The Housecast Sessions

DJ }Moose is a well known name in the electronic music scene. His Housecast Sessions are listened to the world over via iTunes and his weekly live internet radio show, and his house music mixes have been downloaded millions of times - “Funking the Disco” has been the most played mix over at House Music Links for over two years! This interview with }Moose comes from Funkational Recordings - his record label - and looks at the other side of the DJ’s musicality - his own productions and remixing…

Although primarily known as a DJ, }Moose is a talented producer and remixer in his own right, and in this interview we’ll focus on his production techniques, the equipment he uses, and his musical inspirations.

F: Most folk know you as a DJ, but probably wont be surprised to hear you produce and remix as well. How long have you been involved in music production?

}M: Actually a fair bit longer than I’ve been DJ’ing! I’ve always been fascinated using computers for music production. In my college days in the late 70’s we wrote a program on a CTL Mod 1 mainframe computer to create rhythm tracks on a teletype; using the bell, carriage returns, backspaces etc., and the results were pretty funky! We’d record the teletype to analogue tape then take it to the studio to speed it up or slow it down and mix it in with our music. I wish I still had some of that stuff now, it was a pretty unique sound.

I did the Commodore 64 and Atari ST thing through the 80’s and early 90’s, mainly working with sequencer stuff. PCs opened my eyes to audio in the mid 90’s so I spent a lot of time playing around with samples and loops - I suppose I still base a lot of my creations on audio samples and add the software and synth sounds in once the structure is in place.

F: From listening to your Housecasts it’s obvious you have a very eclectic taste even in house music, and your own productions range from reggie to 80’s dance. Where do you draw your influences from?

}M: Mmm - I can’t really think of any particular point when I said “I want to make music like that”, but many a time I’ve thought “wow - what a sound. How did they get that?”. I come from a pretty musical family, and we spent a lot of time as kids in West Africa where we were subjected to amazing music - it was everywhere, and I still love those Afro and Latin rhythms and sounds. I’ve played the harp (harmonica) since I was a wee boy and draw a lot of stuff from the blues greats like Robert Johnson, Sonny Terry, Sonny Boy Williamson and the rest of the gang. I still play and sing in a blues band, so that must rub off a bit in my electronic creations.

Dance music hit me in the late 80’s and I’ve never looked back really. I love the early Chicago acid and warehouse sounds, these guy’s were amazing and totally revolutionary. It took a while to get to the UK, but when it did it rescued us from the commercial shite that was around at the time. Peter Gabriel was a heavy influence, especially the experimental stuff he was doing in the early 90’s - oh, and John Martyn as well - have you heard some of his electronica/dance stuff? But to be honest I love all styles of music, even things like classical and easy listening; Mantovani and the likes! If I like it then I’m not scared to say, that even goes as far as James Blunt (but I wouldn’t tell anyone that - oh shit, I just have). I suppose I’m heavily into Goldfrapp and Nightmares on Wax at the moment, I just love both their sounds, and pretty distinctive and unique they are too.

F: You mentioned Atari and Commodore computers earlier - what do you use now, and what software are you working with?

}M: Apple Macs all the way, and I have a house full of them! There’s two Macbooks I use as my DJ and production machines; a 24″ 2.8GHz iMac (beautiful machine, it’s in our living room as a telly-cum-media-centre); a 1GHz G4 lampshade iMac (I really love that design - probably the best looking iMac ever); a G4 Mac Mini and a G4 AGP box that I upgraded to a dual 1.4GHz machine. Quite a family really. Oh, and there’s my iPod Touch and Shuffle as well, with a Nano on the way for my other half. Apple should give me shares! I’ve also got a couple of PCs in case there’s a must have plugin that’s Windows only, along with a DAW and a couple of audio apps.

Software wise, Logic Studio 8 is my DAW of choice, and it does absolutely everything I need, then some. It’s just so intuitive and works exactly the way I think, right out of the box. Quite often when inspiration hits me I’ll throw an idea together in Garage Band with loops, when watching the telly, sitting on a plane or a waiting room or something. I can then pull the whole thing into Logic and work from there. Most of my stuff is done this way, I rarely sit down with a blank canvas in Logic.

