IN THE STUDIO WITH: Noisia

The Dutch trio are soon to return to the fray with a brilliant new album, Outer Edges. FM visit them in their high-tech lair and try not to succumb to a severe case of studio envy

The very day this issue of FM hits the streets, Noisia will be dropping their, until now, closely-guarded secret announcement of masterful new album, Outer Edges. FM have stayed tight-lipped about the new album’s release, despite our recent trip to the band’s state-of-the-art, custom-designed, new(ish) recording HQ located in the band’s home town of Groningen to speak with Noisia: Thijs de Vlieger, Nik Roos and Martijn van Sonderen. From album opener, The Approach, through Into Dust and the sublime adrenaline-rush of Mantra, Outer Edges showcases three producers/ sound designers pushing the envelope of bass music and sound design to the next level… and beyond! It really is that good! Suffice to say Noisia’s large, loyal following are going to love it!

Having previously visited Noisia in their old Groningen studio, it was a joy for FM to experience their new studio space(s) first-hand and find out how the new environs have impacted on their music and allowed them space to grow as producers. So, without further ado (and glossing over the severe case of studio envy), FM took each member of Noisia into their individual studios to find out how things have evolved for them since last we met… Oh, and whether anyone thought it would be noticed if Thijs’s modular rig accidentally went missing when we left! Bring the Noisia…

Thijs de Vlieger FM: Was this new studio all just an elaborate plan to get space for your modular set-up?

Thijs: “[ Laughs] Not at all, no. The modular thing started after I had the room. It started as I wanted to get something more physical so I got a Prophet-8, which I had for a couple of weeks but gave it away to someone as, sound-wise, it’s really for someone who plays keyboard and wants a synth – not for someone who designs synth sounds. It’s got two oscillators per voice so it wasn’t really doing it for me.”

Yours certainly appears to be the ‘synth’ room out of the three different units…

“Yeah… and also just the ‘stuff’ room as I have guitars and other bits and pieces. I’m more enthusiastic about bringing in stuff. Our storage space has a ton of quirky percussion things and cheap keyboards, which are pretty much all mine!”

How did you decide what went in the modular system or has it just evolved?

“Definitely… in little spurts of just trying to explore options. Usually I get excited by new stuff, which can be a bit stupid as that’s stuff you didn’t know you needed and you don’t really need. Sometimes you run into something when you’re making sounds on the modular where you think, ‘I really need a module that does this’, which is cool as that’s the better approach. At least then when you buy the module you know that you needed it whereas with a lot of the new stuff you buy it’s more the novelty.

“It tends to be more about functions for me; there are really cool things you can do with just a switch, like a relay switch that basically allows two wires to be connected with one and you just select which one that is. It does audio rate and modulation so you can go between two different waveforms at audio rate. All the craziness in oscillators has pretty much been done so I find with elaborate patching there’s way more exciting results to be had.”

Was it a pretty steep learning curve getting into the modular mindset?

“I didn’t have that because way back in the beginning, when we were still in my mum’s house, we were doing stuff with Generator, which was Reaktor before it became Reaktor. We would just build synths and I learned the basic blocks of connecting oscillators and just learning that the oscillator is always on; it doesn’t just go on when you press the key. What’s making the volume go in and out is the VCA… I knew all that stuff from working with Generator. I had always thought that modular wasn’t for me as a friend of mine had one and it was just some super-quirky results that didn’t sound all that interesting. But when I got the Prophet I realised I didn’t actually want playability I wanted the quirkier sound design stuff.”

Do you still have time for Reaktor now you’ve got the full modular rig?

“Yeah… I’ve been using it while I’m out on the road, putting Spotify through it and putting three or four comb filters with high resonance on each of the left and right channels and then putting that through a Max-for-Live granular sampler. You get some really weird results… a lot of them are all over the new album. There were a couple of sessions on trains making sounds that have become really useful.

“The last update with Reaktor 6 where they’ve introduced the Blocks made it a lot easier to use. I have a fair bit of experience with Reaktor but I always seem to run into really simple language problems. I remember when we wrote in Generator there were some weird things you needed to do to allow it to be polyphonic. We didn’t understand that so we looked at different synths and what was in their chain and wrote that into ours so it became capable of polyphony. So, it’s that kind of thing, stuff that I don’t fully understand, that I seem to run into with Reaktor. The Blocks are just really easy to use… especially if you know Eurorack. The sound quality is a lot better in the new version too.”

