Prime Loops get the Lowdown with Baobinga!

Baobinga has been a fixture on the dance music scene for almost a decade now, releasing some of the most distinctive beats around under a whole range of names and side-projects. Over the years he's released dozens of singles and three albums, including one released as a 'pay what you want' venture last year, and another (as The Body Snatchers) which brought a host of US rappers together with UK breakbeat sounds. We caught up with him on the eve of his fourth album release 'Joint Ventures' on his own label 'Build', which sees him shifting the goalposts once again, with a selection of collaborations featuring the great and the good of the UK dubstep and bass music scenes.

So, your new album is almost entirely collaborations - was that your intention from the outset? To write a collaborative album?

Well, it goes back to the original idea of the label really. First it was going to be releasing tunes by me, as well as tunes by other people, but it just naturally became more focused on the stuff I was doing. And releasing collaborations as singles just seemed like a good way to open it up to other artists, while still keeping it focused. But it wasn't really planned like that, it just kind of happened that way - so then when I thought about building up a bigger project, an album on the same theme seemed to be a good way of going about it. So it just grew up naturally from the way the label had developed, I guess.

How did you go about setting up the collaborations?

Well, that's one of the great things about Bristol, there are so many producers around here that it's really easy to get things started. The label got off to a good start with the first couple of releases, they had remixes from Untold and Roska, and then I did a couple of collaborations with Ginz and Cosmin TRG, so I think that put the message out that I was up for collaborating and being serious with it. Then it was just a case of asking people! I had a list of people that I wanted to work with, and managed to hook up with pretty much all of them.

So, on the logistics side, I guess with the Bristol producers you could do the work at your studio?

Yeah, a lot of those were done at my studio, although not all of them - a couple were done up at Ginz's studio, some of the Hyetal bits were started at his and then finished at mine, the same with one of the Guido tracks. But people like Jack Sparrow - who I've still never met! - I sent him a beat, he stripped it back, added some stuff of his own. Then he had some kind of hard disk crash and sent me part of what he had, I worked on that - we basically swapped files back and forth over the internet. That was made easier by the fact that we both work in Logic though, so it was all compatible.

So how did it work when people had different DAWs to you?

Well, for the Randomer track, he was on Ableton, so we were bouncing stems as audio and sending those, which is quite a fun way to work; there's only so much you can edit and change. It imposes certain limitations which is quite an interesting challenge. It's a bit like that release on Svetlana Industries last year, Teebs and Jackhigh I think it was, where they just sent a two track WAV file back and forth, and just layered stuff onto it.

What did you bounce? Full tracks, or individual drums and stuff?

With the Randomer one, I sent the drums separately; kicks, snares, bass, and the synths on separate layers, to try and keep it as flexible as possible.

So how did you start tracks? Was it generally one person coming up with an idea and then taking it from there?

It changed from track to track really. With the Hyetal stuff, we'd generally start it together, both be in the studio with a blank page, and just start jamming out ideas. With the a few tracks, I already had a rough beat going already, which I could send off, sometimes we'd build on it, although Jack Sparrow pulled the beat completely apart. One of the Guido tracks was one of his ideas that he had got stuck with. With the XXXY tune, I already had a fair bit of it done and I thought it'd be really good to get him involved and see where it went - and it ended up quite different to what I expected.

Do you see your work as being sample-heavy? Do you use samples a lot?

Well, I don't know about "sample heavy" - to me that suggests someone like DJ Premier or whoever, taking a hookline out of an old funk or soul tune, and using that as a basis to hang the rest of the track around or something. And I don't really do that. But I do use a lot of samples in my work, drums, single hits, little vocal chops, stuff like that.

Your tracks generally tend towards being very percussive - is that usually a starting point for your stuff? The drum track?

Yeah it is - I do normally start with the drums, but it's good to try and get away from that sometimes too. If you're not careful you can end up with such an interesting and busy drum track that there's no room for anything else! So I do try to avoid it sometimes, like with Make Me Feel, I just threw some placeholder drums down and then spent a long time working on that big synth riff. I think that once you know what you're doing, production-wise, it can be easy to slip into a routine, so it's good to try new things to jolt yourself creatively. So that's another good argument for doing collaborations, working with vocalists, and so on. But yeah, I still do start with the drums most of the time.

Ok then, so you sit down and start writing a drum beat - how do you go about it?

