In The Studio: Gui Boratto
DJ, producer and polymath, Gui Boratto drops Pentagram, his stunning new studio album. Hamish Mackintosh caught up with the Brazilian techno maestro surrounded by his myriad music-making machines
‘Ginga’ is a word once used to describe the mindset, panache and freedom that Brazilian football teams played with. A wider definition would be: ‘Ginga is creativity. Ginga is the opposite of boring; it’s having fun with the ball. It is grace. It is being fluid and coordinated. It is soul; it is dance.’
The reason FM mention this is that Ginga could equally be applied to the multi-talents of São Paulo’s finest producer, remixer and DJ, Gui Boratto, whose intoxicating new album, Pentagram, his fifth studio album, is a masterclass in progressive electronic music.
With a background in recording studios and playing guitar in bands, Boratto broke loose and followed his electronic muse with the release of his debut album, Royal House, in 2004, which alerted the interest of Cologne’s prodigious Kompakt label. Gui’s 2007 album, the widely acclaimed
Chromophobia, along with a slew of excellent remixes for Goldfrapp, Pet Shop Boys, Massive Attack, Moby and Trentemøller, cemented his burgeoning reputation as a producer and remixer who takes whatever he touches to exotic, exciting new places. With a penchant for embracing new music technology, he also began to earn a reputation for his innovative DJ sets and live performances using Monomes and Lemurs.
Back to the present time and Pentagram, the next (logical) step in Gui Boratto’s musical evolution. Cinematic album openers The Walker and The Black Bookshelf instantly wrong-foot any listener anticipating instant 4/4 dancefloor anthems from the get-go, instead showcasing his ability to build atmospheric soundscapes as well as acid-drenched grooves. With vocals provided by Boratto’s in-house (literally, as she’s his wife) chanteuse Luciana Villanova, Overload is a pristine slice of electronica, and further collaborations with Nathan Berger and the one and only BT (on the spiky, sublime Hallucination) make Pentagram Gui Boratto’s most essential offering to date.
In person, Boratto is funny and a self-confessed ‘music gear geek’ whose passion for dance music and electronic music machinery is infectious and charming in equal measure. FM caught up with Gui in his well-stocked studio in São Paolo to talk tech old and new and find out more about the making of the rather wonderful Pentagram.
Could you give the FM readers a tour of your current studio setup?
“Of course. This is a portion of my studio here as I have other things in another studio I have in a house way out in the middle of the fields. Sometimes I’ll maybe spend ten days in the other studio and there’s some different equipment in it but mostly it’s quite similar. I’m 44 so I’ve been collecting synths and drum machines for almost three decades. For example, I still have my first proper sequencer, the Roland MC500. I was also using Notator around that time, maybe 1987, and the MC500 still works. It’s the MKII and the difference is that it has two MIDI outputs. At that time all synths used to work ‘omni’, just using one MIDI channel. I started out with two synths and now I have around 60!
“I have a proper piano and a drum kit in the living room of my house, so I have various guitars and basses in this studio… I love Telecasters!”
You’ve got a nice little modular setup too…
“It’s my new modular space for the many different modules and various manufacturers. I’ve also got the Buchla, which I used a lot on the album on tracks like The Walker and The Black Bookshelf. The track Pentagram was done only using the Buchla with some piano from soft synths.”
What about some of the other areas in your studio… what are they designated for?
“I have a space for old machines… for example the Sequential Circuits Six-Trak, DrumTraks and my 909 are all in there. Each machine has a little story to it. I was after an EMS VCS 3 for years then, some years ago, I saw one on eBay and they’re not cheap machines, maybe around $15-20k. I was in the middle of a US tour and I flew from Miami to LA to pick it up as they’re so fragile. When I got there, it was a big studio and the guy selling it was the actor Vincent Gallo. On the back of the synth there was a sticker ‘University of New York’ and he told me that this was the actual unit that had belonged to David Gilmour when they did Dark Side of the Moon. Whether that’s true or not, it now belongs to me.
“There are other favourite bits of old kit; since my album III, I’ve been super in love with using Kyma, which is a music-programming language that uses icons and you run it in the Paca hardware unit. It’s a dedicated machine, designed for music and it’s similar to Reaktor but it has its own language. You create an icon then connect it up with other icons and you can develop a whole world of different textures… much more than just with a standard synthesizer. It’s also very, very stable.”
You’ve always given the impression of someone continually looking to expand your musicmaking horizons…
“I’m a piano and guitar player, that’s my real background. I can DJ, but I always wanted to compose music and to reproduce that live using 100% hardware and not even one computer. I’ve also been doing more compact gigs using two or three controllers, a drum machine and my computer using Ableton. I’m not too purist about it all as everyone knows that I’m a gear geek. I’m actually involved in a good project at the moment, developing a drum machine with a spring reverb inside it. Along with Arthur Joly and Ícaro Ferre we’ve made a prototype and it sounds incredible… the kick is like an 808, the clap is like a 909 and the
“I’ve been collecting synths and drum machines for almost three decades”
snare is based on an 808 but we have sustain and decay on it so you can make it really long. The spring reverb is pure analogue and the whole thing is made in wood… it’s a really beautiful piece.”
