ESSEX ESSENCE

Formed in Essex in south-eastern England in 2012, Nothing But Thieves broke through with their self-titled debut album in 2015. It was recorded at Angelic Studios just outside of Oxford, and mostly produced by Julian Emery. Broken Machine followed in 2017, produced by Mike Crossey, and Moral Panic in 2020, produced by Crossey and Dominic Craik. Both albums were mostly recorded at Crossey’s place in California, with Jonathan Gilmore working as an engineer on Broken Machine. 

Dead Club City was released in June of this year, and co-produced by Dominic ‘Dom’ Craik and Jonathan Gilmore. The former is one of the band’s guitarists and main writers, and also responsible for synths and programming. The latter is a producer and mixer with credits that include The 1975, Rina Sawayama, Carly Rae Jepson, Beabadoobee, Lewis Capaldi, and more.

Via Zoom from their respective studios in London, Craik and Gilmore relayed how going off the beaten track in their case meant encountering many large-sized rocks, and how they circumvented or climbed them. Gilmore set the scene…

“I began my career working for Mike Crossey from 2011 to 2017. We did the whole of Broken Machine in five weeks, running two studios, with Mike in one studio, and Dom and I working in the other. Mike might be cutting the drums and bass in his room, while Dom and I would record the guitars and add programming before it went back to Mike for the vocals, and finally mix. It was a really tight schedule and thus a bit of a baptism of fire for Dom and I. We’ve been in touch since.

“During the pandemic the two of us co-produced the Nothing But Thieves song ‘Life’s Coming in Slow’ for the Gran Tourismo 7 video game. The sessions were a bit of a circus: Dom was at home with covid and we had to get from initial phone call about the project to finished master in about five days. Audiomovers and FaceTime saved the day! But it turned out well, and I suggested to Dom that we produce the entire next band album together in a similar manner (minus respiratory diseases). I really wanted to support the band in exploring the edges of its stylistic comfort zone.”

COUNTRY HOUSE

After the band agreed for Craik and Gilmore to be at the helm for the making of its new album, the duo, says Gilmore, “pushed for making a record that’s as creative and elaborate as possible and even a bit indulgent. To be able to do that we needed quite a bit of time, so the idea was to find somewhere where we could set up camp and stay for a long period. Dom and I ended up frantically sending each other links to online listings of country houses. We were inspired by Led Zeppelin working at Headley Grange, and Radiohead recording most of OK Computer at a manor house called St Catherine’s Court.

“Unfortunately, because of the British rental market we got priced out of our luxury country house aspirations. Instead, we ended up  stumbling across a place in Essex called Kyoto Recording Studio that was surrounded by a 22-acre farm. I think it had aspirations of being a luxury residential studio, but the studio was extremely basic on a technical level, with some very substantial shortcomings.

“However, the place was affordable for the length of time that we required, so one pre-production aspect of this record was figuring out the logistics of transforming it into something where we would not only be physically able to record the album, but where we also would not go mad. The estate had a country house, and a barn that had gradually been repurposed into a recording studio. But there wasn’t really much diligence paid with respect to the install.

“We had to basically rip out the whole control room, replaced a lot of the furniture, and re-jig everything. I spent two days testing everything in terms of signal flow, and a lot of the cabling was dysfunctional. We replaced the Pro Tools system, all the headphones had faults, as did the guitar lines, and the acoustic treatment was very basic and quite ineffectual. The control room felt like a mixing desk slapped into a conservatory.

“Speaking of which, the desk (an MCI) was a hazard. Honestly, it felt a little like a fire risk. As you can see in the YouTube videos, at one point it started making a rather angry electrical buzzing sound. It had been very poorly maintained, so even though we had it extensively serviced, it basically didn’t work. In the end we just used it for a couple of line returns.

“After the two weeks to sort out the studio, we had quite a slow first three weeks of actual sessions, because we were still hitting a lot of issues. The air conditioning caused electrical buzzing on the mics and we had hornets in the control room. It was pretty rough and ready! I’ve made a lot of records in a lot of different places and these were substantially the most adverse conditions under which I’ve made an album.”