Does the community side of Reaktor and the ever-expanding user library interest you?

“Definitely… I love that. We didn’t use Reaktor a lot until they updated it as, I believe, it was basically still the same sound engine they’d been using since Reaktor 1, or at least an early version. The Monark sounds really good and, as I say, when they introduced the Blocks it just became really exciting again and introduced some new energy.”

You have an Access Virus TI on your studio kit list – a synth a lot of people would kill for…

“That’s been out of use for a while; it’s just sitting somewhere in storage now. When they did their

update there was a lot of cool new stuff. Sylenth, I believe, is modelled on a Virus and we use that a lot. I don’t know what it was about the Virus. The interface wasn’t quite as good as some others.”

The last time we spoke you guys had a huge communal sample pool where you all could grab things to use… Are you still using that?

“Yeah we still use that. There’s a lot of recordings that have the tag ‘modular’ on them now and I also put a few Reaktor things in too as I wanted them to turn up when I search for modular. We stopped naming things with sounds and started naming them with descriptions so they’re easier to search in Cubase. If you type ‘Scary’ you get a lot of scary sounds… [ laughs]… I had a long session of making breathy pad sounds. We’ve kind of stopped making so much stuff for the sample pool recently and we’ve been making way more stuff on spec for a song. We used to do a lot more of dragging in drums or dragging in basses and re-arranging them but now we’re more writing stuff and doing the synth patches live in Cubase so we can all still change them or change the key of the song.”

Are all your Cubase systems linked up?

“No… we have a network. It’s cool with Cubase that you can just go on someone else’s drive and open up the Cubase project on their drive to see how it runs. It all goes into your RAM then, if it works, you can just back it up onto your own drive.”

Has the new studio set-up revolutionised the Noisia process or is it just a nicer place for you to make your music?

“Both. There’s way more opportunity for us all to work on different side projects and it’s so much easier to work on them when we’re not in the way of each other. So, if I’m working on something crazy then it doesn’t mean that Martijn can’t work on a Hip-Hop beat for a rapper or Nik can’t do drums or whatever he’s working on. That’s completely different from the last studio.”

FM recall you were all fighting to take your turn of the solitary computer at the old place?

“Exactly!”

Talking of side projects, you’ve been working with a real orchestra on something…

“Yeah. They asked me in a period where I was listening to Classical music quite a lot and I immediately said yes, not knowing what I’d got myself into! So, the first show, I kind of negotiated that the set-up would be me doing some electronic remixes but also get to write just for the instruments with no electronics whatsoever. So, I wrote a ten- minute, three-piece suite for a wind quintet, which is bassoon, oboe, clarinet, horn and flute. It was a weird ten-minute piece that was inspired by 20th century modern Classical. For the second show, they wanted me to play electronics live along with the orchestra so I wrote a sort of Hollywood adventure/ sci-fi score that was about 20 minutes long.”

One presumes the modular was involved in proceedings at some point?

“Well, it was not necessary… but it was necessary at the same time! I needed a filter, a delay and a reverb and I could’ve easily done it with a computer but then I would’ve been stuck behind the computer, which doesn’t look great really. So, I took the modular and I had nice controllers for everything – a delay pedal and filters on the modular.”

Are the guitars in your studio indicative that we should expect some riffing on the new Noisia album?

“We did have one session where we tried to get something for a specific track but it didn’t really work. On the Purpose EP there’s a song, Oh Oh, where the whole intro is based around a guitar theme. We do sometimes use the guitars on Pop productions that we do for people. Did you see our Platinum records? We’ve got two Platinum records and I’m playing guitar on one of them! We work under an alter-ego with a rapper called Kraantje Pappie.”

I thought modular wasn’t for me… but when I got the Prophet I realised I didn’t want playability but quirkier sound design stuff

How did that feel getting presented with a Platinum record?

“We got it sent to us and it felt funny but not entirely a huge surprise as those tracks were listened to a lot.”

Is that one of the secrets of Noisia that you all diversify and work with other people/projects?

“Absolutely! I think we could have broken up if we weren’t all doing other projects where we can all do different things. When we did the Devil May Cry soundtrack I was just doing a lot of soundscape stuff so they’d talk to me about that or talk to Nik about the more bassy stuff. Having different roles, I think, keeps it open. If we were only doing Drum ’n’ Bass I don’t know if we would have necessarily stuck together. Also, now having the three separate studio rooms lets us all do our own thing.”

