When we played in Groningen a couple of days ago (which was a really awesome night, thanks everybody!), the three Noisia boys also happened to appear there, and we had a nice talk with Nik on a topic that has been on my mind every once in a while – though never that focussed. “How”, Nik asked, “can we break out of this restricting format DnB has been coming to?”.
When I think back of the “glorious” days starting around 97/98, I remember a lot of tunes, which were innovative in pushing something new. I was so exited back then, because everything was so fresh, and people tried new approaches. One prominent example was the time when Fresh put out “Mutated”, which left me with an open mouth, drooling…At that time, DnB really was “music from the future”.
Obviously, due to little ground being already covered by other artists, it was by design easier to create new things than it is now, still I feel we, the producers, have completely changed our focus. As a DnB producer, you have to contain two split personalities, Jackyl-and-Hyde-style: The artist and the sound engineer, who are caught in an eternal struggle for focus. With evolving technology, production quality really has made huge steps in the last years, forcing a certain level for every tune. As a result, your tunes have to have that level of production quality, or it will not be played out, because it sounds crap in comparison with the rest. Combine this with the streamlined, strictly floor-oriented rules established in the last 2-3 years, and you end up with the problem of many tunes sounding very similar. To sum up, the engineer has taken the lead, with the artist being tied in a net of rules.

This approach makes it very easy to flood the release market, once you have reached that production level threshold. Without going into personal detail, I think there is an estonishing number of people who’re behaving like that, becoming big not through quality, but quantity. While it is convenient to be successful, this may lead to boredom, both listener- and producer-wise. Would you expect Noisia to come up with yet another series of Concussion-style tunes? Well, there is no challenge in that anymore, is there?

Instead, it is time to get the artist back into gameplay. Impress through excellence. While it may – also to us – be not too straightforward to really leverage innovation, in my mind there is only one rule, one basic contract everybody is bound to when producing DnB, and that is the speed of roughly 170-175 BPM. If we all tried to question certain standard approaches, ignore processes we have come to automatically apply, we may be able to experiment a lot more. I’m of course not talking about DnB-styled Free Jazz, and simplicity surely is one basic layer of dancefloor compability, but there definitely is space to cover.

How? Well, I’ve always felt that innovation is marked by combining existing approaches. A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon a page titled “Thinking like a Genius”, which confirmed me in that by listing 8 strategies. Not all of them are appliable to this case, still they provide interesting insight, for example

• Look at problems in many different ways, and find new perspectives that no one else has taken
• Produce! A distinguishing characteristic of genius is productivity.
• Make novel combinations. Combine, and recombine, ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations no matter how incongruent or unusual.

Of course I’m fully aware that floor effectiveness requires certain elements in a tune, but there may be novel ways to express them. On the other hand, there are way too many tunes produced for the floor anyways IMO, which automatically get caught in that 3-months-trap and become forgotten afterwards.

Who do you feel is innovative these days and through what? Where do you see potential elements to leverage innovation?

Technorati Tags: production level, innovation

Thanks everyone for voting for us! We’ve been voted 3rd best German producers (behind Phace and Syncopix) on the Future Music Awards of Germany’s main DnB forum! Also, Sienna, White Russian and the Beautiful Bytes CD reached ranks 3, 7 resp. 10 in the national track category. Basswerk was voted best national label. We know this award may by its nature give an odd picture, still it’s great to receive some respect for the effort we’ve put in this over the last months and years. See the complete results on the official page.

Technorati Tags: Awards

We had some really good response (620 downloads to date, nearly 9GB traffic) to our Nostromo give-away a couple of days ago. In fact, I found it very interesting to see the flow of information evolve through different domains.

On 30.Nov, we posted the tune in this blog. As you can see from the chart above, people seemed to notice with a slight delay. This makes sense through the fact that some may read about the free download on various other blogs who re-posted the news. (Thanks everyone who supports us by spreading the word btw – we really appreciate that!) Obviously, this first wave weakened after some days.
Conclusion 1: There hardly is any connection from the blogosphere back to the forums, so the mainstream (haha) of headz doesn’t even get to know about it. To put it in a different way (which is also supported by our own experience on other posts): Blogs are read only by a minority, with little interest by most forum users. Those who do probably blog themselves. (Typical web 1.0 vs. 2.0 issue?)

We watched this for two weeks, then, on 14.Dec, decided to cross the gap ourselves and posted it to various forums. The effect is clearly visible in the first diagram. Now, another interesting effect becomes visible, shown when combining the two charts:
Conclusion 2: While DOA is a really good point to start and leads to a micro-digg-effect, it quickly becomes flooded by the sheer mass of posts on it. Nevertheless, there seems to be a higher degree of interconnectivity from DOA to other DnB forums, which results in a spreading effect. One minor point here is that the amount of downloads via the subforums Board and Grid are nearly equal.
Also visible from the chart is that there is a big amount of people visiting our site and downloading “directly from the source” instead of justing using the deep link posted on some forum. Thanks for passing by!
Therefore, from a marketing point of view, two things become clear:

1. We need more DnB-related blogs and a higher connectivity to spread the word
2. DOA is a great catalyser, but burns at a very high rate, so watch the smaller forums, too

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the tune!