Logic Studio comes with an excellent set of instrument and effects plugins - you can work a whole project just with the built in stuff, which is all optimised for the application. I have a few other third party plugins, notably Kore, Melodyne and various dynamics and effects AU’s. Kore is great for finding just the right sound - it’s very similar to Apple’s own loop browser for digging through the library of patches and sounds. NI’s SoundPacks for Kore are a great source of new and interesting sounds, I can spend hours going through them and playing around with the variations in the stand-alone player.

Once I’ve completed a project I bounce it down to a 24 bit AIFF and pull it into T-Racks for pre-mastering. If you haven’t tried T-Racks then you’re missing out, it’s the sweetest vintage valve mastering suite out there, with a cracking EQ, compressor and multi band limiter, all tied together with IK’s own output stage, where the magic really happens. The warmth and depth you can give your mix with this is just amazing, and you can really push the levels without clipping to get a sound as loud and clear as a commercial release. I’ll push my dance tracks to -0.5 or even -0.2 db, and instead of the square tops you get with other limiters there’s still a lovely curve left on the waveform - great stuff!

There’s FL Studio on the PC - fantastic for putting drum tracks together and it plays host to my PC plugins. FL Studio is a great, if slightly quirky workstation, very dance oriented. I wish there was a Mac version! I also have Sony Sound Forge 8 on the PC, but I tend to use Soundtrack Pro on the Mac instead these days.

On the DJ front I use Traktor 3. There is really nothing out there that can beat this, and there seems to be a new DJ package hitting the shelves almost daily these days. I’ve tried a few, but always head back to Traktor. The only other software I’d ever consider using live is EKS’s Bison with the XP10 controllers - very CDJ like control and nothing fancy, but the downside is it runs on Windows, although I believe there’s a Mac version coming.

F: You must have a lot of outboard gear in your studio, like monitors, audio interfaces, mixers and mics. What are you using?

}M: Now we’re talking! I’m a studio gear junkie and just love my outboard stuff. As you can see I keep things fairly compact - I like everything to be within reach of my chair so I choose gear that will fit in with that remit. At the heart of my system is an Edirol FA101 firewire audio module, a 10 in/10 out unit that’s very low latency with sample rates up to 192KHz in 24 bit. I work my projects at 48KHz/24 bit, but record at 192KHz for the headroom it gives me. The FA101 goes through my Stanton M505 mixer - a DJ device but with studio quality sound and it’s great, I love it! This feeds a pair of Alesis M1 Active MK2 monitors. I just love these babies, great near field units with separate 75w/25w amps in each. Crystal clear sound with excellent and crisp top and bottom ends, they perform more like something costing three times as much. I used to use a pair of NS10’s just because everyone else had them, but there’s no comparison with the Alesis speakers.

In fact any old crap sounds good through these monitors - a mixdown can sound perfect until you hear it on the hi-fi or in the car, so I have a pair of Edirol MA 15D’s which have a consumer biased sound, albeit quite a good one. I also make use of the Macbook’s built in speakers when doing a final mixdown before taking it out to the car.

I have a selection of mics but love my AKG Perceptions for vocals and instrument recording - I use it for my Housecasts as well. I have a little valve preamp with variable voicing which is great for getting just the right sound - the two of them work extremely well together and the preamp makes it sound like a tube mic at a quarter of the cost!

There’s a Korg KP3 effects unit, mainly for DJ’ing but it gets used with my productions as well. The patches are brilliant and the large touch interface is like nothing else. It’s a great XY controller for synths and plugins as well. It’s also a four channel sampler which is really useful sometimes.

F: What about keyboards, synths and controllers?