Well, I usually work in audio and I've built up a load of samples over the years, just from all the tracks I've done, so generally I'll have a sift through some samples, find something that sounds decent and go from there. But sometimes I'll take a percussive loop off an old album or something like that. I do like working in audio though, you can drop stuff straight into the arrangement, move it around, pull it off the grid, see clearly where all the transients are, it feels quite immediate. But some people can get just as good results out of software samplers - it's more about what you're aiming at, rather than how you go about it!

Do you use sample packs at all?

Yeah, I've got a few. I generally go for the more basic stuff though - acoustic drums, drum machine stuff, useful tools. I think they can be really useful if, say, you've sampled a break and want to toughen it up with a bigger kick, or some brighter hihats, that you can just layer in and engineer them so they complement it. But I try to avoid using them for the main hooks in my tracks - I wouldn't want people to recognise them!

How important do you think it is to have good engineering on your tracks, and technically good production?

I think it's getting less important. To go back to sample packs for a second, there are so many out there now that sound so good - they're full of interesting, well produced sounds, and if you just put them all together they'll sound bright and tough and they'll bang in the club. Ten years ago it was pretty hard to make something bang in the club, now you just have to buy a decent sample pack - so it's cool that production standards have come on, but you need something else if you're going to stand out and be distinctive. So I think it's starting to be more important that you create some kind of aesthetic identity, even if that's not as well produced. It's something that I think Hyetal has done really well - his tunes are covered in hiss and distortion and have the treble rolled off things, but it's a coherent world of 1980s references, retro visions of the future and whatnot. And it's very distinctive. You hear it too in tracks by '40', who produces for Drake - his stuff sounds quite lo-fi, dreamy, a bit woozy, but it's really interesting.

So, just to come back around to the label and the album to finish, it seems like lots of producers are now starting their own labels, often to release their own tunes. Presumably it helps them make a bit more cash out of the industry these days - do you think that's something we'll be seeing more of?

Yeah I think so. I think there will still be a few flagship labels who release stuff by everyone and do well, but these days sales are still declining, so if you're going to try and make money from something, it makes sense to try and keep a bit more of it if possible. I know some people think recorded music should be free, but we all still have to eat and pay for our software and sample packs! There will always be labels that release anyone, and a release on them would be a big thing, like R&S, or Hessle, but I think the amount of those is shrinking. Also, doing a label is a lot of work for very little reward, it's tough. And no-one cares about your stuff like you do yourself.

Has it worked out like you expected?

Well, as I mentioned, I had originally thought I would release all kinds of artists, but as it turned out I'm not sure I've got the best ear for A&R! I tend to pass over tunes that are good and badly produced, and if I find a really good tune I'm just annoyed that I didn't write it myself. So I think it's best if I leave that stuff to others...

Is it as much work as you thought it would be?

Well, on the logistics side, it's a bit less - I'm lucky in that I have a management company handling the actual label management side of it, so they speak to the distributors and arrange the manufacturing and so on. But the marketing side of things, that's been a lot more work than I expected. I've always held this slightly romantic view that if you just put good music out there, it will do well and people will appreciate it. But these days there's just so much music around that you really have to work hard to bring it to people's attention. So that's been much more work than I expected. But the rest of it, I've really enjoyed - it was a lot of fun deciding on the album artwork for instance, and seeing the album take shape was really exciting too.

Music Methodology!

Do you find it impossible to finish off a track, and spend ages tweaking all the little details? Or perhaps zap through a beat in an afternoon, only to wonder later on if it couldn't use a little more interest? Then join us as we look at two different approaches to writing tracks, which may just help you find a different style...

There's always an ongoing discussion in music about how long it takes to write a track; put a group of producers in a room and you can be sure that they'll eventually come round to this. Four hours? Four days? Four weeks? Answers will span the whole spectrum, and while there's not really a right or wrong, it is worth considering if you sometimes feel you haven't found your rhythm.

Artists such as Skream and Zed Bias are famous for writing their tracks very quickly - both are quite capable of writing four or five tracks in a single day. While this level of productivity can make other producers envious, it's worth remembering how many they release - an awful lot less than 25 tracks a week! It's clear, therefore, that the vast majority of their tracks do not see the light of day.

Conversely, other artists take much longer; Peverelist for instance has spoken in interviews of how he can spend anything up to a month working on a single track.

