In Pictures: Tocadisco's Cologne studio

Best known for his remix of The Egg’s Walking Away (think dancing car), Tocadisco - AKA Roman Boër - has become something of a go-to man when an artist needs a dancefloor-friendly reworking of one of their tracks. Future Music recently caught him at work in his Cologne facility, where he showed them the gear behind the music.

Roman is a heavy software user, and so the Mac Pro is arguably the centrepiece of his studio. “I’m running an older version of Logic on this machine because I’m not fully convinced by Logic 8 yet [version 9 has since been released], although I am using the new version on my laptop.”

The MIDI controller in the Tocadisco studio is nothing too flash – just a Korg microKontrol – and Roman admits that even that doesn’t get pushed to its limits. “I bought this because it’s small but I never really use any of the controls, just the keys,” he says.

The MS-20 is another Korg piece, but Roman doesn’t have any great hankering for other vintage analogue hardware. “I’d be interested in some of the original Moog synths but the stability and reliability of the old gear puts me off,” he explains. Boër is more enthusiastic when it comes to discussing Lennardigital’s Sylenth1: “an amazing synth where every preset just sounds like a starting point for a track,” is the verdict.

Roman may be known as an electronic musician, but his background is more ‘traditional’. “When I was ten years old my dad finally got sick of me banging on the kitchen pots and got me a tutor to learn the drums,” he recalls. “I learnt how to read drum score and eventually had a whole drum kit in my parents’ cellar. I guess then I started playing in bands doing covers of Guns N’ Roses and so on. During rehearsals the band would all swap instruments and mess around and this is how I learnt how to play guitar and then eventually a bit of piano.”

Boër frequently works with singers, which is why he has this small stack of outboard gear. “If I want to record vocals I have this section with an Avalon mic pre and SPL mic pre. These work very well with my Neumann and Brauner microphones.”

Monitoring is taken care of by a pair of Genelec 8040As. “These are great monitors and because I have a room within a room in my new house I can keep them fairly loud without disturbing my wife late at night,” says Roman.