WMC 2008 Panels: Production Sessions

WMC 2008 Panels: Production Sessions

1 April, 2008 | 3.27AM

• Section: Music News Topics: Miami WMC 2008, Technology
• Written by: Mr. Tunes

There were a few options for conference attendees to brush up on their production skills and gear knowledge this year at the Winter Music Conference.

The first option was to attend the official sessions at the Miami Beach Spa and Resort Hotel with Eric Kupper and Michael Moog, while the other option was the free sessions offered by Apple at the Remix Hotel in cooperation with the Beatport Pool Party. 

In the beginner session, Eric Kupper and Moog discussed some of the basics of doing a remix with various gear considerations, and Moog went into detail about what makes a good track.

Surprisingly Kupper is a big Pro Tools junkie and strays away from writing in MIDI, while Moog is more of a Reason freak and uses it for everything from making beats to even laying in vocal tracks onto the timeline using the NN-XT sampler.

In the advanced session, Stonebridge and Andy Caldwell joined along to offer some extra opinions here and there.

There wasn’t too big a difference between the two sessions; many of the anecdotes were repeated in the second one, but the main difference was there was more room for questions of the more technical sort in the second panel.

Overall, Michael Moog was absolutely hilarious and Eric Kupper seemed like a really chilled guy, but they were essentially Q & A periods rather than nitty gritty production seminars where they take you through a good edit and the like.

After this session, the official discussion panels at WMC were nearly over, so I headed over to The National to see what was going on over there.

The sessions there were sponsored by Apple, and as such, were very much focused on Logic 8 and how artists use it.

I was able to see sessions with Switch, King Britt and Steve Angello.

Switch showed off the session to the track ‘Paper Planes’ that he did with M.I.A.

There wasn’t too much going on with this session, but Switch got to answer some questions as well as discuss some of the process working with M.I.A. and traveling around the world recording together.

A great tip from Switch is that he likes to roll off a lot of mid- to high-end frequencies on instruments where you typically add that sort of EQ.

This helps keep a bit of the analog feel on a mix by not overdoing the high-end boosts which can be too popular these days.

King Britt was more entertaining, as his session of an upcoming remix for Robert Owens was more intact with the original MIDI parts and the like.

He had a very interesting tip about time stretching.

King Britt has found that if you’re trying to make a drastic change, it’s better to go up in increments rather than do a large jump.

If you have a track at 100 BPM and you’re trying to go up to 125, take it up to 110 first, then maybe to 120, then 125 to prevent artifacting.

The last session that I was able to check out was with Steve Angello, who has a really straight-forward approach to producing.

Angello doesn’t like to add too many effects samples to his arrangements.

Instead, he prefers to work the sounds themselves by doing things like adding tons of reverb to the Master Bus for things like transition sounds.

He also is very hands-on in regards to mixing and mastering his own music.

Angello believes that it’s his production and he wants full control over the final result in order to keep it within his vision.

We got to look at what sort of signal chain Angello puts on the Master, which was really great to see how he gets his tracks ready for the clubs.

The official WMC sessions and the ones offered at Remix Hotel were drastically different.

For starters, the Remix Hotel sessions were in a dark room with the lights off so you could see the screen well.

This was a little annoying, since the last thing you want to do on a sunny day with the Beatport Pool Party going on outside is to sit in a pitch black room.

The WMC sessions with Eric Kupper cost additional money on top of the normal pass for attendees, while the ones at Remix Hotel were free but were very heavy on advertising Apple’s Logic software to its attendees.

While I don’t think the WMC workshops should have cost extra, I did appreciate how there was an open discussion about various software packages and equipment.

I feel that that’s important because there are many ways to produce and remix, and as such, I don’t think it’s fair to try to present the topic as if Logic is the be-all-and-end-all of music production software.

Of course, the artists were allowed to discuss other tools they used, but the direction of the presentations were centered on Logic’s features and workflow.

Advertising aside, no one could deny that for the money the free seminars were damn good to check out!

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• Check out Eric Kupper and Andy Caldwell's remixes of 'Breathe You In' on Beatport