On the ground at ADE
FM head to Amsterdam to talk tech, try gear and soak up some club culture
Now in its 21st year, Amsterdam Dance Event is firmly established as the biggest – in terms of sheer scale – event in Europe’s electronic music calendar. With over 375,000 visitors attending a variety of more than 500 talks and 1,000 events, featuring well over 2,000 DJs and performers, ADE now sprawls across the entirety of Amsterdam, straddling the divide between industry conference, production convention and full-on rave.
On the production side, ADE is increasingly becoming the place where producers, tech brands and the public converge to take stock of the latest gear releases, technological advances and unique performance ideas. This year provided a first opportunity for many producers to get hands-on with an assortment of new gear releases.
With a heavy presence at the festival’s Playground gear hub, Roland were demoing more new gear than any other brand at this year’s ADE. The bulk of that gear was comprised of the announcements from the brand’s recent 909 day event, including the new 909, 303 and VP-330-inspired Boutique synths and the new flagship plug-out synth, the System-8. Most interestingly though, it gave us a chance to see a variety of different DJs get hands-on with the drum machine and vocoder-packing DJ-808 Serato controller. In action, there’s no doubt that skilled Serato users can pull off some impressive mixing tricks with this multi-faceted controller, blending live drum patterns and sequenced samples with Serato’s own built-in FX. The jury’s still out on the practicality and value of having so many different devices in an all-in-one package though – we’ll reserve judgement for a full review in a forthcoming issue.
If Roland were the dominant force in ADE’s gear demo area, then the quiet show stealer was Elektron’s recently unveiled Analog Heat effects processor. It’s often difficult to get a gauge on Elektron gear in a show environment – the deep learning curve of things like the Octatrack or Rytm requires a decent investment of time to get the most from them – but a quick toggle of the Heat’s Dry/Wet control and a flip through the eight distortion circuits was enough to be immediately won over by Elektron’s flexible little effects box.
Beyond the demo floor though, ADE provides an annual opportunity to see how artists from across the electronic spectrum are using gear in the real world… from Richie Hawtin and Matador flexing the muscles of the new Model 1 mixer (see over the page), to KiNK demonstrating how he’s working Pioneer DJ’s new Toraiz sampler into his creative Techno sets and to the likes of Noisia, Joris Voorn and countless others breaking down their studio workflow for the crowds. As ever, the main takeaway is the sheer variety of approaches to production, performance and studio workflows out there. It might seem obvious, but it hammers home the fact that there’s no one right way to approach electronic music. There’s arguably never been a better time to try doing it your own way.