Logic Users List Ireland

Emerging as one of the top new producers of 2008, Kid Handsome has taken the techno world by storm, with forthcoming releases on a plethora of International labels.

Given his break with a remix on DJ Pierre’s new Afro Acid label, Kid Handsome soon went on a spree of signings on labels as diverse (both geographically and musically) as Queep, Red Session, Brandnewvibe, and MPdigital.

Bringing a deep melancholic approach to techno, house and minimal, the Kid is still busy producing tracks with a depth you could drown in.

With new releases coming out all the time, this young Irish producer continues breaking new ground with his unique brand of melody driven subversive house music.

Pristine sonic quality, hypnotic grooves, and a sense of musicality that can still captivate the most underground dancefloor are qualities that are making Kid Handsome one of the most significant young producers around.

http://www.myspace.com/kidhandsomejeff

The Kid - Known to his friends as Jeff.. took some time out from a hectic Flu & Hob-Nob couch session, to get quizzed by Logic Users List Ireland about how he got started with the DAW.

We were also lucky enough to gain an insight into how he gets his sound & what we can expect from this exciting young Irish Producer in the future..

Kid Handsome - This is a long one.

Ok the short version. Grew up playing in bands (drums, guitar, piano, singing, songwriting, etc) from the time I was 11 or 12. My family have a classical music tradition.

Both my father and grandfather were professional engineer/producers so I had grown up in studios and knew the ins and outs of everything at quite a young age (although I’m still learning everyday!).

Was in a semi-successful band while in university. In fact so semi-successful we dropped out, toured, did all that stuff. In the middle of signing a deal with one of the Major labels and I sort of got sick of it all. Went back to university while doing my own rock album (i was playing everything on it).

When I finally finished that, I was sort of cracking up. Finished it, and promptly decided to give up music for the foreseeable future.

At the time I was a big ProTools head.

For the next few months, life not being a musician was something I really couldn’t adapt to. It was really hard. I was 22, had done the rock n roll band thing (well most of the good parts anyway), had done my own album and somehow had managed to squeeze in getting a decent education as well.

Then one night, in my pretty depressed state, I met some friends in a club we used to frequent back in the band days. There had been a change in ownership and there was a techno night running.

Like most people in Ireland, I had never been exposed to proper techno music (apart from my passing interest in Warp Records), and well, I was just blown away. The fact that there was no catchy melodies in the music. The sparseness of the sound. The heavy hypnotic sound. I was stone cold sober and danced to this strange atonal repetitive stuff the whole night. My friends had left the club and I didn’t even notice.

I remember driving home and scanning the radio for some of the pirate stations that used to be on the air a few years earlier when dance music seemed to be very trance orientated. And there it was, one of the tracks I had heard in the club. Shlomi Aber’s Freakside. Didn’t know it’s name. Didn’t even know where to start looking for it.

Anyway I got home, opened up Ableton and the next few months are sort of a blur of me working day and night on pretty awful electronic music. I had to sort of unlearn everything I knew about songwriting and being a musician. I just got into techno in a big, big way.

Eventually got Logic after realising the vast majority of my favourite producers were using it. I was amazed at how easy it was to use, and the incredible quality of the plugins and many other things. Pretty much stopped using Pro Tools, Reason and Ableton the day I got Logic (although Ableton still has its uses).

Yeah so that’s how I got into music production and that’s how I started using Logic.

LULI - Can you tell us about your current set-up / List of plugs / equipment etc..

KH - Here we go..

15" Macbook Pro
Logic 8
Ableton 6
Apogee Duet
UAD Xpander

Monitoring:

Genelec 8030A’s and Yamaha HS50m’s

Plugins:

UAD Neve 88rs, UAD Maximizer, UAD Fairchild 670, UAD Plate 140
Sonalksis Compressor
Sonalksis EQ
Obviously all the Logic Plugs
Massey Tape Head
Camel Phat
Camel Space

As far as synth/sampler plug ins go:

I use the EXS24 a lot. Love it. The Logic synths are just phenomenal too. Then I have a lot of 3rd party synths:

Arturia Moog Modular
Arturia Jupiter 8V
Gforce Minimonsta
Gforce Imposcar
DiscoDSP Discovery (sort of software Nord Rack)
Rob Papen Predator
Rob Papen Albino
Native instruments Komplete (Massive, FM8, etc.)
Fxpansion Guru

They’re my main ones

Hardware:

But to be honest, my hardware has a lot of dust on it (testament to how good Logic is).