Martijn van Sonderen Have you adapted to your lovely new studios?

Martijn: “It’s something you get used to… not very quickly but we’ve been here for a couple of years now. I understand that, for people who haven’t been here every day for the past two years it’s quite impressive, but it’s something you do get used to. Although I do really appreciate it.”

Last time FM came, you’d just finished the Devil May Cry game soundtrack. Is there any more of that sort of work in the pipeline?

“I would love to but right now there aren’t any games projects coming up. We’ve tried to get on some more games projects but I think it’s really hard to land serious projects in that world without being extremely dedicated. Most of the developers would prefer you to live in LA and work closely with them. So, we’re not that dedicated… yet!”

The idea is that we asked you all individually about what informed your choice of gear in your studios…

“[ Laughs] I don’t really have a lot of gear in here! I really like working inside Cubase. I did recently get a sub-woofer because it’s so clean in this room that I did begin to sometimes miss the vibe of having stuff vibrate. So I got a sub just for reference and playing back stuff. I don’t necessarily work with the sub turned on but I really like this one as it has a footswitch so I can bypass it and everything runs through it nice and clean. I generally have it bypassed until once every now and again when I want to hear how something translates to a situation where you do have a lot of sub.”

You guys are fairly well known for your abilities with a sub bassline after all…

“Yeah, but we don’t just do bass. There’s also a lot of music out there that’s way more minimal and what we try to do is to keep the right balance. If we wanted more bass, then we’d have to lose some other elements.”

You mentioned running Cubase… What other software is in your set-up?

“We recently upgraded to Cubase v8 – v8.5 in my case – and we have a bunch of plug-ins that we’ve always worked with over the past years but some new ones that have recently sparked our interest. We’ve been big fans of the Native Instruments stuff – Komplete and a lot of what they have to offer. As we’ve said before, we’ve used FM8 a lot and Kontakt a lot too. Also, stuff like Guitar Rig, which is not so prominent in our music but it’s a really cool tool. For processing, we use some of the iZotope plug-ins like Trash 2. Depending on what type of track we’re making, we sometimes also use the Ozone Maximiser as a limiter on the master.

“We use FabFilter plug-ins a lot; they’re Dutch plug-ins. Actually, the guy who co-developed the FabFilter plug-ins, Floris (Kinkert), I used to listen to his music when I was a kid. It was before there was any music available on the internet so when I tried to find his stuff later on I couldn’t find it as it was just released under his first name. So, I was happily surprised to find out his involvement with FabFilter and also that he was still involved in electronic music. They’re really cool plug-ins, especially the Pro-C 2 compressor and we also use the Pro-Q 2 EQ on almost every channel, literally.”

Most of the games developers would prefer you to live in LA and work closely with them. We’re not that dedicated… yet!

What is it you like about Cubase?

“There’s a really cool new feature in Cubase where you can render in place. There are probably sequencers that have that feature but in Cubase it’s so cool that, with one shortcut, you can now bounce some audio, a synth or something, and you can choose whether you bounce it dry or with the effects or the channel-routing. The best thing is that you can set it to automatically mute or delete the original track and we generally have it set to bounce the audio with the effects but keep the routing. If I don’t have a certain plug-in, before loading the project here, I can ask Thijs to render a synth and I can still open a project and use the same routing without having to run that specific synth, which is really handy.”

What about go-to soft synths?

“Xfer’s Serum is one. I think it’s really cool that Steve Duda has stepped up – NI’s Massive was a big, big thing that changed a lot of the musical landscape in bass music, mainly. I hadn’t really got into the whole wavetable thing prior to that. Duda really took it to the next level with Serum. Being able to import your own sounds so easily and all the possible routings and modulations make it really cool.”

Any of Xfer’s other software in your armoury?

“[ Laughs] I secretly use the OTT [Xfer’s freeware compressor] but Nik and Thijs don’t really approve of the way I use it! Sometimes it’s just an easy way to blow up a sound. It’s a bit of a shortcut, I guess.”

FM imagine that creative use of compression figures quite high in that visceral Noisia sound?

“It can do. For creative compression we mostly use plug-ins like Melda’s MCompressor, which is really cool because you can draw the curve yourself. That way it’s very hands-on in terms of how you shape your sound. The FabFilter compressor is more a control thing or for sidechaining.”

