Recording - June 2020 - 16

FORGING
THE

EXOTIC

with Richard Devine
What was the drum machine?
An Alesis HR-16 16-bit drum machine, then I got a Roland
TR-909 after that and started to slowly build up a studio at
my parents' house. I'd scour all the local pawn shops for
gear. In the early 90s, nobody wanted this stuff. Nobody
wanted a TB-303, or an 808, or a Juno-106 or Jupiter-8. I
remember buying an Oberheim Expander at the Salvation
Army for $100. [long deep sigh... -copy ed.] It's ridiculous.
Some of the things that I purchased during that time-it'll
never happen again.

I remember walking into a store in the early
90s, and there was a used Minimoog for
about $120. Back then, no one wanted analog.
I went with a used Yamaha Dx-7 instead.
Yeah, everybody wanted realistic-sounding instruments. They
didn't want some analog piece of equipment that was trying to
sound like a real instrument, but the Yamaha Dx/Tx series was
great too. Getting into FM synthesis was another big turning
point for me. It could do all these really crazy weird metallic
tones and drums and bell sounds. I was such a sponge, learning all these different pieces of equipment. I would just record
and fill up hours of DAT tapes. I'm sure the younger readers
are probably going to laugh, like, what's DAT? [Digital Audio
Tape-now hopelessly obsolete -ed.]

When did the modular bug hit?
I was 17 years old, and I got a used ARP 2600. That machine set the foundation for what was to become the rest of
my career. This was a turning point for me because I'd never had a modular or semi-modular synthesizer. All the other
synths that I played prior had a fixed structure. You'd have
two oscillators, a VCA, VCF, an envelope generator, your
mixer section, and you couldn't change any of that. The ARP
2600 has 66 patch points. So, you can patch things into
each other, or do different fader combinations. It was very
educational to learn about cross modulation, ring modulation,
amplitude modulation, or sample-and-hold, white noise, pink
noise... I was like, this is very open-ended, and you can come
up with very unique sounds.

The late 80s and early 90s were a dormant
period for modular synths-unlike today.
I remember calling a lot of colleges and schools and buying their old modular systems because they were all going
digital and moving to digital workstations at the time. [I actually saw an ARP 2600 that a college dropped off at a music
store-$400. -copy ed.]

16 RECORDING June 2020

Fast forward to now, when it's time to make
music, where do you start? I feel like I'd be
paralyzed by the sheer number of choices.
How do you narrow your focus? Do you start
with a sound in your head, or with a specific
piece of gear? Or do you kind of just randomly
come in, have a cup of espresso, and go crazy?
[Laughs] It's a little bit of both. People look at my room and ask,
how do you even use all this stuff at the same time? Answer: I
don't. I have friends that can compose with 50 or 60 keyboards,
like this orchestra of hardware synths, all running at the same time.
I don't work that way. I have to work with a more intimate, smaller
set of tools. I limit myself to just a couple of things at a time, and
then I pull them together into a bigger composition. I've got about
14 modular cases-four larger cases and ten smaller cases that
float around the room and are easily switched around. For instance, I have one modular case set up for drums and percussion,
and another case that does all the effects. With some of the cases,
the modules aren't even screwed in because I'm always switching
things out. It's a constant flux of different things.

What comes first: sounds,
rhythms, or melodic ideas?
Typically, I think about the drums first-a certain tempo, the
rhythmic structure, where I want them to sit, and that becomes
the framework. I build everything else around that. Then I'll add
in other cases and build in further combinations of synthesis,
sampling, and effects. I'm not a purist in any way-it can be
digital or analog, and at the end of the day, I really don't care
how cheap or expensive the instrument is. If it gives me a great
result, ultimately that's the most important thing to me.

How do your patches become songs?
The way I did my last album, Sort\Leave, as well as the new
album I'm working on, I link several cases together and prepare
my patches ahead of time. Two cases might be dedicated to doing
the drums. The first two minutes might be on one case, and then I'll
have a transition point where I move over to the second case. The
first case would be the master clock, and then I would share that
clock across all four or five cases. Then what I do is move from left
to right, case by case, as the song progresses. Each case might be
a different section of the song with different sounds, and that's how
I move through a piece. This is the only way that I can drastically
change the sounds and movements of an entire piece of music in
real time. With Eurorack synths, split-second changes are not that
easy to do, because of all the necessary repatching and tweaking
involved. For Sort\Leave, I practiced playing the piece by hand
and did multiple takes; the best one was used for the album.

Recording - June 2020

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