Recently I had the privilege of welcoming one of House and Techno’s superstars, Habischman, for a live Masterclass inside of FMM. We opened up 2 of his projects, including his latest release on Dubfire’s label SCI+TEC, to discuss his approach to creating music and how to get ahead in the industry. During the call a bunch of questions from the community were fired at him, so I thought I would share one of his answers this week. If you’re interested in knowing Habischmans’s ‘go to’ tools and plugins from his productions, you will not want to miss this!

Transcript

Doesn’t really change, it looks like I was wasting time his studio just recording all these ideas and I was like okay, they don’t really sound good. I’m just gonna stick to this one, yeah that’s that’s odd words but that’s a good thing you know you just you just have all these ideas later so you can just for example. Let’s see now I can just come back to this I didn’t use any of these, I just try to keep it simple. Yeah, sounds like chirping bird. 

It’s interesting that cuz it’s really clear to see it, at least to me and I’m sure is to the guys as well that we have this technique like even when you jump to a different section there, I can kind of imagine that maybe you could use that if you wanted to that could have perhaps been a part of the breakdown you could have just shot between some of these extra frequencies so I can see the power of the technique. 

Yeah you have the freedom you know you have as I said you have to all these sounds and you feel like okay maybe here you need to change for example if here you need to change just do a small cut, and then just put it here and then you can just use a different color and every time you want to use that you can just copy and paste somewhere else. 

Do you find sort of audio clicks and pops where you’re editing the waveforms like this? 

Ah, sometimes yeah I know what I do I just use a clip option and just cut them out just like this. I just do this for example if there’s a click and I try to use like a clear, clean sound and then rather than just using something that you need to put lots of effects, I’m really using this plugin why there’s a good name yeah, this Rhino the LP. It’s very cool so for example, you just put it on anything it makes it a bit dirty and then [Music]. It clicks it’s from this, it has hum you can just add hum [Music]. So basically it makes it more like a bit like analogue sounding rather than just super digital. So yeah for example you can just put it on, we can put it on anything or you can just put it on a bus channel and just use a send in return but I use this a lot on sounds that are too digital and I wanted to make it make them a bit warmer so for example in this [Music]. 

There are so many options ago and you just need to know what what you want your track to sound like you know there are like so many effects out there that you can use but if you just want to spend so much time in the studio adding effects on tracks and then you’re gonna end up doing nothing. If you think you’re like there’s something in your sound that’s missing or your sound is too digital or you just want to added a bit of warmth to it, there’s so many cool effects there was this effect I watched a video by Garth Guy Gerber,  they put out a VHS effect in the in reactor I guess and it has these kind of muddy kind of tape feeling to your productions and it makes it bit dirty and then yeah there’s so many effects out there. 

A big big fan of all kind of coloration type effect so this ties him really nicely. Actually with a question from Ryan so Ryan was saying awesome track lovely vibe. Looking at your last track it seemed that other than the hardware you’re using mostly stock Ableton effects. Do you have anything in particular VST wise you use or happy with the sound that you’re produced with those effects obviously you’ve got a lot of VSTs there but we saw in the last track it was many Ableton stuff. 

Have you got any there any other ones that are sort of particular favorites I guess, outside of Ableton and what makes you reach for them. 

Yeah as I said I love this one by this friend Clave Grande, I guess I’m pronouncing that right. It has dark has set LP, I use lots of waves plugins and then for creating different sounds and make them noisy I use this one there, the cassette one is very cool. For example if I put this on the kick drum, [Music], it makes it dirty so you mentioned us putting this on anything and it makes it like a bit distorted. For bass, this is good because some of the bass sounds are way too low and you cannot really hear anything, so instead of using the for example the saturator from Ableton you can use this one or any distortion effect I use, what else I use, too many plugins. I really don’t use too many plugins these are just something I installed way back and then it’s like you know you’re just wanting like oh, it looks cool and just want to use them, but there’s one effect that I’m gonna show you. It’s very in my latest production it’s nothing here but I’m gonna show you because I love you guys. 

Legend, thank you. 

It’s this effect by, it’s called Portal. This is a sick thing I’ve recently found out. It’s called Portal. So you can create like amazing things with this one like for example, I’m gonna put this in my drum [Music]. I can go crazy with this I love you can just make it attract with even with this just one plugin it’s so good and there’s  there’re like options like this and because I’m like cycling movies and stuff like that it’s like and then they’re like itch. They turn might drop into something weird. But it’s really good for vocals actually if you have vocals try these ones if you if you don’t want to use like really clean playing vocals just use Porto on anything and then wreak, resample everything for example put it on hi-hat, resample it and then put it in the drum rack rather than just put everything on top like that. That’s just the way I did it because you don’t have enough time so I can show you just put it on, for example one hi-hat. That is crazy. There’s basically I’m just doing nothing I’m just playing messing around this is doing everything for me.

Okay new toy that’s for sure. Oh okay, brilliant. 

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