3 YEAR GESTATION

Although the team managed to create a functioning recording environment, there were more problems to come, as we will see later. To illustrate both the challenges and the magic of the recordings at the studio, the band made a series of YouTube videos , which Gilmore referred to above.

In the end, the entire recording process took 130 days, from August 2022 until January 2023. However, this had been preceded by a three year-long writing and pre-production period. Dominic Craik elaborates on the album’s genesis, first by clarifying how he ended up in the co-production role.

“I started playing guitar when I was six, and come from a classical music background. I can read music, and have a traditional understanding of harmony and how chords fit together from analysing chorales and string quartets when I went to music school. I then applied my knowledge of the guitar and the music lessons to other instruments, and learned how you can create an arrangement, and get this kind of holistic overview of entire pieces of music. This led to me writing and producing.

“[Singer] Conor Mason and [guitarist] Joe Langridge-Brown, and I started writing a little over 10 years ago, but discovered that we just couldn’t write songs to save our lives. It took years and years just to get the basics. At the start you think that because you can play complicated pieces of music on an instrument, you’re going to be able to translate that into writing songs. But it’s just not the case. Song writing is a completely different art form. There are songwriters that can’t even play instruments!

“We just kept pushing and pushing, and eventually the songs came. For many bands now, if you’re also recording demos, there has to be someone who can work GarageBand, Logic, or Ableton, even if it’s just for basic recordings. My curiosity was sparked by Logic, and I became obsessed with trying to copy some of the sounds on my favourite records and implement them in our music. It became this weird jigsaw puzzle to put together. I also learned how to navigate a synth, but I’m more comfortable creating sounds than performing on them. I would rather write out MIDI and send it via USB or MIDI to a synth than play it, because I’m not that technically competent as a keyboardist.”

FLESHED OUT

Craik continues by going into detail about the band’s actual writing process. “In general, writing and recording are quite separate stages for us. We try to write over a long period of time because we find that it gives the most successful results. You gain perspective. The more songs you write, the more you can pick from, and the stronger the album is going to be. You can rewrite things, re-demo, change stuff, if you like a chorus lyric from one song but it’s not the right song you can put it on something else.

“Dead Club City was born out of the pandemic, when we were first able to get back together after all the lockdown stuff. It meant that we were all creatively rearing to go. We had a lot of gas in the tank. The beauty of working as a trio with Conor and Joe is that they come up with ideas that are never fully fleshed out, and this has two benefits. The first is that nobody gets too attached to their idea because they haven’t gone down the rabbit hole of fully exploring it. The second is that you get this amazing level of collaboration, with everyone hearing things slightly differently.

“We wrote most of the material for the new album in my studio. It’s always a bit of a free for all, and there’s no tried and tested method. The last thing we do normally is guitars, which is funny because you’ve got two guitarists in the writing room, or two and a half if you include Conor. Inspiration could come from a synth sound, or a drum loop. It’s never the same, and that’s what’s exciting and one of the reasons why our music is so diverse. Only one song on the album was written in the studio, ‘Do You Love Me Yet?” which is a collective favourite, and one of the more experimental songs on the record.”

EXTENDED PALETTE

By the time Nothing But Thieves descended on the studio in Essex, upgraded to suit their needs, everyone brought their equipment, and Craik tons of song demos on Logic. “They were pretty fleshed out,” he says. “On this last record, they were probably the closest they’ve been to the final product. The arrangements were also more synth heavy than ever before. After working on Moral Panic, I started collecting synthesizers, I built my modular synths and have a UDO Super 6, a  Roland Juno 6, a Moog Sub Phatty and many others.

“Synths offer a whole different palette of sounds. Guitars are incredible, but for this album, synths gave me a new and exciting realm of creation. It was amazing to pull up a hardware synth, program a sound and be like ‘that reminds me of Rush or Phil Collins,’ or something, and be able to pull that into our music. There definitely was a lot of inspiration of the music from the late seventies and early eighties, all that synth-and-band hybrid stuff. It was a case of getting our paints and paintbrushes in front of us, and see what comes together.

