#200: Mario Radetzky on producing Blackout Problems - "Riot" and using Ableton Live to blend rock and electronic production elements

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Episode show notes:

Mario Radetzky is the vocalist and guitar player for Alt-Rock band Blackout Problems and he recently co-produced their forthcoming album "Riot".  PRE-ORDER HERE

In our 200th episode Mario tells us the story of how co-producing Blackout Problems' album came about. From getting the green light from the label to assembling the perfect team for the job. 

Dropping your ego is important when in the studio and Mario shares with us the importance of collaborating with other engineers even asking other producers for advice when unsure.

Blackout Problems are an evolutionary band and changing the band's sound is a daunting prospect when it ultimately leads to losing a few fans, but also gaining some new ones. 

Due to their intricate setup of synths and effects, as well as the traditional band setup, Malcom, Benedikt and Mario discuss the usefulness of possibly incorporating Ableton in to live Blackout Problems' live setup.

Mario also shares his appreciation for The Self Recording Band Podcast and tells us what gear he uses to achieve Blackout Problems' unique sound. 

Let's give a warm community welcome to Blackout Problems' very own Mario Radetzky. 👏👏👏

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Blackout Problems - Website

For full show notes go to: https://theselfrecordingband.com/200

If you have any questions, feedback, topic ideas or want to suggest a guest, email us at: podcast@theselfrecordingband.com

Transcript

Mario: 0:02

And it's something that shouldn't hold you back. If you want to do something on the record that you cannot reproduce live, if you really want to do it on the record, then just do it and play the song differently live.

Benedikt: 0:16

This is the Self-Recording Band Podcast, the show where we help you make exciting records on your own wherever you are DIY style, let's go. Hello and welcome to the Self-Recording Band Podcast. I am your host, benedict Heijn. If you are new to the show, welcome, so stoked to have you. If you're making your own records, want them to sound better, you're in the right place. If you're already a listener, welcome back.

Benedikt: 0:39

Of course, today is a very special episode because we're celebrating episode 200 of this podcast. I can't believe it. It's pretty awesome, and we are not doing this on our own. I'm here with Malcolm, as always, but we have a cool guest today, and that guest is Mario Radecki from the band Blackout Problems. It's a German band that I've known for a while. We've met before in person, which is not always the case with podcasts guests here on the show but I've known Mario for a while. He's a really great dude. I can't wait to talk to him about this record. We're going to talk about their upcoming album called Riot. We're going to talk about his role in producing or co-producing this. I have a ton of questions about the whole record making process, the tools they used, so we're going to nerd out about that and, yeah, I'm very, very happy to welcome you to the show. Mario, thank you so much for taking the time and, of course, malcolm, hello to you as well. Hope you're well, my buddy.

Malcom: 1:37

Yeah, hello, and yeah, thank you, mario, for coming on. I didn't know this was our 200th episode.

Mario: 1:42

Amazing, that's sweet.

Benedikt: 1:45

Thank you so much for having me.

Mario: 1:46

Welcome, thank you.

Benedikt: 1:49

Yeah, thank you for taking the time. So yeah, as I said, special episode 200. Really cool. By the way, if you're not aware, this is both available on YouTube as well as your favorite podcast app, so wherever you're discovering us, you can either watch this or just listen to this. And yeah, so let's dive into this man. So, mario, I have a ton of questions, as I said, about this upcoming record. So, first of all, can you confirm that you co-produced this record? Right, you were not only the vocalist of the band, but in this case, you've done way more than just singing. You actually had a great like had to say, the production, and it's kind of your baby, in a way.

Mario: 2:31

Yeah, yeah, I think it's kind of my baby that's a good way to put it and I think that I was always a bit involved into the production process, but never as much as with Riot and when we started out. I think it's kind of a big thing to be a vocalist and a guitar player and then produce the record that you're also in the band. It's kind of weird sometimes, but yeah, for me it was the perfect way to get into producing and recording a bit more and to somehow give our band a new sound. I think was the goal. When I started out making this record.

Mario: 3:19

I had a few sessions booked with different producers and songwriters and I was in Berlin, worked with a few people that you probably have heard of, and we wrote songs together and produced and I showed them a few demos. And after a week I was invited by the label to show them what I got. And just right, a few seconds before I started playing the first demo, I came up with an idea and I told them you know what? Take a pen and a paper. I'm going to show you a few songs now and you choose your favorite if you want to, and we'll talk about that later. So I didn't tell them which song I did with which producer or songwriter. And after the session they chose two songs and I told them yeah, both were made by me in our rehearsal space, in our jam space.

Malcom: 4:12

Wow, this is really cool.

Mario: 4:14

That was kind of cool because that was the first step towards producing this record on my own. And when our mixing engineer, moritz Enders, who you probably know, he actually encouraged me. He said you know what, I think you should do this on your own and just try it. Just try it, man. And Moritz is such a good mixing engineer and having him on the record was very, very important to me and to us as a band, of course. So when he said you should try it on your own, I was like okay, man, if you say so, then I should give it a go, man.

Benedikt: 4:57

Really cool.

Mario: 4:58

I think that he's like he's so good at what he does that in this case, when he told me like you should try it, I thought if he's convinced that I can do it, then I should probably try to be convinced myself that I can do it.

Malcom: 5:19

Yeah, yeah and just having people you can trust. Like that is so invaluable, like building a team of people where, when they say something, you just feel like good going with their decision. I love that we almost had Moritz on the podcast when we were in Germany but it didn't come together. Unfortunately there was a conflict or something. But yeah, too bad, I wish we got the chat.

Benedikt: 5:41

He was supposed to be on the studio sofa when we were in Hamburg, but he couldn't make it, unfortunately, and hopefully that will happen at some point. But so the way I get this, mario, is you didn't just co-produce it, you actually produced it. Is that right? You did some kind of collaboration with a different producer. And just for context for people, because not everybody might be aware of your band or might know who that band is we're not talking about like the first record that a band makes, the first kind of demo or DIY approach. This is an established band that we're talking about. You've already had records out on labels. You've worked with other producers before, so producing this that's also a major record is. It's quite the task to do something like that and to pull it off properly. It's not like there's a little bit you know there's something on the line here and it's like it's quite different from the typical hobbyist doing it for the first time, just playing around with it. Like this is a serious record that you're producing there. So was it all you then?

Mario: 6:41

Yeah, I did it together with my friend, karan he. Karan Valja. He's from, he's living in Hamburg and he's working in the studio there and he's been working with us for quite some time. He actually produced, he engineered our records since chaos. So we had chaos in 2018 and we had dark in 2021.

Mario: 7:11

He engineered those records and I knew that I had to get a team. You know, when I knew that if I'm the head of it and I'm the producer, I need a good team behind me. So, first of all, the mixing engineer, moritz he was the first one on the team and then Karan, as an engineer. He was also on the team and he gave me the opportunity to like have someone to ask him about stuff and I don't know everything, I just know.

Mario: 7:40

I know our band pretty well and I really know how I want our band to sound, but I don't know how to get there sometimes. So I needed these people to help me guide the way or to help me get there, if I but I'm the one giving them the ideas and they can help me achieve certain things. So this record obviously needed some great help and Karan was one of the, let's say, main figures helping me. He's such a talented dude I can't even tell you he's amazing and he's got a very good ear and he's got a very good style and I don't know. He can be quite fast with things, so sometimes it's hard for me to keep up with him but he's such a talented dude, especially on vocals and drums.

Mario: 8:42

Most of the guitars and bass and stuff was done by me, but he's always the guy that I go. He's my go-to guy if it comes to recording vocals. So he's a native speaker and he helps me with my accent sometimes.

Benedikt: 9:01

Native English speaker.

Mario: 9:01

you mean yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a native English speaker and I'm obviously not, as he can say right now You're doing great.

Mario: 9:11

Thank you so much. Yeah, but yeah, you stop with me. It's actually kind of a fun story. We once worked together with a guy and sent him some demos back in 2016 I think and on these demos I didn't really care for my accent or anything, I just sang and that's it. And yeah, he sent them back saying something like you sound more German than the singer of no Twist and I was like what.

Mario: 9:41

First of all, no, twist is such an amazing band and then I thought, okay, they have an accent. I have to check that. And I was trying to find someone who can help me with that and guide me a little. So I tried like two or three different persons, but Karan was the best way to go and he's done an excellent job, and his mom also is an English teacher, so I'll go.

Malcom: 10:06

It's great if you have any questions on lyrics. So, yeah, great If we're not too quickly touch on that, because that's like, actually I think that's a big takeaway for our audience of self recording musicians that maybe haven't ever considered that. Yeah, if you're. I mean, I would bet the majority of our North American audiences never considered trying to change their accent to sing on a song they're recording, and then possibly some of our European audiences and other places have also never thought of it like you had until you got that note. But that does happen all the time, and even in North America, for North American audiences.