}M: Ooh - I love them all - sexy things! I have my trusty 61 key Korg X5D synth - mainly used as a MIDI keyboard for Logic but I still use some of the sounds, recorded straight in as audio then played around with through plugins. Then I have my M-Audio Axiom 25 - what a great wee controller. This is set up for Kore - the eight knobs directly mapped and the pads set up for the sound variations. I also use it for programming drum tracks and as a general input keyboard - the semi-weighted keys are streets ahead of the Korg’s and have aftertouch.

I also have a couple of Elektribes - a DR1 and an EA1 Mk2. I use the DR1 to program drums into Logic, but occasionally use it as a stand-alone drum machine, great for gritty house and dub drums. The EA1 is just excellent and has a very distinctive sound, again great for gritty house stuff.

I suppose my piste resistance is the Euphonix MC Control - this baby really rocks! I’ve only had it a wee while as the first one had a dodgy screen and had to go back, so I’m still on the learning curve. It really is plug and play with Logic - everything just works and I can see I’ll get to a point where the mouse becomes almost redundant. The motorised faders are the business, and even though there’s only four of them it’s a doddle to jump through the banks or track by track. The touch screen is where it all happens though, and nearly everything in Logic (and Soundtrack Pro) can be controlled or adjusted from here. I’ve really bonded with this controller straight away and it’s a great addition to my production armoury. It was a toss-up between the Euphonix and the Mackie Control, but the touch screen won the day!

For DJ’ing I use a Vestax VCI100 controller - it’s made for Traktor, compact, metal and HEAVY, just the way I like it! I’ve got a pair of XP10’s as well, for a compact live set with an external mixer these wee things are great, well built and have a built in audio interface in each. The Vestax wins the day though for sheer functionality with Traktor, and Traktor’s four band A&H EQ emulation is cracking - very few controllers offer the four bands and it’s the dogs bollocks for live sets.

I’ve tons of other bits of kit lurking in cupboards that rarely gets used these days, just gathered over the years, but the stuff I’m working with does everything I need at the moment. Plenty of stuff on my wish list though - a hardware sampler for starters, mainly for live DJ sets but I could use it with productions. And a good MIDI keyboard - I might just grab a 61 key Axiom as I love the action and the weighting suits my playing style - the Korg keyboard just doesn’t cut it since I got the baby Axiom. There’s a few plugins I’m looking at, mainly vocal harmonisers like Vielklang which looks tasty and doesn’t need an iLock, which I have resisted and refuse to use. I have a harmoniser on the PC (the chorus on Distant Place was done on this) which is pretty good - I can’t mind the name of it off hand but it gives you tons of options, male/female voices and the rest, up to 32 voices in the choir although it fairly hits the CPU when you get to over eight. Oh - and I have to keep myself out of music sites like Dolphin and Digital Village as I always end up buying something!

F: So what are you working on at the moment and what plans for the future?

}M: I’ve got a couple of remix projects on the go - quite big names but I’m under an NDA from the label so can’t say. I’m not even allowed to play the tracks in my sets as they’re not due for release until November.

There’s three of my own projects on the go: a deep house number, a latin flavoured dub disco type thing and a 70’s style housed up disco classic. I tend to work a day or so at a time on each then jump to the next just to get away from it a bit, although I’ve been spending a fair bit of time on the latin disco number - the next release I think, watch this space!

There’s a few ideas lurking on the back burner, and a couple of collaborative projects in the pipeline which I’m pretty excited about. On the DJ front I’ve had to cancel just about everything except the Housecasts this summer due to health - really pissed off I had to cancel Macedonia in July, that would have been a cracker.

F: And what about the album we’ve been hearing about?

}M: Oh yes, well it’s coming on, in fact once I’ve finished the three projects and get the all-clear to use the remixes then it will be ready - hopefully just in time for Christmas, not intentional but might be quite nice for sales! It will be in electronic format only for general release, but I’m printing off a few hundred for local sales and there’ll be a few available through my website and hopefully here.

F: Well thank you }Moose, that was very interesting. Hope everything goes well for you and your health improves soon.

}M: Thanks to you too.