wtf wrote:this music is sort of unique in that people who write the music typically produce themselves. That's not the case in many other kinds of music and because of that I think many newbie-type people approach it with a "I'm going to figure this out! ok, how do you do it?" attitude, because there is just so much to it that seems technical. It's easy to overlook the fact that making great tracks requires some musical input - something not everybody is a natural at. Besides, there is no way that you can be equally amazing at every aspect of this stuff. Maybe you're really tech savvy and you can arrange interesting sampled stuff in a sequencer, but you can't write a melody to save your life. Or maybe vice versa and computers/sequencers just baffle you. I think the difference between *writing* music and *producing* music doesn't get mentioned enough.
Many of these questions sound like they're asking about writing music (how can I write songs that sound like Gaiser?), but I think they are usually more about producing music (what sort of tools does Gaiser use?). I think it's totally valid to ask what tools your favorite producer uses. Why not? There are so many vsts, synths, etc out there. You've got to have some way of figuring out what to use.
On the MONEY with this comment. One of the most insightful things posted on this board. Yeah you can tell him the usual vague crap about how it's so much more satisfying to do it himself but he is NOT asking how to BE Gaiser, how to steal his sound. He wants to know if anyone here has any tips to open up avenues towards the sound he wants to achieve. Yeah Gaiser is great, very tight and impressive production wise, I think he lacks the soul I might want in my own music but I would still love to know more about how he creates his work. We've all gotta learn the technical stuff somewhere and surely that's one of the great things this board could provide: I can speak to some guy in Sweden or Germany or who knows where and he can say try X, then someone from Argentina or US can say try Y; then I can go and try both and create my own thing and I never asked the 'secret formula' to techno, only for advice from people who seem to know much more about something I'm interested in than me. Not a lot wrong with that in my opinion.
All I can glean about Gaiser's sound is that, as has been pointed out a lot, he seems to use microtonic or something very similar for much of his drum patterns and a little playing around with this software and it doesn't seem to hard to come up with a similar sound. But I think the punch and focus that his productions seem to have, why most seem to respect him, is related to a more musical knowledge of arrangement and this I can't claim to be an expert on. For example Seepage is full of rhythms that offset and effect each other, shifting time patterns within a larger structure which are difficult to program. My tip would be to really concentrate on how one element musically interacts and effects all the others in the track and create multiple strands of rhythm in that sense; I think this characteristic is clearly related to why Gaiser's tracks often lack a sense of induviduality overall, yet in their detail and sheer texture are some of the most clever and interesting programming that has been achieved in the genre.
