We’ve recently made a contest in partnership with french ‘one stop geek blog’ Geekzone.fr, and Matthieu M. aka Alkama was the big winner, taking home a deserved Ohm Force ‘ALL-ALL Bundle’. The contest theme was about christmas – we’ve actually challenged the contenders to create some “Electrohmic Christmas” soundtrack – and Alkama did it greatly: he’s found a creative way to stay coherent to the proposed theme, with a groovy jingle-bell-bassline that goes along the whole track, but also with beats and melodies that go beyond the contest subject and could easily be at our Mp3 players during the whole year. The Ohm Side of the Moon has made a big interview with him, so click here to listen to his winner track while you check it out:
1- For how long you produce music and what is your studio setup?
I’ve been producing music since the middle of the 90s, as a teenager, when I joined a digital movement called demoscene as a coder and musician. Back then, I used to run on C64, then Amiga, Atari and the early x86s. Those were quite stable platforms to develop on, with known reachable limits. Today, the average computer is quite a monster, and demoscene slowly evolved from its “pushing limits” goal to an expression media. A way to produce underground animated art.
My homestudio is made of a Desktop PC with an RME HDSP9632 sound card connected to a pair of DynAudio BM5A and a Mackie BigKnob to control the volume. The RME card is flawless and impressive, I used to plug some Sony MDR7509 headphones and it sounded just good enough. I’ve waited a long time before buying descent monitors: it’s an expensive investment. But now I got those Dynaudio, I just cant remember how I did before. It completely reshaped the way I mix my tracks. The mobile part of my studio is composed of a MacBook Pro laptop with a NI Audio Kontrol 1 sound card. The sound card is less important on macs, since audio latencies are short anyway.
On the software side, my main tools are Ableton Live and MaxMSP. As all geeks, I like to experiment and nothing beats the old good “do it yourself” state of mind. MaxMSP is a dream tool and a pleasure to play with (now that I went over the beginners aggressive learning curve), and Live is just easy and flexible enough not to be a hassle while trying to lay down an idea (click here to take a look at his track’s live arrangement). Plugin-wise, I’m a total fan of the Minimonsta. I use it for just everything. It’s much more versatile than one could suppose. And the idea of embedded “LFOs/ADSR on every control” makes it even deeper and expressive. Lately, I also bought myself Logic Studio, hoping to spend more time finalizing my songs. (more…)