What's happening here are basically two different means to the same end. Those who turn out tracks by the dozen are essentially coming up with an idea, finding a way to run it over the course of 6 minutes, making sure it sounds roughly right and then moving on to the next one. The ideas are not overly developed - there isn't time for that - but just presented in a raw form. Some of them might not be amazing, but that's ok, because one of the next few might be the hit - an idea so good that it just works on its own, looped up.

The opposite end of the scale involves starting with an idea, which may or may not be amazing, but then working on it and shaping it until it finally becomes a good track. This can require plenty of changes and a willingness to recognise when something isn't working - if you need to scrap a bassline for instance, even though it's been in there since the start.

The upshot of both of these methods, of course, is broadly the same; you spend a long time writing music in order to come up with a good track. But if you sometimes find yourself stuck in a rut with your tune writing, it's often worth trying a different tack to see if it doesn't give you a fresh way of looking at things.

So if you normally spend forever tweaking and changing your tracks, then set yourself a challenge - try and write a tune in, say, 5 hours or so. To do this, you need to forget about messing around with the details and concentrate on the big stuff; the drums, the bass, and the main hook, be it a sample or a melody. There's no point in spending 20 minutes EQ'ing a reverb tail if your drums don't cut it. Do that at the end, if at all! With any luck, once you've got a strong basis for a track down, you might realise that the reverb tail isn't as important as you once thought.

If on the other hand you start a new track every evening, then it's maybe time to slow it down a bit, and work on something until it's fully ready. When working like this, there will be plenty of ideas and sketches that don't make it into the final arrangement, and sometimes dead ends where you scrap a whole big chunk of the tune and start over. To do this, you need to use one of the hardest skills to acquire in music - that of listening to your work critically and objectively. You need to be able to step outside the 'creating' bubble for a moment, and instead of thinking "do I like this lead/breakdown/bass?" consider "does it do what it needs to do?".

One good way of getting into this mindset is to get a friend round and play them the beat - if you find yourself apologising for the track, or saying things like "wait for the next part, it's great", then you know you need to go back in. And before you try to argue that you'd get bored working on a track for so long, remember that if you can't listen to your eight-bar loop for three days solid, then it probably isn't good enough! So at this point you need to be ruthless; cut out the bits that don't quite work and try again. It will be possible to create a good finished article, so long as you have the discipline to make it work.

So, there are two basic ideas for writing – keep to the bare bones of an idea, finish it quickly and let it be seen in a basic form, or spend time working and developing it until it's as good as it can be. Both sides have their disciples, and both can be equally rewarding - so maybe it's time to switch up your workflow, and try a new angle on production!

Get the Gig!

Playing gigs, whether DJ or live sets, can be one of the best ways to get your sound out there, and even make a little money from what you're doing. But it's one thing to say "play more shows", and quite another to actually get the bookings! So how should you go about it? Let's consider the options...

Right now there is something of a surfeit of DJs out there. Everyone wants the gigs, and there are only a certain number of clubs and weekend nights to go around. So you have to work that bit harder to make sure they go to you!

The classic way of guaranteeing yourself a set is to start up a night. It sounds so simple. Book a venue, get a crew together, get some other DJs involved, get promoting. It is simple - but it's also a huge amount of work, and even financial risk. You need posters, flyers, online promotion, lots of friends, cash upfront and plenty of time. You also need to make sure it's a really good night; you can't be half hearted about it. The first time (or two) your friends will all come down to show support - but after that you need to be bringing in new people each time. Not easy!

A lower-stress option, therefore, is to get booked for an existing night. Now this is a tougher prospect; as we know, there are always plenty of DJs willing to play for a few beers and a taxi home. So you have to put yourself in the position of the promoter - who would they want to book? First, they'll want someone who can bring a bit of a crowd with them. If you can bring ten or fifteen friends, then this will make the promoter more money - and promoters like money.

Also, you can help out with a spot of promotion; if you're at college, offer to put up posters and flyers in the student common room or bar, or offer to get hyping on any forums and online communities you're involved with. The more useful you can make yourself to the clubnight, the more they'll want you to be involved.