When will we be able to see it in action?
“Well the plan is we have a meeting next week and I’ll be using the prototype on the forthcoming tour which starts June 15th. We’re planning to sell 100 of them so each unit will be numbered between 1 to 100. So, it’ll be quite a collectable unit for people who are in search of a unique drum machine sound. It’ll have that typical Boratto palette of sounds.”
Do you find it ever harder to carve unique sounds from the plethora of great music equipment available now?
“There are a lot of manufacturers, yes, and there are all kinds of machines. If you need a sampler/drum machine then there are many options, if you want a synthesiser/drum machine then there are a bunch of great options too… not even mentioning all the Eurorack stuff!”
When you were putting your modular rack together did you know which units you specifically wanted or was it trial and error?
“[ laughs] This is a vice, man!! I started with just one rack, which is now underneath this Toft analogue desk, which is like a small Trident. I initially built my modular rack just to be a drum machine, so I had a sequencer and drum modules. Then I bought a whole Make Noise system and some other modules to produce synth and basslines. Now, I’ve added a whole row of sequencers like the TipTop Circadian Rhythms, which is basically 16-step but in actual fact is more like 64-step. I’ve got a Kilpatrick sequencer that’s more for notes as it has forward, reverse, major/minor so it creates a major scale arp that’s great for synthesisers. Mutable Instruments Grids is a topographic sequencer and it’s nice. Much more complex is the Modcan TouchSequencer, which has a pen to input things and you can have full songs.”
Is it a purer form of sequencing with hardware?
“I love sequencers like Doepfer’s Dark Time for the studio and playing live because it has a lot of CVs and also MIDI I/O which is an incredible convertor. You have the switches that let you jump notes or go forward or backwards. The way it works is quite similar to the ARP sequencer, for example but it’s very small but solid and nice to take on the stage.”
Hardware sequencers tend to help you come up with a different kind of sequence too, don’t they?
“For sure. Every machine you use creates a different approach from you. When you start messing around with the Dark Time you create something very different than you would starting from point zero on Ableton. You think differently. It’s like when I get a guitar and start writing a song, the relationship between the melodies and harmonies… I just compose differently than when I put my hands on a keyboard.”
Has having a grounding in audio engineering helped you as a producer?
“Yes… I think everything like that can help but also maybe be an obstacle too. What I mean is that in my early years I used to put a lot of information on my techno production. I had to simplify in terms of my musical knowledge to be more objective. When you’re producing a new album, you have that possibility to explore new paths and atmospheres, which allows you to be more musical, slower, darker or happier. You don’t have that compromise of the dancefloor. There was a time in my life where I was working and recording lots of bands and it was good to know how to record a piano, drums or vocals properly. I’ve always had a DIY approach to things as when I started there weren’t any courses, and everything was really expensive in Brazil as we don’t have any manufacturers. So, everything was coming from Japan – Roland, Korg… or even synths coming from Germany or the USA. The taxes to import any gear at that time were huge. That’s why only fairly recently you have Brazilian producers… 20 years ago there weren’t any!” Maybe an apt point to find out more about the synths and gear you used to create Pentagram “I used pretty much everything in here. I used the Roland Super-Jupiter, the MKS-80 a lot, and a lot of the Paca I mentioned earlier. I’ve been using the
ROLI Seaboard a bit. There are a few things that are only possible using one of those as it has the five different variables; the after-touch, expression, modulation and pitchbender. I was doing something similar when I was using the (JazzMutant) Lemur then, years later, the iPad version of it. In terms of sounds, of course, I used guitars and bass. Songs like Forgotten, for example, have a lot of guitars on them and the bass is a blend of a sine and the MusicMan. It’s the only ‘plug and play’ bass because it’s so good when you just plug it in line. Obviously, you have the battery in it, so you can go active. I love using the Phoenix Audio preamps with the MusicMan.
“As I said, I used a lot of the Buchla and the Eurorack stuff on Pentagram as well as the Moog Sub37 and Arturia’s MatrixBrute. I like to try out new synths that come out as sounds inspire you. If you’re stuck in the process you can even take out these guys, Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operators… I have the first three they released of those.”
