- Hi, this is Ashley Shephard. We're at the NAMM show 2018. I'm talking with Robbie here. And you're originally from the UK? - Yeah. - But you're also spending time here in the states? Here in L.A.? - That's right, that's right, yeah. - Just what's the latest thing? What are you working on right now? What's your current thing? - I've been, just finished a score for an animated movie. - Okay, good times with animation, right? - Yeah, it's my first one, yeah, it was fun. Really enjoyed it, - Yeah. very different to live action. - Can you tell us a little about it or is it okay? - Yeah, it's kind of, yeah, it was fun to do. It's very different obviously, because a lot of the work you did was like with wire frame and things were partially rendered. - Right. - So it's a very different process to getting the emotion for things that you can't fully see. - 'Cause it, dialogue so much. - Yeah, but it was really good fun and been doing a lot of producing and mixing as well for artists and stuff. - Okay. for this, yeah. - So you're keeping busy. - Very, busy, yeah. - And so, if I understand correctly, you have a studio in England. - Yeah, I have studio in the U.K., yeah. - Where you have worked for years. - And then, I've got a, I'm just working from a satellite sort of set up in L.A., yeah. - Sure, makes it easier, right? - Yeah, that's right. - Communication and everything. So, but your background is more from the electronic music side of things? - Well, I'm classically trained on piano but when I was 11 someone gave me an album by an artist called Howard Jones and I was like... - And you were done. - And I was madly into synth after that point. - Sure. - And I ended up then being his MD and stuff years on, later in my life, - That's awesome. but yeah, no I got headlong into electronics so. - What was the first synth? What was the first toy you got your hands on? - My synth was a proper synth. Was a synth called a Korg Delta. - Yeah. - I got it rom a second hand guitar shop when I was about 11. - Just wah, wah, wah. - Yeah, so I mean, I was hooked after that, so electronics, and kind of music technology has always played a massive part in my kind of development in my career in music, so, yeah. - It's interesting you know, 'cause the technology is one side of the brain. - Yeah. and the heart and emotion and the thing, is the other side of the brain so we're constantly. - Trying to keep the two, trying to keep the two juggling, so you don't end up with too much technology you can't outwork what you're really feeling emotionally or the other way around. You strip it back too much so you don't have enough things to kind of inspire you to do the job, - Yeah. so, it's a balance. - That's a great way of looking at it. - Yeah. - So, well, what are some artists that you're producing or maybe something that you're finished with that we can listen to like we want to check out? - I, because of my work with Howard Jones I've ended up over the years by default doing quite a lot of things for all sorts of artists from who are known, starting off in the 80s. So I've worked with all sorts of people from the 80s. But I had a track on Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday album. - Oh, so there you go. - All sorts of other things really. I'm what you call a musical polymath, - Oh, yeah. - I don't like to kind of get too stuck in one genre. I like to kind of just push myself into doing all sorts of things. - Right. as long as I feel like the music isn't generic and there's something interesting about the artist then I'm always happy to kind of go for it. - Okay, well, that's awesome. I mean, you're in a lucky position. You're doing film scores, producing artists, I mean you, I know in film scoring you get to do anything, right? - Yeah. - There's no stylistic restrictions, You're not following an artist trajectory. You're just doing something... - Well, they say that but there's always. - Well, yeah. - There's a director's vision, so... - That's true. So you always have to work within that as well. - Right, but I mean, you can find yourself with world beat textures and orchestras and electronics and guitar... - Exactly, yeah. It's doesn't matter, all willy nilly, interesting. So, in your studio in England you have a full surround system... - Well. - So you're working in surround from the get-go on a film score? - Well. Do you think that way? - Yeah, my first proper studio monitors that I really spent money on and really loved well I had an original set of the Dynaudio BM 6's. When they first came out. I had those... - Passive ones right? No, no, the active one. - Oh, they were active. - Yeah. They were the active ones, yeah. I loved them so much and then I started getting into working with films and also surround mixing for artists. - Okay. - And so, I just naturally gravitated towards the AIR system so I ended up with a 5.1 AIR system with a big... - Lucky you. - AIR based sub which I've got to this day and it's like I will never change it because it's like to me monitors are kind of like your second ears, you know? Without the the things, those things that you really can trust it's kind of like you're tuning in the dark. - Very true. - And then I've had I've got a pair of little 5 Compacts BM5 Compacts that I take around when I'm doing like sort of work out. - You're flying around and stuff... - Out and about. And then most recently out in the states here. I've got the LYD 7's. - Okay. - And the 9S sub. - Okay, right, the new sub. - Yeah, just a