Djrum’s new album Under Tangled Silence is now out, and it’s a swirling blend of fractured rhythms, ambient washes, and warped acoustic textures. But for all its intricate sound design, the producer’s relationship with the tools of electronic music hasn’t always been so intuitive.
“It took me a long time to be comfortable using synths at all,” Djrum – real name Felix Manuel – admits in a new interview with MusicRadar. “When I first started using them, I wasn’t very good at it and made sounds that were not great.”
For a long time, presets were out of the question. “I couldn’t stand the idea of using presets,” he explains, adding that he found it “very frustrating to not know how a sound is made.”
“I would start using a preset, and I would want to change something about it, but then with a preset, you then have to figure out, like, what’s this all doing? Why is it making that sound? I found that so frustrating.”
These days, Djrum keeps his studio setup intentionally simple.
“My general setup is all focused around Ableton,” he says. “I think the built-in effects in Ableton are really good and you can do mostly everything with what’s there. I do use some iZotope and FabFilter stuff. I want a better reverb than the Ableton built in one.”
Hardware is kept to a minimum as well. One of the few pieces in his space is a Novation Peak, but even that gets limited use.
“I’ve got one hardware synth, the Novation Peak, which is really cool,” says the producer. “I got it because I felt like I should give it a go, as I’d never really used hardware before… but I don’t use it much.”
“It’s cool to jam and twiddle knobs but if I’m making a bassline or a melodic thing, I want to have it in the session and be able to tweak it and change it. That doesn’t really lend itself to integrating hardware. So the Novation is actually barely on this latest album.”
Instead, Djrum prefers to go deep with a few carefully chosen tools at a time: “My approach to synths is very much, like, one at a time,” he says. “Get to really know a synth before you get another one. I use very few. I use Massive and I like Arturia Pigments, Serum, that’s kind of it.”
The post “It took me a long time to be comfortable using synths at all”: Producer Djrum admits he “couldn’t stand the idea of using presets” at first appeared first on MusicTech.
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