All Star Remixer and Recording Artist BT: Part II

“Remix” magazine editor Kylee Swenson continues her discussion with BT, dance music progenitor, in M-Audio’s booth at Winter NAMM. (Read Part I…)

REMIX: There are so many amazing things about Reason. What are some of your favorites?

BT: It's such a fantastic program. And the Malstrom synth, I think it was made for me personally. You know, it's the first real commercially available synth that features a grained synthesis prominently in its engine. It's just an incredible piece. I've used that one synth so many times while making my new album. The only other piece of gear that I had prior to Reason that was great at grained synthesis was Kyma. Everything else was throw something in it and you walk away from the computer for four hours, and then come back and you've got some granular thing.

REMIX: So this has totally speeded up your process.

BT: Absolutely.

REMIX: I know you are also a huge fan of Ableton Live. Can you tell me a little bit more about the program and what you've been doing with it?

BT: Yeah. Actually I've been using Live in tandem with Reason to do live remixing on the fly. I have a Titanium PowerBook, an Oxygen8 and decks and CD players. The hard thing was always chasing the tempo. Live 2 has fixed this. When you're tempo chasing a record, you're dragging your finger on it to slow it down and jogging the middle to speed it up. That's a pain on a laptop when you're trying to use a mouse pad, and somebody's spilling his beer on you and stuff.

Now the tempo is assignable to a controller. So basically I've been using it as a means of remixing things on the fly. Instead of just playing someone else's record, I'll start by playing a track of mine, but I'll strip some of the ACID lines out of it or some of the keyboard parts out of it. I'll go into Reason and ReWire it to Live. Instead of beat-mixing in a record, I'll take my Oxygen8 and I'll get a cool arpeggio pattern going in the key of the record that I'm playing. From there I'll beat-mix that in. And then in Live, I'll drop in a few loops. So in effect, you're writing music on the fly.

Before I actually saw it work, I thought it would be too processor-intensive to work in a real world application. But I just got back from DJing for 10,000 kids in Hong Kong and I played pretty much my entire set in Live—with a bunch of oil-based smoke machines! Oil smoke machines are every touring musician's worst nightmare with electronic gear, because it freaks everything out. But Live worked great. There aren’t enough good things I can say about this program.

REMIX: I’d like to open this up to some questions from the audience now.

AUDIENCE: What was the learning curve like for Live?

BT: Carlos Vasquez from M-Audio came over to my house and said, “you’ve got to check this program out. It's incredible.” I'd been knee deep in the Kyma manual for two years, and was thinking “I don't have the time to learn another program.” He installed it on my computer and literally in a half hour I had the entire thing sauced. It's one of those things where it couldn't do it more simply. So the learning curve was really quick for me. It's the kind of thing you can use right away.

AUDIENCE: You were saying that you got rid of your Pro Controller. Is it because it got in the way? I’ve heard a lot of people saying that they actually prefer to mix with a mouse. Is that your feeling?

BT: That's exactly what it was for me. For different people it's different things. People that come from traditional engineering backgrounds will find that kind of surface perfect. But I grew up using a mouse. I could not mix a record on an SSL or a NEVE, but sit me down with a copy of Logic and a mouse and I feel comfortable. It's a different way of thinking. When you're working on a board there's a lot of controllable parameters at once. I'm over-stimulated. I need to focus on one thing. I want to sit down with one instrument. Say I've got this evolving textural line. I want to concentrate on automating the mid-ranging cue on it, and automating effects throws on it. I want to spend an hour on automating just that one thing. So I'm comfortable doing it with a mouse. That's just me.

AUDIENCE: So you're comfortable using external controllers for synthesis and the first part of the creative stage... but once you get to the mixing stage you prefer to actually use a mouse?

BT: Exactly. I prefer to use a mouse. And it's a weird thing—you point out something that's a paradox. But for writing a song—like when I'm playing—I want to be able to sweep filters and do all that kind of stuff. But when I'm sitting down and mixing, I just like using the mouse. It's a preference thing.

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