Armin Van Buuren : August 2009
In this article:
Ben Allen  Mixing R&B  Babydaddy • Dan Grech-Marguerat The Scissor Sisters' first album, recorded in a Manhattan apartment, sold 3.5 million copies worldwide. The follow-up sees them expanding their horizons, while keeping their DIY ethos very much intact. Artist/Producer  Writing & Producing With Robbie Williams Despite his best efforts, Stephen Duffy's solo work never quite made him a superstar — but it did get him one of the best co-writing gigs around. Producing Kasabian & Arctic Monkeys  Yellow Magic Orchestra goes Latino Yellow Magic Orchestra helped pioneer the use of electronic instruments and sampling. Now Uwe Schmidt, aka Señor Coconut, has used the same techniques to render their greatest hits as Latin dances, with contributions from all three original YMO members. Recording Morph The Cat  Folk Music For The 21st Century The idea of bringing folk music up to date is not a new one, but few people have taken it quite as far as Jim Moray. His material may be traditional, but his approach to music technology is as modern as it gets. Andy Jackson David Gilmour's chart-topping solo album was recorded on his own Astoria houseboat, a floating slice of studio heaven. Engineer Andy Jackson describes the making of the album. Mike Elizondo  The Current State Of Affairs What can we, as engineers or musicians, do to prevent our recorded legacy being lost? Record Producer  Richard Aitken of Nimrod Productions  Writing & Producing in LA The success of Avril Lavigne's debut album Let Go catapulted The Matrix to the front rank of songwriters and producers. Since then, they've moved in ever wider musical circles, culminating in their work with nu-metal pioneers Korn. Producing Hip-Hop Miami is now a hip-hop centre to rival New York and LA, and Cool & Dre are two of its most active beatmakers, songwriters and producers. Craig Bauer Craig Bauer has been part of Kanye West's career from the beginning, and as a mix engineer on the smash hit Late Registration album, he had to marry West's artistic perfectionism with his own technical standards. Roy Thomas Baker  John Fryer  Harry Gregson-Williams  December 2009
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Other recent issues: | Armin Van BuurenArticle Preview :: Producing TrancePublished in SOS August 2009 People + Opinion : Artists/Engineers/Producers/Programmers Not content with being one of the most celebrated DJs in the world, Armin Van Buuren has also had a string of club and chart hits. We asked him to talk us through the production of a top-notch trance anthem.
“Imake what they call underground dance music,” remarks Armin Van Buuren, as we talk in a hotel prior to his set at London’s Ministry Of Sound. You’d be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the ‘underground’ part of that description. After all, this is a man who has been at pole position in DJ magazine’s list of the top 100 DJs since 2007, and has produced a string of hits since bursting onto the scene with his track ‘Blue Fear’ in 1995. His popular weekly radio show, A State Of Trance, also recently celebrated its 400th episode, so it’s probably fair to say that Armin’s particular brand of ‘underground’ is about as well concealed as London Transport’s. Unlike the Tube, though, Armin shows no sign of stopping. A variety of new remix and production activity is continuing apace at a newly constructed studio in his home town of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he frequently works alongside his studio partner Benno De Goeij, half of the production duo Rank 1. To begin with, I asked him how he typically sets about putting together a track from scratch; unsurprisingly, it’s his wide knowledge of the music scene, built up through his DJ’ing, that informs the process from the earliest stages. “Usually we start by listening to other records. There’s a few records around at any given time that have this hype around them, so all the producers listen to these records. A little while ago you had Deadmau5, with his sound, then you had people copying Deadmau5. We were listening to Deadmau5 as well, so our sound was a little influenced by that. And you can clearly feel the whole dance community shifting in response to the best new records. “I’m a trance DJ, that’s what people know me for, but I try to follow the trends as well. The bpm over the last couple of years went down, for example, and productions have a lot of influences from minimal and electro percussion right now. If we’re making a track or a remix, we listen to the current sound a lot. You have to go on iTunes and listen to a lot of other records. That’s really, really essential. You’re not copying them, you’re being inspired by them. The Beatles listened to Bob Dylan — it’s that kind of thing. You kind of go with the flow. DJs won’t play your record if it doesn’t sound enough like the other records, because they’re building a set and they’ve got to rock the crowd. So no matter how many hours of production you put into it, if it doesn’t sound a little like the previous record or the record after it, then it’s not going to fit, and they’re not going to play it because it’ll make their set sound really weird. So doing research is extremely important.” Theme & Variations
The genesis of a new track is frequently a single main theme. “Usually we start with an eight-bar main theme, with maybe a piano melody or some strings, and drums and a bass line going. In the studio we’ve sync’ed up the main Mac via MIDIoverLAN, which is a really quick way of working. I can be sitting behind the keys making a melody, and my sequencer’s running, sending out a MIDI clock to Ableton or Logic. Benno, with the headphones on, can have a laptop connected to the system making loops, while I’m making a bass line or melody, and it’s always in tempo. It saves us a lot of time because two people can be creative at the same time; sometimes we make a track in half an hour! In fact, the strange thing is that all my biggest tracks were written in under two hours.” ...
Published in SOS August 2009 
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