The melodic techno that Mathame has built its brand from thrives off of simple and often repetitious melodies played by synths with dense timbres and intricate modulations.
And while software can get you close to the results this Italian-brother duo has seen over the years, nothing can compare to the simple complexity that hardware like the Arturia Polybrute brings.
It was the synth they most commonly reached for while producing their latest single.
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Stream Mathame’s Latest Single Below
Listening to the duo’s latest single, you understand what they mean in the following interview by the phrase ‘simple complexity.’ The track masterfully leaves what is necessary, giving the vocal all the more space to shine through.
The result is an infectious groove that gets locked in your head and never leaves.
And while Mathame keeps a few of their secrets on what tools were needed to make the track come together, it’s evident how influential the Arturia Polybrute was in the creation of this song, which makes me all the more excited to check out how the duo used the hardware synth to craft such a phenomenal track.
What makes the Arturia Polybrute your favorite tool for producing music?
In the gigantic world of hardware synthesizers, it’s not easy to untangle and find the right sound, and in a touring life like ours, speed of execution is what we’re looking for.
When we are in the studio, finding the right sound at the right time often triggers that magic that leads to the idea of the piece, a moment that only producers can understand.
That’s why we chose Polybrute: it allows us to quickly get to the sounds we have in our heads.
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Which parameters on the Arturia Polybrute are your favorite to modulate to create complex synth patches fast?
Because we are heavy users of Max For Live, we often use our MIDI patches by automatically routing them to Polybrute sounds, allowing us to arrive with the matrix built-in system at a “simple complexity” and timbral quality that no software can achieve with the same amount of process calculations.
We use a few custom-made Max4Live plugins, which we keep secret but are essential to our own workflow while using the Polybrute.
When do you most often reach for your Arturia Polybrute compared to other studio tools?
We wrote for our album more or less almost every time. For example, all the singles you will hear this year have received special treatment from Mr. brute.
For example, it was the lead in “Come For You” which you can hear since the first drop at 1:03
Which plugins are your favorite for processing sounds from the Arturia Polybrute?
Apart from what I said before from our Max For Live patches, which are not really plugins, for our album, we processed almost everything with two elements: in first place equal the Fabfilter suite and Izotope Rx with Ozone, monstrous both for precision, transparency, accuracy, and quality and were indispensable in treating the most difficult parts; they have no equal.
Special mentions are two:
- The Plugin Alliance suite, especially for the legendary Maag soft synth and the incredible unfiltered sounds.
- The Soundtoys suite is ubiquitous throughout our productions.
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Tell me about a feature of the Arturia Polybrute that you wish you had started using sooner in your career.
A lot of times, I wished we had Polybrute back in the days of “Nothing Around Us,” for example, where we had something like 70 arrangements between timbre research and mix, and every one of them was different because we were always dissatisfied with the software timbre palette we had.
If you go and dredge up the videos from that summer, from one set to another, you will hear huge differences. Today, we would have a few fewer white hairs. We have always been great software advocates, but hardware analog polyphony stands up to all kinds of blind tests, try it to believe it.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