The Melda Production plug-ins are great but don’t seem to get a high profile do they?

“No, they don’t. I don’t know if they’re particularly popular… they should be. Maybe it’s because people don’t understand how there’s such a big bundle but it’s not super-expensive? There’s all kinds of cool stuff in their bundle. In the video interview, Nik was talking about the convolution plug-in they have, the MMultiBandConvolution. They also have MultiBand versions of everything they do, which is really sick because some of the plug-ins are effects that you normally wouldn’t be able to use in a multiband way. It’s cool to have plug-ins like their frequency shifter (MMultiBandFreqShifter) that are just different. They’re different in their own way to begin with but to be able to use them with multiple bands is extremely useful.”

What criteria do you use when deciding which software you need or want?

“I’m not really someone who goes out and looks for new stuff. I guess, I’m a bit more of a lame follower. Thijs is more the guy who is always looking for cool new gadgets… Nik as well. I might bump into something every now and then but we have plenty of stuff here. For example, there are the guys at KiloHearts who’ve been making some on-spec plug-ins for us. People will sometimes ask us what we’d like to see or change in a certain plug-in and I tend to be more interested in looking for practical solutions for stuff that doesn’t work or isn’t hands-on enough. Thijs can maybe ask for something a bit more ‘out there’ that I hadn’t thought of – [ laughs] although I might be very happy to use it once it was there.”

What’s the average life expectancy of a Noisia studio monitor?

“Well we haven’t replaced these ones yet! I’ve been told that you should replace your monitors every few years but I don’t know if we have to. We’re just going to stay in touch with Thomas Jouanjean [Northward Acoustics owner and chief engineer] who designed the rooms specifically for these speakers to be where they are. Whenever he comes in and says, ‘guys it’s time to change the actual speakers’, then I guess we’ll get new ones.”

In your old studio you had a flat-panel screen for your computer. Is it less taxing on your eyesight working with these big screens?

“It is and it’s quite necessary although I’m already fucking up the stereo image a little just by having the desk and this smaller monitor as a secondary screen. You want the sound to see as little as possible before

it reaches your ears so the big screen is mainly where it is so the speakers don’t see it.”

Is the solitary Roland HP505 keyboard in your room testament to your aim of keeping everything as minimal as possible?

“I would consider having something like the Access Virus in here, which I have had previously. Mainly because it can run as a VST. I don’t really like recording stuff into my project, which is why I’m not really on the lookout for outboard gear. I mainly got the Roland piano to record MIDI that feels natural. To get a real piano wouldn’t really work in this room.”

You’re working on a quite successful House side project, Zonderling, at the moment too…

“Yeah. I used to do a lot of Techno but nothing ever really serious. Noisia is obviously very much about impact and sound design but I also always liked doing melodic and harmonically interesting, feelgood music, which Noisia generally doesn’t cater for. So, I was doing Techno but after a few tunes I wasn’t all that interested in doing more deep underground, credible stuff so I tried to do something a bit more commercial to see how far we could take my approach to production but in a progressive House way. Our label manager started doing the DJ shows for that and so far it’s been going really well and a lot of the big DJs have been picking up the music. It’s just something I really like doing on the side and it balances out well with the Noisia stuff.”

It seems quite a healthy way to experiment in different musical disciplines while staying centred in Noisia…

“What it also does is that you pick up different influences and techniques, which you can then apply to what we do together. After Thijs worked with the orchestra he came back with a lot more knowledge of that side of the musical spectrum. You sometimes maybe pick up a little bit of mindset or a different way of arranging.”

Given your vast sample archive, could you ever envisage releasing a Noisia sample library?

“We have always declined that because the stuff we want to use we want to use. The stuff we don’t want to use is not used as we’re not happy enough with it so we wouldn’t be keen to release it. I’m not saying it will never happen but not for now.”

Can you tell us about the weekly Noisia Radio podcast that you’ve been doing?

“A little over a year ago we decided that it would be a cool idea to have a way of playing music to people that we felt we couldn’t play to them in a club environment. Also, we wanted to be able to reach out to the people that listen to our music more than just the occasional shout out or ‘buy this record’ type post on Facebook. We would average maybe one show in a city every two years so that would be the only time people would be able to see us so we thought a podcast would be good; then we had to decide how often we wanted to do it. My preference was to do a weekly show as if you do a monthly thing then you’ll have a lot of new music and you end up having to be very selective about it. For the weekly thing, it’s very hands-on and we get a lot of new music and we have a lot of old music so we can just play some stuff. So, whenever we think something’s cool enough to play we just play it.”

