It's
been a little while
since I did a full blog post, so now that
I'm sat on a flight to Budapest, I thought it was an ideal time to lay down my
thoughts on what I've been getting up to, what I like, what I don't like, some
things that are relevant, some that are not................
Tonight
I am playing at a big event at Cafe del Rio, in the
Hungarian capital, called the Rio Summer Festival. I'm very
excited about this party, as there is a massive lineup, including some trance
favorites, ATB & Marcus Schultz. I believe I'm on before ATB tonight,
so I think that gives me license to play anything I want. Just how I like it :)
Either
side of the show will be a few hours of press, and then I'll grab a few hours
rest before heading back to London. Unfortunately this week I had my Friday gig
in Cyprus cancelled, much to my disappointment. I don't have many details
on the reasons for this cancellation at the moment, but as soon as I have more
info I'll get something up on the Rising Blog about it.
So
now with a bit of last minute schedule shuffling, I've arranged some studio
time with Nastala, to help her finish recording her new single on her album.
It's probably one of my favourite jobs to do, working on tracks for other
artists, as it just allows me to open up my creativity, and maybe allow me to
try out ideas I wouldn’t necessarily use for
a Chris Lake track. I also have a few other projects to
finish off, so studio time is a must. Not getting to enjoy the summer in the
way I originally hoped (horizontal, with a cocktail in one hand, suntan lotion
in the other), but I'm trying to take advantage of an insanely big creativity
burst that I'm experiencing at the moment.
The
collaboration I started with Marco Lys this year has definitely been one of the
highlights of 2009 for me. He is such a great guy, with a well practiced talent
in the studio. Sonically he gets it, and he understands how I like to approach
a track. When we work together, or pretty much when I work together with
anyone, its a case of leaving me for 20-30 minutes to sit in front of a
sequencer and keyboard, load up some synths, and just create LOADS of ideas,
until I get bored or frustrated, then Lys comes in, and wreaks havoc on the
project :)
Having
already released 'Violins', and now the current release 'La Tromba', We're keen
to capitalise on the attention the music is getting, so we're going to finish
off a track we started the last time Marco was in London, via the internet. We
finished Violins this way too, so we're confident it works.
The
problem we've had is that his studio in Northern Italy is too hot to work in
during the summer months, and I've been touring so much that we haven't found
any more dates to hook up together. I'm sure once September and October
comes though, we'll finish up 3 or 4 new tunes to release. Good news on La
Tromba though. The Swedish House Mafia have been going positively ape shit
about the track, so Steve has picked up the record for his Size imprint, to
release a round of remixes by himself, Dirty South and Christian Smith. I can't
wait to hear what they all do to it.
I've
also been doing a lot of remixes recently. My remix of Mini Viva - Tokyo should
be dropping soon. Big house action is the order of the day here. I uploaded a
clip of the mix on my MySpace player if you want to check it out. Other mixes I
did were for La Roux - In for the kill (USA release). I dropped this last week
at Cream, Ibiza, and the place went MENTAL. Lys and Myself did a remix of Sour
Grapes - Stay for now, Coming out on the first week of August, and we also did
the lead mix for the debut
single for 'Nelski' called Body Pop. This track smacks of a cross between XPress 2's 'Lazy' and Tom Novy's 'Your body'. HUGE! Lastly though, I was lucky enough to get on the new remix package for Madonna's next single with Paul Oakenfold, called 'Celebration'. I just got news 2 days ago that it
was accepted by Warners and Madonna, so I'm super happy this is coming
out.
Sounds like Madonna back to her best. Catchy stuff.
Other than that, I've been having a good mess around with new ways I can
play out live. I mentioned at the beginning of the year I am considering doing a live show. In the mean time, I'm looking at more of an evolved DJ performance. I picked up a Jazz Mutant Lemur last week, and I've hooked this up to my MacBook pro running Traktor Pro, and running this into the Pioneer DJM800. I probably have a month of setting up to go, but early signs are that this setup is a lot of fun to play with, and allowed me to be a little more creative with how I deliver my sets. Again, many of you will know about my hookup with www.awdio.com, where I have streamed many of my shows live through their site. With this new setup, I can record every one of my sets easily, making them available online the week after if I choose, as well as easily publishing track
listings from my shows. The downside is that I doubt I will be using controller CD's for this new setup, which means no beat-matching, but you know, I've been beatmatching for 10 years now, and it's no big deal, and proves very little. Not having to do it will allow me to do many other things, and that satisfies me much more. I'll keep you updated if I manage to work anything else exciting into my setup.
On a production tip, I've been messing with a few new pieces of gear. I got myself the UAD2 card, which I think sounds great. Some of the plugins are superb. Personally, I'm really into the Roland tape delay and chorus, along with the Fairchild Compressor, and the De-esser for vocals. My friends at Arturia have also now updated their minimoog synth to v2, and the new features turn it into a whole new monster for me. Unfortunately,
for production, I've not found the upgrade for Ableton Live so enjoyable. It
still feels very buggy, and a horrible sequencer to use when opening old live 7
projects in the new version. It also doesn't run so great with my Access
Virus TI, giving a lot of latency issues, and in general, using live with
external synths, or for recording vocals, feels backwards compared to many
other sequencers on the market like Cubase and Logic. With the new
features made available in Logic 9, I feel its time I use Ableton Live, only as
a sketchpad for my ideas, then do everything else in Logic.
There are a couple of new pieces of kit I have my eye on though. Vengeance Soundshave just announced a new line of plug-ins, one of which I felt has been a must have for a long time:A multiband sidechain. This would allow me to sidechain a bassline against a kickdrum, only reducing the volume of certain frequencies, allowing me to push the sound louder into the mix, and without giving the bass that total 'sidechained' sound. I also tried out a demo of the 'Sawer' synth. Looks good to me. If they feel generous and give me a copy, I might even give it a full work out in of my tracks...
The
last bit of gear I'm looking at is a re-issued AKG C12 Microphone. Nastala was
using one in a recording session a few weeks ago, and after hearing the results
from the session, I need to get one asap. The only downside is the $5000 price
tag.
Anyway,
my flight is starting to land now; so time I wrap this up. I've got a new
iphone application being made available very soon for free, so more news on
that soon, and in the next few weeks, I'm making a brand new track freely
available for download. If you join my Facebook fan page you can keep right up
to date with everything there.
Chris 'very
talkative today' Lake
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