So, essentially, it’s anything that fires your imagination, really…
“Yeah. I don’t have a standard method to produce. Sometimes I’ll start with a bass or guitar idea. Sometimes I’ll mess around with a beat then add on harmonies. With an album like Chromophobia, I did maybe 90% of the basslines with Novation’s BassStation. Now I have more space for my music gear, so I have the drums and the baby-grand piano in the living room. With the drums, I started out with the idea that I would only record live hi-hats, so I bought a full drum kit and that was the first time I recorded my own real drums on this album. In some songs there was maybe one or two bits of real drums but in The Black Bookshelf it’s maybe 90% me. It was a good exercise to do that and I’ve always wanted to try it. I used only three mics, two SMs on the snare. I love the Neumann U87 and the AKG C214 and D112, which I use to make different left and right overs.
“Each song starts talking to you and you need to have the tools and the skills to execute what it needs.”
Pentagram is a real journey, at times rich and cinematic, at others very acid and dancefloor. How did you choose your collaborators for the different styles of songs?
“When I need a vocal, Luciana is always willing to do it… [ laughs] as Luciana is my wife. She’s not a singer which is why her voice is very pure and naïve. That kind of sound result interests me because I know a lot of professional vocalists, but I prefer to use the purity of what Luciana does rather than put a diva singing on it. With BT, I’ve known Brian for a lot of years and maybe about ten years ago we started trying to collaborate on something, but it was around the time I started doing those endless tours and not being in the studio very much so, at that time, I went from being a studio-nerd to being a DJ. When I DJ I’m still quite shy, I’m not like Carl Cox or Sven (Vath) who both really interact with the crowd. I just try my best to present my ideas and my compositions live with a little improvisation too.
“It’s difficult to improvise too wildly as my songs tend to have verses, pre-chorus and choruses, I never do one-note techno where it’s flat and there are only production details changing. I love to have a surprise change, another part or a different harmony.”
As well as the Lemur, you used to use a Monome for your live show. Is that still in the setup?
“I keep changing things. For my recent shows I was using the MFB Tanzbär because it sounds incredible and I just receive the clock and play. I can mix it in really nice with my large pieces of audio. Most of my live set comes from the computer because I have such large audio files in terms of duration… I don’t have just a sample of bass and a sequence that’s repeated endlessly. I can have that with drums sometimes but, if you listen to my music, there are different parts and nuances, so I need to have large audio files of it. My new show I’m using the Pentagram drum machine, and, with the help of a friend, we’ve developed a software that runs on Max for Live that runs a DMX USB lighting rig. I use the Akai MPC Live to control the lights, which are basically a visual version of my drum machine. The five lights create a pentagram. A couple of months ago I opened for Depeche Mode on their only show here in Brazil for almost
30 years. I used the drum machine and lights for the first time. I’ll be using it on some shows in Europe soon, but it needs to be dark enough for the effect to work because they are so dense… [ laughs] they’re like Jedi lightsabers!”
Is Ableton Live your choice for live and studio?
“Well, yes, although I’m still using Rewire so Logic is my main tool. I was doing a remix for the Pet Shop Boys song Love Etc that’s originally a shuffle beat, and I changed it to 4/4. So, there was a lot of timestretching and Logic’s timestretching at that time wasn’t perfect when I used it on Neil Tennant’s vocals, so I did a similar timestretch in Ableton and two other different algorithm plugins so that I could take the best parts of each of them. Some phrases were better with Ableton and some better with Logic as they use different algorithms to do timestretching. If I want to test out loops then I’ll open Ableton in slave mode in Rewire but I’m still much more familiar using Logic, especially the zoom and the MIDI implementation, which is much more complex. Live is more intuitive and there are a lot of new functions with Live 10 and the stability is better. I couldn’t use Logic live as it would crash every so often. It’s about getting the best from both worlds.”
What other software or soft synths do you find yourself using?
“I love Kontakt as a sampler. In the beginning I was using the EXS24 in Logic but Kontakt is ten times better for many reasons. I love Reaktor too and the newer Native Instruments things like Polyplex and Form. Basically, everything Native Instruments does is really stable, and the sound design is incredible. But I also love rough things like Da Hornet (http:// www.vst4free.com/free_vst.php?id=597), which sounds really ugly and incredible. I like that kind of thing with hardware too… I still have the MPC5000 and that has a unique sound to it. I never sold my Akai S6000 sampler because it has those incredible filters that only Akai has! It’s hard to reproduce those using software; likewise it’s hard to do what soft synths do using hardware.”
Sounds like you’ve been a fan of samplers for a long time…
“The Ensoniq EPS-1 was my first sampler, then I bought the EPS16+ before buying the Ensoniq ASR-X, which I had three of. The Ensoniq filters were incredible too. I still have my old DP/4, which is brilliant. It’s got wah and distortion and things that those kinds of units just didn’t have. It’s good to have two stereo effects or four mono or two mono and one stereo. There are a lot of people still using them live… If I’m not mistaken, I think Richie still uses one for his Plastikman shows.”