Wayne Lotek, Mercury 2009 Prizewinning Album Producer - Interview Part 1

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing a certain Record Producer with 15 years experience in the cutting edge Urban music scene. He has forged critically acclaimed tracks for both established upcoming talent whilst successfully creating his own unique and often imitated productions as an Artist in his own right. Oh, and he just happened to produce this years Mercury Prize winning album, “Speech Therapy”..His name..?

Wayne Lotek

DV247:
Hi Wayne, does this interview find you at your home studio in Melbourne or at one of your other favoured countries to produce/record?

WL
Yeah back in Melbourne now, good to be back but the weather’s a bit dodgy at the moment. Melbourne weather is quite English, 4 seasons in one day that kind of thing.

DV247:
With the equipment technical limitations and striving for recognition in your early career, as opposed to today’s environment of no doubt a vast array of gear and deserved prestigious standing, do you recall feeling more creatively vibrant then, or now?

WL
I feel more creative now than I have ever been, I feel like I have the knowledge and skills now to make the music in my head. When I was younger I had so much energy and enthusiasm but now I have experience which I think is much more valuable.

In terms of the music equipment, so much more is possible now and for a reduced cost compared to 10 or 15 years ago. Having said that I found that when I started out (on an Atari ST 1040 running Cubase and an AKAI S1100 sampler, and little else) that I was having to push each piece of equipment to its limit and each time I introduced a new piece of equipment, even if it was borrowed, it opened up new possibilities that I had no access to before. This made me appreciate what I could do and use everything above and beyond its standard function.

Now each time I start a new song I know that I can use pretty much anything, if I don’t have the real thing then I can probably find a plug-in emulation that comes pretty close. This can make things difficult, it’s like setting out on a Journey and the first thing you come to is a junction with nearly an infinite amount of turnings, which direction do you head first? Will you ever get there or forever be lost going round in circles down never-ending alley ways?

Just recently I have been buying up old gear that I used to dream about owning 10 or so years ago but has now fallen out of favour. For example I just got hold of a Tascam 1/2” 8 Track. The day I got it I recorded a test vocal just my regular mic (AKG C414) in the middle of a pretty much untreated room and it sounded good. The same vocal recorded the same way into my computer sounded so cold and you could hear the sound of the room, all of the impurities were captured in 16bit digital quality!!

Its not just the sound that is different the work flow is different too. I’m not always such a big fan of total recall, there’s something cool about knowing that you can’t move on to the next song until this one is just right or if you do come back to it then you have to start from scratch. It totally changes the way you have to think about the what you are doing.

DV247:
Have you been gigging yourself much recently as an artist in your own right?

WL
I’ve done a few gigs here and there, while I was over in the UK for the Mercury Prize I did a few gigs in Germany and Japan. I actually put together a big live reggae/ska band as I don’t think that performing with a DJ will really do what I’m doing justice anymore. We’re still rehearsing getting it really tight and then after that I’ll be hitting road and going worldwide. Probably early next year in Europe.

DV247:
‘Control Alt Delete’ is right on the money for contemporary radio and dancefloor’s alike: how’s the single performing for you in the global marketplace and ‘live’ with different worldwide audiences?

WL
I haven’t really pushed in the traditional sense yet. It’s just been doing the rounds on the internet. I’ve performed it live all around the world and it always gets a big response. I think the song is cursed though, I never had computer issues until I wrote this song now my computer keeps crashing, so did the computer belonging to the video director. People come up to me all the time saying how their computer crashed watching the youtube clip or they got home from my gig to find a blue-screen-of-death on the PC at home!

There’ll be a full release for the song and a remix before the end of the year.

DV247:
You’ve been recognised as a true producer blessed with the abilities to empathically link to your artists and take creative control of their direction, has this ever been tested to the max with any (and they can remain anonymous) artists?

WL
It’s always tested, trying to guess what someone else is thinking or work out what they might like even though they may not have heard it yet is very tough to begin with. With most people they have a strong sense of who they are and how the music should sound or at least are able to communicate that and then I guide them through the possibilities.

Most people are open to that and are respectful of the role of a producer. When I was working with Roots Manuva he once asked ”how should I rap this?”  This was years before I started rapping myself so I had no direct idea on how to rap so I told him to do it as he pleased. He asked again, this time adding “….produce me”. He knew what he wanted but also wanted to get a second opinion, I know from doing my own music how hard it can be when you’re the only one in the studio.

It’s not always that easy, some artists have very little knowledge and often only vague ideas of what they want. This is much harder but also much more satisfying when it is completed. In some ways it would be nice if every artist knew what they wanted and were able to communicate it but then it’s the artists that don’t have that who need me the most.

