Ignoring the trends: Steve Bug

Ignoring the trends: Steve Bug

22 June, 2009 | 1.31PM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: audiomatique, dessous, poker flat, steve bug

Trends are as much a part of the fabric of electronic music as drum beats. The scene’s contempt for the old, and its obsession for the new, can be traced back to its dependance on technology: electronic music is in a permanent beta.

Steve Bug, the long-serving German DJ and producer who runs Poker Flat, Dessous, and Audiomatique, has seen many trends come and go. Yet as his new album ‘Collaboratory’ proves, he’s never been one to hop on the bandwagon.

With 11 tracks of warm melodic deep house, subtly evolving minimal, pop friendly vocals, and sultry techno, Steve Bug’s fourth artist album is far from the club music trends of today. It sounds quite timeless.

Beatportal met Steve Bug in his studio in Berlin (he moved to the city 11 years ago, long before it became an electronic music hotspot) to discuss electronic music truisms and trends like mp3s, analogue, Traktor, and percussive house.

There are certain truisms in dance music. ‘Analogue is better’ is one of them. Your new LP ‘Collaboratory’ was made using mainly analogue gear. Why is that?

I used a lot of analogue gear for the album, but it wasn’t solely produced using analogue. These days it would be hard to produce a whole album using only outboard gear.

It would be pretty uncomfortable - for instance, we had to record a lot of the synthesizers as audio in case they broke. The machines are very old. A lot of the drums we produced on computers too. I used Logic and had a couple of plug ins like Native Instruments’ Pro 53 and Battery 3.

Even when I started producing back in 1993 I used an Atari.

Why is analogue better?

Emulators sound OK but they don’t have the same thickness of sound, and deepness, as analogue.

A lot of stuff that comes out of computer software is pre-equalized and pre EQ’d which makes the sound flat. With analogue you get this dirtiness which is quite hard to describe.

I also prefer having knobs to play with than a mouse, especially when there’s a few of you in the studio at once.

The main problem is a lot of DJs play MP3s these days and aren’t prepared to pay the extra few cents for a WAV.

We all know that MP3s are worse quality than WAVs even though a lot of producers and DJs probably wouldn’t be able to hear the difference if you played a WAV and an MP3 back to back. But after a whole night of just MP3s, your ears get tired. You get this feeling crawling in your stomach like something’s not quite right.

If your ear is tuned you can hear the difference though.

So why is producing tracks using analogue gear important, if it just ends up getting compresed into MP3?

If the track still goes through an analogue soundboard and gets properly EQ’d it’ll sound a lot better to begin with. If the source is high quality, then when it’s compressed into MP3, it will still sound better.

I don’t personally mind people listening to MP3s at home or on their iPods, but I don’t understand why professional DJs would play MP3s.

Then again, there are still loads of DJs out there who don’t know how to use a basic mixer. You turn up at gigs sometimes and see them pushing into the red, completely unaware that they’re distorting the highs and the bass.

I’d rather play it a little lower and have good quality sound than have bad quality sound at a loud volume.

Collaboration seems to be happening more and more in dance music these days, and your album celebrates it. Why do you like collaborating?

Us dance music producers spend a lot of time producing in solitude. Sometimes it can be fun by yourself, but it’s more fun when you can interact with others.

I had most of the musicians who contributed to ‘Collaboratory’ visit my studio in person to jam out.

It’s easier when collaborating to try things out on instruments at the same time. Someone can be messing around behind you and you’ll hear something great and go ‘wow, let’s use that sound’. I think collaborating offers more opportunities.

Digital DJing and software like Traktor and Serato have really taken off. What do you think of this new DJ technology?

I was one of the first people in Germany to start using Final Scratch, the precursor to Traktor.

I converted after I saw Richie Hawtin using it. At first I thought it was weird to play off a laptop, but then I realised that for traveling it was so much easier.

Sound wise, I’d rather play my sets using vinyl, but my tour schedule is so heavy that’s there’s no easy way to do it with vinyl anymore.

The software has got so much better too. You get all this extra info with Traktor now.

The loop player and FX on the new version are great. You can also see the soundwave of the file as it plays so you can see when the beat is coming back in. That’s important to me, as I play a lot of music that’s off beat and with vinyl you had to try and guess when the beat was coming back by reading the grooves of the record. That’s not easy to do in a dark club.

I still use vinyl to control Traktor though as I don’t want to change the way I play. I could just let the computer beatmatch it all but I’d just be bored.