“I also used soft synths. I’ll take whatever sounds good. Jon and I did a lot of A and B-ing of synths versus soft synths, and for example the U-he Diva is an incredible plugin, really thick-sounding, loads of character, and it doesn’t sound plasticky or thin or any of that kind of plugin stuff. Sometimes the plugins would beat the analogue gear, and you don’t even know why. I like hardware synths because you operate them with your hands and they’re fun to be with, but sonically analogue doesn’t always win.”

JUMPIN’ JACK PATCH

Gilmore: “So Dom brought all his toys and his synthesizers, and I brought in my full recording studio complement of gear and microphones, and all the various drums and accoutrements you need. We installed a Neutrik Jack Patch system whereby we could easily interface between the synths, the guitar pedals, and the hardware outboard, including Dom’s Binson Echorec, Roger Mayer 456 Tape Emulation, Thermionic Culture Vulture, several old nineties effects units, and so on. I’m also a guitarist, and brought my custom pedal boards and a big crate of loose pedals. We probably ended up with about 100 pedals between us!”

Craik: “From the outset we wanted to have a very fluid, quick and spontaneous relationship between the outboard, guitar pedals and synths. If you don’t colour synths a little bit, they can feel a little bit cold and separate next to the guitars. You need to run them through a guitar pedal or an analogue effects unit or an amp, to add a bit of grit, and make it all fit together. In addition to the Jack Patch, we also had a Radial unit (EXTC Radial reamp box), which took care of impedance and level conversions, so we could use easily route synths, outboard and pedals to each other.”

Gilmore: “Between Dom and I we had a great collection of guitar amplifiers: a Fender Twin, a Fender Vibralux, a Mesa Boogie Mark 5, a Marshall Bluebreaker and also some weirder stuff, like a Silvertone 1485 and a Laney Klipp, which we used a lot. We mainly used an Ampeg SVT stack for bass. All the bass performances (and some of the guitars) ran through a guitar amp and a bass amp simultaneously, so we could have that kind of throaty upper voicing on the bass guitars if we needed it, and low end on the guitars if required. In addition to all the guitar amplifiers we would also use a DI, often with pedals.

“All these different layers were phase aligned at the source, so the phase was coherent. That allowed us to make stylistic choices with the guitar, including some really idiosyncratic ones, to give them a lot of personality. We cut all the lead vocals with a Neumann U67. The tonality of that microphone suits Conor’s voice really well. It gives it a bit of a midrange focus that I think is very helpful. It went into a  Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel mic pre.  We had a big rack of Neve 1073 preamps for everything else.”

DRUM SURRENDER

The company recorded all the above at the revamped Kyoto studio in Essex, but the issues with the studio proved insurmountable when it came to drum recording, for which decent acoustics are the most crucial.

Gilmore: “I would say that the tone of the rooms was the biggest challenge in making this album, and it meant that everybody had to be on headphones a fair amount during the entire process. We mostly used Shure SRH940s, and also Audio Technica M50s. The control room had a pretty substantial null at around 110Hz, where all the good stuff is, so monitoring sounded really strange. It was quite drastic.”

Craik: “For monitoring, we normally use the Unity Audio The Rocks, which are great, but you can have the world’s most expensive speakers, and in a terrible room it will still sound terrible. It was a bit of a nightmare. We’d gone to the studio with the intention of recording everything there, but the reality was that the acoustic treatments were purely for show. Once we got to recording drums, it turned out the sound was uncontrollable, with mad resonances.

“After trying the main live room and a smaller side room for a week, we decided to record the drums elsewhere, and went to a small east London studio called Baltic. It has a great, very controlled and punchy live room, apart from the fact that they put in an upright piano in the live room, which caused quite a bit of ringing. We added a lot of aggressive compression to the drums on this album, which of course pulls up all sorts of resonances, so we did a lot of work on dampening the room and the piano, like gaffa-taping windows, and leaning chairs against things and so on.”

LOGIC & TOOLS MAKE FRIENDS

Throughout the recording process, Craik used Logic and Gilmore Pro Tools, which led to a lot of sharing of files. The latter explained, “I think it’s fair to say that Logic is a very creative environment for music production, and Pro Tools has an accuracy when working with audio, which cannot be matched. So recording and editing audio was all done in Pro Tools. Meanwhile, Dom was throwing ideas around in Logic. Our Engineer Freddy [Williams] was also on a Pro Tools system.

