Ring in the 2023 with Kaskade as he returns to San Francisco for his annual New Year’s Eve shows. Coming off a busy run of shows leading up to NYE, Kaskade played two sets in San Francisco to celebrate the new year. He started off the night at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, around 11:30 PM on New Year’s Eve, playing to a packed crowd of attendees before ringing in the new year with balloons and confetti. He played some crowd favorites like Escape and Disarm You, and also brought on John Summit for a fun B2B set.
After his show at Bill Graham, he played a special redux set at The Midway for a more intimate crowd of fans. This was a smaller show for a few hundred fans who had purchased presale tickets. He played from around 4 am to 6 am on New Year’s Day, and we at Magnetic think that there was no better way to start off 2023.
Omnisphere and Prophet.
I love Omnisphere, its very simple to use and has so many sounds to choose from! The depth of the synth is just incredible too. You basically can’t tell its not an analog Synth.
Prophet Sequential is a beast – it gave me the Polyphonies for Ephemeral that I was looking for very long!
That exact sound I had only in my head, but I couldn’t produce it with anything except with the Sequential. So when I found that preset I had to tweak it to get to the sound I really needed to complete my song.
Sometimes I just go to Splice for samples and other times it could be sample packs from Vengeance.
In this particular track it was a mixture of my Roland Drum Machine and Samples from Vengeance.
I chose this Drums to give me the overall warmth and depth I wanted for Ephemeral to go with my melancholic melodies.
Learn More About Splice Here
Most of the time it’s trial and error.
But for this track the lead sound was created with Prophet, I had to tweak a preset to the sound I wanted. It took me a while but I was happy I could finally find that sound I needed.
When I received the vocals I knew I needed something more deep to go with them. I love how the vocal and lead supplement each other.
I don’t really have any tricks. It’s all about feeling for me… not sure if this is a trick but I doubled the kick drum and pitched second sequence to really low so it has more low end.
That really works if you need some extra Frequencies down there – but watch out it can get very muddy quickly!
Learn more tricks for beefing up your kick drums here.
My Moog Sub 37 which forms the bass line and gives the track that warm analog groove. What I like to do with the Sub37 is put it into ‘init patch’ mode then usually just using a single oscillator I will play around with the ADSR and the Arpeggiator section until I find a groove I like.
Also In this because the Sub37 does not have any onboard FX, I ran the synth through Ableton and into a 1/8th dotted delay with some low-cut reverb.
Amazingly I recorded everything into audio in Ableton in one take, just one of those days where everything clicked!
Learn more about Moog’s iconic synth here.
For soft synths I have the ‘Push 2’ which makes everything much more hands-on and tactile with regards to automation.
For my hardware I don’t often record the automation via MIDI into the DAW, it’s too much hassle and never really works out that well as you are forever going back and fiddling with it. I tend to just record 4 or 5 takes to audio in Ableton and use the best one.
My general rule when I am messing around with the hardware synths is that I am always recording, so if I do something great by accident then I can go back and use it in the track somehow.
It depends on the track – I have a big library of about 2,000 different drum samples. I also have a folder of sampled drums from various tracks that I use as a ‘groove library’ where I can extract the groove and apply it to my custom drum rack in Ableton.
There are some great sample packs out there available for drum hits though, I can recommend ‘Keinemusik Werkzeug by David Mayer”
You can purchase this sample pack on Keinemusik’s website here.
The lead actually has 4 different layers in this track. But I will talk about the main layer of the lead. On that I used the analog wavetables from the Prophet 6 layered with some white noise. Fed those into Serum as I am pretty comfortable using the various modulation and automation options in there.
Then I added a Decapitator from SoundToys which gives the sound that grit. Then I added an Echoboy, 1/2 dotted delay in parallel. An imager after that as the sound was getting too wide for my tastes so I made it a bit more mono.
Then some sidechain compression to the kick, a glue compressor that I pushed pretty hard and finally some EQ cutting out the low to allow room for the bass.
Check Out More In-depth Guides On SoundToys’ Powerful Plugins Here
It’s a good question, it’s very hard to say when a track is finished and I kind of have to force myself to move on as I am a bit of a perfectionist by nature. I have a rule that if I am on a roll with a track I will stay up all night and make sure I arrange and finish it so it’s in a place where it’s close to sending off as a demo.
I also mix and master my tracks myself so I tend to get it into an acceptable format then I send it off to some trusted producer friends as well as mix engineers who usually give me feedback within a couple of days. I write all their feedback down, sit on it for a week and then have another crack at finishing it. That is usually the point where I feel comfortable that it is ready to send out.
I wanna give a little shout out to my friend Guido. He is an incredible mix engineer and a lot of what I have learned about mixing is from him. I will always send tracks to him first to check before I send anything out as he has an incredible ear and a fantastic listening space.
You can find him by searching for @catsandbeats on Instagram.
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