Apple Logic
“It might sound weird, but we can’t get rid of Logic; we kind of cling to it. It’s true that it has a relatively bad sound engine, and the plug-ins have very old algorithms. But we like to work with Logic because its way of working is logical to us. It’s definitely time that Apple did some more development on it, though. Solution: German engineering!”
Native Instruments Reaktor
“We are not programmers, but it’s fun to work on ensembles or patches and to build in some nice ideas or pure nonsense. On the NI site there’s a huge library with thousands of patches and ensembles, and a lot of them are easy to use and great for sound creation. In our album Monkeytown we used the synth Razor, which Errorsmith built in Reaktor.”
Cycling74 Max/MSP
“Max/MSP is an object-oriented programming language. It sounds difficult and it is difficult. But you never stop learning! At the end of the ‘90s, some sunny boys and girls from California programmed a live looping tool. This tool is still our live tool now!
Our best friend Sascha Ring - aka Apparat - developed it with us in the early years of the new millennium. Back then we also used Cycling 74’s Pluggo plug-in in nearly every track. This was programmed in Max/MSP, too.”
Native Instruments Maschine
“Maschine is a very innovative hardware/ software combination. It’s possible to integrate Native Instruments’ entire library and other VST/AU plug-ins into the software. You can build beat patterns pretty quickly with Maschine - in the studio and live on stage. Our top tip: turn off quantisation!”
Sugar Bytes plug-ins
“We always have plug-ins from our Berlin buddies Sugar Bytes in our channel strips. They all have great names! We like Artillery, Wow, Effectrix, Consequence, Thesys, Vogue and Turnado (pictured above. We pulled Busdriver’s voice on new track Pretentious Friends through our sugar-sweet Sugar Bytes effect chain.”
Modeselektor’s new album Monkeytown is out now.
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