IN THE STUDIO WITH:

Alex Niggemann

The German club icon talks us through the evolution of his genre-hopping sound

Aclassically trained pianist, Alex Niggemann’s love of dance music formed at techno clubs in his hometown of Dusseldorf. A DJ career was appealing, yet it was a degree in audio engineering that laid the groundwork for his technical understanding of production – then it was all about following his nose. His 2012 debut album Paranoid

Funk immediately captured the imagination. While limitations are a factor in Niggemann’s creative process, some attributes are instinctive, such as his uncanny ability to merge influences and create entirely new sounds.

Since 2006 a steady flow of critically acclaimed releases have marked the arrival of a true visionary. By launching the AEON label in 2013, Niggemann has not only developed the careers of others, but widened his appetite for exploration further still.

How did a classically trained pianist segue into electronic music?

“It was a strange route. I was playing piano from the age of four because my brother was also playing at the time. Later, he would influence me because he was a ravehead in the mid-’90s and used to throw his own parties. I was 15 at the time and had only heard about techno clubs – I just needed to find a way to sneak out of the house and go to one. That was the starting point for it all, but if I didn’t start playing piano I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

Is it true Ken Ishii was a big influence on you?

“He was the one who said to my brain, ‘you’ve got to do this’. He was playing with three decks and I remember thinking, how can he make people freak out like that just by playing records? I felt I needed to discover how that could be done, and that’s how I started as a DJ. It was only later that I became interested in how the sounds were made, but I always thought that DJing and production were a combination that belonged together.”

Was it difficult to become a DJ in Dusseldorf?

“The scene was quite small at that point, and we don’t really have one in Dusseldorf anymore. I was trying to get a slot somewhere to play records, but because I was the young guy the established DJs didn’t want to share any slots in their residencies. I often wondered how I was going to make it, which is probably when I began to focus on production.”

How much easier does the technology make it for DJs these days?

“It’s a lot easier now. I cannot really say how much easier because I don’t really have the experience of just starting with the equipment that is around now, with all the sync, loop and effect functions. I can only imagine that if I played with sync and all these automatic algorithms that calculate everything in the right pitch and time, it has to be much easier to put records together. When I started, it was about making sure the records fitted together musically and matched tonally when you mixed them to make sure the beats were tight on each record.”

Has technology benefited the art of DJing or detracted from it?

“I feel like it’s actually less human. I had a very funny experience because I saw some posts on the R&S Records Facebook page after seeing a video of three DJs. I think one of them was Roger Sanchez. They were playing back-to-back on six decks and people were complaining that the tracks were not always in pitch and the DJs had to correct them manually. People are so used to everything being precise, clear and on point, but for me the whole human aspect is missing. I prefer DJ sets from people like Derrick May or Kevin Saunderson. They may sometimes feel out of beat, but you know they’re working instead of just mixing tracks together automatically.”

It seems the technology gives the DJ more time to be the focus of everybody’s attention…

“It’s going that way, but I’m not the type of person to say that everything was better in the ‘good old days’. Obviously, all of the techniques and technology right now should ensure that the music sounds better than it did in the past. So it’s definitely a help, but when you come from the period that I did, I guess you value certain things more.”

You studied audio engineering. Was that with a view of getting a job in the industry or simply learning about production?

“It was both. At that time I had the chance to go into my father’s company, so I had the choice to either become a salesman or make music. It was clear to me that I wouldn’t make much money making music but, luckily, he gave me the chance to study and see if it would work out. I followed my dream, but had to improve my skills. I was already good at composing but always had a problem getting my melodies to sound as good as I felt they should. I needed some form of technical education as I didn’t have a clue about stuff like EQing or compression.”

Would you advise people to take a music production course rather than try to figure everything out for themselves?

“It wasn’t a course – I did a Bachelor of Recording Arts. It definitely helped to give me a technical background. They do tell you that things need to be done a certain way, but I also think it’s important for artists to remove these preconditions because nothing is written down about how music should be. But that education does allow you to understand more the possibilities of what can be done.”

Did your classical training help you to compose, even in a completely different style of music?

“Absolutely, because I’m not only doing techno or house music, I’m working on many different projects. I’ve done hip-hop music and even recorded

folk, so it’s become really important, especially when I work with another producer because I have these moments where I have melodies in my head or somebody plays a note and I have an intuitive feeling of what needs to follow. Of course, a lot of people can do that by ear, but it also helps to have an understanding of the technical direction that sound can travel in.”

Piano was quite prominent in early house music, albeit on a more simplistic scale...

“Yes, it was mostly very simple chords although I was not using piano at that point. As a teenager, having already played piano for ten years, and my mother telling me to practise every day for half an hour, I no longer wanted to do it. So I fled from classical piano playing into something different, but that education is always there. Now when I produce albums, I use the MIDI-piano to play almost every sequence live, and even played kick drums on it without using a Push controller. I just have a feeling for it, because that training gives you a natural instinct for playing any instrument.”