Malcom: 10:46

I had a great vocal session with another producer producing. I was engineering and a great artist and we were, I mean, the producer was just trying to make them sound more American so that it was more, you know, could sell the album down south of Canada, and it was like, oh yeah, this is a high level, this matters. So know your audience, I guess, and at least know what your goal is for how you wanted the sound of that. And I'm curious, mario, why did you want it to sound less German?

Mario: 11:14

Yeah, I think that the German accent might not be the most sexy accent in the world and I just wanted to. I just wanted to get that right a little and he it kind of, really, I don't know. He looked very, very closely at me and he helped me guide me through singing some of the lyrics in a different way. Especially, he looked at me and looked at my mouth like what am I doing here? What's if I say this? If I, for example, sing the word me, do I say me or how do I pronounce it and how do I act with my mouth? And he really diagnosed, he really looked at me very, very closely and that changed a lot and I think, I think it's.

Mario: 12:11

It's something that you might consider. If you're from Europe, for example, and you try to sing in English and you haven't done that all your life, then, yeah, try to get a native speaker, native English speaking person to record your vocals. It might help you, it might not. I don't know. It's different for everyone, but for me it was quite important and it helped me since our second record chaos. Yeah, he's helping me with that.

Benedikt: 12:40

Cool, yeah. So I think there's another great takeaway here, and this is the whole topic of building a team. So when people think of self-producing records, they immediately think the term producer often for many people means producer, engineer, mixer and all of these things, when in reality it's like different roles. Some people do it all themselves, but it's very often a smart decision to be like, okay, I can do this very well, but I definitely need help here and I need to build a team to make the record the best it can be. And so you actually went out and got more hits on board as a mixer, then you got help on the engineering side you engineered some of it yourself, I assume, and then you are obviously the creative producer.

Benedikt: 13:21

But that whole thought process of building a team which kind of people do I need? What can we do ourselves? I think that's a really, really cool thing for our audience to know, because, yeah, I just know that in some situations you've just got a DIY or people just want to, but oftentimes DIYing everything is not going to lead to the best result. So, yeah, can you maybe touch on that again real quick? Just have you had some experiences in the past that made it clear that, for example, mixing would not be something you want to do? Or what was like the? Or was it clear for you immediately that you needed to build a team of people to get it done?

Mario: 14:00

Yeah, I think you touched on so many things. First of all, I have to say that you don't have to do everything yourself. We, as a band, we started out being a DIY band and we did everything ourselves. We even copied our own demo CDs and stuff and handed them out at shows and stuff like that. We did everything ourselves. But as soon as you start building a team, it's really great to have people to work with and to get that take on stuff. And it's the same with producing. When I started producing this record, I thought that I had to do everything myself. But if it came to recording vocals, for example, I knew that Karan was the go-to person. If it comes to mixing, I know that Moritz is the go-to person and he's way better than I could ever be on mixing. So when it came to synth and programming stuff, I knew that there was another person that I wanted to have on the team. It was Geister. He's an electronic producer.

Mario: 14:59

They are in sorry English pronouns that's not my thing are an electronic producer and Sebastian really Geister. Sebastian really helped me on that. I knew that I can try stuff and I can get it to a certain point. But if I wanted to get it further, then a team or another person is the best way to get your own thing further. It's something that you have to consider. You don't have to do everything yourself. I had another person on the team if it came to backing vocals. All backing vocals, or a lot of backing vocals, were made by Leonie Klinger. She's a singer of the band Oma Block. I love her. I love the way she harmonizes vocals and stuff. So I got her into the studio and we just tried to do certain things. We actually worked on a song a bit more. The song is called DNA and it's the first one on the record. She's doing the chorus, so we also had a feature on that song as well with her. That was kind of special. But you had another question you touched on.

Benedikt: 16:25

No, that was basically it. It was the whole collaboration aspect really. And the second part of the question was if there was any specific experience in the past where you tried something and clearly failed at doing that. Maybe that was also part of it. Sometimes we have to do something to realize that we are not the best person to do it.

Mario: 16:49

Right before or during the process of writing this record, I was producing a record by Oma Block and I really did everything myself. I did the recording, the engineering, the producing and I also mixed the record. I just had another person mastering it and that was great. It was great to do everything myself and to try out different things, but I kind of knew that if it comes to blackout problems, I need some help and I need, because I was also in the band.

Benedikt: 17:23

Yeah, it's a perspective.

Mario: 17:24

Yeah, and I really needed that and it helped me a lot. It's not something that sometimes I maybe thought it's a weak thing to ask another producer for help or something. That's not the case. It's just not the case. It's just an ego thing. You have to let that go.

Benedikt: 17:44

Yeah, and so many great records, like major records, are made that way, like even the best of the best in this game. They still collaborate and get help, and many great producers and mixers will tell you that they can't either mix the record themselves or master the record themselves because they're too close to it or whatever this happens to like on all levels and it's totally normal. But yeah, it's a learning process for sure. I had no idea that you produced the OmeBlock record because they were actually playing a show in my hometown a few weeks ago. They are great, but I had no idea you made the record for them. So this is great.

Mario: 18:17

Yeah, it's a totally different sound and, yeah, it's something completely different. But I love that about music. I love how diverse things can get.

Benedikt: 18:26

That's a great segue actually into what I think could be a main part of this conversation, or I want it at least to be, because I have to learn a lot there as well. This is the whole blend of rock or heavy music that is part of Blackout Problems, with the electronic and pop side of things that is also part of Blackout Problems. This OmeBlock record is more pop than anything, I'd say, and Blackout Problems is still a rock band and a pretty heavy one, but you kind of blend all these things together and I'm obviously familiar with that and I do that a lot too when I work with bands, because just many bands do it, but you do it. You take it further than most bands and also you are using tools that I'm in the process of learning still and I want to know more about them. Because you're using, you're working in, ableton, which is not really what I work in with. I have it and I sometimes do stuff in it, but usually I do all my entire, even the whole MIDI stuff.

Benedikt: 19:23

I do all that in Cubase, but I just love the Ableton MIDI workflow and I would love to learn more about it, and you are a rock producer who uses Ableton and incorporates those great features, and I'd love to learn more about all of that, basically. So let's start by where does this blend? How did that happen? Because I think I might be wrong, but I think you transition more and more into that electronic side of things. Right, because Blackout Problems in the beginning was more pure rock than it is now, if you want it, like for lack of a better term or like heavy musical punk rock or whatever you want to call it. But I think now I'm hearing more of these electronic elements than before.

Mario: 21:45

Yeah, totally. I think first of all, we started out being just a normal band, and what I mean by that is we got together in our rehearsal space and we just jammed. We jammed a lot and we just played and tried out different things before even trying to record anything. We just jammed and played and made music and wrote songs. And then the first record that we did was Holy, we just rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed and then went to the studio and recorded the whole thing in three days and that was it. We were three piece back then Drums, guitar, bass. We played all the tracks live and then we did a few overdups with the guitar. That's where we got our second guitar player, moe, in the band to get that sound that we recorded live on stage, because we just considered ourselves as a live band and we wanted to do everything live and raw and our idols were bands like, for example. Heiskald is one of the bands that we thought the way they do it, that's the way to go. They can do everything live and they produce that on the record. The older we got and the more we experimented with things, it kind of built up to that point where we are now and we're still trying to find out what Blackout Problems really is and what we can do.

Mario: 23:32

But when I started writing this record or starting to produce this record, I asked myself a lot why do we sound like we sound like? Or what do we want to incorporate in our sound and what do we want to sound like really? And it was the first time that I really got to look back on the records we did, and with a positive mindset. I always wanted to break with that and I wanted to do something completely different and this time I could look back on our legacy and see what did we sound like when we started out and what's the next step for us. What's the next step and what do we want to do now?

Mario: 24:20

And I kind of think that the whole rock and pop and electronic side of things they blend together now because that's all things that we listen to and that's all things that we love. And it kind of built up because someone bought a synthesizer and brought it to the rehearsal space and tried out what can we do with that? And then we started not only playing with a normal bass but also with a bass station and do synth bass sounds live on stage. And then the next step was I got an MPC and I had some samples that I used live on stage and we played around with that and that's always it's like a thing that kept building up and building up.

Mario: 25:07

It's not something that we never. We were never a band that had a big master plan, or something like that we just did, and did stuff.

Benedikt: 25:20

Do you think that was part of the success, part of the reason for why the bank got successful? Also, that whole evolution and that incorporating of different elements, because at some point you reached a point where your albums were in the charts and you play pretty big festivals and the band had really some success and continues to do so, and do you think that helped with that, whereas, as like, staying the normal band without experimenting with all these things, does it lead to a broader appeal or does it make you more unique? What's your take on this?

