! Making music for me is usually always starts with a sample from someone else's music music and then I just build up around that sample. I might take the sample away at the end but it always starts with that little seed of inspiration so if I'm blocked or just a bit stuck, often I forget that just listening to music is the best inspiration you can do.
Especially stuff that's nothing to do with what you're making. I like having the synths running through different sorts of signals and getting a different sound. I don't want things to be clean anymore. I've been messing around on the Korg Poly 800, and I love that the keys are really springy and hard, and I kind of feel when I'm playing that, you can kind of feel me really digging into it. I prefer having an MPC, no matter which one. Right now, I'm working with the Renaissance, and you can just run it as a plug-in through Ableton, so Ableton is my main thing, and I run everything through that. I just love hitting buttons. That's important to me, because that's how I started with all analog gear, even with the synths. But with time, everything got simplified into a computer.
So I still keep a couple classic synths around just to get that warm, real warm sound that I know is authentic to what I want to get to my ears. But other than that, it's Ableton. And like with that and a drum machine, it's just perfect. Sometimes it can be really hard to start from the ground up, you know, to get a full idea of where you're headed. And so I'm with him, and a lot of times I'll just be listening to some of my favorite latest music that's really inspiring. And I think when you have the intention that, okay, I'm going to listen to this to be inspired, to gain an idea for one of my tracks. And a lot of times I'll be listening to other people's music, and that will give me an idea for just a melody, you know? And it plays off the rhythm of that track, but then, yeah, it's like once you wipe away that track, you have something brand new, and then you can just build from that.
Like when I seen Addison Groove play live for the first time, I seen Cole play live for the first time, I seen King Britt play. I'm like, man, how do you guys do it? But like they doing it and they having fun, they doing it and it's so creative. I see a lot of people that play live and stuff like that. It wasn't that interesting to me. But then I see these guys, I'm like, oh, okay, this definitely gonna make me want to go back at least visually. I see visuals. Sometimes people got dope visuals that inspire music being somewhere and everybody feeling it. And I'm like, okay, let me see if I can feel what they're feeling. And if I feel that, I just spark some inspiration right there. I might not bite their track or something, but it's just the energy that came from that. I take that home with me, for sure. So I feel as an artist, I'm always being followed by a shadow. And the shadow is called money.
So the question I had is, how does the issue of money basically influence creativity? meaning that you know I guess suppose unless you have kind of personal wealth already you get where you can purely choose the projects you work on there's often gonna be a balance between say things that pay or things that are purely creative I think it works like both ways depending on what type of person you are if you're like a person that's just about money then I think that money may spark creativity instantly you know like oh man if you do this right now i got a hundred thousand dollars for you you know some people could work like that some people may be like well what's the catch of this hundred thousand dollars or something so because nothing is like you know comes easy and nothing for free so when money comes along i
really kind of stay away from money because like money is not my motivation i want to be able to support my family money comes with that but i feel as long as i stay positive and i'm doing something good the money's gonna come with that I don't really put that into the forefront thank y'all because we made some of the best musicals did broke sometimes that you wonder like in a post-genre world where you know everyone is playing a bit of this and a bit of that like what if the energy ran out you know if there was no more local scenes and at the same time there's you know the new thing is these scenes have been born purely online that have no fixed geographical location it's just like a producer here produce over there produce it there and so on despite the fact that i play
so many different genres in my sets i realized that you know without the local scenes producing all these different genres you're nothing you know without south london and dubstep without chicago and footwork without trap in atlanta without jersey club and so on you know without that actual energy from an offline scene, there'd be nothing left in my sets. Genres sometimes are just like almost a good way for people who are starting, say young aspiring producers, kind of need to have a genre of reference they like so they can start to learn that and then try to challenge themselves as you said before and try to get something out of that track or that specific artist and maybe follow the steps. I mean we all learn by imitation
since the very beginning of life you learn by imitation so it's just part of human behaviour in a way to get there I think. The reason I got blocked for a couple of years is that I just couldn't finish tracks anymore I just didn't know what I wanted to hear at the end of the track I wasn't certain about it, so I would just leave the track unfinished and I kept doing that and then I just gave up for a couple of years It was driving me crazy. But certainly DJing with your tracks helps a lot. It makes you realise actually it's not as bad as I thought or actually that's worse than I thought. But it gives you some clarity on where you're at in the process. You know, you can't be creative on demand all the time. Even if I'm just sitting in the studio, like staring at the ceiling,
kind of doing something, I'm thinking about it. You know? Something I do a lot if I'm not really feeling creative enough to like make an entire track or anything. I just work on sound design. And I think that's a good point because sometimes you'll be completely stuck, don't have any ideas, but then you just create that one sound. And then that just opens up a flood of ideas. I've been using the same drum machines since forever. I just sampled them and resampled them. And we just change them up a little bit. But it's like the same sounds. Just we go back every few years and probably revise them or something like that. And then there's just so many new devices and plug-ins and things like that to play with. We have our set sounds just like the Tech Life kit. So that's just all the drum machines, they're our favorites, and we put that together.
And that's just the sound that you're gonna hear basically in every track that we make. But now that we got open ears, definitely making different stuff, but with the same sounds, it's crazy. I just can't wait for people to hear it. Awesome, thank you so much, guys. Thank you. Thank you guys so much. Thank you.