Beloved for his delicate, detailed, and highly emotive production style, Martin Stimming has carved out a niche in the world of experimental IDM. Based in Harmburg, Germany, the producer is currently on part two of a trilogy of albums; each one dedicated to his three sons. 2021 brought us Ludwig; a glorious subversion of the artist’s more club-centric work, while the recently released Friedrich retains that sonic freedom but arguably dives even deeper into the emotional resonance that electronic music can offer.
We catch up with Stimming to get the inside story on how he produced his recent single, Lucky Me.
Finding the feeling
A big part of Stimming’s creative process involves building up an archive of melodies, tones, beats, and field recordings, which might then chime with an experience or emotion he wants to explore on a track.
In the case of Lucky Me, the original musical material came from a small family pump organ situated under the staircase of his parents’ home. Having kicked everyone else out of the house so he could get a clean, ultra-close recording using a pair of LOM microphones, Stimming says he started performing with no clear idea of where the audio would eventually end up. “I knew what I wanted to capture,” he recalls of the process. “But, when I do a recording like this, I just think of it as sampling material; I know I will use it somewhere, but I don’t know where.”
The next element grew out of a jam session on Erica Synths’ PĒRKONS HD-01 drum machine. “It’s four voices of digital synth,” Stimming says of the instrument. “The special thing is the UI and the sequencer – the sequencer can change the patterns and the sound settings independently, and you can jump between snapshots seamlessly in an instant, which is crazy.” However, rather than use it for percussion, Stimming says the PĒRKONS HD-01 instead provided Lucky Me’s bass tones: “Drum synths are very good at baselines because they have this punch. So, I found a way of creating this ‘whoof whoof’ sort of dubstep bassline.”
Once Stimming brought together those organ recordings with his drum machine baseline, it resulted not only in great music but also produced a sound and a feeling that spoke to a deeply personal time in Stimming’s own life.
Two years ago, the producer received a cancer diagnosis — the treatment was successful, but it left an undeniable impact on him:
“Especially after I was first diagnosed, there was a feeling of being frightened but also of being challenged. After the surgery, it was like being released from it. I recognised that if I combed the pump organ recordings that I did at my parents, those tones together with this very deep bassline… it got very close to expressing what I really felt at that time.”
Pragmatic percussion
When it comes to percussion, rather than overthink it, Stimming’s approach is much more pragmatic – if it sounds good, use it.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the drum sounds in Lucky Me come from the OP-1 Field,” he admits with a laugh. “Teenage Engineering really put great sounds in there. This other track from the album, Sugar and Lemon, the main chord is just a preset from the OP-1 Field, which I combined with the Behringer TORO. To have this €2,000, tiny, high-tech thing alongside a cheap clone from a German company made in China, I did it just for fun.”
Of course, he didn’t stop there. The next step was to add in some real hand claps and run the percussion bus through some outboard gear. “I layer things up,” he says. “And then it’s going to be sidechain compressed. I think the whole groove on Lucky Me went through the API 2500 compressor, for that old school glue.”
Avoid Anything Annoying
Stimming says one of the biggest and most time-consuming challenges in production is figuring out how to develop musical ideas. “Let’s say, theoretically, the whole time to create a track is twenty hours,” offers Stimming.
“Fifteen of those hours are spent trying to grasp how to proceed. While the actual procession, the improvements or expansions actually happen very fast. On Lucky Me, the two and a half minutes which are the really important moments came out naturally. Then, of course, there’s lots of work needed to make it into a five-minute track.”
His trick for knowing when a section is finished and it’s time to move on? Repeated listening.
“It’s a technique that I heard Kraftwerk also use,” says Stimming. “I listen to the loop for ages — sometimes it feels like four, six, seven hours—and if there’s nothing popping out that annoys me, then I’m good to go.”
Jamming, recording, and compiling
Stimming is known for the intricate sonic details that fill up his productions. On Lucky Me, there are a number of musical elements that gradually shift their tone and timbre as the song unfolds. Rather than automating changes after the fact, Stimming says he performs those evolutions live and then listens back to find moments of magic. “I record quite a lot of material,” Stimming emphasises. “For the bass, it’s just one jam, which I was going crazy with. Then, afterwards, I listen to it and cut all the parts that I like. All the sections I find have a meaning or they play into the story that I want to tell.
“I’m not sure if it’s the most clever way to do it,” he continues. “It’s very time consuming to listen to it afterwards. It’s just like a vocal session – and I hate vocal sessions so much. Not the session itself, but choosing which take to use afterwards is the hardest part.”
Stimming uses a similar process—capturing long sections of audio and then comping—in his field recordings. Throughout his career, found sound, nature recordings, and sonic oddities have been a mainstay of his production style. Lucky Me is no exception, featuring watery clicks, chirps, and thuds.
“Every so often, I have a phase where my ears open up to all the surrounding sounds, and I start recording them,” Stimming says of his love of field recording. These days, however, he’s not content to present those field recordings in their natural state. “I feel like using field recordings on their own isn’t that interesting anymore,” he muses. “It’s like… here’s a sound from the city, yeah, we get it. So, the way I use it right now is to throw it in a granular synth, for example, and all of a sudden it becomes an interesting texture. The GR1 is an incredible synth for that: it can handle really loud impulses, and, if they’re even a little bit atonal, you can use that tonal element to morph it into a pad or a chord.”
Playing with space
The details of Stimming’s sonic creations are easily matched by the nuances of his stereo mix. Spreading out across the stereo field, Lucky Me blends distant and close sounds to achieve a highly dynamic result.
Though he now mixes on a pair of Kii Threes at home, Stimming says his approach to space was shaped by his experiences using 4DSOUND, a spatial audio system, back in 2013. “I was playing on the 4DSOUND system for quite some time,” says Stimming. “It gives you these 3-dimensional containers for mono signals and you can move those containers around. Working with that system, using that dimensionality as part of the musical expression, it really helped me a lot even when moving back to 2D sound.
“On the one hand, the mixing happens quite intuitively,” Stimming continues. “But at the same time I do have some strict rules about what I put where – for example, if you want to open up a space, you have to close it beforehand, or if you want to make something appear louder then you have to remove the loud sound so that you can then jump back to it. This thinking is something I learned working with the 4DSOUND system.”
Keep pushing yourself
Perhaps more than anything, Lucky Me is a track that shows how important it is to challenge ourselves as producers and songwriters. After years spent perfecting his house and IDM skills and having built a dedicated following, it would have been easy for Stimming to stick to tried and true approaches. Instead, he chose to eschew formula in favour of experimentation – and the results speak for themselves. “This album came out of a desperate need to get rid of the strict 4/4 formula,” he states. “Once you get rid of the straight bassline, everything gets shaken up and pretty soon you’re in uncharted territory.”
The post Stimming breaks down the production techniques on his new single, ‘Lucky Me’ appeared first on MusicTech.
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