Producer’s Chair: Mark Knight

Producer’s Chair: Mark Knight

11 June, 2010 | 4.50AM

• Written by: Alex Hughes
• Filed under: Music News: co-production competition, mark knight, remix contest, tool room

Mark Knight‘s co-production competition isn’t a run-of-the-mill remix contest. Instead of delivering the parts to a finished track, Knight is giving aspiring producers the opportunity to complete a co-production with him. He’s supplying a loop and a MIDI bassline; it’s up to the entrants to flesh that out into a finished track.

To mark the occasion, we sat down with the producer, DJ and Toolroom Records founder to find out what he’s looking for in a hit. Read on for his advice, including arrangement tips and the secret weapon in his arsenal of VSTs.

Why did you choose to do a production contest rather than a remix contest?

I’m just trying to move things forward a little bit. The remix competitions have been great as a concept, but what we’re trying to do at Toolroom is push things forward a little bit. I don’t think people were really getting the breaks off the back of the remix competitions that they really expected to. We’ve always been about finding and nurturing new talent, so what better way than to fuse those ideas together, and with me being a producer and having a record label, I was in a position to offer both things. I don’t think producers are really getting the breaks they deserve.

I see the winner receives 50% of publishing. Meaning if the track gets licensed, they get 50%?

Absolutely. And all mechanical royalties, sync rights, everything. It’s very much a co-production. I’ve laid down the basic idea of the track, the template and direction, and now I’m just looking for people to move on from there, and do what they can do.

Tell me about the philosophy of Toolroom, which is described in your bio as a “workshop for 21st century dance musicians”.

We’ve never really been about the checkbook mentality of finding big records, throwing money at them, and running off the back of that. We’re all about nurturing and creating our own sound. I think if you look at any record label in the past, whether it be Stax or Motown, Strictly Rhythm, they all had a sound, and that was paramount to their success. We’ve always been about that—finding producers under the umbrella of our general sound, and nurturing them and giving them proper A&R and backup and support to create our own individual thing. We felt this production competition would be the opportunity to find someone else we can bring through the ranks. People like Dave Spoon, he was just a demo in the post, you know? We heard his talent and nurtured that and moved it in the right direction, and now he’s off on all sorts of things.

Where are you finding new talents?

Through demos, all sorts of ways—people give me CDs in clubs, emails, all the usual routes. But we do take a lot of time out to listen to that, because these are the stars of the future. You can hear talent pretty much straightaway. Sometimes it’s not the finished article, but with a bit of refinement, you can nurture that to be as good as it could be.

Are you using SoundCloud for demos?

Yeah, we are, but we still get thousands through the post every week, and emails—it’s quite inundating, really, to stay on top of it. But you’ve gotta do it. Ninety-nine percent of them are pretty sh*t, but that one percent is all you need to have a hit.

How did you approach making the parts for the contest?

We just wanted to do something that wasn’t the obvious for me. I’m slightly moving my musical direction. Not massively, but with the last thing I did, the ‘Bullets’ EP, it shows that I like to play long sets; I want to make music for all the different points in my set, not just that big, last record of the night, enormous anthem, every time. Lately I’ve been doing one big release, then one more underground one, and it was time to do a more underground release. I approached it less as a big, hands-in-the-air, cliché Mark Knight record and more as a cool groover. I think the important thing to do before you start is to have an idea of what you’re trying to achieve. Otherwise it’s a very, very blank canvas when you switch on the computer. It’s paramount to have that idea initially, and the idea of this track was to go a bit deeper, a bit trackier, a bit cooler.

When you’re making a track, what’s the first thing you do? Do you start with the drums, the bassline, or does it change depending upon the situation?

It depends what you’re trying to achieve with the record. If you’re doing something that’s very bass-driven, it’s best to put that down first, and let the drums work around that. If you’ve got an idea for a cool progression or a riff, it’s important to get that in first, and then write the drums around it. If it’s a very percussive thing, then obviously the drums will come first. Otherwise, it’s very easy to fill the drums up with lots of little hooks and things, and it’s very hard to get the music in. There’s no room for the music, if you’ve filled up every little space with drums and hits. You have to approach every track on its own individual merits.

