Ableton Live
When I was kid, I started out on Cubase and got all my info and tutorials from Computer Music! It took about a year to click, but then I went on to learn Pro Tools and now the band has all settled on Ableton. When we’re not in the studio, we can swap files so easily with Ableton - it’s been a godsend.
Arturia Jupiter 8V
I love soft synths, but if I’m being brutally honest, we spend a lot of time in the studio trying to get soft synths to sound like analogue synths - warping them, adding huge chorus effects and even sticking them through analogue preamps. All to get that little bit of extra warmth.
IK Multimedia CSR Hall Reverb
The wrong reverb can feel really, really cheesy, but there’s so much depth and space in the CSR - we’ve put it on a lot of different instruments and it always seems to make whatever it’s on sound so much cooler.
Waves Mercury Bundle
The thing about compressors, EQs and saturators - all those tools that turn an idea into a finished song - is that you’ve got to feel comfortable with them. If you’re always struggling to get it to do what it’s supposed to, you’ll start looking elsewhere. You never get that problem with Waves; so intuitive and immediate.
Rob Papen SubBoomBass
This gets used a lot, for the main bassline as well as the sub. We might occasionally add a hardware top bassline - something like the MS-20 or the Mopho - but we always end up filtering out the bottom end and letting the SubBoom do all the bass work.