Mario: 25:58

That's a good question, I think it makes us a bit more unique, I think, but it never really helped us on the short term Because, for example, holly, our first record was really punk rock based, and I think so. The next record was called Chaos, and the first singer that we dropped broke with everything we did before. It was so different from all the stuff that we did before that a lot of our listeners were like what the fuck?

Malcom: 26:32

what are you doing now?

Mario: 26:33

And the same thing with our last record, dark. The first single that we put out was called Murderer and it's different from everything we've done before. So everyone was like what's that? And I think we've always lost a few listeners to our new records, but we gained some new ones, and the family or the fan base that's around Blackout Problems is really as unique as the band. It's a family thing.

Mario: 27:05

I think we're not a hype band. We've never been really successful with this one song and everything has to sound like this one song. We've never had a hit single or something like that. And yeah, I think that's a positive thing because we kind of played ourselves to a space where we have a safe space for music and we can do whatever we like. Even the label doesn't really give us advice on how they want us to sound like, because they know that we're so stubborn and we're so we're kind of ourselves. That's the thing, and maybe that helps us.

Mario: 27:52

On the other hand, I think that there are a lot of decisions that we made that were purely artistic decisions, that didn't really help us to get more successful, because we probably, if we were one of these bands who had a master plan and did everything perfectly planned out and stuff like that, we probably would be way more successful. But that's not who we are and that's not what we want. We want to do great records. The biggest goal for me was always to play as many shows as it takes to get to the next level and to be able to afford a studio, because when we recorded our first record Holy we just had money for three days in the studio, so we had to do everything in three days.

Mario: 28:44

That's our record, except for vocals. We did it in rehearsal space.

Benedikt: 28:50

The record did quite well, though, right.

Mario: 28:54

Yeah, and it was so much fun. It doesn't have to be something bad to have three days in the studio. It's just what we had back then. It's just intense.

Malcom: 29:07

I've got a question for you. Because you slowly introduced electronic elements through various different synths and stuff like that, did you have to figure out? It sounds like you did that live first and then put it onto the album. Is that correct?

Mario: 29:24

That's not really the case. We also experimented in our rehearsal space and, of course, in the studio before we went on stage. We do quite a lot on stage as well. It's kind of both ways.

Malcom: 29:43

With Ableton as your doll. You have this big advantage of that. You're able to use Ableton with your live show. I would assume that's what you're using for lights and tracks, and.

Mario: 29:53

No.

Malcom: 29:54

Anything like that. Is that correct? No, that's not correct.

Benedikt: 29:59

That's misinformation that I probably gave to Malcolm, just because I saw you at when we first met. I think it was Rock the Hill the festival. That's where we met personally I think the first time the two of us. I saw your live show there and I was very impressed by the whole production how well everything was synced and the entire team, everyone behind the desk on stage, everything like the light, sound, everything, the backing tracks, everything was so spot on. I assumed you were running Ableton to do the accomplished that, but I might have been completely wrong. I was just impressed by what it looked like and I talked to your engineers or people in your team that you had with you and they told me about how everyone was listening to the same thing and everything was synced up. I just assumed it was Ableton, but I'm obviously wrong.

Mario: 30:44

No, no, but that's a really nice thing to say and I'm going to pass that on to our crew. That was super impressive Our sound guy. He's called Crispin and he's been with us since the start.

Mario: 30:57

I think he's the first crew member that we have and he's amazing. We wouldn't beat a band we are without him, that's for sure. So shout out to Crispin. But the thing is that we don't have at the moment, we don't have a computer on stage and we didn't have a computer back then at Rock the Hill. It was more or less loop-based back then.

Mario: 31:26

So, we had a few loops on the SPDSX, but we didn't incorporate Ableton into our live set because we didn't have the money to do so. Very interesting, because it seems to be the perfect tool for that.

Benedikt: 31:44

So it seems to me probably more difficult to do it loop-based and to make sure that everything is really synced up well and works that way.

Mario: 31:54

The thing is that we have a few backing tracks now on the SPDSX. We just got the new one.

Benedikt: 32:02

Can you tell our audience, please, what that is just for the people?

Mario: 32:03

who don't know what that is. Yeah, it's a drum pad where you can put samples on and you can also put backing tracks on. On the old one, I think, you have three outputs. You can route a click track to the third output and you can have the two main outputs to run stereo backing tracks. The new one has six outputs now, or seven, I think, I'm not quite sure. So don't judge me. But we actually wanted to have an Ableton set. But the thing was that first of all, it's kind of expensive compared to an SPDSX. If we would have incorporated an Ableton set, we would have loved to use more channels. But the thing is that our sound guy does our monitor sound from the front of stage at front of house.

Benedikt: 33:07

Even on the bigger festivals where there's monitor mixers you still do it from front of house Always. That's interesting too. Okay, great.

Mario: 33:17

Yeah, always. For us, the problem with that is that he doesn't have any more channels on his desk, so we're using all the channels we have and we're not able to add more instruments or add more channels, for example, to use more Ableton stuff. And if we only have two channels left, then why should we get an Ableton set?

Malcom: 33:50

Yeah, that makes sense. I did the exact same thing with my band Band of Rastals. We used an SPD drum pad to do exactly that Click on one channel stereo out to the desk with our backing tracks and it was actually a great setup. It's more work for the drummer probably whoever's running it to make sure they click the right pad and have that all going, but once you've got it set up it actually works quite well, doesn't it?

Mario: 34:16

Yeah totally.

Benedikt: 34:18

I mean sorry. I gotta say it was a pretty surprise hearing all of that, just because that festival show was really impressive. It was a fully professional production that seemed to be or probably was very well thought out and you were not playing the headl. I think there was one band after you or something. Millincoll is after you. Millincoll is one of the biggest punk bands on this planet, I think, and a very well-known big band, but they didn't have a chance. I wouldn't have wanted to be in their shoes actually playing after you because the show was over. Basically, I know it's always a personal objective and all of that and I'm not talking about the music or the band themselves, but just the professionalism and how well you pulled that off. That was crazy good. I'm very surprised to hear that you did that way, because that also included the lights and everything and just how you ran that whole show.

Mario: 35:23

Thank you so much. It's so nice to hear that, because we don't look at ourselves as professionals at all. We have a very healthy respect for stages. None of us really properly learn how to do what we do. We started driving out and playing all the shows that we can get and we played everywhere. We probably played your backyard at one point and just did it to get better. It's always nice to hear something like that.

Benedikt: 36:14

Are you planning to incorporate Ableton in the future? Crispin has to answer that if he doesn't get a bigger desk, there's no way.

Mario: 36:25

We're thinking about getting a monitor pulled now. I always like the live aspect of a live show.

Benedikt: 36:42

Including triggering the samples yourself with the pad and stuff.

Mario: 36:46

I know that you can do everything with Ableton nowadays and Ableton also has this solution to Ableton can also get the tempo that you're playing and then match that. At the moment. I think it's a good thing that we're still a live band and we're still doing live things. A few years ago we changed our normal amps to Kemper amps, which was a big step. Maybe the Ableton set comes next year.

Benedikt: 37:26

I know some people are asking the question themselves. I had that question in mind when I first heard about these things. What happens if you trigger a backing track, a loop that's going on for a while and then, throughout this thing playing, somebody doesn't hear the click anymore or loses it in any way? Everything falls apart. Has that ever happened? If that happens, what do you do Because the backing track keeps going? If a band member or the entire band loses the tempo or the click, then it can be pretty chaotic that way. I don't know if that's ever been the case, but I've talked to many people who are afraid of using backing tracks because they fear that if somebody makes a mistake, everything goes sideways.

Mario: 38:11

Basically, yeah, of course we did a lot of mistakes, but I always see the drummer, who starts the whole SPD6 stuff, as the center of the stage and if he sometimes gets the click through, he splits the click and he gets the click directly from the SPD6 and that's the safest way, first of all, and then if you mess up or play a different part or anything, you have to get back into it. I always see the drummer as the center and he's going to tell us if we're off and he's going to beat the metronome if the click is not there anymore. But just in case, normally on the SPD6, those pads, you have to imagine it like this On the one pad there's the click sound and on the other pad there's the backing track and these pads are linked to each other. So in case the backing track stops, probably the click will stop as well, so you can start the song all over again. It rarely happens that the click stops and the backing track still runs.

Mario: 39:38

And then you also can Do arrangements where you don't need the backing track. I've heard of bands cancelling the show because the backing track didn't work. I mean, that doesn't have to happen if you can do an arrangement that allows the backing track to fuck up. That's probably a good thing, but of course, yeah, we trigger a lot of drum sounds with the pad as well. For example, if you take the track Murderer, the first beat is always on the pads. So if that doesn't work, then we're fucked as well, so the drummer has to jam something or make up something.