Tracklist:
01. Soul Socket Remix Feat. Eisblume
02. The Fork
03. Seduce
04. Hunter (Citrus Recordings 027)
05. Respond
06. The Brood
07. To Be A Boy (Citrus Recordings 027)
08. Your Game Feat. Eisblume (Destination Recordings)
09. Disarm (Template Recordings)
10. Open Borders Vip (Citrus Recordings)
11. D.n.a Vip (Template Recordings)
12. Pilot Installation

All Tracks written and produced by Rawtekk.

Download Rawtekk @ Hoch10 Liveset…

via Multiple Extase

“Good things take time.”

Undeniable. But time requires money, as soon as you start acting on a more professional level. There are times in your life when you have the freedom to “invest” time without having to think about that, like when being a student. And even then, there are times when you’re forced to step back, write your exams or whatever. Seems money is coming somewhere, almost magically. Of course it isn’t, but your daily costs – rent, food, loads of other fixed costs – are somewhat low, partly due to lowered taxes, but also because at that time your level of living often is lower. These are the times to build up skills you use later on in life.

The effort
Most of us are not in that position though, so we have to “find” the spare time to use for DnB business, be it as a promoter, label manager, dj or producer. The promoter has to manage communication with artists and supporters, the dj and the label manager will need to check and work on new material, which is created by the producer. (Interestingly, the abstract business picture of producer and consumer doesn’t fit too well in DnB, as we also have mediators (promoters) and a second, passive type of consumer, the party guest. The market theories therefore don’t fit well.)

The problem now is, that after learning the basic skills to act as a producer, you still need quite some time to put out a new tune and get a release on a label. For us, a typical release requires the following steps (estimated average values):

• Basic tune and arrangement: 12 – 18 hours
• Mixdown issues and fine-level adjustments: 3 – 6 hours
• Label issues, reconcilement, promotion, contract stuff: 3 – 6 hours

As you can easily imagine, this is “magic” time put in in addition to our normal jobs/commitments! We therefore prioritize it high enough to put out a tune every 4-8 weeks. Also notice, that there is an amount of stuff we throw away or put aside in early track development stages.

What is important here is that the times mentioned are based upon previous knowledge earned in the past and characterize a typical tune. Consequently, this is not a tune containing either especially innovative elements or collaboratively recorded vocal bits. Now you may see the difference between a Noisia and a Dillinja tune! Yeah, good things take time, but great things take ages! Therefore, an awesome tune may easily require 3 to 4 times the effort!
Interestingly, there is a rule (called the Pareto principle) stating that it is possible to get 80% of the maximal possible result by putting in only 20% of the necessary work. Vice versa, the required “price of perfection” grows exponentially!

The result
If you set this time efforts in relation to the money earned, this is more than a joke. In our case, we’re talking about none (hello, labels x and y!) to some hundreds of Euros. It’s obvious DnB labels don’t make much money either, so most of them consequently can’t really pay much. This is totally understood and all good. (There are some labels out there who on the other hand should be able to do so, but actually don’t – you may have heard the stories…)
In consequence, you have to dj to make at least any money with it. The releases here primarily serve the purpose of promotion. From that perspective, you may ask why not putting it out all free via the net? Well, labels not only handle promotion to have tracks be noticed in the vastness of crap put out every month, but also guarantee a certain style and degree of quality. The better the label you release on, the easier and more lucrative it is to be booked. Period.

Nevertheless, djing doesn’t mean making a fortune either. (Just think about travelling times!) Yes, there are some artists who are paid really good amounts (I bet Andy C isn’t doing too bad), but for the majority of djs, their fees are based on guest numbers, and these in turn are not through the roof in these times. Especially, if you’re running a cutting-edge style far from the mainstream. My rule thumb is that a gig gets you about as much money as a release.

But how many gigs are you able to play per month? Assuming one or two gigs and statistically half a release per months gets you enough to pay your rent and re-finance your DnB investments (vinyls, equipment, …), but not much more.

The option
Summing up these figures and getting back to the starting point: Basically, you won’t get rich. Instead, there are three ways of making a living being a DnB artist (and I haven’t even started to think about personal future, life after hanging around clubs, or having kids to feed):

1. Do DnB in your spare time. Have a fulltime job to pay your bills. Put out a record once in a while and dj not too often to avoid burning out in your primary job or losing all friends. Don’t rely on the money. Therefore feel free to be innovative or to put out many crap records. No responsability, but little chance of getting really big.
2. Do DnB as a part-time job. Rely on the money. Find a balance between innovation and reasonable release cycles. Find a job that guarantees time flexibility and some income. The optimal job is one which is based on your skills, like doing workshops, writing articles or building presets. Because it is only part-time, you won’t get too big a payment though. Try to fill that financial gap by the irrational joy to live your dream.
3. Throw away that well-paid job, focus on music. Music? Yes, DnB alone won’t in the long run get you enough to pay the rent. Try some more commercial genres as a backup. But then, isn’t this the same as #2?

I know people from all three categories. As long as we’re that far from the mainstream as we are now, only very few people will dare to pick option 3. A lot of “old heroes” do, but as pointed out in previous posts, most of them rely on the same formulas to guarantee sales. And these sales are decreasing over time. Anyway, as newcomers you don’t have that choice.
There is no perfect solution, instead your choice depends on complex factors like DnB skills, non-DnB education/job and desired standard of living. You decide.

The guys at Create Digital Music have put together a nice and conveniently categorized list of freeware items, mostly plugins. Have tried a couple of them myself in the past, and I have to say they totally rock!

Article link