.
.
SEB STEIMEL

Yannick Schütz and I decided to choose tracks from a time when we didn’t care about releases at all. We collected many of our influences coming from soul, dub, hiphop and electronica. Both tracks accrued in one of the days when we were sitting in my old room – I was sitting in front of the TV, watching science fiction B-movies from the 50s without sound, all the while Yannick was creating this great dub tune which fit perfectly to the pictures. After drifting off to those ascendancies, I started remixing his track all the while still having the pictures of this movie in my head.

Both tracks originated in a time when everyone was talking badly about mp3 sound quality (note that today mp3s are sold - no need for commenting on this fact...). We really liked the artifacts on the high frequencies you would get combined with the typical compression, so we decided to run them thru an mp3 converter before working on the wavefile. This was a major experiment and worked (in our opinion) quite well for these two tracks, especially because of this manufactured “pirated feeling”. However, we discarded this procedure shortly after we got our first outboard equipment and were able to enjoy the fortune of analogue sound processing!

Normally I prefer to work alone with music. Sometimes I need a sample which I like because of the groove or the melody. Then I start to alienate it. The rest creates itself. As I came from the Hiphop scene, I think all my productions are influenced by this fact.

Later on, when I work on the mixdown and mastering of my own tracks or of others, I become more or less conservative and work like the audio tracks are coming from a band. I think I can blame my studies as an audio engineer for this fact and I’m really glad to be able to separate these two aspects in working with music. When I get material for mastering purposes I try to talk to the artists and labels to find out what they're aiming for. I start out working on smaller adjustments, like EQ and compression. On the second day I listen to the unfinished master again and when I’m happy with it, I start to work on the limiting. I'm not a big fan of killing all the dynamics so I just use it slightly to get the track on a proper level.

Making music for me is something like a valve – most of the time i'm working against my feelings which are surrounding me the whole day so I write sunshine tracks in the winter and vice versa.

As both of the tracks are more than six years old now and because of the fact, that we did this mp3 experiment, I don't think that they're a good reference for my mastering works. If you're interested I recommend listening to the digital releases of Produkt Schallplatten.

yannick schutz - process part 118 (sofa so far (seb steimel rmx)) by modyfier