Mario: 40:26

You have to find a solution. That's the beauty of playing live and sometimes the dark side of playing live as well. But I tend to look at it as beauty.

Benedikt: 40:38

I was just looking up your Spotify real quick because I wanted to check something, just something you've touched on before. You said you never had a hit single, but you have this very loyal, family-like audience and stuff and I found actually something that never stood out to me, but it's actually pretty remarkable. I just found that you're right, you don't have like I mean, you have some songs that have like millions of streams, which is awesome, of course, and you have 150,000 monthly listeners, about something like that. But what stands out to me is the overall amount of streams and how evenly it's distributed across your songs, because not many bands have that. A lot of bands have, like this, one or two songs to get streamed a lot and everything else just kind of nobody listens to.

Benedikt: 41:15

But if I look at your albums there, it's like the last one is a little more. You know, some songs are a little more popular than others, but across the board you've got hundreds of thousands of streams or tens of thousands of streams on the older record for every single song and it's pretty evenly distributed, which is awesome because it means people listen to the record as a whole or to every single song of those records. So do you think this like? What do you think has that to do with this? I know it's totally unrelated to what we've just been talking about, but I've just looked it up and I just wanted to point it out, because it's really not that often the case that if you look at Chaos, for example, the 2018 record every single song is like six figures in streams and like there's many songs around like 300, 500, 700, 260. So what do you think is the reason for that?

Mario: 42:07

I think the reason for that is that we are an album band. We don't do single after single after single. We write records and we take quite long to do so. We, for example, our last record came out in 2021. It's the next one's coming out next year, in 24. So it took us two and a half years to write that, and we always have like a concept to a record.

Benedikt: 42:38

That's our latest thinking.

Mario: 42:39

There's a sound concept, or there's a lyrical concept, or there's themes and topics, and we always try to write records that you can listen to from the first to the last song in one. Give it a go. Like you know, it's not that we're not this band that has this one song that's big, or we're not a band that drops a single every other month or something. Yeah, we kind of take our time and then we lock ourselves into the rehearsal space and come back with a whole record and a whole piece of art.

Benedikt: 43:17

Basically, like this. Yeah, piece of art or concert or anything.

Mario: 43:22

And that's maybe a reason for that. And of course you have a record then, and some of our listeners have favorites on this record. But if we post like what's your favorite song of the record? We tend to hear, we tend to read all the songs. Everyone chooses a different favorite.

Benedikt: 43:44

Interesting.

Mario: 43:46

And when we for this new record Riot, we had a session with our label and our management and we told them to like give us ideas. What are the singles for the record? What do you think and what do we think? Everyone had a pen and a paper and had to write down different singles and every song was named, except for two songs that were definitely no singles, but they named every song and that's remarkable, I think.

Benedikt: 44:15

Yeah, let's go through that record real quick or not so quick, depending on how we're going to do this. I got a lot of technical and like specific questions about some things that I've heard and also the text that I got the kind of promo description text from the label, because it's always interesting to me to get these kind of descriptions and I tried and I did it the same way this time. I always tried to listen first before reading everything because I want to hear it unbiased, and then I try to compare what I think about the songs with what they sent over, and sometimes there's a great overlap and sometimes it's the exact opposite of how I felt when I listen to it, and I've marked some parts of that text and also made my own notes. Maybe we can talk about some more able to specific things then as well, because there's a lot of protection techniques and stuff that I heard that I have questions about.

Benedikt: 45:07

So I want to start by the first thing that I felt, at the exact same way that they described it, which was the entire record, is an interesting mix of I'm just going to use their words, because they described it really well here in this text, like the certain sadness which is overplayed by infectious rhythms and invites you to dance, and this bipolarity, this thing between, like, the melancholy and the sadness and the songs, but then also the groove and the kind of almost, you know, feel good vibes sometimes that come with that and in combination with the sadness, is what really stuck out, and I think you captured that very well sonically.

Benedikt: 45:49

So my first question would be how do you manage to get that across in the production? Like, how do you make a song feel sad or the opposite of it, or do both at the same time to achieve a certain feeling? Is that all like songwriting and it does nothing to do with the production, or are there certain production things that you used to create this kind of vibe? Because I think it goes through the record in a way. It's like a part of the theme of the record, almost.

Mario: 46:18

That's a good question. Yeah, first of all, I have to say that I probably have to explain my whole songwriting and production process a little so you can probably get into what I did there. I did a template on Ableton where I had tracks for drums, for bass, for guitars, for synth and for vocals and I just started writing songs and as soon as one of the songs like stood out to me or I wanted to work more with the song, I always went back to this project. So there are projects that I started in June 2021 that really had tracks in them that went on the record and I never changed the project. I always worked with the same project. So the whole songwriting and production process, kind of mixed up, was kind of mixed up.

Malcom: 47:23

So do you mean that you are writing the song in this Ableton session and then that is what goes on to become the session file for the recording process as well, that same Ableton session. Is that what you mean?

Benedikt: 47:36

Yeah, very interesting because this is pretty much the opposite of what I teach, for example, in our coaching program. Not because I think it's wrong, but because I think for people getting into this it really helps to have different perspectives in different parts of the process. Many people, if they mix it all up, they get confused and they build these very complicated, cluttered sessions and eventually want to start over again anyways. So it's very interesting that it worked for you, but it's kind of the opposite of what I usually recommend doing. So again, it's interesting and you're not the first person to tell me this, but it's interesting to hear that Because I assume these sessions will get pretty big with lots of takes that don't make it on the record, and they can get cluttered and chaotic. And you somehow navigated it for like two years until the record got done right.

Mario: 48:26

Yeah, and actually I would totally agree with you that it's not the best thing to do. But for me the approach was to make the record very personal and when we did our last record, we did demo sessions and songwriting sessions with our producer.

Mario: 48:47

back then Our producer was called Geister, the same one that did the electronic side of stuff here and we Geister always wanted us to keep the demos or to keep the demo tracks and we always were thinking like, no, we gotta go to the studio, we have to record in a good room, we have to record good big drums, we have to get better guitar amps and stuff like that. So we did that with our last record and the recording process was very long and very exhausting and at the end of it it was sometimes the record got better and better and better, but sometimes it kind of lost the vibe from the first songwriting sessions and that's what I wanted to keep. I wanted to keep this vibe. If you take a song that is called Gloves, it's already out. Now it's the song with the feature by Rao Reynolds of Enter Chikari.

Mario: 49:53

I recorded a guitar in the intro section that was only recorded as a DI track. I took the guitar and plugged it into my interface. I didn't know the I tracks, no preamps, nothing, nothing, just the I track and that's what I recorded. And I didn't even put an amp simulation on that, I just added a few. I think I just added two plugins by Soundtoys, the little plate and the tremolator, and that's it. And it was so special. The sound was so special that when I tried to re-record it I never matched it and I knew that I wanted to keep that sound, and I also did a mistake on that. On playing this guitar. There's one note in that that really doesn't belong into the chord progression, but I don't know. The vibe was great so I really wanted to keep that and that's what makes records personal and special.

Mario: 51:01

It's these little things that happen along the way, that if you record anything with your phone and then put it into the track, that's what makes a record special, and big drums and big this and big that. That's also part of it and that's good if you have that. But I wanted to try a different approach and I really wanted to keep our personality in the songs, because, if you break it down, personality is or, let's say, style or sounds. It's so important to have something that you can really connect with. You can really connect to and perfectly arranged songs and perfectly tuned vocals and perfectly I don't know sampled drums and stuff. That's also cool if you want that. But I really wanted to have to create something that's different.

Benedikt: 52:05

I totally agree with everything you said there, and there's never a right or wrong way to make music anyways.

Benedikt: 52:11

But I still want to encourage people to listen to the record when it's out, or that single that's already out and also the previous ones, because people might hear this and be like cool, then I can make all the mistakes I want, I don't have to tune my vocals, I don't have to make sure everything's played well, because the mistakes are what make it great. I know for a fact that some people always take it like that when someone says something like that. So if you listen to that record, though, you'll still hear very well produced records that doesn't have a lot of distracting, obvious mistakes on it. It's still tracked very well, played very well. There's certainly some editing being done and stuff. It still has a vibe. It's certainly not mathematically perfect, but it's still well made, well produced, well engineered and all of that. I'm just saying this because before people come back to me and be like, yeah, you got it, you were wrong with your perfectionism, they do it all.

Benedikt: 53:06

No no no, no, it's still part of it. It's finding the right balance and the art is to keep that vibe, like you said, and that magic and the imperfections that make it great, but not to the degree that they are distracting or hurting the song. That's what you want to do. That balance you want to find there, basically.

