s all there is. Everything else they did was just a question of arrangement. They’d just arrange things on top of each other, and that’s what we did as well, I guess.
“The track is basically a little bit of 707, a little bit of 808 as well, all mixed together. It’s all really dirty too; we put a lot of analogue distortion on the drums. For the clap, we recorded two
lines, one for the left side and one for the right, to have a weird stereo effect. Then the cowbell – it’s from the 808, and we just put that through the ring modulator and tweaked it. We had a lot of fun doing that track.”
Let it be
TS: “With this track we didn’t do that much after we recorded the drums. I record everything into a mixer and then into the soundcard, so I tweak it in the mixer. Sometimes it’s too much, sometimes you have to find the right frequencies for four different hi-hats, but in the end we don’t do that much when it’s recorded. We’ll add a little bit of reverb, a little bit of equalising, but not really much.
“The drum machines sound good already, so there’s not much you need. For the bass drums you need a little bit of extra sub bass, or for the hi-hats a little of whatever frequency makes them shine, but apart from that it’s pretty much done. There’s not much compression on this track.
“I send all the parts out of the computer and mix them externally again, so that if something is not right, I can tweak it at the back end. I use a TF Pro mixer that I got a couple of years ago for summing.”