Ry What was like your breakthrough track, do you think?
Paul
I suppose there’s been a few of them. I mean, like the first track that I made that people played ah lot was some was the first scuba release. So I mean, I was making tunes for a long time before that, before I launched that kind of alias. It was a track called Timber. That was the one really that, I mean, the Hotflush 001 as well to an extent, but… I mean, the one that, you know, I was kind of happy with, the one that I was really happy with and people were like, okay, yeah, this is actually good, was that, basically. But then that was, that’s at a very low level. That’s in a kind of like, micro scene, as it was at the time, context.
I suppose the one that made the most difference overall to my… career was probably “Loss”, the track that came out on Aus in 2011, which was kind of the the kind of first House track that I made that really made a sort of big impact really like outside of microscene, and I’m talking about Dubstep as a kind of microscene. Obviously it was much more than that by 2011, but in terms of like coming to a wider audience, that was that was probably the one, you know?
Ry
I actually had written down here the Aus music releases as a talking point, because I love that like, I don’t want to call it just house because you’re so it’s so much more melodic, and it’s almost like touching on that like prog-house feeling that you know I personally love so much.
When writing stuff like that, maybe like adrenaline, hard body, are you thinking like I’m going to write like a deep house track, or like a prog house track before you sit down? Or…
Paul
The first batch of tracks that I did like that, that made an impact were all made really quickly close together. Loss, adrenaline, feel it, never, and there was a couple more, a couple that came out as ESS a little bit later on. They were all made in about a month, space of about a month, or maybe even less, like two with like three two, three, four weeks sort of thing.
It was basically in the period where triangulation had come out and had done pretty well and you know Crooks and Lovers (Mount Kimbie) had come out on the label and it was really the first time that the label itself was doing well financially, and I felt a lot of, kind of freedom really you know and I was just like well fuck it let’s just mess around and make some you know make some house tunes and the other context of it was that I was playing in Panorama Bar quite a lot I was beginning to get booked in Panorama bar. Because obviously we were doing our party at Berghain but they were booking me we’d done a couple of them where we’d had the whole venue. I’d taken the opportunity then to play upstairs as well as downstairs and they’d obviously liked it. I was getting booked occasionally to do that. I was like wanting to, you what was that kind of influences what you do or something that at that time that was a big, what I was going to play in my sets was a big and was a big and influence on what I was going to do in the studio. It was, wanting to have tunes to play in those house sets as well. Wanting to have these kind of big moment tunes, I suppose.
There wasn’t really it’s a lot around like it that much, that kind of thing. Because, there was a lot of the music that came out around then, it was obviously sort of the end, the sort of tail end of minimal, but the kind of yeah UK house thing was beginning to beginning to happen.
But even within that, the UK house thing was much more of a sort of like kind of baseline, kind of bumpy, kind of bangers kind of thing, and there weren’t really these kind of big kind of shutters up moments that I was looking for, the Panorama classic thing where they open the shutters.
I think that was an influence on it too. It wasn’t so much like sitting down trying to write a prog track. I was very surprised, for example, when Sasha started playing them. Because I followed Sasha a bit in the 90s but wasn’t really aware of what he was doing then and then suddenly I kept getting videos of him like opening his sets with Adrenaline it was just very strange, a kind of surreal experience.
Ry
Do you think any if any of your house stuff as prog house? Or is it really you are like, no, this is like a straight house music.
Paul
Yeah, I think the like the drums, what other of those tracks anyway, like the drums are all very kind of, they’re all kind of old school house Chicago drums, actually. They’re all kind of 727 and all that kind of stuff. They were I suppose with, the big kind of trance-y synth, I mean, trance was the word that was used at the time, not prog. Which I’m not sure if that’s even accurate either.
I just I saw it as just being sort of euphoric house music, really, I think is what I kind of thought of it at the time without getting too bogged down in the kind of minutiae of sub-genres.
I think the way I thought about it was just like, I’m not making bass music anymore and whatever I’m making, different to what I was doing before, really. I couldn’t really place it.