Mario: 53:26

Yeah, you could paint a picture like that you have, like this take the best drums you have, take the best bass and the best guitar that you have, and then just add this crappy melody that's recorded with your phone and then put that in.

Benedikt: 53:40

And then it shines even more.

Mario: 53:42

Yeah, that's the personality that you put in. If you lose that, then you sometimes lose the magic of the song, and I was really looking for magic here and, yeah, I was trying to keep that in our record. That was really important to me.

Benedikt: 54:05

Yeah, okay, great. So the first song according to this info that I have, that you made kind of a test of how it works when you self-produce the record was Stash right. This was like the guinea pig of this whole thing, like the first experiment. What made that a good first song to try the whole self-producing thing, like what did you do there and what were the learnings that then made it also to the other songs.

Mario: 54:33

It was a finished song. Yeah, it was already done basically.

Mario: 54:36

Yeah, it was, I don't know. We kind of felt that this one's finished and the other ones were not even written at this moment. So we went into a studio called Circle Studio. It's in Berlin and it's a very small. It's not a very small but it's a very cool studio. But it doesn't really get used by a lot of rock bands. And we went in with our drums and we were one of the first bands that recorded a whole set there, and usually they're just songwriting or producing sessions of rap artists or pop artists who use, like they have, this big desk, but most of the producers that come in just use an Apollo X4 and that's it. They don't use all the channels here. So we were one of the first bands that used every channel and every preamp in the studio. We started recording there and the room was not well prepared for drums, for recording drums it was way too small and we didn't have. At one point we opened the doors and put a stereo mic into the hallway to get some echo chambers or something like that.

Mario: 55:54

But we thought that's a studio that we have available at the moment, so let's take it and just ride with it. So Stash was the first song that we recorded and it was the first one where I had to make some decisions as a producer and was like, okay, let's try to record a chorus where you only play the ride. Very, you only play the ride. You're not going on the crash, you only play the ride. For example, that was one of the first decisions that I remember where I was standing there in the control room and was like, okay, we do it this way.

Mario: 56:32

And I kind of felt the I kind of felt how heavy it is to tell everyone that's how we're going to do it. I was never trained to do that, so it was kind of intimidating for me to tell Karan and Marius, who played the drums, to tell them what they had to do. But it worked out at the end and I think everyone was very content with it. It was great.

Benedikt: 57:07

So again, that's an interesting piece of information. Right there, you not only self-produced and built a team, but you also rented out or went to different studios, so you didn't do all of it in your own jam space that you're in right now, right, or your own home recording studio, basically.

Mario: 57:23

No, a lot of the record was recorded at Circle Studios in Berlin. It's a studio that is practically on the ground floor of a label's building. It's a free-to-use studio for all the artists that are assigned there. That was basically for us. That's perfect for us. Let's go there, let's just have three or four days every other month and just record some stuff there, and they have good gear there as well, so way better than the stuff we have in our rehearsal space. So we thought why not give it a go? And it kind of helped us, because the record wasn't finished when we started recording. We were still in the process of writing songs back then.

Benedikt: 58:16

Again, again. Another thing that I will have to explain to people. I'm so sorry. I love that because it's so cool that all those records are made in very different ways. This is actually helping my message and just showing that there's no right or wrong. It's my preferred way of doing things and what I recommend to new artists, but it doesn't mean you can make a different record. Right, so perfect.

Mario: 58:45

I would recommend that as well. I would even recommend it to myself now. Now, having experienced what I have experienced. First of all, usually we roll a record and then we rehearsed it for like four weeks or six weeks straight. So we tried to meet every other day and just play the record and then record the record and that's it. But now that we kind of went on a different route, we thought, okay, let's do something, let's do it differently, and there was so much work to be done and I was so overwhelmed by the whole process and the whole challenge to do all that. It kind of helped me to get into the studio, record something, see how it works, and then go back, write another song and go back to the studio, record something. But it's just because the studio was available. If the studio hadn't been available, we would have probably booked the session at Toolhouse Studio, because it has a great room for drums and then go there in I think it's in what's the city called where Toolhouse is?

Malcom: 59:59

I don't know, but it's a great studio.

Mario: 1:00:02

The studio is great, the studio owner is great and Moritz, our mixing engineer, has worked there quite a lot, so he's great and the studio is great. But the city is not that great. You don't want to go there and record there every other month.

Malcom: 1:00:17

It's roten Brötchen der Fulda. Yeah, it's a different thing with Berlin.

Mario: 1:00:22

You go there and you have a great time in Berlin and you kind of meet some people and some people come to the studio and you exchange ideas and it's a great vibe. But if you go to the Toolhouse Studio, your record has to be finished. Yeah, you record everything, go back home and of course, this way if you have a studio available for free, you can rent it for free. Then you can use it and try out stuff and experiment and go back and erase certain things. We recorded some drums and then just threw them away and just used loops, for example, which we probably wouldn't have done if we had to rent out a studio. That hadn't been that cheap and we had recorded it all. Then we probably would have stick to that.

Benedikt: 1:01:15

Which is great news, because why produce this out there? You have that luxury if you're producing in your own jam space, right? That's one of the advantages of not booking a studio, where you have a certain limited amount of time and a certain limited budget and everything and it has to be done. There's, of course, pros and cons to both, but that's one of the cool things about self-producing is, if you have your jam space already, you can do exactly that. You can try something and if it doesn't work, throw it away and do something else without it costing you a fortune. So this is actually great news and good to hear that you say that.

Mario: 1:01:48

Absolutely. And don't get me wrong, we're not like the band that has a lot of money at their hands and can do everything they want. That's not the case. This record is DIY as fuck. I was really basically googling stuff and watching YouTube tutorials while doing that and listening to this podcast while recording this record.

Mario: 1:02:14

So it's DIY as fuck, it's really basic and we just used every opportunity that we had. But besides recording at the Circus Studios, we also recorded in our rehearsal space and we also recorded on tour. I've been last year I've played like a few shows with a different band and they I was only playing guitar, so I didn't have that big. I have the luxury of having some spare and free time during the day, so I just started bringing my gear and recording in hotel rooms or just in the backstage or stuff like that. So yeah, they were talking about that. When the record was finished they were like, yeah, man, you can have like experience tour, the record's finished. Because I was always on tour and just recording and working on the record or editing stuff in the backstage. And actually the last guitars that I recorded I recorded, I think, in Chemnitz in the hotel room and sent the record off into the mixing process from tour. So it's not only the record wasn't only recorded in proper studio situations, but also everywhere that I could record, basically in my basement.

Malcom: 1:03:38

That's so cool. Would you mind sharing what your little mobile setup was? I'm just curious.

Mario: 1:03:45

Yeah, funny story. I started out with an RME, a Fireface Interface, and I had an ADAT to it to focus ride. That's probably that's not my mobile situation but the ADAT situation. That was only in our rehearsal space. But I took the RME interface on tour but I put it in my backpack and I put the backpack right beside the van and I basically just drove over the interface.

Malcom: 1:04:21

That's how you get that gritty sound.

Mario: 1:04:27

Yeah, that's how you get to smash it. In the back there was trousers, there was the interface, there was a MIDI board. You know the small one, the Akai that one.

Mario: 1:04:47

Yeah, that one. I sold it afterwards on eBay and I basically typed in what happened Maybe someone ran over it with a van and maybe it's not working, but maybe you can do something with that and I sold them both. After that I got the Apollo X4, which is great because it has these two inputs on the front for recording guitar. There was one weekend where I booked the studio to record guitars with Karan as an engineer, but he hadn't had time on that weekend so I tried to get another engineer coming in, because recording guitars is sometimes really hard because you fall out of tune and maybe it's not the right guitar, maybe it's not the right tone. I was kind of nervous about that and I didn't find an engineer to do that session with, so I decided to try it on my own.

Mario: 1:06:04

I took my interface to Berlin with two guitars, two cables and that's it. I didn't bring any amps or anything. I put that all on my bike. Four in the morning went to the station. I actually fell over, which is not that dangerous at four in the morning because no one's out. I had these two guitars and my backpack with my recording equipment, went to the station, went to Berlin, closed all curtains and just tried to do it on my own. What I did then was I just took the guitar, the cable and the interface and I didn't use anything else than Neural DSP plugins, because I obviously could have recorded with amps and tried out that stuff. But I wanted to try something else and I wanted to experiment with the mobility of stuff.

Mario: 1:07:06

Can I do this in a mobile version? Is that also? Is that doable? And yeah, it kind of worked out great.

Benedikt: 1:07:15

But you're not even the guitar player in the band, right? Yes, I am.

Mario: 1:07:20

I do vocals, I do sing and I'm the main vocalist, but I'm also a guitar player. Have you always done that?