Did you have a clear idea of what sort of sound you wanted to create?

“I think that 99% of producers start by trying to redo music or adapt a certain style of music. For me, I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the beginning so it was a learning process. There was nobody on Instagram or Facebook showing me how to do things. It helped that I no longer had to pay £10,000 for a synthesiser and could get a small one for £150 to start with, and the more music I made the easier it was to find my own sound. Now, I’m so diverse that every production can go from deep house to electro to techno or even pop, so I don’t believe you can categorise my sound.”

Was it difficult to pick ten tracks for the release of your AEON 5 Years Compilation?

“Actually, it was not that difficult because I’m working with a lot of very talented people at the label. We took a lot of care with the release and only looked for tracks that had a certain quality and variety. I feel we managed it quite well. Techno was always called future music, and it’s not really possible to reinvent techno, but the genre always wants to move forward and that’s important to me. We may go back to certain sounds and sub-genres, but because of the technical possibilities we have now, techno music is always developing.”

Is technology still driving the genre?

“There was a time when people were just using samplers, then plugins arrived and people just used those. Now a lot of old synthesisers are being refaced and people are getting into analogue sounds again. The genre often seems to take one step back to move two steps forward. Now you can easily integrate a Prophet into Logic, switch the sound and play whatever you just recorded on something else, so it’s easier to sync all that stuff. Before, you had to sync everything with and record to tape or eight-track, which had more character but was limited.”

Because your music is primarily instrumental, do you need images or concepts to drive ideas?

“I don’t have any images, so it’s rare that I have a concept in mind. We are all so influenced by different things in our surroundings that I prefer to thrive off certain moods, go into the studio and just be inspired by sound. I’m more of a composer and creator than a technical nerd who has to try out many different things – although obviously I have those moments when I come across new hardware or plugins.”

If sound itself is a motivation, will you look for gear that can provide something new or just work harder on the processing side?

“I used to get a lot of gear, but then started getting really confused because if you have too many instruments, sample packs and plugins you can easily get lost. It’s similar to when you try to find new music, there’s so much of it you don’t know where to look. These days, I try to limit myself with plugins and analogue stuff. If you have 60 machines, you’re unlikely to know all of them inside out, so everything becomes trial and error, whereas if you only have a few machines and plugins I feel it’s much easier to produce results. When I get inspired, I know what I want and where to find it.”

“If you only have a few machines and plugins I feel it’s much easier to produce results”

Your tracks are simple and spacious. Do you deliberately avoid overcomplicating production?

“For ten years I made tracks that would have 32-48 sequences going on in a project, but I always wondered why I didn’t get a certain fatness in my tunes. Obviously, the more instruments you have, the less space there is in the frequency spectrum. I must have started a thousand projects before I came to this realisation, and they’re all lost on my hard drive. I’m really trying to improve on that because I think simplicity is best, even if it sometimes takes longer when you’re only using a few sounds because they need to be absolutely perfect to fit together.”

Does that choice come from experience?

“Production is reduction, and whilst it’s sometimes difficult to stick to that, I believe that’s how it should be. When you’ve been making music for ten years, you learn how to make a certain sound more dominant by having more attack and pushing the sound to the forefront, or giving it more attention by pushing the rest of the non-characteristic frequencies of an instrument to the back. Sometimes I get frustrated when people send me demos saying they’ve been producing with Ableton Live or Fruity Loops for one year and please could I release it? Some of these people have talent, but after one year? I’m not so sure. If somebody wants to copy me, I can teach them my way because it’s easy to tell someone what you know, but if they want to develop their own sound, I don’t think you can give them that.”

How important are the room acoustics?

“The room and monitoring is the most important thing. I built my studio room using bass traps, a Helmholtz Resonator and diffusors to make it sound good. I reference with three pairs of monitors – Genelec 8060s, Kleon and Hummel O300s, including subwoofer, and a very old pair of Yamaha MSP5 monitors. The MSP5s were the first speakers I bought and sound so horrible that I know that if something sounds good on them, it will actually sound really good on a record.”

Do you have any other advice on how people can start on a production path?

“My advice is to find your own way to do it because there is no recipe for success and those artists who are really successful usually break all the rules. For me, it’s very different. Sometimes I start with an atmosphere that puts me in a mood that I want to continue working in, or, I’ll play something into the Arturia BeatStep Pro or Roland TR-8 and create a groove or a loop. Sometimes I listen to other genres to get creative ideas. Having been in four-to-thefloor music for 16 years, it’s difficult to listen to house and techno as a consumer unless I’m dancing to it in a club. At home, I’m more into piano or film music, which I still analyse but can at least relax to.”

Would you like to venture into soundtracks?

