Welcome
A regular fixture in the Beatport charts, Dutch house/techno DJ and producer Joris Voorn has a couple of albums and a slew of remixes to his name, and has also set up Rejected, his own record label. Future Music recently headed over to Amsterdam and climbed the steps to his loft-based studio.
Studio overview
When asked to explain his studio philosophy, Voorn replies: “I do love the real instrument part of having hardware, even just the aura of having these bits of equipment around me just makes me feel like I’m in a real studio. Having the opportunity to put signals from Ableton [Live] through nice bits of hardware and generating new sounds this way is really nice.”
Roland TR-909
“When I started, techno was still pretty big, so I decided that I needed to have a 909,” says Joris. “I bought the 808 as well, but the 909 has a much tougher sound on the floor. I don’t use it much now - apart from the odd sample here and there.” You’ll also note that sitting on top of the drum machine is another classic Roland box - a TB-303.
Outboard
Joris has a small but significant stack of outboard gear - he describes the Zoom 9150 delay (third from top) as being “really simple, but very nice to use”. Then there’s the Lexicon MPX1 reverb: “I bought this a while ago; again it was used on the track MPX309 - hence the reason it’s called MPX309. I haven’t used it at all really after that but it being on that record meant that it paid for itself.”
Finally, Joris has TL Audio’s C-1 (bottom): “I used to use this as a master bus compressor, but I try to keep the mixes much more open now and don’t really need this sort of compression on the master channel.”
Computer and monitors
Unsurprisingly, there’s a computer at the heart of Joris’s setup - a Mac running Logic (favourite plug-ins include Omnisphere, Sylenth1 and Battery) - while monitoring is taken care of by a pair of Genelec 1031a speakers. “They’re really crisp and clear but with enough of a clubby sound for me to hear what the tracks will sound like on the floor.”