I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of the way it fitted in to that scene at all, because I knew I was going to release it on Hotflush.
I wasn’t sending it to labels. I wasn’t trying to you know fit in with other people’s catalogues at all. It was just like, I’m just gonna make this, I’m just making this stuff, and it’s coming out well, and I can play it in my sets in Panorama Bar.
I was surprised that it caught on to the extent that it did. I was very surprised that people liked it as much as they did. I knew it was good, I wasn’t like, it was surprising to me, for example, that, it got played outside of Berlin.
I was kind of like, sort of half expecting the Berghain and Panorama Bar guys to play because they’d been playing my techno, I’d been making techno before that, and people like myself and Devin, and those kinds of people were playing my techno stuff . I wasn’t a bit surprise when those house tunes got played in Panorama by Panorama Bar DJs but for it to kind of go out in a kind of wider way was it was a surprise definitely.
Ry
Did you start to approach your production differently? Were you starting off with like different elements? Did you start off with, I’m going to start with a drum machine this go around instead of if you’re starting like a more bass music track, or was it melodies?
Because a lot of these are very melodic, the melodies are the backbone. They’re like the best part of your housey stuff, in my opinion. You can do it better than most people.
Paul
I think the change or, the big change was starting with a drum machine instead of starting with a bunch of found sounds that I would make into drums, which is how I was doing it.
The dubstep stuff, most of the stuff on triangulation, the drums are not, they’re not drums as it were. They didn’t start off as, the samples didn’t start off as being drum samples for the most part.
I mean, some of them did, I would basically start a tune by collecting a bunch of found sounds I can use as percussion. That would be the kit in those tunes. That was always the first, that was always the way I’d start off, and I know that because I’ve kind of been doing that again recently for the first time in years. The difference with these is I would just just make a kit out of, old Roland samples,
And the kind of big, but one of one of the big, i remember a time, like one of the kind of big aha moments was putting the, putting a sort of, putting the as the same 808 that I was using for the dubstep tunes, putting that under a 727 kick and making it so you have a big kick and and think, oh, okay, that that could be my kick for these tunes.
I just used it like so many times. That was definitely a big change in the way of of just getting started. Also using ah using a lot less, fx samples. With the dubstep stuff, I would, spend ages chopping stuff out of, film rips of sci-fi films just building up these huge kind of so sample libraries of things that you can just drop in and kind of create a sort of 3D world. Not doing any of that at all and just having maybe a noise track or a crack a crackle track or whatever. Something to give that a little bit more of a bed so you don’t have dead silence, but not anything more than that. I would use those sorts of fx in the dubstep tracks as fills basically. You’d have a big kind of, reversed explosion or kind of like some crackle crazy thing going on with a massive load of reverb.
That would almost be your kind of sweep or whatever, or kind of accent that you would, in a dubstep track you’d use strings for that. I would, in the house tracks, I wasn’t getting those things from samples, and from found sounds, but was using synths for everything.
That, and when you do that, you just get more melodic by definition almost. When everything’s part of the song as it were, as opposed to, the sound design, I think that kind of pushes you down a more melodic route anyway, perhaps, I’m not sure, just less samples and more, consciously just drum machine and synths really.
Ry
I heard you talk that at one point you were like, I’m going to go all hardware was this when you went the all hardware route, or was that prior when you’re doing the SCB stuff?
Paul
No, the hardware thing was much later.
So the hardware thing wasn’t until 2017, 2018 like five, six years later.
Basically the very early stuff was made using a sampler and a desk, one sampler one desk, one effects unit, and a PC running Windows 95. All of the early scuba stuff was made like that. Then about 2006, I went in the box and was in the box for basically 10 years, like exclusively in the box, like 100%.
Ry
Was it like Ableton, or FL?
Or we’re you using even something even more primitive?
Paul
Always been Cubase. I was using, yeah, I was using…On have my Windows 95 PC, I had Cakewalk. It’s the precursor of Sonar, actually. It was like Cakewalk 3.0 or something, but it wasn’t running any software. It was literally just a sequencer.