Benedikt: 1:07:29

on every song. I remember you just standing in front with the mic, without a guitar in your hands, or maybe I'm just wrong but, that's what I remember you do, on stage at least.

Mario: 1:07:39

Yeah, yeah, sometimes we have Mo who's our guitar player as well, but yeah, we kind of joke about who's the lead guitarist and who's the rhythm guitarist?

Benedikt: 1:07:48

Yeah, you switch between just singing and playing guitar and singing right.

Mario: 1:07:52

Yeah, yeah, you're right, I still look at myself as the lead guitarist.

Benedikt: 1:07:59

And Mo disagrees there right.

Mario: 1:08:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's an ongoing joke but yeah, it's basically.

Mario: 1:08:09

Guitars are a very interesting topic on this record and I wanted to not do too many power chord, big, distorted guitars on that record. I wanted to do something else and just switch that up a little. And I think on songs like Gloves you really you can hear that it's just no deep or like low tuned rock guitars on that track. It's just different and being a rock band, you always try to like be in a rock band. That's like blackout problems. You always want to try new stuff and that's basically one of the things that makes this record very special. I think the guitars.

Benedikt: 1:09:02

Going back to Malcolm's question about the setup real quick and the mobility and everything, how do you get your tracks? Or when you say you finished the record in a hotel room and then sent it off for mixing, did you export everything to the way that Moritz wanted you to do it, or did you just send the Ableton sessions? And he had to figure it out, because I'm pretty sure that Moritz doesn't mix in Ableton. So how did that work in that case? And yeah, let's just start with that. I have more questions, but let's start with that how did you get the tracks out of Ableton for the mixing?

Mario: 1:09:38

So the person between Moritz and me was always Karan. Karan fixed everything that had to be fixed.

Benedikt: 1:09:47

Did he do the editing in Ableton or in a different door?

Mario: 1:09:51

Yeah, so I edited guitars and bass sometimes and he edited vocals and drums and he sometimes I think he must have edited some guitars or bass, probably somewhere along the way, but he did that. I think he usually works in Cubase, but he prepared a project for Moritz in Pro Tools.

Mario: 1:10:21

Yeah, that's what I thought so yeah, that was like our deal with Moritz was always to give him prepared sessions that he showed us that he gave us a session where he told us that, like that's the way I want it, because he mixes analog and, yeah, there was a certain way that he wanted to have his sessions look like.

Benedikt: 1:10:42

Kind of surprised he doesn't have his own assistant prepping sessions or something for him. He does, but maybe he trusted you and thought you were also capable of delivering it the right way.

Mario: 1:10:53

Yeah, that was basically. I think that was the third record that we did together. We did the Blackout Problems record, Dark, and we also did a Nikolaska record together where Moritz did the mixing and we know each other and he knows that we're like an always broke band. He showed us that solution to save a little money, basically. But we Karan did that, so I have no clue about Pro Tools. I really have to learn that.

Benedikt: 1:11:30

So you gave the sessions to Karan, the Ableton sessions, and he did whatever was necessary to get it to Pro Tools.

Mario: 1:11:38

Yeah, that was kind of interesting. So the last, for example. Let's take one song. For example, we recorded drums with Karan's laptop and we recorded vocals with Karan's laptop and he did the editing process. Oh, I forgot, some of the tracks were edited by a guy called Hannes. I don't want to forget him.

Mario: 1:12:05

Thank you. But it all went back to Karan's laptop so he bounced all that stuff. He bounced all these tracks and gave it to me. I recorded the bass, the guitar and I recorded some of the synth stuff myself and I got some of the synths from Geister and imported all that into one big session, into my songwriting session. And then sometimes I deleted the demo drums or whatever I did there and it kind of evolved to a finished track and then I mixed it to a rough mix and bounced that, gave it to Karan.

Mario: 1:12:50

He imported all these tracks into one big Pro Tools session for Moritz and then Moritz had an idea of how I wanted the song to sound like and he had all the tracks in the right session so he could mix that. And he really took these rough mixes as an orientation point and he was like, yeah, okay, that's what you want to. And I always told him like, for example, with the song Puzzle, I didn't really like the drums that I did in the chorus. So I told him that's the track, that's what I want, but I want the drums to sound basically just better. What can you do? And then he did that.

Benedikt: 1:13:36

Okay, very interesting process. So that's how I thought it was done. But it's interesting you hear saying that, especially that it went from Karan's laptop, which probably was done in Cubase or whatever, to your setup in Ableton, back to his setup to edit or fix things up and then to Moritz, to the Pro Tools session, which is very interesting.

Benedikt: 1:13:56

So can you tell us a little bit about because you said you need to learn Pro Tools at some point? I'm not sure if you really need to, but I want to learn Ableton because I think it's a very useful tool for the electronic production stuff. And also today I made an announcement in our coaching community as well, where we have now so many students that use all kinds of different DAWs and some of their questions are very DAW specific and sometimes it just it would be more helpful to show them how to do it in their DAW versus the way I do it in my DAW. So I made a commitment basically of getting installing, setting up and learning all kinds of different DAWs in 2024. This is really something I look forward to for the coaching and I need to bring in some people to help me with that.

Benedikt: 1:14:39

But I really want to do that because we got to a point where it got necessary and we now also have a few people actually who use Ableton, which was not the case for a long time, because most of our students are rock bands or rock musicians and Ableton is not the most common there, but now we have some who use it and out of all the DAWs, ableton is the one that I'm having the hardest time getting used to, just because the workflow is pretty different. All the other ones, I look at them. Within a few minutes I pretty much know what to find my way around. So can you tell me basically what specifically you made you choose Ableton, what you use it for, like, what is the thing that it does very well? And maybe give us like a few key things a new Ableton user should learn or need to learn, or maybe for the existing Ableton users, a few things that they might not have discovered yet, because it's interesting hearing that from a rock band producer who uses Ableton.

Mario: 1:15:34

So what's Ableton specifically good at, what made you choose it and what are the things you would learn first, so when I started, I started in Logic and I always thought that it's kind of hard to get good sounds. So when Marcus, our bass player, started to work with Ableton, the other guys started working in Ableton as well. So I had I was playing in a band where three or four guys were using Ableton and I was I always had the feeling that they kind of were faster and the stuff that they did was better sounding than what I did.

Benedikt: 1:16:16

What do you mean with it? Was hard to get good sounds and logic. Like the samples that came with it Because, like, when it comes to plugins or the sound of the DAW, there shouldn't be much of a difference. But like, what do you mean with that?

Mario: 1:16:29

I mean, when I listen to projects that the other guys did, I always had the feeling that they had an easier time getting to the goal, so to say.

Benedikt: 1:16:42

Specifically with electronic stuff probably right.

Malcom: 1:16:46

Not really.

Mario: 1:16:48

I think it was just easier for them to get the DAW. I don't know. It's kind of hard to explain, but I really had a hard time and struggling with getting like my demos to sound good.

Malcom: 1:17:03

I think.

Mario: 1:17:04

And so I knew that I knew nothing about recording and I knew that there was like a lot to learn and so I thought if three or four guys use Ableton, I probably should use it as well. But every time I opened up Ableton I was thinking like what's this? It's like an alien space.

Benedikt: 1:17:23

That's what it feels to me.

Mario: 1:17:24

I have no idea where to go now and I think that Ableton, cubase, pro Tools, all these DAWs look a little bit like the same DAW in certain aspects. You know where the tracks go and it's.

Benedikt: 1:17:38

Everything except Ableton. You mean yeah, and Ableton is so different.

Mario: 1:17:43

Yes, that's what I mean, and it's like where do I start now? And yeah, I kind of I looked at a lot of tutorials and just YouTube is the place for it, of course.

Mario: 1:17:56

Or the self-recording band, like it's the place for it, where you can learn these things, and it's great to have those tools available. So I started learning Ableton and it's basically. What's great about Ableton is that it's once you're in, it's very usable. You know it's user-orientated I think it's, I don't know it's. You can do certain things that you or you could do certain things in Ableton that you couldn't do with Logic, like, for example, warp stuff and change tempos more easily and change keys more easily. That was a bit easier when I started out using Ableton compared to Logic. Nowadays everything's a bit different.

Mario: 1:18:44

I mean, that was like a few years ago where I think that Logic has some of those functions now where it's way easier to record in Logic. In Ableton one of the biggest problems was that you couldn't record in take groups, Take folders or yeah, take folders.

Mario: 1:19:07

Yeah, that wasn't possible, but that's possible now. So it's way easier to record, for example, drums, where you have Every time I recorded drums back in with Ableton 10, I think it was on 9, I don't know when I had these 12 tracks or 16 tracks drums, I always had to duplicate 16 tracks to do another recording, which is mad. If you have to edit that, it's just it's hell. That's basically the wrong door for that. But now they have take folders and it's that's easy.

