THE TRACK DJOKO
With a refreshingly upbeat and funky take on minimal house music, Cologne’s Johannes “DJOKO” Kolter has scored releases on Golf Clap’s Country Club Disco, Okain’s Talman Records, and DJ Steaw
VIDEO ON and Gunnter’s Rutilance Recordings. We caught up
FILESILO
with the Teutonic tech-house titan to find out how he makes his trademark airy, infectious grooves, and the absolute madlad made us the basis of a track from scratch.
The track you made in the video sounds great! Did you finish it?
“No I didn’t! I could, maybe in the future, but the video was actually my second attempt at doing it, because the first time I tried it I had a technical issue. It turned out my camera had a maximum limit of 30 minutes of video, and after that it stopped recording. So, I had to make the whole video again!
Do you have anything on the master track in the video?
“Very little, just a plugin called CamelPhat which acts as a limiter. It’s not really supposed to be used as one, but I figured out it has the sickest limiter on this planet! I always leave it on with the clean factory settings, I have it on every channel where I think there could be clipping, and CamelPhat works some magic on it.”
Your studio appears to be bristling with hardware synths. Which are your favourites?
“I’ve told people before that I really love the Nord Lead, but you know, everything gets a little bit boring eventually, so that made me get my hands on an Oberheim OB-6. I went to the music store because I always love to play a little bit around with a synth instead of just buying it online. I was planning to get one of the Behringer clones, but then I laid my hands on the OB-6 and it just completely blew my mind. It’s so unpredictable!
“The one I bought, at least, needs like ten or twenty minutes of warm up until it’s tuned, unlike every other synth which I just turn on and it’s directly usable! I’ve never came across this with a synthesiser, but for me, this is a little bit of a cool feature because sometimes there’s some nice, not so on-point notes coming out of there, which are interesting to put in a track.
“Recently I went on eBay and got one of these really old
Roland grooveboxes, which came out in like 1995 or something,
and mine had like a display malfunction or something. It has an integrated mixer in there and stuff. So you could only do a track by just using this groovebox. It’s called the Roland MC-505. Man, does it have some spacey synths in there! So yeah, with these two synthesisers I’m currently experimenting a little bit, but you know, it’s like there’s some days where you use them and then there’s some times where you just completely put them away and do everything in-the-box because of convenience or something.”
You only use 18 tracks in the video. Is that typical?
“Yeah lately, I’m becoming a little bit more lazy, maybe lazy is the wrong word...”
Efficient?
“Yeah, efficient! I used to have like 60 different channels on some tracks, since you can just bang them out on Ableton and it doesn’t really make the CPU run slower or anything. But lately I’m trying to just keep myself in the range of maybe 20 channels or something. But there’s no hard rule; as soon as I want to just put one more FX sound effect in there, I do a new channel and just bang it on there.”
Do you have a preconceived idea of the track you’re going to make when you’re jamming it out?
“Most of the time I’m inspired when I’m sitting at work or
“Sometimes it’s one idea in the beginning, and then it comes out completely different. It could start from a chord sequence or something, but ends up somewhere else because I took that element away again”
something. I have my usual day job, and I listen to music while cutting video, and when I really get inspired, I note down the track which really got me going. I don’t try to recreate the whole track or anything, but I like to snatch like a little idea from it, like having a chord sequence, a certain rhythm, any element from it which I thought would be cool to integrate into the next track. From then on, I get into the flow and just try to do something similar, but basically every track I did, it was just being inspired from another track somewhere on the internet, be it ten years old or just one, it doesn’t matter.
“For me it is just the fuel which sparks the idea into one direction, but sometimes it’s that idea in the beginning and then it comes out completely different. You know, it could start from a chord sequence or something, but ends up somewhere else because I took that element away again. So other tracks, other artists, which I really dig are really the best inspiration for me.”