“21 YEARS of incredible producers in Computer Music”
RONI SIZE
The legendary jungle producer on discovering a genre
“Music technology, computer music, urban music – call it what you want – hadn’t been done in the UK before. The horizon was as wide as you wanted it to be; the future was yours to mold in whatever way you wanted. It felt like anything was possible.”
“My brother jumped in way before me. He got an Atari, an S950, a Studiomaster desk… These days it seems very basic, but to us, it was an Aladdin’s cave of sound. Equipment was so expensive and so rare that you felt like a king if you owned just one synth.
“And that willingness to work with whatever was at hand was a great lesson because it made you hungry and it stretched your imagination. If I looked through my mum’s record collection and found some long-forgotten soul album, I’d listen to it and pull out ten different samples that I could put to good use.
“I think my first setup was an Atari, Notator, a 707 drum machine and a Kawai K1 module. Simple, but effective. And I was so naïve that I just thought I was going to make the greatest records the world had ever heard.
“My sound was… well, I guess you’d call it digital reggae. I was listening to hip-hop and reggae and, like so many British kids at the time, I was trying to make it mine. I didn’t want it to be from another country; I wanted it to be from the UK, from Bristol.
“I would argue that it was the search for our own sound that eventually led the UK to jungle. The speeded-up breaks gave it a sort of punky attitude, you had samples from hip- hop, the sub-bass from reggae and a dash of rude boy. When I found that, I felt like I was finally coming home. I had my girl, a bit of weed and, at last, I had my music.”
“I could still give you a killer tune, even if I was back working with the Kawai and the 707. Don’t get into a situation where all your hopes and dreams are relying on what equipment you’ve got. Those hopes and dreams should only be relying on one thing: you!”
PAUL VAN DYK
The DJ and multi-million album selling producer on history
On analogue vs digital
“There are always going to be people who say, ‘Blah blah blah, there is no substitute for the real thing’. But anyone who knows about production and physics will tell you that almost 100% of the music we listen to is digital. Even if you make it with analogue machines and release it on record only, it will have been recorded on a computer. At some point, there will be a digital link in the chain, so how can it be ‘true’ analogue?”
On Ableton Live
“Ableton allows you to experiment; it allows you to twist an idea in your own personal way. I bet that if you talked to one hundred Ableton users, you’d find every one of them used it in a different way.”
On the instruments that make history
“This is something that’s happened throughout history. When the Gibson Les Paul arrived, it changed music. The first synths changed music. The 303, 808 and 909. The sampler. The Atari. The Nord Lead. Cubase, Logic, Ableton and other platforms. The JV-1080. Massive – even though I personally didn’t like it (I
