Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands

 


The Grid gives you the opportunity to question some of drum & bass production's most prominent figureheads. This Q&A will consist of a moderated open thread in which you can ask production related questions to the interrogated. For this first edition we happily invite Noisia!





Noisia, Drifter and Hustle Athletics are all aliases which belong to the same three individuals: Martijn van Sonderen, Nik Roos and Thijs de Vlieger. They hail from Groningen, a city in the northern part of The Netherlands where out of five inhabitants at least one is a student; A peculiar type of species which they themselves belong to, even after their recent success. After their first initial signing on 'Shadow Law' and release on 'Nerve' things moved very fast. In a two year period they've released on a fuckload of labels, including forthcoming material on 'Metalheadz', 'BC Presents', 'Renegade Hardware' and 'Subtitles'.


This Q&A is closed!

Last edited by Croms on 12-22-2008 at 03:31 AM

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Location: holland

: first

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hi :)

http://www.myspace.com/denoisia

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Location: Norwich, England

What is your current set up and what does each part play? What do you use/value the most? Big ups for doing this btw.

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quote:

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Originally posted by CunningLinguist
ahh so that's what that thing is. I just thought Andy really liked napkins or something

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Location: in a tea daze

well lets cut straight to the chase.

1. those bass sounds.

current grid "best guess" seems to be basically ... taking some sort of reecey bass sound, sweeping notch/filters through it, resample, layer, more sweeps, resample, layer, repeat many times.... with added distortion/pitch env etc, to taste

care to give any more specifics?

2. teebee's aim?

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Location: holland

quote:

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Originally posted by Andydextruss
What is your current set up and what does each part play? What do you use/value the most? Big ups for doing this btw.

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hi :)

http://www.myspace.com/denoisia

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Location: www.myspace.com/generis

Wot freq do eq your sub kicks too and wot do you use to get that evil distortion?

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Location: holland

quote:

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Originally posted by hipnotic
well lets cut straight to the chase.

1. those bass sounds.

current grid "best guess" seems to be basically ... taking some sort of reecey bass sound, sweeping notch/filters through it, resample, layer, more sweeps, resample, layer, repeat many times.... with added distortion/pitch env etc, to taste

care to give any more specifics?

2. teebee's aim?

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1. it varies per sound, there's no set path to every sound; but generally the sounds are made from base sounds we make out of synths, resampled, put into a sampler and played with (and yes - rinse and repeat) - we often just spend an afternoon making mids on dedicated sx projects, meaning you can use all your cpu on one sound, and bounce out a bunch of variations / sequences to be used as audio later or loaded into a sampler again. its all about getting to know your tools and slowly learning what you can do and how you can translate whats in your head into a sound, or just make accidents happen that might sound good ;)
and of course filters are important, but key here is:
the thing about basslines we like so much is the dynamics in the sound - movement. and that doesnt necessarily always have to come from filters, theres a million ways to make something change over time, for example just using volume changes run into a distortion plugin can work; ringmodulation, pitch modulation, anything goes really.
it wont help anyone if we start dishing out specific details on how a sound was made; it's all about finding your own taste in things, no one ever taught us anything about basslines... we just listened and fucked around.

and to round it up; learning to discern what you like and don't like about a sound (might sound obvious...but it's not!) and knowing what to do in the latter case is probably the most important thing to get into.

and the only way you can find energy to dedicate yourself to this long and exhausting process, is to have a lot of fun doing it :) so you can keep it up longer without getting bored or frustrated trying to do something you think you should be doing.

2.





no.

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hi :)

http://www.myspace.com/denoisia

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Location: in a tea daze

quote:

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Originally posted by noisia
we often just spend an afternoon making mids on dedicated sx projects, meaning you can use all your cpu on one sound, and bounce out a bunch of variations / sequences to be used as audio later or loaded into a sampler again.

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aha... thats very interesting.

i think one of my main problems with trying to do that sort of bassline is trying to do it inside my main project with the cpu already pretty damn high.

cheers

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Location: holland

quote:

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Originally posted by project
Wot freq do eq your sub kicks too and wot do you use to get that evil distortion?

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hi :)

http://www.myspace.com/denoisia

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Location: Asia / Europe

which do you prefer writing at the moment? breaks, house or dnb... question for the batty one known as Thijs

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Location: holland

quote:

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Originally posted by MiL0
which do you prefer writing at the moment? breaks, house or dnb... question for the batty one known as Thijs

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hi :)

http://www.myspace.com/denoisia

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Location: www.myspace.com/generis

Out the tunes you have made which took the longest and which one is your favourite?

