We’ve uncovered a few long chats with Skrillex in our archive recently, including an interview from 2012 where he was aghast at having a whole album’s worth of material stolen. It’s hard to remember now, considering his stature as something of an electronic music deity, but Skrillex - aka Sonny Moore - was once an enthusiastic and eager young creative, keen for people to experience the amalgamation of sounds and styles he’d concocted in the box.
“I wouldn't call myself stubborn in an egotistical way but I do like the idea that in the past, what I do would not have been considered production - it would have been considered noise,” Skrillex told us in a 2011 interview, prior to the mainstream explosion of dubstep. “I like doing things in a very minimal, unconventional way as a personal way of saying, ‘Look, I made a career out of carefully and craft-fully, though unconventionally, making records on laptops and blown speakers’.”
In this production-focussed conversation, Skrillex explained to his approach for making beats drop with impact;
“The easiest trick I use is basically to make sure that whatever sample you're using, it's hitting at 200Hz. Look through a spectrum analyser and you'll see a little 'dunk', and it should sound like that. The beginning transient should look like a brick that kind of bubbles out into the notes, creating a big hit that dominates the whole spectral sphere of your music for that one second. The drum becomes the loudest element in your mix just for an instant.”
For that gnarly dubstep-distortion, Skrillex had some key favourite plugins…
“I really like iZotope Trash, which is a great plugin for distortion, as is Ohmicide, which I love. It's an absolutely crazy multiband distortion, compression, EQ and filter, which pretty much lets you do anything.”
He also told us how he found working in the box to be a struggle occasionally, if he got so locked-in that he forgot to label his work…
“It's only evil when I work so fast that I haven't properly labelled anything and my project files are all messy. To me it's always a joy to create music no matter what it takes to actually get there. The real evils are always whatever stops you from doing that - like if your CPU is spiking and you have to sit there and bounce all your MIDI to audio. Now that's annoying!”
