All Star Remixer and Recording Artist BT, Part I

BT has been a major force in electronic music since the early 90s, when he began creating the wildly innovative sounds that have since become known as trance music. His debut album on the Perfecto Label, “Ima,” impressed audiences with its fusion of New Age mood music and the hypnotic pulse of the dance floor. BT moved on to create dazzling remixes of tracks by Seal, Madonna, Sarah McLachlan, and DJ Sasha. These early works quickly established BT as the progenitor of an entirely new type of dance music. His later works, “ESCM” and “Movement in Still Life,” revealed further development of his signature celestial style of progressive house.

BT soon moved on to film work, scoring and/or contributing songs to “The Fast and the Furious,” “Driven,” “Zoolander,” “Gone in Sixty Seconds,” “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever,” and more. He also produced N’Sync’s “Pop,” the song the band selected as the first single for their multi-platinum album “Celebrity,” adding still more momentum to the wave of success BT has been riding for the last decade.

With the first single of his new album “Emotional Technology” now hitting the airwaves, BT’s fans are finally able to hear the results of a project two years in the making. Since M-Audio last spoke with the ever-innovative electronic music giant at AES (December M-Pulse) BT has focused most of his energy on finishing the much-anticipated release. Not one to sit back and just enjoy the fruits of his labor for long, BT has already immersed himself in scoring the upcoming Charlize Theron movie “Monster,” tentatively slated for release in October 2003.

Kylee Swenson of “Remix” magazine had the honor of interviewing the very enthusiastic Reason and Live user at M-Audio’s booth at Winter NAMM. Read on as Swenson unlocks BT’s unique production techniques, discusses the process of working on “Pop,” and gets a hands-on demonstration of M-Audio hardware.

REMIX: At “Remix,” we really like to get into the nuts and bolts of recording, producing and performing. We love interviewing people like BT so we can pick their brains for ideas that we can take back to our own studios. Obviously you've been building up your studio for so many years now, and one thing I want to know is how your studio has evolved with M-Audio gear.

BT: I actually just moved my studio. My studio had become very bloated with lots of antiquated equipment I wasn't using. So I kind of “Feng Shuied” my new space. I kept pieces that I use all the time, but I got rid of my Pro Controller. I still use Pro Tools, but I wasn't using my Pro Controller. I took a lot of my vintage synths, and I put them in storage. I don't want to sell any of that stuff because a lot of it is very valuable, and like you said, I've been collecting it since I was a kid.

For things like my EMS-VC3, Prophet-5, and Jupiter-8s, I go to software synths now because they’re more powerful and there is more opportunity for sound design. More interesting things can happen—and they’re portable. So my studio had evolved for many years, and had gotten to a place where it really was out of control. It was just too Spinal Tap at my house.

Now, I've got a Radium sitting in front of a Mac Cinema Display. I have a JV-8000 and a Virus. There is also some outboard gear for recording vocals and guitars. And that's it. I sent all the rest of the stuff back to Maryland. I haven't been using this stuff for a long time and it was just time to tailor to the process for writing music.

REMIX: Are you missing some of that gear?

BT: I'm not, actually. I miss looking at it—it looks really impressive. I do have some really great vintage pieces, but I would only go to them under such extreme circumstances that I thought it a good time to try paring down to my key pieces.

REMIX: When you are working on a new remix or whatever it is, do you start off then with some of your soft synths and just kind of look around for a sound and try to find something that inspires you?

BT: It depends. If I'm working on “The Fast and the Furious” or “Zoolander” or something like that, I'd be shown a piece of the film. That's the best thing about having your gear pared down to how you work. I know it's impressive to have loads of sliders and knobs and lights and all that kind of stuff, but it can be really distracting. It can distract you from the process. I will sometimes start with soft synths. But more often than not, I'll just sit with a piece of film and watch it 20 times. I'll try to get some internal dialogue going as to how it makes me feel. And then I sit down with a piano sound, or sit down at acoustic guitar, or just walk around. I just leave it and walk around and see if anything comes to me. Good things often happen if I walk away from it.

REMIX: I know you have the Oxygen8.

BT: Yeah, I do. I take the Oxygen8 on the plane with me. And I also use an Oxygen8 when I'm DJing, in tandem with Live, turntables and CD-DJ. It's a great keyboard. It's got nice little controllers on it. The best thing about it is you can power it off USB. I can use it on a plane with a bunch of soft synths, and a PowerBook. You can make music wherever you want.

REMIX: Can you give me an example of a song or a track that you were working on that you did on the plane?

BT: Yeah, definitely. When I did the track “Pop” for N’SYNC, I actually did a lot of the vocal edits on a plane. I probably did about 25 different vocal treatments. I took that along with an isolated a capella. I cut and pieced the vocal together. There's something like 2000 or 3000 edits in that three-minute song. And I did that sitting on a plane.

REMIX: That song is one reason I think it's interesting to hear you talk about pop music and how it has evolved. I used to have bad associations with pop music. But one thing that you've brought to pop music is a forward-thinking kind of production. I want to know how you balance that forward-thinking production with still reaching out to that huge audience.

BT: What is commercially viable? It's a good question. The answer is I actually don't ever think about it. That gets me into trouble sometimes. Sting had written this really beautiful song and I just treated it as irreverently as possibly, while still respecting Sting as an artist. I'm a Sting fan—I love what he does. But I tried to approach it with the most punk rock sensibility that I could. I wanted to do something that would be interesting, so who cares what the audience is for it?
Sometimes it gets me into trouble, and sometimes it's a cool thing. After doing “Pop,” I couldn't believe that they accepted it, much less picked it for a single. I was in Thailand when they picked the song for the first single. I thought that was just retarded. No one's ever going to play that song. Ever. I tried to make Justin sound like a cross between Michael Jackson and Max Headroom. I just wanted it to sound like you had Michael Jackson in like a headlock and were just shaking him. I couldn't believe that they played that on the radio, much less that it was a single and a hit.

REMIX: So we have a Radium in front of us. I wonder if you could maybe show us something you've been working on.

BT: You can assign a knob to control multiple controllers. The thing that's so great about the way all of this stuff is set up (both Reason and Live and all of M-Audio’s gear) is that it's user configurable on the fly. I can't tell you how many times at DJ gigs I've had to set up on top of somebody spinning records. I’ll do a new auto load on the fly because I'll have an idea on the way to the gig. I’ll be thinking, “I should put in snare fills and assign a knob to filter that.” Having stuff work this simply, you could sit down in a smoky club, assign a bunch of controllers and get to work. So it's a really exciting thing.

Be sure to check out next month’s M-Pulse for the second installment of this interview.

Return to the M-Pulse homepage