The Beatserv Series Two sessions started with Corey McCafferty and I in a loft space in the Kinzie Industrial Corridor area of Chicago. I’ve worked with Corey for a couple years now in Atomica Project. He’s got a real unique approach to playing as well as recording and we thought he’d be perfect to help us record some raw samples.
We used an array of mics – an old Audix D3, a shiny new AEA r84, a matched pair of Peluso ribbons, an Oktava 219 (custom mod by Michael Joly @ Oktavamod.com - and recorded the samples into Nuendo through my Lavry Blue converters and Corey’s reclocked (via the Lavry) MOTU 896mk3.
From there, I handed the raw files over to Dean and Andrew. Everyone used a completely different approach to design their beats. Personally, after trying 1000 other things, I decided to build a custom NI Battery kit to work on my beats. We’d been toying with the idea of adding NI Battery to our formats so it only made sense and proved to be a wise choice. Making beats comes pretty easily to most of us – choosing the right sounds out of literally thousands of samples can be a bit more challenging.
Dean and Andrew used a lot of re-synthesis techniques to enhance their samples. I won’t even pretend to know what Andrew uses but I know Dean prefers to work in Live. Corey and I went the more organic route, though both of us are pretty serious compression geeks. At the end of the day I feel like we all created something unique using the same source material – and that was the goal to begin with.
I’ve talked with Andrew about Buzz and Reaper. I don’t know how extensively he uses them, or if he did at all for Ocular. He’ll have to weigh in on that. I don’t know much about Buzz, and have never actually used Reaper, but it looks like a straightforward tracking DAW.