Everything it was just triggering this e-mu sampler I had, and somehow I found work.
Ry
Did you try any of the trackers like even before then when you were running these like older computers, or did you go back like far enough?
Paul
No, I just had this one setup that I knew how to use, and it would break occasionally I’d be totally fucked. Eventually I got it down to this one setup, which was reliable.
I just used that for for a long time, actually. I must’ve used that for five years. Just kind of learning how, I think learning how to make a tune, and I don’t mean from a technical perspective, I had to really think about how to you know put something together people find that really intuitive and it comes to them immediately and it really didn’t with me. It still sort of doesn’t. Knowing how to structure this kind of music you know because I’d come from you know being in bands and writing songs and stuff and it really didn’t make sense to me at all for for quite a long time. How you’re supposed to do it, how minimal it is and how prescriptive it has to be. Just accepting you have to play by those rules. Took me a long time. I did did all that on that setup. Then I was in the box completely for about 10 years.
Then when I moved back to London full time anyway, in 2016,the end of 2016, I made a conscious effort.
I was like, right, let’s let’s do hardware. Which was in hindsight, not really the the cleverest move, I spent, those few years trying to make that work and never really, I think the problem I had with it, jumping ahead obviously, but the problem I had with it was having to commit, having to print much earlier than I would have done otherwise.
I’m back working in the box primarily now, and I do so much tinkering and it takes me months. I have loads and loads of projects and just not commit and then go back something months later. It’s all still in MIDI. It’s all still in the synths. Do you know I mean? And I wouldn’t have committed to anything.
Obviously it’s much harder to do that when you’re, in hardware. I think that it just didn’t really work for me. It was it was a good it was a great learning process in terms of, learning how the machines work and, that actually helps, I think, a lot with with plugins, a lot of plugins are designed, to be like hardware. It was it was helpful, but from a musical output perspective, it was not productive.
Ry
Are you running MIDI controllers to help you get your ideas is out faster when you’re working software-based? Are you running a Ableton Push or are you running some other sort of MIDI controllers?
Paul
I just have a few pads. I have a keyboard and a few pads, basically.
I play melodies on the keyboard and have some drum pads set up, it’s pretty basic, to be honest.
I don’t use Ableton. I do kind of use Ableton. The last time I did a live set, that was all in Ableton with a push.
I’m kind of sort of comfortable using that. It’s useful for that kind of, in that kind of context, but I’m just used to sitting with a keyboard, a kind of black and white notes keyboard and a qwerty keyboard, which everyone says is the worst kind of creative, but for me, just quite comfortable with it.
Ry
I mean, you don’t need more. I can’t remember what Four Tet album it is, and he hows his whole studio. It’s just a sound card and his computer. He’s like, “I wrote the whole fucking album sitting here.”
Paul
What I made the first three albums on, in fact, the first four, basically all of my albums were essentially made with that kind of setup. I’m very much back to that kind of thing now.
I just don’t think you need to over complicate it. With the caveat that I think when you’re working with someone else in the studio, when you’re collabing, it’s really fun to have hardware going and to jam and have a sequencer going on.
In the studio I had in London where it was all set up like that. When I would have people in, that’s when it would be fun and that’s when it would work.
But that’s been very much the exception for my whole career really. I haven’t done a ton of collabing with people generally speaking. What I found is that while I’m not collabing, I just don’t really use that kind of stuff anyway too much anyway.
Ry
Because so much of your stuff sounds so analog, is that through the sources you’re using sample or are using like sound toys, saturators to get like more of a grit effect or color?
Paul
I started using a lot of saturation in the last few years, but most of my catalog hasn’t gone through a ton of processing.
Most of it is just picking the sounds, the vast majority of it.