new sub because I wanted something that was kind of the nearest kind of family kind of sonic imprint so that AIR 6's, which I have as my main studio monitors. - I got you. - So, yeah. I mean, to me good monitors, a computer with massive processing power and a couple of good mics and some good software that you know intimately are the most important things to me. Everything else is just like icing on the cake. (laughing) - So, how's your process work? You know, you get a film or an artist, I mean, where do you start? Do you like prepare sounds or do you start sequencing things and then find sounds, or? - I'm a little bit subversive in what I like to do. I like to work with an artist who comes from one thing, I don't know, maybe like a folk artist or whatever a rock artist and say, well this is what you do how about we do a bit of this with what you do? So I like to kind of I like to bring in something a little bit more interesting and different. - Sure. - To make a bit more of a hybrid thing. - Okay. - So, sounds and textures for a project are very important to me so I either focus in on one particular instrument or a bit of software that I really want to really delve into deeply for projects and kind of get as much out of it as I can. You know, just so there's a jumping off point. - Yeah. - That you can kind of come back to and kind of feel like you're developing something that isn't just like you know, let's just throw a bit of this in, let's throw that. Something that feels like it's actually intrinsic to the artist or, you know, the film. - So it keeps consistent. If you pick a particular instrument, let's say, - Yeah. - Or guitar, let's just say guitar. You're gonna create all these textures in your guitar to have a palette to choose from. - Yeah. - ...in that department or a piece of software that you're using. - A bit of software or an instrument. - Let's explode it and see how we can use it. - A little instrument that I've come back to time and time again which I love is a little instrument by a company called Teenage Engineering called the OP-1. - Oh, is that the... - Tiny little thing, looks like a VL, Casio VL. It's an amazingly powerful, but very hands on synth. People think it's a toy but I can't tell you the amount of work I've done on that for films and albums. - Plus, it's so little. - Yeah, I can take it anywhere, yeah. - Throw it in a backpack, off you go. - Tools for me whether software or whether they're instruments they have to have an immediacy to them. That you, not an immediacy in that they have lots and lots of presets where you can go I'll pick that I'll pick that, because then you're music has got no individuality, but an immediacy that you can immediately turn them on be inspired and make things great out of them without having to look in manuals and think, oh, when was the last time I used this? I can't quite remember how to do it. - Intuitively tactile. When it's like that, it's just I have no interest in them. So, the tools I tend to have rationed my setup of like musical instruments and synths and stuff has tended to kind of shrink and shrink over the years. - Interesting. - To just a few things that I really know well and really love to use. - And they have some sort of like, oh I don't know how to say this, like riding a bike. I mean, you can get your hands on it and get a visceral reaction from it. - Exactly. - 'Cause you're touching it and it's doing, you get feedback like I guitar. I mean, a guitar gives that to you. - I mean, I can learn an instrument really learn the depths of it and all menu dive and all that but when you've got an artist sitting there or you're up against a deadline you don't want to be doing that. - That's true. - For me it's all about, it has to be there, it has to be plugged in, it has to be ready to go you have to be able to do something great with it and move on, so, yeah. - So, you say usually, you need a couple of mics. What sort of recording do you do? I mean obviously, vocals and that sort of stuff. What do you find yourself going out? - Mostly, I do vocal recording. And to me the vocals I listen to a lot of modern production and vocals, in particularly like the EDM world just seem to be like the vocals is like another instrument. It's so processed. It's just like it could have been in a synth or something playing in the park. - Feels remixy. - So I like a vocal, I like to build tracks around a vocal. So I always gravitate toward working with vocalists, that have kind of a character to their voice and I want that to be the centerpiece of the recording. - Sure. - So, it's very important to me that, spend a lot of time recording a vocalist well and making them feel comfortable to give the performance and then to bring all the other stuff in as a backdrop around them. - Interesting. - So, I've got a couple of mics. My mics aren't actually that exotic. Mics are a very subjective thing, but I think certain mics just work amazingly with certain artists. But one of the mics, I've had for 15, 20, maybe more than that actually, I just give my age away. And, I've had for a long time its a RODE mic, called the Classic. - Yes. Classic II, it was their flagship valve mic. - Right. - And I've just used that over and over again. I've got a few other mics and I've got, the pencil mics if I need to do guitar or something like that. I'm never really mic-ing up anything bigger than that. - Trunk case or orchestra or? - If I did that I would go somewhere else, get somebody who's really good