Nik Roos How did you choose what gear to have in your room?

Nik: “Well, we work mostly in the box so there were only a few things I thought I would need in my studio. One very important thing was to have good monitor control. In a space like this you need good, transparent monitor control and I wanted to be able to listen to different sources, listen to the mid, the side and listen with different speakers. So, I got that set up with four outs from the soundcard. One is the normal digital one then I have three analogue outs that are low-pass, band-pass and high-pass so I can select them and listen to the mid or the side of that band then put it to another speaker. That’s why the Crane Song Avocet is really important to me.”

The weekly podcast is very hands-on… Whenever we think something’s cool enough to play we just play it

With the sound design way you make music the monitors must be pretty vital?

“Yeah. We went to Amsterdam Mastering to master some stuff and we got in touch with Thomas Jouanjean, who designed the room there. In the process he showed us these speakers and the rooms were all built around them [ATC 110s] because we liked the sound of them so much.”

Everything must sound sweet on these ATCs?

“Yeah… especially coming from nearfield monitors, it just sounds like a much bigger picture. With smaller speakers you can hear the speaker or the limits of the speaker much quicker. You can hear it distorting or you maybe get overtones in your room. You don’t get any of that in these rooms. Nothing vibrating, no overtones. The low of the kick that you normally get from turning things up and listening is actually gone because everything is just really transparent and large sounding. So, you have to simulate it. Thijs has got a sub-pack attached to his desk and an extra sub just to get things rattling when you want them to. I’ve been thinking of doing that too but I haven’t done it so far. It’s just all so clear that it all comes down to what the music is actually saying… you really hear what the music is doing. That basically sums up the whole space. There’s really no excuses when you’re in this room.”

Would you struggle to go back to nearfields?

“[ Laughs] Absolutely… I’m so dependent on this room now and the faith I have in it and the speakers is absolute! It’s taken me more than a year to really get to know what this room means, what the sound means. I have the Audeze LCD-X headphones too that are really, really nice. I actually A/B with them and the speakers quite regularly and sometimes I’ll literally sit with them on and think I’m listening to the in-wall monitors because, to me, the sound is very similar. The monitoring is a really important part of everything. I’ve got the Avontone Active MixCube speakers too for referencing.”

What informed your choice of keyboards?

“I’ve always wanted to have an analogue synth and when I heard about the Moog Sub 37 – it’s got really nice modulation options and it does a bit more than you might think from a synth this size. I really like the sound and that the oscillators are already saturating past 12 o’clock. If you have everything on there’s just loads of colouring. It is one kind of colour for the most part so you get a very typical Moog sound but that’s fine as I’m not going to use it for everything. I love being in a project and knowing I can do a little something with it. There are lots of Noisia songs that have little bits of Moog in there. For one, I used the headphone out of the Sub 37, into the PC then back again with some strange, phase-smearing plug-ins on the out. High-resonance cutoff sweeps would give this kind of bendy bass sound that we used on the track, Incessant.

“The Korg SV-1 is just a very nice keyboard with great key action. I really like the sounds that are in there. The pianos, mostly the electric pianos, are great. I love the strings that are in there too. I read a review of it at the time it came out and they said they didn’t know why Korg put the strings in there but I think it’s a really good string sound.

“The Roland FA-06 is great to have all those standard sounds available quickly. Kontakt is quick but this is faster so if I’m working on Pop stuff I can get the sounds straightaway. Sometimes when you’ve done something super sound-designy, made all the drums, the little hits and all the little sounds, then sometimes it can lose its direction a little bit so you think, ‘fuck it, I’m just going to put a really silly organ preset in there, create some tension and see what happens’. So this is useful for that, to sometimes create a contrast in a song by just using a really flat kind of preset.”

Using the outboard synths must save a bit of demand on your CPU too?

“Yeah but that totally depends. Recently, I’ve been hitting the limit whereas I hadn’t before that. There’s this one project where almost all the drums are from Serum; the snare is six instances of Serum, the kick is four and they’re all velocity sensitive and that’s all triggering so that was little bit too much for the CPU!”

How much RAM do you have running?

“We got these PCs installed back when we got these spaces so I think it’s a 12 core and there’s 16GB of RAM. That should handle most stuff but, for