Welcome
Not much more than 24 hours after the attacks in Paris, the terrace at Miami's Club Space is defiantly rammed with party goers who have braved flooded avenues and long, rainy queues to welcome home their hero.
A few hours beforehand, a plane carrying globetrotting DJ Markus Schulz made it through the miserable weather that's plagued the city over the past few days in order to make his homecoming gig in the legendary venue. When he takes up his position behind a quartet of CDJ-2000NXSs, banners bearing his name go up in the crowd, and four powerful fog cannons flood the dancefloor with artificial smoke. It's 2am and we're just getting started.
Ever since the German-born Schulz topped the American side of the influential DJ Times poll in 2012, he has been hailed by what he refers to as the trance nation as their sovereign. Fans follow him to his gigs Grateful Dead stylee (in fact one club goer tonight holds up a bucket list of Schulz shows he's been to), and he regularly feeds their devotion with a steady stream of releases from the Coldharbour Recordings label, a weekly syndicated radio show, and a touring schedule that rivals most top tier Pop outfits.
We caught up with the man himself at his Miami studio the morning after the gig, where he talked us through some of the gear that forms the backbone of his setup.
For the full interview, pick up issue 300 of Future Music magazine.
Laptop
“I get inspired from shows like last night or by a major show like EDC. And when I get inspired, I can’t wait.
“I open up my laptop, whether I’m in a plane or at a business lounge and I start working off that inspiration. And I start accumulating drafts so when I get to a more focused situation I can start cleaning up those drafts and turning them into a proper arrangement. And then at the same time, when you’re working on stuff in the studio you can get excited and can’t wait to play that live.”
Synthesizers
“The Waldorf Microwave XT is an old classic. There’s a Nord Lead around here somewhere, the Novations are still here and I used to collect a lot of E-mu rack-mounted synths like the Orbit and Planet Phatt, but I haven’t used them in quite a while.”
Reverb plugins
“On the road I just use the native reverbs that are in Logic, but when you get to a place where there are really good speakers I’ll switch to the ArtsAcoustic because of all the ambient air it brings to the top-end.”
Apple Logic Pro 9
“Still on Logic 9 [laughs]. I can’t go to 10.
“For me, a DAW needs to be reactive. It should be an extension of your fingers. If you have to think, ‘Where’s this at?’ or, ‘Where’s that at?’, you become nerdy. There’s a time to nerd out and there’s a time just to get into the computer what’s in your head. That’s why I’ll just use a lot of native plugins while I’m creating, because I don’t want to get stuck on the nerding out part until I’m in the mood for that. Otherwise it can be never-ending.
“I know some of the most talented people, and they're always like, ‘Check this new plugin!’, but they never finish any tracks. Just from the City Series alone, I’ve had to come up with 12 tracks this year. Plus, I’m working on my next artist album and so far we have over 20 pieces there. So the last two years have been pretty heavy with writing. And that creation for me is more important than geeking out [on gear]. Usually when I’m stuck and have writer’s block is when I’ll go to the newer stuff and start experimenting.”
Lennardigital Sylenth1
“We contributed some banks to the new version of Sylenth that’s coming out, and I can’t wait for that.”
Tools for the road
“The one that I’ve noticed is that it’s going away from having a stationary computer. The computer might be there for tracking vocals, but everybody just brings their laptop.
“Especially for touring artists, everything happens in the laptop. And even if we’re in a big studio with a huge board, we wind up just saying ‘Do you have a mini-jack?’. And we’ve even been talking about doing that with this studio, where anyone can bring in their laptop, plug in and go! That’s the trend that I have been seeing.”
Reveal Sound Spire
“We also love [Reveal Sound’s] Spire. That’s probably the newest one that we fell in love with. The only problem with it is that when you’re working on the road it’s a hog and it kills your battery.”
Dada Life Sausage Fattener
“With the Space gig last night, the stage just goes dark and the first thing you hear is these pulses that are kind of just an alert sound. And that comes from the Massive synth with the Dada Life Sausage Fattener.”
Korg MS-20 mini
“I’m not much of a sound designer. I know what I want and know how to get to that on my laptop, but the MS-20 I love because of the unique sounds it has. But you really do have to take a day just to come up with something different.
“It winds up getting used a lot in social settings where someone will jump on it to jam something out. I used it this year for the City Series on Bayfront (Miami) and we also used it for Golden Gate (San Francisco) as the lead.”
For the full interview, pick up issue 300 of Future Music magazine.