I definitely think that that’s, that’s the piece of advice that I would give to anyone. The single most important thing is picking the sounds. There’s only so much you can do if your sounds are shit. If they’re great, then, you know, you can polish them and you can mess around with plugins and all you want and all that kind of stuff. At the end of the day, if they’re great, they’re great.
Ry. Are you like a person that when you open up a window, you have a million plugins, or are you like, no, I have like these 10. I live by them. This is it?
Paul
Funnily enough, I reinstalled Cubase this morning and had to do my plugin manager thing again. I have quite a lot, the ones I actually use, there’s not a ton at all. There’s two EQs, a couple of mastering EQs, two or three compressors. Two or three reverbs, some delays, there’s a kind of flanger that I go to a lot, and then a few more specialized things. The unfiltered audio stuff, I think is fucking great, but that’s very kind of specialized kind of effects.
But in terms of the kind of basic tools that you need to make a tune, it’s not much at all.
The UAD Harrison EQ, the FabFilter EQ, You know, the UAD distressor, compressor, emulator, there’s a couple more compressors and, delays and stuff.
Apart from that, most of it is sound identification.
Ry
Is that how you feel like you morph your sound is because it is interesting that, no matter what genre you do, I feel like the three elements are the same. It’s going to percussive, melodic, and “bassy”. It sounds like you’ve made it. That’s just surely from you making patches and identifying what you want.
Paul
Yeah, I think it’s funny because everyone always says that. It sounds like you. I’m not, I’m unable to identify these characteristics completely. I have to take people’s word for it. I don’t know. I think i think it’s more I have a quite specific taste in how I think how i like things to sound.I think stuff like reverb is is kind of important.
I mean, in terms of a sonic signature. The kind of choices you make with percussion, I think, quite often give someone’s work a distinctive character.
It’s difficult for me to say that because, I listen to my stuff a lot. I’m not one of these producers that never listens to their own tunes. I listen to my tunes quite a lot. You just get, overly familiar with them. It’s very difficult to step back and look at things things objectively.
Ry
Are you one of those people where you like you keep listening to your tunes because you’re like unhappy with the final product, or like it’s because you’re overly happy? I personally, am like this is not it.
Paul
Actually what I find is, once something comes out, it’s usually better to give it a bit of space. You know, once it’s out there, give it six months or whatever.
Because like, that’s when the sort of anxiety peak is at its highest. I mean, it’s out there, people listening to it. You’re like, oh God, I should not have done this. I should have made this, new change that no one would ever notice.
But when it comes out, give it a little bit of space and then you can come back to it six months later. Usually you’re like, oh, this is pretty good. I was right to put this out.
Ry
I think the world wouldn’t disagree with that the majority of what you’re putting out is absolutely great. I was looking at all of your different sales on Beatport, seeing some reviews online and you’re still one of the most highly regarded producers of the last 20 years.
Paul
Maybe it’s nice of you to say so. Again, it’s difficult. I don’t know, whatever. It’s nice you to say so. Thank you.
Ry
When you are working collabs, you said you like to have a little bit of hardware in there, but in today’s realm, are you doing it mostly like digitally through like email? Also, who do you how do you choose who do you collab with as well? You have a wide range of folks that you have definitely worked with.
Paul
It’s mostly people who I know almost exclusively. The majority of stuff that’s actually come out, Collabs wise, has been done remotely.
It’s really fun jamming. The thing about jamming is that, you know, when you have fun in the studio, it doesn’t always lead to the best musical results.
I mean, without wanting to be cynical about it, you can almost kind like, inversely correlate between the amount of fun people having in the studio the quality of the music that’s gonna come out at the end of it.
I think that certainly for me, I have to get quite granular about it and sort of quite hunched over the desk and deep in the sort of reverb settings and that kind of thing. That’s kind of a solitary person in the studio doing that kind of work really.
Having said that, it’s nice when something comes together and you’ve genuinely made it with someone else.
I have to say that.
I think if I have a bit of a regret and something I wish I’d done more is that I wish I’d made the effort to do more kind of IRL collabs.