What are your favorite pieces of gear or software right now?

Yes, the Vengeance side-chainer is amazing. I’m a massive fan of that. Since I got that, it’s been like, how the f**k did I make anything sit in the mix without it? It’s so clever, how you can side-chain frequencies to get some awkward things to sit in the mix. Especially with the reinvention of the disco sample idea, it really enables you to get tricky samples to sit lovely in the mix. At the moment, it’s my favorite plug-in by a mile. You need that one—it’s killer. Just little things that bounce out of the mix sometimes, you can get them to sit without losing them. Sometimes, with the conventional side-chain approach, you tend to lose too much of the original signal, but with this you can set it up to shelve off the right frequencies, as opposed to the whole sound.

Looking at your mix CD, I’m struck by its range, from Sasse to Faithless. Do you think the underground and the overground are coming together?

Absolutely. With the last CD, what I love to do is to play long sets—eight, ten hours, because you can really express yourself musically. What I tried to do with those CDs is to condense that whole musical journey into one CD. I think the trick is how you tell that story, how you paint that musical picture. If you can do that, then all the things can come together.

I think when you DJ, it’s all about telling a story. It’s not just one linear thing; it’s like, I’m going to start here and end there, and you’re going to come with me on this musical journey. There’s too many mix CDs you switch on, and from the first track to the last track, they’re all the same style. It’s just a collection of records—there’s no real skill in that.

You’ve had quite a lot of success with cover versions over the years (Good Times, Man with the Red Face, Strings of Life?). What else would you like to tackle?

Not really. We had fun with all that, and it was a real moment in time, but I certainly don’t want to be remembered for doing just that. The projects we chose were pretty successful, but I’ve very much moved away from that. I get asked to do remixes of classic records, brilliant things, and I turn 95% of them down. I just don’t want to be remembered for doing good cover versions, I want to be remembered for my own productions, like ‘Downpipe’ and things like that.

Could you name a track that particularly inspired you as a producer?

From a house point of view, there are so many, but I find ‘Love and Happiness’ by Masters of Work just amazing. That truly is an inspired piece of music, the arrangement and the detail, it’s so clever. That’s a very inspirational record to me, to show how you put that much music, and can be that clever, and yet it can come across in a club way.

A lot of producers don’t try to be so clever—they let the sound design do all the work, but don’t pay attention to arrangements and the other things that give you those “wow” moments on the dancefloor.

Absolutely. Arrangement is really my forte. I love that creative process of making a record, sitting there for weeks shuffling things around until you get the correct order. I love the way that producers think outside the box. People like Joey Negro and Masters at Work were experts at doing things like that. How you might take an idea and twist it, as opposed to just doing the obvious. There’s nothing wrong with having a formulaic arrangement, but there’s something special when you hear a track that’s different, that makes you think, “F**k, how’d they think of doing that?” That’s the kind of thing that inspires me to not just go back to the same old arrangement that I know will work.

Hopefully this will inspire artists entering the contest to try something a bit different as well.

Absolutely. Sometimes it doesn’t always work. I’ve made a lot of records that I played for the first time, and felt like, “Oh my God, that was way too clever, they really didn’t get that”. The first time I played ‘Downpipe’, people just didn’t get it. They just didn’t get the arrangement. But now it’s sunk in, and three years on, it’s just getting bigger and bigger. It’s not an obvious thing, and I’m glad we didn’t go down and obvious route. If it does the things you predicted it to do, you’re going to move on from that. But if it’s something really clever, and every time you go back and listen to it, you think, “Bloody hell, I wasn’t expecting that”, it gives it a bit more shelf life.

They say that ‘Acid Trax’ cleared the dancefloor three times the first night it was played, so you just never know.

Too right. It’s good to push yourself and be a bit brave, and not go for the obvious. I mean, there’s a time and a place, and you pick and choose your battles, but those records that are a bit clever stand up to the test of time.

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