“It was a bit chaotic, but it meant that there were always three things happening at the same time, and multiple songs would come together really quickly. Conor and I would be recording vocals, Freddy might be editing backing vocals, and Dom might be working on a synth arrangement for a song that we are going to cut vocals for in the afternoon. I think this album is sponsored by AirDrop! All three of us sat in a room together, and along with the rest of the band it was an open forum of coming with ideas. It was quite a fluid process, with the three of us throwing files around. And fortunately we had a huge whiteboard to keep us all on top of what we were doing.”

Throughout the 130-day process, the original Logic demos changed remarkably little. Gilmore: “Because the arrangements were mostly already great, and the songs themselves were already the strongest contenders, it was not like other projects that I work on where pretty much all the demos require structural and tempo/key changes. Our process was re-recording all the main band elements and then enhancing things or modifying things to make them better. We did add a lot of stuff but it was to support and enhance what was already there: backing vocals, additional melodies, ear candy, and so on. I think only ‘Tomorrow is Closed’ and ‘Welcome to the DCC’ went through substantial compositional changes.”

Craik: “Once Jon had finished and finessed the recordings of the vocals and the additional instruments, that stuff would come back over to me and I would do additional production and get a rough mix together in Logic. I built these rough mixes over quite a long period of time, and many eyes and ears went over them, questioning everything. We gradually developed a detailed idea of what we were shooting for and what we’d send to Mike Crossey, who would be doing the final mixes. Once we agreed on a rough mix, we’d send it to the label, to management, to ourselves. Once it was approved, there was this massive transfer of my rough mix over to Pro Tools, and Freddy and Jon would spend days putting on the final touches.”

Gilmore: “The rough mixes reflected where the songs needed to go creatively, and then I would go through everything on a technical level, to make sure that everything we sent to Mike was as bullet-proof as possible, and we squeezed every last percentage out of what we had, with the absolute best drum sound we could get, the best guitar sound we could get, exactly the right vocal, and so on. The rough mixes were mostly delivered with compression and EQ on the tracks and everything else production-wise printed, because the sounds we wanted were all there. The exception would be the vocals which we did deliver with FX prints and live processing on the channel but without any processing committed to the audio. By that point we had usually been through multiple stages of rough mixing, so the production was really the way we wanted it.”

Gilmore might have added that they also made sure the material  explored “the edges of the band’s stylistic comfort zone,” while still sounding like Nothing But Thieves. Despite, or perhaps because of, the adverse conditions, it’s exactly how Dead Club City turned out. As one critic put it, “It is distinctly Nothing But Thieves, but with a fresher, funkier twist and a concept album foundation.”

SUM & DIFFERENCE MAKES A DIFFERENCE

I process all my drums using sum and difference rather than stereo. I use an SPL Gemini that does the conversion. I have a couple of old outboard items in this signal path and, initially, I think my motivation for processing in sum and difference was I didn’t know if I could totally trust that gear to process both the left and the right hand sides exactly the same. I didn’t want the left hand side to be half a dB louder, for example. So my entire drum bus signal path is sum and difference, including the SSL G compressor.

Sum and difference is a well known mastering processing technique but not used so much for mixing. The ‘sum’ information is everything that’s in phase, while the difference is what’s not in phase. For the type of music I work with, it’s especially helpful because the technique allows me to more heavily compress the in-phase, centre information, while allowing a reverb tail or a background vocal to have a much lighter touch. On the other hand, if I crush it all with a stereo compressor then I lose my depth in the sound stage, because I’m squeezing the decay time and bringing it up front. Sum and difference allows me to get maximum punch on the mono information while keeping the sides more open.

It’s just another technique that allows you to increase perceived loudness without destroying the depth of the mix. If you’re indiscriminately compressing everything, including reverb tails and HF elements of your mix, it makes your mix smaller and becomes more fatiguing to listen to. You may not even be able to hear 15kHz but if those frequencies are getting squeezed hard, then you feel tired listening to those songs over and over because there’s no dynamic range on the top end. That area is very sensitive to compression, in a bad way.