Benedikt: 1:19:47

So you can just easily comp things right.

Mario: 1:19:48

Yeah, you can comp things. Yeah, just the other day I had a recording session and we recorded a song and we did 10 takes of the chorus, 10 takes of the verse and stuff and we just comped it in a few minutes and that wasn't possible.

Benedikt: 1:20:10

But it's interesting how some of these seemingly basic, very important features take some company so long to implement. It's fascinating. Some other things I get, but you would think that's a critical feature. I remember a Reaper user telling me this year or last year or something. They wrote me hey, did you see that In Reaper you can now grab this tool and you can mark a section of a take and then it will automatically select that and put it together with the other section and basically show up, be comping in Reaper, which was new apparently, and I'm like, yeah, like how we were doing it in Q-Ways for the last 10 years, I don't know, and Malcolm and I have this ongoing conversation as well with some features between Q-Ways and Pro Tools sometimes.

Benedikt: 1:20:50

But yeah, the other hand, ableton, as you said, has a few other things that Q-Ways doesn't have or, like any other, like no other DAW basically has the whole how you can manipulate samples or waveforms and how you can yeah, you know these creative things to manipulate sound basically, and then obviously the MIDI workflow. So I think this is really every time I see someone use it I don't get fully. I don't fully get yet how to do it, but every time I see someone use it, I'm like I want that. That seems so much fun. So what do you think are like the key features now that, or are the things that you love most about it that maybe are unique to Ableton, and what are the things we should learn first when we get into Ableton?

Mario: 1:21:29

So to be perfectly honest, I'm not like the biggest pro on these things.

Benedikt: 1:21:35

But if I have to. It wasn't enough to produce a major record, so yeah.

Mario: 1:21:41

But you know, yeah, that's, but that's, that's like, maybe that's the main thing. I'm not like a professional, but I still was able to record, to produce a record, you know, because I yeah, maybe that's the best feature about it. But I think that having the opportunity of of working with a door, no matter which door, as soon as you, as soon as you kind of get a workflow and as soon as you know where to click, that's that's the best thing that you can do and it doesn't really matter which one you use. If you use Ableton you have.

Mario: 1:22:33

For me it was it kind of gave me a new perspective on songs and it kind of I don't know it was easier for me to blend the rock and the electronic side of stuff together, not because I, not because that wouldn't be possible in other doors, for example, enterchikari I think that is also produced by their singer, rao, and I think that he's a logic user and I mean, if there's one band that implements like electronic and rock, like perfectly, that's Enterchikari, basically. But yeah, I don't know, I had all the tools at my hand. I could record analog stuff. I could record drums in our rehearsal space, which is like basically the most rock thing you can do and then mix them together with MIDI synth sounds or with samples from Splice, for example, and put that together. I don't know if you've heard of Splice it's like this.

Mario: 1:23:43

Using it like that, yeah, and it's one click and it's in my door and I can use it on a track, and that's basically yeah it's easy.

Benedikt: 1:23:56

Not many people know this but because it was a top secret project in the beginning. But I once had to write and produce and mix and master all of that 60-something songs for a Swiss radio station who would use them in their night sort of program stuff. Like they had to be electronic, chill out, dance, whatever songs which is not in my wheelhouse at all. But for some reason they wanted me to do that and I still don't know why, and Splice saved my ass on that project.

Malcom: 1:24:23

I got it done and the stuff was played on the radio.

Benedikt: 1:24:26

It was a nice gig and a good budget and all of that, but without Splice I would have been lost.

Malcom: 1:24:30

So yeah, I remember you getting that gig.

Mario: 1:24:35

Nice man. There's actually one Splice loop on our record as well that I kept in, but I was trying to. Splice was a good song starter thing, and some of these loops sound so good, and it's kind of interesting that a lot of especially a lot of guitar loops found their way into popular music now, and I was just really inspired by that, and I was inspired by how do I get my guitar to sound the way a guitar should sound in 2023? So sometimes I chopped it up and did some guitar loops that are just under the track and some of the guitars really sound like synth things and, yeah, sometimes it's just a DI guitar and that's it, and sometimes there's not even an amp plug-in or anything on that. But it's just the way that the guitar as an instrument is something that I can more or less play, and so it's my go-to instrument. So it's easier for me to write something on guitar than on another instrument, and if now Ableton helped me to make the guitar sounds more interesting, I think.

Benedikt: 1:26:06

Okay, interesting. Thank you, very cool. So one question I have to ask before we wrap it up, because we've been going for a while now, and one thing I need to ask you, mario did you use anything on that record specifically that you've learned from this podcast? Because I know that you've been a long-time listener and the first time we met in person it was like years ago and you already, like I think, you downloaded our first free PDF guide that we put out there back then and stuff like that, and we talked about it and I know that you're at least you know, I don't know how regularly, but I know that you listen to the show through the podcast. So is there anything you've learned from this show specifically or from some of our material that you've actually used on that record?

Benedikt: 1:26:46

Wow, or did it help at all, I'm just interested, yeah, yeah probably, first of all, it helped me.

Mario: 1:26:55

Of course, it helped me just to hear your sweet voices every now and then talking about audio stuff Awesome, yeah, first of all, it's great to have a podcast like that and to learn new things and to hear stories of other producers or recording engineers or anything, and to hear what are their problems, how did they solve them and what's their story and that's always interesting for me and tips and tricks. I think, yeah, that's very interesting, because a thing that I really struggled with sometimes was signal flow. I now have this patch bay here and it's I don't know if it's a thing that I've learned on the podcast, but I've learned that on certain, especially on podcasts or on YouTube tutorials that how do I really wire my whole studio stuff. That was like a big thing for me, a big takeaway from the internet and maybe also, yeah, we have some episodes on that too.

Mario: 1:28:13

Yeah, yeah, that was interesting because now I have only 12 channels here. I have the Apollo X4 and an Aided Focusrite where I have eight channels, but I have two patchbays from our old rehearsal space, so I have a few free channels now and I was thinking about how can I get some loops or some recorded tracks to sound more interesting, and I rewired the whole thing and go through my guitar pedals and that's basically a thing that I struggled with. So the internet helped me out. So I think these podcasts and tutorials even though You're not always taking 100% of that away and put it into your own work, you always hear something that strikes a bell and that gets you to think about your stuff differently. So that's, I think you really, I really admire that. You do this every week and especially I don't know if you listeners know that, but Malcolm gets up at 6 or 5, I think, because it's 6.30 at his place.

Mario: 1:29:32

That's impressive. Yeah, that's true.

Malcom: 1:29:36

Coffee helps.

Benedikt: 1:29:39

That's true, you're totally right. Yeah, and you don't look tired at all, it's always funny when we tell people that and you see the question marks in their faces. Like Kole was the same thing Kristen Kole who was just on the podcast. But I told him what time it was at your place, malcolm, he was like why do you record podcasts that early?

Mario: 1:30:02

Like is there a?

Benedikt: 1:30:03

there must be a good reason for that right.

Malcom: 1:30:08

Sometimes I feel like I'm at a disadvantage and like, come on brain, get going, get going.

Benedikt: 1:30:13

I thought there's still the other way around honestly, malcolm, like for me it's late afternoon and I get up early as well, and I feel like in the morning I would have more energy, probably, than I have this time of the day. So maybe somewhere in the middle would be nice for both of us, but that is not possible.

Malcom: 1:30:27

So we have to live with whatever we have.

Benedikt: 1:30:31

Very cool, mario. Thank you for all of that. So, Malcolm, do you have anything that you want to ask Mario that we forgot so far?

Malcom: 1:30:39

We really did cover pretty much everything I was really interested in, like the collaboration of the Daws between you and the rest of your team and the team you managed to put together and how you handled finding them as the producer of the project. But you really did cover all of that really really well. I also really did enjoy hearing about how you handle the electronic elements on stage and, be that not using your dawg like you're doing using pads, it's still interesting, I think, for our audience as well. One of my pet peeves is the like oh, we shouldn't do this on the album because we can't do it live, and it's like you just haven't figured out how to do it live. You can totally do it live, you just got to figure it out, so I like that You've just made it work.

Malcom: 1:31:24

No matter what, that's awesome.

Mario: 1:31:26

Thank you, and it's something that shouldn't hold you back. If you want to do something on the record that you cannot reproduce live, then if you really want to do it on the record, then just do it and play the song differently live.

Malcom: 1:31:40

It's gonna be different either way.

Mario: 1:31:42

Where's the problem? I think we all know bands where we have, like these, certain favorite live records, where the live recording just sounds different from what we hear on the normal record and we love it, and that's the thing. We're all fans and we're all musicians and we shouldn't hold ourselves back too much and don't think too much about stuff. I mean, yeah, it's just playing, it's playing and it should be fun Cool.