It’s quite nerve-wracking. Even when you know the person, you know it can be quite intimidating getting started with that kind of thing. When it works, when it comes together, when you do make the effort and it actually yields something really good, then I think it’s sort of it’s something you know it hits different, you know to use the vernacular.
It is something a bit different.
Ry
Well, and of course, you’re doing it in a more authentic way, saying you’re only doing it with people you know, because now, of course, collabs are the most easy lateral move, I feel like. But we’re not going to get into it.
Paul
Oh man, I mean, literally, like it’s almost like if you’re not doing a collab, like are you even really making a tune now? you know It’s like, fuck.
Ry
Fucking ridiculous. But anyway, but they also could be great.
And sometimes they actually you can hear both artists like influence. sometimes you But you could really tell. Sometimes you ah pull up a track and you’re like, this one person made it, this other person’s name’s on it, and they have no involvement with the production at all.
Ry
If you had like any advice for people trying to finish tracks, what’s your…
Paul
Yeah, I mean, this is the kind of classic question, isn’t it?
I think basically if you can find a way of testing it out, whether it’s, you’re playing a player in a DJ set, even if it’s a really unfinished version, just fucking play it.
You find out so much about something. And then obviously if you just just play it in front of someone else, that’s really good too. If you’re driving in a car with someone, say, I’ll just stick this on for a moment. Then you you’re kind of trapped in there you have to listen to it with them. That absolutely concentrates the mind in terms of like working out what needs to be done to attract.
for sure. I think getting the kind of arrangement into a state where it it could be a finished track, also doing that as soon as quickly as possible, getting out of a loop stage as quickly as possible, and then committing to playing it to someone.
I think if you can do those two things, then that will be a pretty good push along you know the route to actually being being you know actually having something finished.
But like if it’s a dance track, you never really know until you’ve played it in a club, basically. I mean, it’s it’s until you’ve really seen it, until you’ve seen how it performs, do you know what it is. Is this really a banger?
Ry
This is true.
Paul
It feels like a banger, it should be a banger, but until you’ve got kind of documentary evidence that it is, then it isn’t, you know? That’s obviously, pretty nerve wracking as well. When you stick something that you think is great, you stick it on peak time, let’s do this, and it works it’s great feeling, but obviously sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes you’re wrong. That’s the thing. You never really know.
I don’t think anyone can, people say, oh I can always hear a hit. I’m skeptical about that. Sometimes it’s just a kind of intangible attraction to to a record that doesn’t reveal itself to you.
But it’s there and it you know reveals itself when you play it and you know in out in the wild as it were.
Sometimes it’s awful for a reason. Sometimes you can immediately see why it’s not working. Like if you could mess up something in the mix or whatever, or like, you know, just yeah sometimes it’s easier, easily identifiable. It’s rarer when it just, you’d like, oh no.
But that obviously, it does happen. It’s like, no mix down is going to fix this mess, unfortunately.
Ry
To some extent it’s our egos, I made this thing, I get it, I love it and then you’re like, but you have to accept maybe it doesn’t have to be put out into the world.
Paul
Yeah. Well, that’s true as well. There’s nothing wrong with that. Not everything that you make has to come out. That’s absolutely fine. I think the thing about finishing tracks, you should try and finish everything.
You know, I don’t observe that, but I try and do I try and get as much stuff as finished as possible.
Even if I know it’s not gonna come out, try and get it through this for as far down the road as possible. Then then then you have it, you know, and you can come back to it later, for years later. You can see what I was trying to do there and I can see, the mistakes I made.
I mean, don’t go crazy and spend, weeks doing it or whatever, but I think it really helps, I think, to take each bit each piece of work to as much of a conclusion as you can without, wasting too much time.
Obviously there are there are bad ideas and a really bad idea usually reveals it’s itself to be a bad idea quite early on. Obviously jets on those.
Just getting it into, like I said, sequencing it up, getting it into a stage where where it’s a proper track, doing that for as many tunes as possible, I think is really good piece of advice to have as well.
No Such Animal 