Roland Jp8000
Novation Nova
TC Electronic Finalizer
Whatever vintage stuff I can get my hands on at any one time.

I think that’s everything!

LULI - How you typically go about making a track with Logic? What are the basic rules that you follow?

KH - Some people start with a kick loop. I can’t. I just get bored.

Actually most of the inspiration for a track comes to me playing in clubs or even just djing at home.You know… when I’m really immersed in it.

When you’re djing or performing live (I do both - though not at the same time….yet) you really get to hear what’s working, what’s not, what kind of track you’d love to be playing next that doesn’t exist yet. That’s sort of my thing.

I study my favourite records a lot. Down to the the most minute detail regarding structure, timbre, arrangement, musical characteristics.

Then I’ll open up Logic and start building up nice drum loops, basslines, everything really. I’ll keep working on an 8 bar loop for days and days sometimes.

Sometimes I’ll reference what I’ve done versus the kind of stuff that’s influencing me.

At a certain point, I stop referencing. I let the track do what it wants. I think it’s important to let ideas develop and develop. Not to sound too cliched here but you gotta work until it comes to life and then let it take you.

I normally spend a day on arranging a track, which sometimes means rewriting a lot of bits and pieces and sometimes it’s just completely different to the loops I had going.

But like I say, you gotta learn to go with it. If you don’t, it’s gonna sound forced.

Another thing I like doing is really focusing on a concept.

Supposing I’ve done a track and there’s one little bit I really like. Sometime’s I’ll scrap the whole thing and then develop everything around that little part. I’ll exagerrate some of the weirdness or peculiarity of the part and let it take the track where it wants to go.

I can’t really follow any rules. If I try and make a bigroom banging track, inevitably it comes out as trippy, dubby thing. If I do ever follow through on what I started out doing, it always sounds crap - too forced sounding, not sincere.

My minor ‘hit’ (and by that I mean my track that the most people have heard) Silent started with me trying to make the darkest, most atonal, weird track.

Of course Sod’s law kicked in and before I knew it, it was a Progressive house melodic track. Next thing I knew Hernan Cattaneo and a few others were giving it big support, it was selling real well and was played a lot on radio stations around the world.

Like I say, you’ve got to let the track take you.

I know if I tried to write another record like Silent, it would either come out as a pale imitation of it which I wouldn’t like or else as a very underground totally different record which I’d love (and that would probably sell only about 50 copies!).

LULI - What is your favourite feature of Logic & Why?

KH - hmmmm……

This is difficult because there are so many features that I rant and rave about that are incredible.

A few people I’ve worked with lately have said that I’m like a Logic promotional video because as I’m working I’m turning around going ‘watch what logic can do….genius’.

Right now, the Match EQ is my number one favourite thing.

Actually when I showed that to a Dj/producer friend of mine yesterday while we were mastering a collaboration we did, even he was there saying ‘holy crap, that is unreal!!!’.

It’s just a genius invention. And unlike most genius inventions, it works great. I use it in mastering to shape the tonal characteristics of the track. I pick a similar track that I like the sound of, whack it into logic, let the match EQ listen and then do it’s thing and then boom, just have to adjust it a tiny bit and I’ve got the exact sound I’m looking for.

Also, the Logic compressor is the greatest plugin ever for so many reasons.

Sidechaining obviously is one. Not many software plugins can boast having such a defining impact on house music over the past 3 years.

I’ve tried getting the same sidechained sound with a bunch of other fantastic (and indeed expensive) compressors and none of them came close to Logic’s one.