Malcom: 1:32:17

Yeah, I agree. The only other thing actually I did want to mention is that I feel like in these days, putting out a full album every couple of years is actually pretty prolific. Bands tend to be pretty slow, so I wanted to tip my hat to you and just like you're crushing it. It's a lot of material, it's awesome.

Benedikt: 1:32:39

Thank you, thank you. So one final technical question, maybe just real quick, mario which kind of synths or like sound generators, if you will, are you using for the electronic stuff? So you mentioned splice for the samples, the loops and stuff like that, but like when you create something from scratch, any favorite tools there that you use, is it stock Ableton stuff? Is it outside third party stuff? What do you use?

Mario: 1:33:03

Yeah, sometimes it's a Novation bass station. That's a synth that's just right beside me. That's Marcus's synth. I don't have one at the moment and I'm thinking about getting a mini-loak or maybe. I've tried out a few different things but I really couldn't decide on a favorite electronic piece of gear that I really want to use, because I come from this band background and from this guitar playing and a background I really like to touch knobs and do things with my hands and sometimes too many plugins can overwhelm me.

Mario: 1:33:48

I really need a few go-to plugins that I really have to get to know and check out. And then that's why I also have these guitar pedals beside me that I can run my sounds through, because I know these pedals and I can turn the knobs with my hands and I know if I turn this knob then this happens. That's pretty good for me. But my go-to plugins are a lot of sound toys plugins. I think that 90% of the rewurps are sound toys, little plates, the Echo Boy. I did most of the side chaining. I did not the usual way with side chaining, but I did it with a tremulator. I think that's basically these are my go-to sounds. I often start just playing a guitar rhythm or a melody or something like that and then get it to sound weird and then it sounds like an electronic element. But it's not. It's a guitar.

Mario: 1:35:05

The first thing that I was asked a few years back was have you just sold your guitar and just used synths? And the thing was hey, on this record there are no. There are basically not that many synths. These are just guitars, but they sound like synth. And a very good plugin for that was also by Neural DSP, the archetype Rabéa. It has this implemented synth, and you can also generate arpeggios with that and get your guitar to sound completely different.

Malcom: 1:35:48

It's very good stuff. Soundtoys well loved by Benny and I we're huge Soundtoys fans. Have you tried their Super Plate yet, or are you still just rocking Little Plate?

Mario: 1:35:58

Yeah, I've changed to Super Plate now.

Malcom: 1:36:02

It's the best.

Benedikt: 1:36:02

It's really cool.

Mario: 1:36:04

Yeah, I love that. There's another podcast that I love. It's called Tape Notes. Have you heard of that?

Benedikt: 1:36:11

Yeah, we were talking about it last week, mario.

Mario: 1:36:13

Yeah, it always gets a producer and a musician together and they talk about their record that they did. And they often ask about what are your favorite plugins and a lot of them say yeah, soundtoys. It's something like that. You get ideas and you try out different things, but you yeah it's. I think having like 10 or 20 favorite plugins that you get to know is sometimes better than having too many.

Benedikt: 1:36:47

Yeah, absolutely. One key takeaway from this whole conversation, mario, is really that it seems for you it seems to be more about the vision and the vibe you're trying to get, and whatever is necessary to make that come out of the speakers You'll do basically. So it doesn't really matter if it's a synth or a guitar that sounds like a synth or just a guitar or witch-daw or whatever it's like, you just make it happen and you don't really care about genre, conventions or things that you should do or should not do. And I think this is really interesting. And it totally makes sense that you like Soundtoys plugins, because they are really some of the most creative plugins. To me they're kind of unique. They are not the 15th version of the same compressor that everyone models, but they are like their own thing.

Benedikt: 1:37:32

And especially for a and I don't mean that in a negative way, mario, but especially for a non-technical sort of minded engineer type, but a creative producer, artist type like you are, I think these tools are the best because you can just play around with them until they sound great, you can make something unique, and maybe I get it all wrong, but I get the impression from talking to you that it's more about the creativity, about the feeling and the vibe than and less about the exact way to do it technically, which I love. It's a very creative approach and makes total sense for someone who's an artist first and then got into producing. Basically, this is not surprising.

Mario: 1:38:13

It's basically the same way that we run our band. We don't have a master plan. I don't have a master plan with producing. I just do what comes out of me and I sometimes have a goal and I try to achieve it, and that's basically the thing. And that's the same approach that I did when I mixed this Omer Block record. The band wanted me to mix it and I told them that I can try, but I have no idea if I can do it, and they have really specific ideas on how they want to sound and I tried to match that. What came out might not be the best engineered or the best mixed record in the world it obviously is not but it's their record and it's about their vision. And it's the same with Riot with our next record. It's our vision and it doesn't have to be perfect, perfect.

Mario: 1:39:06

It just has to be perfect for you. I did as much and as long as it took to get to a point where I was content with hey, that's what I want us to sound like and I'm happy with it. So let's give it away. As soon as the record's out and I'm going to listen to it I'm probably going to find some things that I'm going to be like on the next record. I want to do that better, I want to do this better, and that's a good starting point for the next record.

Benedikt: 1:39:35

Awesome. Where can people check out that next record and what's already out? When is it going to be out the full thing? Where can people find and check out blackout problems and learn more about you? Where should we send them?

Mario: 1:39:48

On February 23rd our next record Riot will be out. You can pre-order that one right now, and we have two singles out now. The next one comes out on Friday, so probably before this episode is.

Benedikt: 1:40:04

This one's actually going to be out two days from now. This is the very last minute of the recording, which is not always the case, but in this case it is Okay.

Mario: 1:40:11

so this Friday, our next single funeral drops. You can check us out on tour. We'll be all over Europe Mainland with Entraseekari and Fever 333 in February we're going to play a few release shows and then do a few festivals. We'll be at Rock'em Ring and Rock'em Park this year Very cool and probably a few smaller ones as well and then do a big tour, which is not announced at the moment but it's going to be out, I think, in February or something like that. We tried to do our first proper European tour now with all the countries that we missed in the pandemic Awesome.

Benedikt: 1:40:59

Really, really cool.

Malcom: 1:41:01

Do you ever come over to North America?

Mario: 1:41:03

No, we haven't, and we really need to do that.

Malcom: 1:41:07

Yeah, please do.

Mario: 1:41:08

Yeah, it's not that easy. I mean, especially for a German band. It's really hard to get out of Germany and play somewhere else than Austria or Switzerland, and we managed to do that in the UK now. Or we played in France, in Czech Republic and Holland and Belgium. But playing in the US or playing in Canada or something like that, that would be amazing.

Malcom: 1:41:36

Yeah, it's a big commitment of time and planning and money.

Mario: 1:41:39

Yeah, of course there's a lot of money involved and people probably don't know that, but it's really fucking hard to do that and, yeah, it's a goal for us. Maybe it's going to come true, maybe not, we don't know. We just go with the flow.

Malcom: 1:41:55

Awesome, I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

Benedikt: 1:41:56

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is for sure. So, yeah, we're excited for that record. All of the info, the links to that, the pre-order, all of that will be in the description or the show notes of this episode. And if you have any follow-up questions for Mario, please just feel free reach out to us. We'll forward it. I can't guarantee that Mario's going to take the time to answer, but I'm just offering this.

Mario: 1:42:17

I'm going to take my time.

Benedikt: 1:42:18

Awesome, perfect, thank you, so do that. And yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to do this, mario, and also shout out to Wayne, who's editing our podcast. We don't do that often enough, actually. Thank you, wayne, for editing this and very sorry that the moment we have an episode that needs to be done in a day, basically we give you this long, long-ass episode today.

Benedikt: 1:42:41

We could have done a 40-minute one, but it's that we chose to go for an hour and 40 minutes.

Benedikt: 1:42:45

Sorry, wayne, thank you for getting this done in time. And I got one more thing before we leave you guys, and that is because it's episode 200 and because it's the end of the year and all of that, I have, or we have, a special gift for you. I can't tell you yet what it exactly is, because I will only do that when I have it in my hands, basically, but I have prepared something as a gift for our listeners and subscribers. So if you're not on our email list yet, please do by downloading one of our free things, for example, standout mixes, our latest mixing guide. If you go to the self-recordingbandcomstandoutmixes, you can get that. If you are on our email list, you'll get an email very soon with a gift for you that is celebrating the 200th episode and also just the end of the year and the holidays, whatever, but you're getting a gift, which is great, and thank you again, mario, for taking the time and talking to us about all of this. This is really exciting. And also thanks for being a listener of this podcast.

Malcom: 1:43:38

Appreciate it, yeah thanks, mario, it's been great.

Mario: 1:43:41

Thank you so much, I really appreciate you.

Benedikt: 1:43:45

All right, see you next week. Bye.