Ah, our famous first question: What do you do besides music?
F: I don’t know how exactly it’s possible, but I teach English. I do this three days a week at a secondary school in Goes. I also read comic books, consume lots of sugar, I like to complete collections, entertain friends, and I greatly enjoy simplifying complicated processes.
N: Over the years, I’ve essentially been converting my hobbies into work - so apart from making music for a living, I also create artwork and websites for mostly music-related projects. “Free” time is usually filled with watching movies, playing console games, reading books and going on bike rides.
What does your weekly schedule look like regarding the making of your music? Do you have fixed studio days, an inspiration day or a day especially for mastering?
F: I teach Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays. Teaching, regardless of how rewarding it’s said and supposed to be, drains me of all of my energy. This pretty much means I can’t get anything creative done on the days that I teach. I can try and sit behind my awesome pair of 22” monitors as long as I like but I usually end up playing pre-existing music really loud and thinking to myself how bad-ass it is.
F: I can, however, work on things that do not directly require any inspiration such as sampling, organizing samples, working on sounds, etc. I still get very little time for that during those days because I often have tests to grade. Sometimes my girlfriend even requires attention or makes me vacuum. It’s all very annoying. The days I do have off and those that are not spent recovering from gigs I try to work on the creative side of things. When nothing exciting seems to flow from me I work on drums, breakbeats and bass sounds. Unfortunately I also have tons of people that like to come by my house to hang out, so I often have weeks at a time where I don’t get to work on any music at all.
F: Mondays and Saturdays are my favorite days to work on music. I like to sleep in as late as possible and then crawl up to my attic to work on tracks. My best stuff is done without showers, food and drink. You figure it out.
F: Oh, and we try to do all mastering and mixing as we’re producing our tracks. Doing that stuff after the fact is not very conducive.
N: I read somewhere that the average (full-time) professional musician writes about 3 minutes of usable music a week. Usable music translates into something that is fully mixed and 100% ready for production. I think that I definitely meet that target amount - since I spend a lot of my week days working on tracks. This work consists of all the things Frank mentioned and more - you wouldn’t believe how much time you can spend simply working on one particular sound. As he said, we try to do a lot of the mastering and mixing in the production process. However, when you are finalizing a 12”, you usually have to make sure that all tracks “match” which requires more tweaking and altering.
Do you guys ever get tired of making music and performing on stage? How do you try to prevent this to happen?
F: Never. I do get something I know some other producers must suffer from as well, but they’ll probably never tell you, and that is that I get afraid to make music. I know I’ve made some really good tracks and I am often confronted with the fear that I’ll never be able to top some of my older tracks. It is an extremely annoying feeling.
N: The only reason that sometimes forces me to stop is physical tiredness - but no, I’ve never grown tired of making or performing music. I see it as a continuous learning process - and since I’m eager to learn more about something that actually interests me, I usually do not want to stop. The creation of music is very diverse - you can write melodies, create sounds, program beats, mix, master, sequence - so it’s not often that I actually feel like doing something else by preference.
N: There are times however when you don’t know what exactly to do with a particular track. Apart from the conscious desire to mix and match genres - since I really do not like being limited by unwritten rules - some combinations are a direct result from getting stuck.
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