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Another 10 questions with Wolfgang Gartner
We first caught up with him a year ago. Now his name is one of the biggest in dance music. We talk to him about his year's highlights, about when to abandon a mix and how he gets THAT sound.
In the space of just two years, Wolfgang Gartner has forged a reputation as arguably the most revered producer in dance music. His productions have stormed the Beatport charts and everyone wants to know how he gets THAT sound. It's been a year since we ran our seminal debut interview with him. Since then, he's gone truly stellar and we had to find out more.
Since we interviewed you last year, you've enjoyed phenomenal success with both your electro-house sound and with a deeper techier sound. What can we expect from you in 2010?
Lots of different stuff. The overall 'electro-house' sound hasn't really been doing it for me lately, or at least the stuff that gets categorised as electro-house. I'm trying to do something new with it - fuse it with different sounds and take it to the next level - maybe create a new genre in the process, who knows? Aside from that, I'll be doing some mix collaborations, some vocal collaborations and a couple of projects with other artists that I'm really excited about.
Do you have any plans to open your Kintergarten label to other producersor is it exclusively reserved for your own tracks?
Nope. It's just for me. I think Kindergarten in 2010 will mostly be an outlet for my more techy / techno / house stuff, with a majority of the electro material going to other labels, but we'll see.
How do you see the dance music industry developing over the next few years?
I see it developing in a very big way! It already is. You look at people like David Guetta doing collaborations with Akon and such, and see more and more people embracing dance music. It's really on the rise here in America too, which is so exciting for me because it had a pretty bad lull there in the early 2000s. Some people think that mass consumption of dance music is a bad thing, but I feel the other way. The more people who get into it, the more people will start producing it, and it just leads to more talent, more music, and more of what we love.
What's your current DJ setup? Do you have any plans to do a 'live' show or use a laptop-based set up?
At the moment I use two CDJs and a Pioneer 800. But yes, I am starting to scheme ways to incorporate more live elements. I don't see myself using a laptop any time soon as I don't trust them for live PAs, but I'd like to incorporate a synth and an effects box or something. It will definitely happen - I just want to make sure I choose something that I feel comfortable with, as it will have to go down 100 per cent perfectly.
What single biggest piece of hardware or software has influenced your sound/workflow this year and why?
The Dave Smith Poly Evolver. It is so versatile - a really modular in the way the routing works, offering so many possibilities. But my new toy is the D-CAM Synth Squad: those are the best VST synths I've ever used and I'm using them in everything now.
You told us before that your mixing is shaped by a complex series of bussing techniques. Can you elaborate on this?
That was last year when I was still mixing analogue. Now, I am mixing all in-the-box with Ableton Live. I still do a lot of grouping, but my overall mix technique has been simplified drastically. The hardware compressors and mixing boards were just too much work when doing recalls and revisions.
When mixing, what do you find the hardest thing to get sounding right?
The low end: the way the kick and bass sit together - always has been, always will be. The solution for me ends up being a mix of side-chaining and multiband compression, but I still haven't found any magic settings or combination of plugins. It's always hard work to get it right, and the process is different for every track.
I'm sure a lot of our readers are itching to know how you get your bass so low and how you accurately measure it without over/underdoing the low frequencies!?
I don't have any specific plugins or tricks that I use to get the 'low' bass. My bass is just the result of side-chaining, compression, multiband compression and EQing. A lot of the time my bass sounds comes from analogue synths.
What would be your biggest self-criticism?
Not knowing when a certain approach or attempt at a certain sound is working in the studio, and spending too much time trying to nail something that just isn't going to work. Sometimes you need to know when to move on, and I have a tendency to be too persistent. This can play both ways, but a lot of the time it is more of a flaw than an asset.
And finally, what's been the highlight of your year so far?
There have been so many. It's hard to choose just one., but if I had to it would be a really epic moment on my Future Music Festival tour in Australia earlier in the year. Basement Jaxx were closing the festival after two weeks of touring, and me and a bunch of other people got up on stage with them and danced around like idiots in front of 15,000 people during their last song. It's not something I would normally do, but there was a really special energy in the air that night which made it a classic.
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More from Wolfgang Gartner: www.myspace.com/djwolfganggartner
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