my name is Jon1st, I'm a DJ and producer from Leicester in the UK. I'm Alex
I go by the name Shield and I'm from Copenhagen
we actually met through a club night and record label that we're both associated
with called 2020 which is Ivy Labs record label. I'm working with them as a
resident DJ at their club shows and Alex was one of the first artists they signed
to the label, and we discovered we have this mutual interest in making live
music. Me as a turntablist and his background as a percussionist, it was a
good fit, and we thought we should give this a try sometime see what we come up with
definitely our differences in in styles I feel compliment each other and it
works really well in terms of broadening the variety
of music we would make. For this particular track it's called holla and
we started actually on the TORAIZ just with one sample and eventually it
became a whole arrangement and a track quite quickly. Because we have background
in being live performers we really liked the tangible side of equipment so
using a bit of hardware to start a tune feels really intuitive to us
So the first thing we did was we imported a vocal sample using the
record in function. We've got a step sequencer here so we chuck that on there
So we grab some drums, we chuck them in the sequencer got a groove going. The drive
function is a great addition, it's a part of the Dave Smith filters and what it
does in this instance is it just beefs up the sound and you can hear if I
exaggerate a little bit, it gives some nice distortion and some nice low ends. We're
just gonna keep it at 10 o'clock for now. We decided to grab a bass sample, so
first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna pitch it up a bit, an octave, and then chuck it in the scale mode
we added a bass melody with the AS-1 and for this we just started out
with the idea on the machine
and we fooled around with the cut-offs and some resonance and then found this
lower octave idea that gave us kind of a new hook to the beat. So while alex is
playing I can adjust the the filter and filter settings and create loads of
different modulations to make the melody more varied and interesting
one of my favorite things about the AS-1 is the software that it comes bundled
with. You can see a map of your sound essentially which you can manipulate in
real time. You can also save your presets as you made them to your computer or to
your synth which means you can send it to someone else who has the same piece
of equipment they can load it in, and for our project it has helped massively that
we are able to be in each country and export stuff for each other
after we'd laid those out we do some scratching, some additional breaks and
things that we'd previously sampled and embellished a bit using some software FX
so once we've built the song we start thinking about how we're going to
perform it live and what's going to be the most interesting and engaging way
to do that for an audience so we completely stripped the track down again
we pick out key elements for each of us to perform and then we program the SP-16's
to suit that. We try to take that energy
that is in one track and to stem it out and to show people visually and you
know audibly what is actually happening in the track and make it more
of a show so even if you're not a musician it's obvious you would
if you hear a sound you can probably see it happening as well, and its very
understandable
for this particular performance we used the SP-16 as the backbone, the backing
track essentially is coming from there and we're both playing to that doing the
scratching and stuff like that over the top of what's in here, but at the same
time I can use it for doing those one shots so it's playing this element in
the background I have all these extra pads on it so I don't need two units to
do that job. When I use the AS-1, a really cool feature I use is you can
actually play the melody on the actual machine or on external keyboard, it gives
you a lot more flexibility with different octaves and different melodies
stuff like the synthesiser and the sampler felt real easy to use, yeah it
just it feels like everything is together, it has all the filters and
the sound fits together. Like we were saying earlier I think the equipment feels really stable live
like you know, when you're in the heat of the moment and the
excitement and you wanna hit stuff a little bit harder for dramatic effect
and that, the equipments robust you know, it's good. We out. Peace