DRUMS: BOXING CLEVER

So now when I have the tone or the colour that I’m after, it’s going back in the box. Studio One is doing 90% of the work, but my drums really benefit from what I’m hearing through the analogue transformer saturation, the compression, and the EQ. But I’m making my listening decisions in the box. I’m listening to the Studio One session, post-conversion, back through my mastering console.

I think this is the difference in my approach versus an analogue engineer running channels up through an SSL, for example. I’m using my analogue gear as a ‘soft ceiling’, that I can push into from my DAW. Of course, I need high quality converters so I can trust the results coming out of my DAW. That said, I’m also often using the converters as another stage. I’ll intentionally clip my converter, just to shape the transients a little. That’s part of my sound and another reason why I’m making all my decision post my conversion.

STUDIO ONE: IN THE PIPELINE

Studio One’s Pipeline plug-in is what triggered me to switching DAWs after 16 years on Logic. It was in the middle of a weekend and I getting frustrated with Logic, battling with latency when I was trying to A/B a plug-in. I think Logic has fixed the problems with those functions now, but at the time it was messy. 

Someone told me about Studio One and Pipeline (I think it was Steven Slate, actually) and I guess I was desperate enough to give it a go. I wasn’t looking to switch DAWs. The other big ah-ha moment was seeing that I could work with 32-bit floating point files, while at the time Logic wouldn’t let me import 32-bit files, you’d have to down-convert to 24-bit. As I got to know Studio One, the more I was impressed. For about three months or so, I was working on Logic with my daily mixes while continuing to experiment with Studio One. The way it integrated with my analogue gear ended up winning me over.

The interesting fact is with Pipeline you can parallel a piece of gear with the plug-in, all in perfect phase alignment. I can do automation on the mix knob. In fact, you can take a photo and then drop that photo on the plug in when you open a session and it’ll emulate the photo settings in the hardware. So that’s why I was hooked.

VCA MIX TIPS

I do a lot of VCA automation in Studio One. The aim is to trigger my analogue compression and saturation differently for different parts of the song. For example, I want to keep the verses very dynamic. So in the verses I’ll pull back the VCA and let my analogue gear breathe a little more, less pushing. And then I hit in my chorus with more level. Again, there are knock-on and compound effects down the signal path by making small VCA moves.

WIDTH

If you mix wide — where you’ve got a stereo widening processor on everything that’s not mono — then it’s not going to sound wide after about 30 seconds, because now everything is so out of phase that you don’t feel it being wide. To me, it’s all about contrast. It’s like watching a black and white movie, and you get a flash of red and yellow. The contrast is striking. If everything is pumping red and yellow the whole time, you zone out. Which is why I stay extremely mono on drums, but then I do something like a ‘tree’ effect, where stereo element open up and out using chords and synths, growing wider… then close again. It’s more like a dynamic approach to stereo instead of a static super wide approach that loses its impact. 

808 SECRETS

Nailing the kick drum sub sound, the 808, can be really frustrating. Producers commit to a sound when I get to hear it and often it’s produced in studios that can’t accurately reproduce what the 808 is actually doing. I see a few common mistakes. One is tuning the 808 in the wrong key. Or the 808 is tuned too low. If its fundamental is at 30 or 38Hz then there’s not enough low-mid information for it to translate on smaller speakers. So I recommend you pick the right key — that’s the most important element.

I previously mentioned a few other tips about dealing with the 808, but I’ll finish off with a well known example.

There was a track called ‘Turn Down For What’ (2015) for DJ Snake and Lil John and everyone was just raving about my processing on the 808. The sound of the 808 was literally a multi-band compressor saturating the second octave only. So you have the attack of the 808, let’s say, 55 or 60Hz, which I leave alone, completely clean. That’s the sine wave component, and I don’t want to change its texture — I’m not going to turn it into a saw tooth or triangle. But an octave higher than that, with the tail, then I start to saturate that part. It means you can hear the 808 envelope on small laptop speakers, but you retain the bottom-end clarity — you get a clean envelope of the sine wave on the first octave under the kick.