Also my DJing style is such that I like tracks to play out it full, rather than play just small loops of a track or re-edit stuff live. I use loops to keep mixes going longer, and I sometimes jump cue points, but I like to try and keep the original vibe of a track.

I also like the occasional mistake, as it shows that it’s a human behind the mixing and it doesn’t sound too clean.

An upcoming trend seems to be DJing with parts. What do you think of that?

The tracks I like have stories already. I’m not a big fan of playing just loops, or loop based tracks. I like harmony in my sets. Sometimes I might drop a loop based drum track, but it always leads back to a harmony.

There are a lot of DJs that only play percussive tracks these days, but I need harmonies. Melodic stuff will keep me on the dancefloor for hours, percussion won’t.

Your album has a lot of melody. Do you think that producing melodic stuff is harder to make than DJ tools or percussion tracks?

Definitely. Making melodic tracks takes real musical skill. Software developers these days follow trends in dance music, and make software that comes with pre-made loops and sounds that make it simple for you to make those tracks.

It’s always been like that in electronic music though, from the very beginning there were cheap drum machines knocking about that had these simple sounds already pre-made for you.

I prefer to write music. I like some of the software and may use it from time to time, but I’m not excited by a simple drum track.

I need a weird twisting line or evolving melody to get me excited.

Did you study music theory?

No I never did. Back when I first started making music I didn’t know anything about music theory.

Recently I’ve been thinking quite a lot about studying music. Like I thought maybe it would be cool to learn the piano or keyboards, but in the end it all comes down to your ear when you make music. As long as you can hear what works and what doesn’t, you can make music. You don’t need the theory.

Plus sometimes, you can get too musical. Every now and again, you see these producers that used to make great club music suddenly working with musicians and their work loses some of its edge and begins to sound like a live jazz thing. They can lose their magic.

I hope with my LP I have melodies there, but it’s still stripped down and groovy.

Is the dancefloor still your main focus?

I’m a DJ so of course I want to be attached to dancefloors. With my albums, I always try to be a bit more open-minded.

I got into production through house music, so that affects my sound.

Is house at the core of everything you do?

Well these days house is quite misunderstood. People think house is commercial US deep house, but I’m not into that.

Tech house seems to have emerged again. If you said that you played tech house a couple of years back, people would have said ‘oh that’s so five years ago’.

I think Detroit techno is firmly at my base as that was one of the original sounds that got me into this music.

It’s totally ridiculous when you think about it. It’s just people going, ‘this is cool, this is not, this is cool, this is old’. It’s always been like that in dance music, from the very beginning and there’s nothing we can do about it.

You mention the tech house trend. After all these years in the industry, do you have any idea how these trends start?

Hmmm. I don’t know why trends start. Take the percussive house sound for instance. All the guys from Oslo and Cecille started that movement. Then everyone suddenly jumped on the trend. Everyone copied them, and then the software people came along offering pre-made drum loops so you too can make your very own percussive house track.

The market gets flooded with the same sounds, and it gets boring. The original guys that started the trend are left looking outdated whilst everyone else moves on.

It’s totally ridiculous when you think about it. It’s just people going, ‘this is cool, this is not, this is cool, this is old’. It’s always been like that in dance music, from the very beginning and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Why is dance music in particular, susceptible to such trends?

It’s always had a fashion side. People like to say ‘this is next’, and then a few months later say about the same sound, ‘oh that’s so yesterday’. But it does makes it unfair on the originators and pioneers of new sounds.

Personally, I don’t like just one sound. I always try to find a good deep house record and play it next to a good techno record. I’d hate to have a one track mind, or simply follow whatever is popular.

People have said that your track ‘Loverboy’ was a trend starter and helped kick start the minimal house movement.

‘Loverboy’ came out in 1999. It took years before it got noticed. It just kept selling in really small numbers until one day it blew up.

For me, it’s more about being true to yourself and finding your own sound. Ignore trends.

Like your labels Pokerflat and Dessous? They’ve stuck to their guns regardless of the current popular sound.

With Dessous, we actually had a problem a few years back before deep house came back around. There was almost nobody producing the music - we couldn’t find any deep house tracks, it was really strange. So we had to widen our sound a little and we were lucky to find producers who were making kind of deep house, but they were also influenced by trends.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with borrowing certain sounds or styles from a trend, so long as you can combine it with your core sound. It’s about stealing what’s relevant from the trend and staying true to yourself.

In the end, it was not exactly what we were looking for but it worked out. That said, I’m a firm believer in moving on. I’d rather stop doing something than continue with a direction that no one likes.

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