Ableton Interviews Mijk van Dijk
Mijk van Dijk has played on all continents and in just about every kind of location. His music moved crowds of 120,000 at Tecnogeist 2001 & 2003 in Mexico. His first two albums, “Afreuropamericasiaustralica” (MFS) and “Glow” (Superstition), solidified his reputation as one of Germany’s top producers. With his subsequent albums “Teamwork ” and “Everyground,” Mijk van Dijk expanded his fan base to Japan, where Sony Music released the albums locally with tremendous success. Mijk van Dijk speaks about how he created “DECADE—the Mix” using Live. “I have used Ableton Live for a very long time now,” explains Mijk van Dijk. “I bought Live shortly after its release; I became curious after hearing the many positive reviews. When I bought it I did not know what to use it for exactly. First I found that I liked to use it as a luxurious loop editor, ReWire-slaved in Cubase. With Live, it was so easy and fast to try out various loops with my Cubase arrangement. “I delved more deeply into Live when I was assigned to mix a CD for the 10th anniversary of my label, Superstition. In 1999, I had produced a track for a Superstition anniversary release (their 100th), which was composed only of samples of the 99 previous releases. This concept appealed so much to the head of Superstition, Tobias Lampe, that he assigned me to do something similar in album length for their 10th anniversary. “The question was: How should I do it? It didn’t seem reasonable to deconstruct the whole back catalogue, dig for input for my sampler, and ego-trippingly produce some Mijk van Dijk tracks this way. Role models for this project did not exist at this time. I wanted both to represent the records and the artists that had grown important for me during those 10 years of Superstition releases, and to get as close as possible to the core of the music. I did not want a nostalgic retrospective, but a mix as fresh as 2003, ten years of history polished and remolded for a new club generation. “I started a first draft with Ableton Live, got to know the Arrangement View, mixed the beat of a Greenman track with some Stereo Jack vocals, added some typical Oliver-lieb textures—and was delighted. Everything fit together; categories like Techno, Trance and House did not seem to matter anymore. Speed differences of 30 bpm did not create audible problems—and pitching whole tracks over three semitones still sounded great.
“Indeed, the whole production was “learning by doing.” I found out about new features and tricks every day. The most astounding thing about Live is the complete creative freedom in terms of timing and pitch for an audio file. It was hard to get used to this after 15 years of sampler usage. Another great feature of Live is the ability to completely automate all mixer and effects parameters. So I was able to design the mix both very precisely and with great complexity. For sound design, I just used the internal Live effects: Auto Filter, EQ Four, Reverb and Ping Pong Delay. Auto Filter is very easy to use. EQ Four was effective for isolating or matching frequencies of different tracks. “I can well imagine that more and more mix albums will be produced using computers in the future. Computers will not displace the classic DJ mix CD, but the new potential to mix all kinds of input precisely is both challenging and fascinating. “Meanwhile, I am using Live as an arranging tool for my Cubase audio parts, as a composition sequencer, and, of course, for remixing. I even use Live to compose more often than my MIDI sequencer in Cubase.” For more information, visit http://www.superstition.de/. |
On
September 29, 2003, Superstition Records released a 10-Year Anniversary
retrospective entitled “DECADE—the Mix.” The
CD presents a fresh and unique mix concept: the sound of Superstition’s
first decade, presented in a breathtaking 70 minute flow of excerpts
from 68 essential tracks, reinterpreted, rearranged and computer-mixed
by Berlin-based producer and DJ Mijk van Dijk using Ableton Live
software.
“When
I found out about the possibility of syncing a whole track by
using Live´s Warp Markers, I immediately loaded about 150
songs onto my G4, warp-marked them and tried to find matching
combinations. It was more play than work. I only used the complete
stereo files of the label back catalogue. So, anyone who uses
Live and owns the right Superstition tracks on his hard drive
could theoretically produce the same mix (or, of course, a completely
different mix).© 2007 by M-Audio, All Rights Reserved.