TIMBER TIMBRE

The pandemic standstill and lockdowns also gave De Laet the time and space to finally create his own purpose-built studio, and move out of the make-shift home studio that he’d been working in at his Brussels apartment. The result was his spectacular Treehouse Studio, built by the Belgian company AMPTEC, which opened in March 2021. Despite its name, it is not actually built in a tree. 

“I’ve always dreamt of having my own studio,” explains De Laet. “First of all to have good and reliable sound, and also to be able to work without disturbing my neighbours, because I live in the city. The new studio is built in an old, typical Brussels town house, in the centre of the city. There’s a small garden, and a terrace, and the studio is in an outhouse at the back, with sunlight coming in, which is nice.” 

De Laet and his team have created an Instagram page dedicated to the studio, @treehousestudio.bxl, on which one can admire photos of some of the building work and also of the gear in the studio, including the massive, 49-inch LG Ultrawide screen, some outboard, and an abundance of monitors, keyboards, and acoustic screens.

BOX ’N’ DICE

The presence of all this hardware is quite unusual in a time when in-the-box-setups with just a computer, I/O, and monitors have become the norm. De Laet started out like this, as he explains: “I got into music by playing piano, but I also listened to a lot of electronic music. When I got my first laptop, I started producing music in Reason, and from there I went to Logic. I still use Logic today. I guess I am a self-taught home producer, used to working in the box.

“My first monitors were the KRK Rokit 5, and from there I bought a microphone and then got Yamaha HS7 monitors, which I really like, and which give me a different sound. I then bought a Moog, but I had no idea how to use it. I read the manual, and found that super-fun and interesting. I now have four or five Moog synths, and read all the manuals, and I now work on them in a super-instinctive way.” 

De Laet has over the years acquired more and more hardware, and one of his aims in building Treehouse Studios is to create a setup that is tailor-made for them. “I wanted to be able to just plug and play and be able to use everything super-easily. I did not want to constantly remove cables, move things around, plug things in and out, and so on. So now in the studio, everything is connected via MIDI and audio. I can record all the audio straight into my computer. I can also do sound design, record it, and everything goes super quickly. Using hardware in my studio is almost as easy as using a plugin.”

HARDWARE EASY

According to De Laet, the hardware in his studio has changed his working methods quite dramatically. “When the pandemic hit, I had much more time and also in my previous studio I started connecting all my hardware and used it a lot more. It’s a completely different approach. I really like the fact that you have to commit to what you record. When you create a distinct sound, it is less easy to recreate, which makes it more unique.

“I also like to be able to play keyboards and use my hands when programming synths. Sometimes I simply hit the Record button, and I will have a super long loop, and I will record myself playing for like 10 minutes. After that I will select what I like and create something different from it. This never happens when I use only software. It is a completely different approach.

“Of course, it’s easy to recreate the same sounds with plug-ins. With plug-ins you can also constantly redo things, constantly adapt, and so on. When you use the hardware, because it takes more effort and more time, you think twice before you decide whether you use a sound or not. And if you don’t use it, you might use it for something else. Using hardware can also be a pain, because everything takes more time, but I get more out of it. It is super fun.

“If I don’t have the time to use hardware, I will just open some plug-ins. The thing is, I know what I want, and with plug-ins I can get it done in a few seconds, when I am doing remixes or last minute treatments of things, or the label wants last-minute changes, I do it with the plug-ins. But when I have the time and I like to be creative and inspired, I’ll be using the hardware.” 

MOOG NO. 1 

According to De Laet, the Moog One is his favourite synthesizer. “It is my baby. I can do everything with it. It’s polyphonic with 16 voices, and I like the small screen in the middle, which gives a nice visual aid. It’s very intuitive to use, and easy to understand what you are doing when you turn buttons and link stuff. Another favourite Moog is the Sub 37. I’m also fond of the Arturia MatrixBrute, most of all, its distortion knob, it gives me a really different sound. Another favourite is my Sequential Prophet X.”