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Question:

How are you using reverb on your breaks? Do you insert it on a group channel or do you put it on individual parts of your breaks seperatly and then group them?? Or do both??

Also do you send the highs to one group and the kicks and snares to one group and deal with them seperately??

Big up for doing this by the way! Got a lot respect for you lot!

Deceptive

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Location: holland

quote:

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Originally posted by project
Out the tunes you have made which took the longest and which one is your favourite?

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hi :)

http://www.myspace.com/denoisia

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quote:

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Originally posted by noisia
lately we have been spending a lot of time on tunes, it started with 'meditation', we knew it was a special opportunity for us so we wanted to do our absolute best, i think we spent about 3 months on that tune. then messiah remix, if it counts, took us about 4 months, a week for the intro orchestration, a month or two on the main groove (drums and sub work) and trying all sorts of ideas and angles out, a couple of weeks making reeses for it, edits etc...then sequencing it out and finishing it up.
right now we are working on a thing called 'the tide' which has already taken us about 5 months, we want it to be special so we're gonna take our time...

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Can you explain how you guys make tunes as a group of three? How does the creative process work between three people, and how is this realized in the actual making of the tune? I generally find collaborations to be very difficult, any tips?

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"The amount of energy needed to levitate a cup (genuinely) would be of sufficient force to place an idea in a group of people's heads half-way across the earth, in turn, motivating them in accordance with your will. The Satanist knows that even if you succeeded in lifting the teacup from the table, it would be assumed that trickery was used anyway. Therefore, if [one] wants to float objects in mid-air, he uses wires, mirrors, or other devices, and saves his force for self-aggrandizement."

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Location: holland

quote:

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Originally posted by Deceptive
Question:

How are you using reverb on your breaks? Do you insert it on a group channel or do you put it on individual parts of your breaks seperatly and then group them?? Or do both??

Also do you send the highs to one group and the kicks and snares to one group and deal with them seperately??

Big up for doing this by the way! Got a lot respect for you lot!

Deceptive

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hi :)

http://www.myspace.com/denoisia

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quote:

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Originally posted by noisia

favourite tunes... thats hard....
nik:
-noisia : concussion / messiah remix
-drifter : come true

thijs: same

martijn:
-noisia : lockjaw / meditation
-drifter : deeper love

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quote:

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Originally posted by noisia
as far as reverb goes, we usually either use the natural reverb thats in the recording of the break (we also use single hits obviously, but i'll bypass that bit for now) or use a mild room verb on the drum track, hardly audible, lately we've been just reverbing the snare, just taking one snare and put a dedicated reverb on it, and run it outside of the usual drum routing to give it room to breathe...

as far as freq splitting is concerned, it depends on what we think the breaks need, multi band compression is a great tool, we use it quite a bit but not everything needs it by default at all... we do split drums into kicks/snares/ghosts/hihats/rides channels, and eq/process then separately, especially when the break is dirty and needs cleaning up. and sometimes if we want to retain the feel of the original break more we duplicate the entire break onto 4 channels for example, splitting it into frequency ranges, so you can control them individually - for example gating the lower mid region can be quite useful on muddy breaks....and then sometimes we....etc etc

as you can tell our entire way of working is subject to continuous change and selfcriticism...

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Oh ok...I always thought your breaks sounding fat but without being too close if that makes sense.....? For some reason producers I have spoken to seem to rubbish reverb and say they never use it but it's blatently obvious they do, seems unfashionable or something. Glad you guys are big enough to admit the use of it


So are you using reverb through sends or inserts???

Cheers lads,

D

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Location: holland

quote:

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Originally posted by Concealed Identity
Can you explain how you guys make tunes as a group of three? How does the creative process work between three people, and how is this realized in the actual making of the tune? I generally find collaborations to be very difficult, any tips?

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the big key for us to collaboration is trusting your 'creative companion' with your 'artistic integrity' (yeah right, like theres such a thing in d&b )
you have to realize that the other person will never make something exactly like you would, and you have to accept that his influence will be in the music, you might not like everything the other does, but it is a collaboration, and if you want to work well together, you have to give eachother space - you might not see the potential of a certain element the other is working on at first glance and lose faith but chances are the other person knows what he's doing and will come out with an angle you hadnt expected. once you have given eachother the space to feel comfortable in, you will notice that creating a vibe together is much easier, sometimes you might not take the same path to a certain idea as the other but if you've all arrived there, you have succeeded (wow, that sounds esoteric).
and there is nothing quite like vibing off something together. it's all about getting that vibe going....

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http://www.myspace.com/denoisia

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