A very common thing to do right now is to stick the Logic compressor on your master bus, give a tiny bit of Gain Reduction (1 or 2db) and then set the output distortion to ‘soft’ (it’s in the sort of hidden menu down the bottom).

It’s genuinely like hitting the ‘good’ button.

Don’t know how it does it, not sure why it does it, but it’s just amazing.

If some of Logic’s effects were given a fancy GUI and sold as third party plugins, they would dominate the high-end market.

LULI - So what are you hoping might on the cards with Logic 9?

KH - Right now, I love Logic to bits.

Only thing I’d like to see would be a more Ableton like browser where when you preview something it’s in sync and timestretched etc.

Oh and I have this idea for all DAW’s. They should have an ‘analogue’ mode on their mixers, so that if you’re working with fairly hot audio tracks the fader actually mimics an analogue console where when the fader is up at max it’s actually only outputting say -12 db or whatever.

One of the problems with mixing in the box is that it’s very easy to end up mixing with all your faders barely off the bottom due to summing.

Hope that makes sense. Oh and if anyone at Logic reads this and implements it, just send me the cheque!

LULI - Can you give us one excellent Logic tip that might just make our lives that little bit easier?

KH - Let me think..

Enjoy whatever you are doing.

If you sit down to work everyday with a childlike wonder about music and technology, you can work at it for as long as you want. You won’t get tired, you won’t get frustrated, you will get more done in one day than what some people do in 6 months

Music requires a lot of discipline and hard work in order to feel satisfied and fulfilled.

You’ll burn out every so often but you’ll always come back more determined and focused if it’s what you love.

LULI - What’s your favourite piece of music of all time & why?

KH - Ooh tough one!

Ok if I had to pick one it’d be Idioteque by Radiohead.

On a personal level I can relate to it.

It’s former rock musicians ditching guitars, sampling an obscure fm synthesis piece by some obscure electroacoustic composer, layering the heaviest beats imaginable on it, building the most unsettling instrumentation around it and then topping it off with paranoid lyrics about the apocalypse.

Yet it’s beautiful, and highly emotive. It’s sort of everything I love about electronic music.

Machines expressing what sounds like emotion. You can’t ignore it. It’s not background music.

Put in a historical context, it was the same band that released two of the most popular (and in my opinion greatest) guitar-music albums of all time (Ok Computer and The Bends) only a few years earlier. At the height of their fame, sucess or whatever, they make this track.

The absolute antithesis of a radio hit. But still highly accessible.

LULI - So what’s next on the horizon for you? Will you tell us about your Future plans / Forthcoming Releases?

KH - Where to start?

Ok I’m gigging around a good bit over the summer, but still trying to lead a sort of reclusive studio life.

Have a lot of releases coming out on various labels over the next 9 months. Developing a working relationship with one of my favourite labels (and a very well known one at that!).

Just gonna keep developing my sound and hopefully people will be into it as much as they’ve been into the stuff so far. Obviously I’ll be djing around the place too, but I’ve sort of dedicated the next year or so to focusing on my productions.

There may be an artist album in the pipeline too.

I’m collaborating with one of the most talented DJ’s around, Al Keegan. He runs Aciitone Digital and funnily enough was the guy running the techno night I stumbled into 2 years ago that I mentioned earlier.

We did a remix of a Sourcecode track to be released soon and it turned out really nice.

Literally just finished a new original track yesterday and we’re really having a blast.
 

Great thing is that between mine and his djing and gigging schedules we can be really immersed in what we’re doing, and roadtest new material all the time.

Continuing on the collaborative theme, there are plans for myself, Al Keegan and Matador to form a sort of ‘band’. That should be so much fun, and there is already talk of me jumping behind the drumkit again. This time playing techno!

Right now the project is provisionally titled ‘Berlin Funk’.

LULI - Appreciate your time Jeff - Its been a fantastic interview! Why don’t you End it on a high & tell us a joke! (A slightly funny one preferably!)

KH - A joke?

Ok. What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?

About a second and a half.

http://www.myspace.com/kidhandsomejeff

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