I believe that the role of a producer, in the traditional sense, should be quite transparent. Nowadays “producers” like The Neptunes or Timbaland work with an artist but the music has more of their character stamped on it than the artist themselves. For me good production should reflect the character of the artist not the producer, sometimes it means that I don’t always get the credit I feel I deserve and on some occasions the artist will think that everything on the record came from them and that I was merely an engineer. In a way this is the ultimate triumph of production but on the other hand it often means my work goes unnoticed.

DV247:
Mercury prize aside, was the decision to fly Speech over to record with you into Oz, (rather than say you returning to London away from your familiar gear and surroundings) beneficial to you, the artist and the label?

WL
Yes. Looking back it worked out really well, funny thing is I had most of my equipment back in the UK, I just didn’t want to go back yet as I hadn’t finished what I came out to do. As it turned out the label got the album made very cheaply as they didn’t have to book studios and Speech got the chance to get away from London during European winter and come here in the hottest months. I think the surroundings helped the subject matter as it’s easier to be on the outside looking in to get a clear perspective of something especially if you have spent a long time deep in it.

DV247:
Having worked with Diplo before, I’d guess you felt pleased as punch that some of the Lotek sound has perhaps translated to his work with Switch on the ‘Major Lazer’ project?

WL
I didn’t actually work directly with him, in fact we never met. I was responsible for recording some vocals for his first Big Dada album as he wasn’t in the country. I’d like to think my music had an influence on his new project as I think it’s great. That may well be the case, it may also be that dancehall is coming back around again and I was just a bit ahead of my time in what I was doing with Lotek Hifi. Either way it makes me feel good.

DV247:
Renowned for your raw and unique drum sounds and rhythms (departing from a world of blatantly recognizable percussive samples used by many others), can you give us a production insight into how you create such individual beats and loops?

WL
It’s hard to say straight off the top of my head, for a start I go through phases of doing things a particular way. When I start each new project I always begin by making a palette of sounds, mostly drum hits and percussion samples but also a few synth/keyboard patches. How I make those changes from project to project. With something like the Speech Debelle project I kept it as natural sounding as possible so it was all about capturing it the way I wanted it to sound rather than treating it afterward to achieve that. For example I made a Battery drum patch of live drum hits that I used to create the foundation of many of the tracks on “Speech Therapy”. Those sounds were recorded on a drum kit set up in my hallway with polished wooded floors. I experimented with mic positions to get the reverb sound I wanted. Once I recorded them, I only used a little compression to sit them in the mix.

If I am using sampled drum sounds and not a live kit then I tend to get most of the sounds from the intro to reggae songs, they nearly always start with a drum roll so you can grab a kick or snare from there.

Before I had a large recording space with nice natural reverb and session drummer or a large reggae collection I used to use stock standard drum samples in my MPC and then play them through my monitor speakers and record them with a microphone at the back of the room. Combining the programmed drum loop with a recording of natural reverb really made them come alive.

DV247:
Was the transition form the role of ‘producer behind a mixing desk’, to ‘artist behind a microphone’ a natural evolution for you, or a reaction to need or circumstance?

WL
There were two main reasons for me to make that change, firstly I spent a couple of years working in commercial studios and saw a lot of “pop stars” with very little talent, this was being covered over by a team of writers, arrangers, producers, musicians and sometimes session singers to the point where some of these artists were responsible for only a small fraction of what went onto their music. Up until that stage I had no real ambition to be an artist, the studio was already a really exciting place.

The other reason was that I got tired of people (mostly rappers) turning up late or sometimes not at all for sessions. In the end, I thought, “It’s just talking in time to a beat.” so I decided to give it a shot.  At first it was just to test out new beat ideas or to put down a guide vocal to make sure I didn’t add too many musical elements to the song, which is very easy to do when you are working on music and don’t know what the vocals might be doing.

I got better until more people were telling me that my best work so far was the stuff I rapped on myself.  I gave up arguing with them and decided to work on it seriously.

DV247:
The new Lotek album ‘Go’, in CD and MP3 format, seems to be primarily available by direct purchase and not through a label or digital aggregator. Is this a strategy for you regarding future solo releases?

WL
That album was released in Russia by 2.99 Records. Part of the deal meant that they gave me a stock of CDs for me to sell at shows and on my site, which I did and actually doing so has made it one of my most profitable projects despite selling far less than other releases through labels.

I don’t think I’d want to release all my future releases that way, it limits the amount of people that will get to hear the music and it’s quite a lot of work. I got most of my sales in response to myspace bulletins and emails I had sent but I don’t want to get distracted from what I do best which is making the music. Eventually I’d like to set up the infrastructure to release records so that I can have the best of both worlds.

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Check back here tomorrow for the second part of this exclusive Wayne Lotek interview