Afrodeutsche creates a techno jam in Live
Henrietta Smith-Rolla has been steadily climbing the ranks of leftfield club music over the past few years (a few months after we met her, she supported Aphex Twin at his biggest UK show in years). We visited the producer in her Manchester studio to watch her talk through WASP, a synth-led techno cut designed for her live sets.
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Henrietta says:“I usually start by making a kick drum, and playing around with the sound of it once I’ve got something going.” Once she’s programmed a basic kick rhythm in Live’s Session view, she duplicates the clip and adds another drum sound, creating new clips and adding new sounds until she has a selection of clips.
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Once she’s created the first drum track, Henrietta creates another similar track, this time using 909 samples. Dada Life’s Sausage Fattener is applied to this track to warm it up a little. “I generally keep things really dry. I get really impatient when I’m making music, so it tends to be a lot later in the day that I’ll do any manipulating of the sound, and then it’s usually just reverb.”
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Once she’s happy with the beats, Henrietta adds a squelchy bassline from Arturia’s Matrix-12 V. “I quite like to play with octaves – what usually happens is I’ll have some sort of groove happening in a higher and lower octave. It feels like it brings it together in some way,” she reveals.
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For WASP Henrietta creates individual instances of the Matrix-12 V for the left and right channels, and layers them with another instance of the synth playing a more bass-y version of the part dead-centre in the mix. “I think I just wanted to make some space in the groove!” she explains.
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A lazier, more buzzy split Matrix-12 V bassline is added, and then the track’s crowning glory – a Nitro Deluxe-style classic rave stab from the Novation X-Station – joins the party. “This sound isn’t actually recorded in this track,” reveals Henrietta, “I keep elements out so that I can play them live.”
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Henrietta creates the arrangement for the track by jamming with the clips that she’s created in Live’s Session view: “Once I’m happy with everything, I’ll hit record and start by playing the kick drums, then I’ll just freestyle the arrangement – I’ll start triggering other clips when I feel it’s time for them to come in.”