bringing them over to Nick, then we can both look at the material together. We do some file swapping, but the most crucial work gets done in real-time, in person. Things go much faster that way.
“We’ve deliberately avoided trying to define
specific roles in the project. If you wanted to
make a really generalised stereotype, you could
say that Nick has more of a ‘producer’ approach
and my approach is more composition-based.”
65
Teengirl Fantasy | In The Studio With
“This synth is a beast for ethereal, hard-to-define, elastic, and digitally fucked up sounds. Favourite things about it are the D-beam and touchpad, which give extra dimensions to your performance.
Lots of bend and squeal in this one.”
played other peoples’ . Juno-60s and -6s and really don’t like how they sound. I love how the 106 is so soft; it always sounds good with the cutoff down. It’s our go-to for chords, and sometimes bass.”
Roland V-Synth
Roland Juno-106
helps to achieve a more ‘real’ sound, whatever that means. What we also like about it is that whatever we run through it as an effect cannot be messed with later like you could an effects plug-in. Because it’s set in stone, you have to like whatever the effect is – I especially like the harmoniser and guitar distortions on this rack. We also like the Eventide Eclipse for its rich reverb, and we’ve been using that for quite a while.”
Do you have any tips or techniques on how you approach sound design and creation?
Nick: “Creative panning can be super-effective.
Being able to draw the pan in Ableton or have certain high-frequency elements on a pan with LFO can be a good way to create dimension. Stereoisers are cool, but they often weaken sounds.”
Logan: “We’ve got into the habit of always trying to record a live take of an automation first, preferably with a real knob or controller. You can hear the live-ness of it better that way, and of course you can always adjust it later. Just think with your gut and trust your intuition, and louder isn’t always better.
Increasing our dynamic range was something we talked about a lot with some of these tracks.”
Are there certain tenets you stick to when it comes to trying to achieving a great mix?
Logan: “When we’re making a track, there usually comes a point where the focus becomes more about what things to take away rather than what to add.
Simplifying and subtracting has become a crucial step in the process for us.”
Nick: “Honestly, I think learning the ‘proper’ way to mix has been a double-edged sword. Yes your mixes might become cleaner and more hi-definition, but it’s easy to go overboard and stop just listening. I’m really trying to detox from the habit I got into of staring at plug-ins while mixing, and just trying to listen as carefully as possible. I think having that balance of intuition and learned skills is the best.”
What tools do you use for compressing and limiting the sounds within your mixes?
Nick: “I’m still trying to figure this out, but usually I’ll mix into a limiter with the threshold at zero just to catch the peaks. My advice would be to make the attack slower if you want louder transients. I try to match the makeup gain to a little below the amount of gain reduction, so that the volume isn’t lost from compression – just the little peaks. The stock Ableton Glue compressor is pretty good actually, and the Waves CLA-2A is also good for when things need to be loud. Slate Digital compressors are pretty good for a more transparent style. Using sources other than just a kick for sidechaining can help you find some nice unexpected grooves.”
What are the different strengths behind the various hardware synths in your studio?
Logan: “We have the Elektron Monomachine, which is great for sequencing, both onboard and MIDI out. It’s also great for bass and off-the-grid rhythmic sounds. I’ve got into exploring the different user waveform packs that are out there too,
In The Studio With | Teengirl Fantasy
so it’s still a valuable piece of gear in our setup six years in. Our newest piece of gear is the Elektron Analog Rytm, which appears on a few tracks on the album. We’re really into this one – the analogue synths cuts through in the mix in a really nice way, and the drum sounds are nice and full. It’s probably the most intuitive piece of Elektron gear they’ve released so far.”
You have a few classic synths like the Roland V-Synth and, as you mentioned previously, the Juno-106…
Nick: “We discovered the Roland V-Synth because it was sitting in a writing studio we used in the UK.