“Absolutely, in fact I have another project that I’m doing with a vocalist that I would call cinematic pop with a modern electronic influence. We’re quite a good team and have done an album together. Unfortunately, I can’t say too much about where and when it will be released because we’re in the middle of dealing contracts, but it will see the light of day next year.”

You tend to use vocals more like effects…

“It’s sometimes interesting to have vocals in electronic music, but I feel that for electronic dance music it’s too easy. When you have vocals it’s much easier to make something that’s catchy, but also a little bit cheesy. I don’t really feel a need to participate in commercial music and find that instrumental music is more of a challenge. With my music, the sound is so prominent that it doesn’t really need a big pop vocal that needs to associate with certain frequencies, chords or a bridge. I prefer to play with vocals, so I’ll let a vocalist sing something, sample it and use it as an instrument.”

Your music is quite percussion-heavy. At what stage is percussion added to the production?

“The main groove and beat is always at the start. It starts simple, with boom tschak, boom tschak and maybe an off-hi-hat. The fill-ins come in alongside whatever instruments I’m playing, for example, a tom or a drum fill. If I need a bigger progression, maybe I’ll use an open hi-hat or a shaker.”

Have you always used Logic for sequencing?

“I started with MAGIX Music Maker and Fruity Loops at the age of 14, but the first real program I worked with was Logic and I’ve been messing around with it since version three. It’s the programme I feel most comfortable with, although I know programs like Ableton Live can make things a lot easier. I could get lost in the possibilities.”

Does your resistance to Ableton go back to your theory about deliberately limiting yourself?

“In Ableton, there are all these MIDI effects that can play a melody for you and you can throw all these loops in there too, but then I start to get the feeling it’s not actually my work anymore. But it does have a lot of advantages, so I do have the Ableton Push and sometimes use Ableton via ReWire in Logic. But to make a song in Ableton you need some special skills because the summing is actually not very good compared to Logic. Everything sounds super flat, and when you see the waveform it’s like you have a wall in front of you. I think you need to produce at a very low volume in Ableton if you want to make sure you have the right spectrum to place sounds.”

What hardware synths are you using?

“I have the Dave Smith Prophet 6, a Moog Sub 37 and the Voyager. I also have a small Dave Smith Mopho, which I use for effects because it sounds really raw. I like the Roland hybrids – the TR-8 and TB-3, the Arturia BeatStep Pro and multitimbral controllers like Expressive Touch or ROLI. Otherwise, I have a Yamaha Clavinova for making melodies and a colourful Akai MIDI keyboard that I’ll play notes on when searching for sounds.”

Do you use hardware to generate ideas and software to process them?

“Right now, there is software that sounds so good that the general listener cannot hear any difference, so I cannot really say why I’m using what because it

depends on the music I’m making. If I’m making something quite rough, tight and old-school, I’ll use hardware. I try to get to a certain point quickly, even if it means I have to redo the sounds using other digital or analogue gear. But we definitely don’t need to discuss the fact that a hardware bass or lead has more body or soul, because every synthesiser does its own summing. There are a lot of synthesisers that do the same thing, but their sound engine and the electrical circuits they’re using makes them all sound different. You simply don’t get that with VSTs.”

Presumably, the same theory applies to your adoption of outboard gear?

“That also depends. Sometimes it takes me ages to create an effect when I’m working in the box and I know that it will sound better if I just route it through a compressor or some other outboard gear for summing, but I’ll still use a lot of internal effects. I have to say, UAD plugins sound so incredible that it’s difficult to hear if a sound has gone through a real Pultec EQ or been processed internally. For me, UAD are the best plugins on the market.”

Is there any other outboard that’s integral to your processing?

“In terms of the dynamics, I would say no. I use a multi-clock sync box, which I plug all my synths into. I prefer not to route them in via USB because when you have MIDI there is different processing at work. I really like the shuffling mode because if you take a sequence in the Prophet, for example, it will play it in a certain rhythm that’s too staccato but the multi-clock can shuffle it or add a little delay and you’ll get better, more human-sounding rhythms.”

Will you use VST plugins to generate sounds?

“I really like the whole Arturia bundle. When it comes to other productions where I might use a lot of weird instruments, I’m really happy with Native Instruments’ Komplete and all the add-ons you can get, like the Spitfire Audio sample libraries.”

You sound excited by modern plugins?

“It’s quite stunning to be able to play orchestral strings with the right velocity and dynamics and use all these different virtual microphones. I used to have the Philharmonic Orchestra plugins and at one point thought they sounded really good, but when I listen back to them now it’s like, hmmm, maybe not. With these add-ons for Komplete, you can use touch expression or the ROLI and literally play a note like a string instrument with the attack slowly coming in. This allows you to feel all the right dynamics and power so it sounds like a real instrument.”

want to know more?

Alex Niggemann’s AEON – 5

Years Compilation is out now on AEON. Find more news and release info at Alex’s Facebook page: facebook.com/ alexniggemann.official