Other keyboards at Treehouse include a Moog Grandmother, a Roland Jupiter-X, and Moog Sub Phatty. The studio surely will see more, as De Laet explains, “I’m buying tons of stuff at the moment! More hardware is coming in. I put a picture on Instagram recently of my Finegear The Dust Collector unit, which contains two VC LFOs, two tape saturations, a spring reverb, a delay and a phaser. I can mess with the knobs when I send audio through it. The weirder things get, the more interested I am in buying them, because it means I need to get out of my comfort zone when using these things.” 

Treehouse also has two racks of outboard, on either side of the central position behind De Laet’s desk. The rack on the right contains a Heritage Audio DMA73 mic pre, a UAD-2 Live Rack, and an Antelope Audio Orion 32+ GEN3 converter. However, it seems that De Laet’s real attention goes to two main units of outboard on his left… 

“I love my Wes Audio Next Generation Bus Compressor, which adds really nice harmonic distortion. When I put a Moog One sound through it, it adds really nice, midrange body. But of course, if you later want to recreate that sound, it’s harder to do. I sometimes use the API 2500+ compressor on the stereo output for premastering for radio mixes, but when I do club mixes I’ll send them through the Wes Audio, which gives a more aggressive sound.”

TREEHOUSE: BRANCH OFFICE

Concluding his tour of Treehouse, De Laet explains, “I have the Yamaha HS7 monitors here, Kii Three, and Neumann KH310A monitors, with a sub. I use the Neumann’s almost constantly. I only skip to the other monitors when I’m not sure about how something translates. They’re really nice speakers, and with the sub they are great for just vibing. I use the Heritage Audio R.A.M. System 5000 as my monitor controller.

“Oh, and I also have a Neumann U67 mic, which I don’t use as much as I would like, because I now work mostly with famous singers, and they usually like to record in their own studios with their own engineer. By the way, I also still have a basic home studio at my apartment, because all the gear and all the options I have at Treehouse can make it more complicated to create. I can sometimes get overly focused on details — if I need to keep it simple, I go back home.

“At home I have just my first KRK speakers, my laptop, UA Apollo X4 soundcard, and a Roland JU-06A and TB-03. Having just this gear creates limitations and forces me to be creative with what I have. So when I’m stuck, I sometimes go there. I’ll try to get a first idea, and once I have that, I’ll go back to my main studio and go crazy with sound design and things like that. On all my computers I have all my favourite plugins, by FabFilter and SoundToys, Valhalla, and so on.”

MIXING FREQUENCIES

Once De Laet finishes a track, he sends it out to mixer Andres Algaba. “He has mixed all my tracks since ‘Reality’ in 2015. Sometimes he does not change a lot, and he’s more concerned with consistency between all the tracks on an album, so they are the same in terms of volume, dynamics, where the bass and the vocals sit, and so on. Also, when I do a DJ set, everything has to sound like a whole. You can’t have one track with super loud vocals and other with super loud bass He takes care of that, and also makes the stems, so I don’t have to do all that.” 

Early June, Lost Frequencies released another single, ‘Questions’ (with James Arthur), and De Laet reveals that he’s “working on an album at the moment. I’m also preparing for the live shows for the summer. I have a drummer, Thibault on guitar, there’s a singer, and I play keyboards. We use Ableton for the live shows. I really like the Ableton interface, but it’s easier for me to create in Logic, so we translate everything that I have in Logic to Ableton for the live shows.

“I’ll be using a Roland Ax Edge keytar, a DJ TechTools Midi Fighter, a Roland Pro 61-key MIDI controller, and also the Sub 37. On the last tour I had the Prophet, but it would detune if it got hot. The drummer has a completely digital kit, which looks analogue, but allows him to use all samples of my tracks. The guitarist also plays a MIDI keyboard. We resample everything so we can get things to sound as close as possible to the original versions.

“It’s a lot of work, but performing live as an electronic act gives me a lot of credibility, as opposed to just doing DJ sets. I also learn a lot in terms of interacting with the crowd. It’s going to be fun. In December we go to Asia, and in January I’m on holiday!”

Clearly, De Laet’s has returned to his pre-pandemic globetrotting days. But his Treehouse Studios is sure to lure him back to Brussels more often than before.