at doing that, to mic it and then bring back the files and work with it. You know, that's how I kind of work. - Well, so, in your studio, what's your? Where do you sit? What are you looking at when you're doing your work? - Well. - How does it look from your point of view? - I have, I use the most powerful 24 core current Mac Pro trash can thing and I have a bit of an unusual setup because I have these very wide screen LG 34 inch wide screen. - The panorama one? - Monitors and I have two of those, one above each other. - Oh, okay. - So you'd think it was weird because it's quite tall. - Yeah. - But it means within the center field without having it really spread wide. - You've got a lot of... - I've got a lot of real estate so I usually have my, I work in Logic, I have done since like Logic One. I used to have when it was Notator on Atari I've never deviated. I have all that the arrange window like on the bottom. Bottom screen for doing all my sequencing and writing and then the top window. The top screen is usually the mixer. - Okay. - So, it's like a massive long mixer and I have that. I have the Dynaudio stereo pair, pair behind me. One that sits above the set. - It's above the monitor pointing down. - Sends a... - How do you look at picture? Do you just watch picture on one of those screens? Just sort of put it up wherever it's convenient? - Yeah, put it up there. And I use Universal Audio Apollo hardware for my... For my internal out. - And I have the synths that I have over to my left and I've got a modular and a master 88 note native instruments controller on my right. So everything's kind of like just there. - So keyboard's off to the right. That's what I was kind of getting at, 'cause like some people have a little mixer in front of them, some people have a keyboard in front of them and the mixers on the side. - I'm obsessed with there being no mess. - Ah. - People come to my studio and they go does anybody actually use this studio? Because everything's neatly, you can't see any cables anywhere. It's all, but I like it, I just can't deal with clutter. - It affects your mental space too right? - Yeah. - If the place is cluttered, your brain is like, eh. - I just like it to be, yeah, just like, yeah. I know that some studios people love having that kind of ramshackle instruments propped up against the wall and how do we plug this in? How do we do that? I can't deal with that. I just want it all there ready to go. - Right and tight and good to go, - Yeah, yeah. interesting. Well, what's something recent that was particularly interesting to you whether a film score or an artist or something and it doesn't I'm not asking you for your flagship thing, just something that was intriguing to you that we can go check out that you can be like, hey this was a neat thing. - Actually, well I, I have done stuff very recently, but unfortunately I can't talk about it 'cause you know, I've got to sign it. But something I did relatively recently was for, it was for a Canadian band called Thousand Foot Krutch. They're sort of a big Canadian rock band and they basically came to me and asked me and a couple other people to do some remixes of their stuff. But what I didn't want to do was just do let's speed this up and turn this into. - Sting. a dance mix. So, I kind of thought if I was producing this from scratch. - What would you do? - And I had the singer into sing what would I do? So I basically stripped everything away. - Started with the vocal. - Which I did for the track Be Somebody which was real, full on. - I'm sorry, what was the track? - Be Somebody. - Be Somebody. - Yeah, that's a good example. Where it was a full on standard rock thing, ballad. I took it all out, everything. And just kept the vocal and it turned into this kind of almost sort of modern Depeche Mode style. - Oh, cool. - Electrotonic sort of, with lots of sound, sort of sound manipulation stuff on it. And it's only, it's just amazing how the context of music changes everything. - The meaning and the feel. - I learned that so much when I started doing film scoring when you'll be setting a film. - Yeah. - The first time I was setting a film and there was no music on it, it was just dialogue and then you start putting stuff in. You realize the power. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. - You realize the power you have. - To set the mood or change to mood. - Change the mood, yeah. You realize the power of how that really sets the tone and the same is for mixing or remixing or re-imagining other people's music. - Right. - Soon as you strip the vocal out and use the vocal. - How does it make you feel and you react to that? - It totally changes people's perception of that. So I do get called on quite a lot to do that now. Because people like that aspect that I don't want to just do like a fall to the floor dance mix. - You come at it from the other angle. - Yeah, yeah. - And provide this unique perspective, that's cool, well. And I'm glad you gave us that example because when you were talking about first were you like you come at it from this whole other place you want to bring this different element into what they've already done. So that's a good, that would be a good example to check out of that, so. - Yeah. Okay, well, cool. It was really nice to meet you. - Pleasure to meet you. and I'm interested to check out your stuff. So, I hope y'all enjoyed that, this has been Robbie. We're here at the NAMM show 2018 with Dynaudio and make sure to check out his stuff.