It’s a truly bizarre workstation from 2003 that kind of does everything at once while doing nothing a digital workstation would normally do. For example, there’s no true piano or string sound, but there are a lot of digital monks and indescribably elastic-sounding arpeggiators. It has a rough, plasticky quality that we utilised a lot on this album.
The sounds can be controlled with a digital beam handwaving motion, so it produces organic modulations of inorganic compound sounds.
“The Juno-106 has been our go-to synth for chords right from the beginning. It makes some appearances on 8AM because we love to use it with the chorus effect on, but we recorded in mono.
We also use a Korg Wavestation SR, which is a sick rackmount digital wavetable synth. We downloaded some patches from some random corner of the internet and loaded them via SysEx. The
Wavestation has a good ethereal, mountainous vibe.”
Where do you stand on the modular craze?
Is it something you’ve looked into?
Nick: “Modular synths always look really cool and impressive, but they sometimes seem limited to me in terms of what sounds you can actually get out of them beyond bleeps and squiggly res-y bloop sounds. But I can’t really say, as I’ve never gone in-depth and used one.”
Logan: “I respect the amount of control they give you over the sounds, and I appreciate the idea of people building their own sounds rather than selecting presets. Sometimes it feels like a scene unto itself, but you could also say the same thing about making music on computers. Basically, if I had more money I probably would have got more into it by now.”
Where do you stand on the question of gear?
Do you like to accumulate a variety of kit, or do you prefer to go deeper into a few select pieces?
Nick: “More gear is not the answer to making better music. Knowing the gear you have super-well is much more important. That being said, walking into a studio filled with random toys you’ve never seen before can be inspiring and help to make a new track fast. One of the tracks on our album, Star-rise, was made in a studio in Berlin that was filled with sick synths and a Japanese board that made everything sound really thick when you ran stuff through it. But that studio was all arranged for everything to only be recorded as a two-track, which I thought was crazy!”
Do you master your own records, or do you prefer to hand that part of the process over to somebody else?
Nick: “8AM is our first record to be mastered by Beau Thomas at Ten Eight Seven Mastering in London, otherwise it’s mostly been done by Joe LaPorta. We went with Beau for the Planet Mu record because he masters all of their releases and we didn’t want to break form with them. We’ll definitely still be mastering with Joe in the future – they’re both fantastic. Since we didn’t have any help with mixing 8AM, the mastering was more important in order to help the tracks sound more slick and complete. We often prefer more muted sounds, which can end up with purposefully muddy or dark mixes, so I think mastering helps to balance that out.”
How do you spin a studio projects into something you can use to play live?
Logan: “My setup is mostly Elektron-based at this point. The memory structuring on their machines can seem a bit convoluted, which is why I don’t think people use some of their machines to their full capability. This was my problem at first, but there’s so much room and space on these things to invite endless non-destructive variations and playing with ideas. The ability to end up in a new place from where you started is what I appreciate,
and it’s what try to cultivate in a live setup. Basically, we have all our gear synced to a MIDI clock, triggered either by the MPC or the Monomachine.
When recording, we’ll send a MIDI clock out from Ableton, connected to all our gear so that they can start on time.”
Nick: “When we first started touring, the gear we made the music with was exactly the same gear we brought out to play. But now I’ve been able to replace my Juno-106 on tour with the new JU-06, which is a portable digital version. Man, I really wish this existed a few years ago when I was slowly destroying my Juno-106, lugging it around the world. When we improvise at shows, it’s pretty similar to the improvisation process when we write a song. Many of our earlier songs were composed live, so they’re a little easier to play out, but with the addition of Logan’s Elektron Octatrack, we’re able to sample stuff out of the computer but still be super-flexible with it.
Now, we’ll often rewrite or create new songs when we’re performing live. I also like to project to the audience the fact that we’re playing live rather than DJing – sometimes people make this mistake even when we have keyboards on stage!”
want to know more?
Teengirl Fantasy’s latest album 8AM is out now on Planet Mu – http://planet.mu