Another key point, is that they'll want someone who is versatile. Put aside for now that dream of smashing the main room at 2AM - that's what the headliner is being paid handsomely for. What a promoter needs is someone who can revive a flagging dancefloor at the end of a long night, or someone who can entice sober clubbers onto the floor with a warm-up set at 10PM. This requires a varied music collection, and someone who won't always try to drop the latest bangers at all times!

This leads on to the issue of the demo mix. You should, of course, be making sure it's easily accessible, (use a streaming service like Soundcloud, so people don't have to wait 10 minutes to download it from MegaRapidSend) but you need to think carefully about the content too. As mentioned, you're unlikely to be playing the main room at peak time (not yet, anyway) so your mix needs to reflect that. Show that you can build a set, that you can make some clever blends, throw a couple of classics in there, the odd curveball - demonstrate that you have great taste in music, and a depth to your selection. No promoter wants to hear the Beatport top 10 mixed together, and no online fan wants to hear a bedroom DJ mashing the latest dubstep bangers together - they can download a mix by Skream for that.

That's right - online fans. Once you've got your mix online, hit up some blogs and ask if they wouldn't mind featuring your mix. Be polite, include a tracklist, tell them what it's all about, even offer it exclusively to a blog. This isn't so much to generate fans for yourself, but more to show promoters that you've been working hard to get publicity for your sound and your DJ skills. It will demonstrate that you can pitch in and help make their night a success.

When talking about club performances, in 2011 it's important to think about your hardware setup too. Just as you should try to be interesting and different with your selections, the concept of mixing one CD into the next is pretty standard in this age of controllers, samplers, FX boxes, laptops, and so on. A live set is often more interesting for a crowd to watch (not always though; peering at a laptop screen for an hour is no-one's idea of fun) and gives the promoter something else to hype in their press releases and online promotion. And again, if you're doing something that no-one else in your town is doing, it will make you stand out from the crowd.

We've discussed what you should be doing to make yourself more attractive to promoters - but how will they know who you are in the first place? It's that old chestnut, networking. The necessary evil that permeates the whole music industry. You need to make yourself known to the people in your scene, which means you have to get down to all the club nights you might want to play at; partly to show support, but also to meet the protagonists. Introduce yourself, get chatting, let them know you'd like to get involved. Hang out at the local record shop and chat to the staff and customers. Get yourself invited to house parties, bring your tunes down, go to the smaller bar nights. It's actually a lot of work in itself, and often involves going out on a Wednesday just to show face, when you'd much rather stay in - but if people don't know you, then they can't book you. So it's important!

It's a lot of work - but its all worth it when you're finally on stage dropping that track you've been itching to play for weeks! So get your demo together, think about what you can contribute to a successful night, and head out into the world to meet some new folks...

Finding the Sweet Spot!

How's your home studio setup looking? Are you one of the many who has their speakers piled up on some boxes or shelves, books and ashtrays on top of them, and everything crammed into the corner? If so, it might be affecting your mixdowns. So lets run through a couple of the basics on how and where to set up your room for the best sound!

The first, and probably most important issue, is where you have your speakers. This takes two parts - where they are in the room, and where they are in relation to your sitting position. It can sometimes be difficult to move your speakers too much, as you might need to move your whole desk and kit too, but it's worth trying, as it can make a world of difference.

We'll try not to get too heavily into acoustics in here, but you need to understand the idea of "room modes". These are basically resonant frequencies, which in simple terms means that some frequencies sound louder than others, while others can be cancelled out. It's mainly noticeable in sub bass and frequencies up to around 250Hz, and it happens when the wavelength of a sound is an exact multiple of one of the dimensions of your room. The thing with room modes, however, is that the effects vary depending on the placement of the speaker and the listener. Try it - play some bassy music and walk around your room, and see how the bass gets louder and quieter. You'll probably find it's loudest near walls and in the corners.

This works the same if you move the speakers, too. So the primary thing is to avoid putting your monitors in a corner, or too close to the walls, as this will exaggerate those particular frequencies that your room already emphasises. Pull them in towards the centre and it will already sound more balanced. You also need to have the speakers at roughly head-height (when sitting down!), and in the classic "equilateral triangle" arrangement - so that your head and the two speakers form a triangle, to give the best impression of stereo spread, and to avoid phasing issues.

Phasing can cause all sorts of complications, and it goes pretty deep, but the basic idea is that your speakers throw out sound in all directions, which bounces off the walls and the ceiling, sometimes combining to make things louder, sometimes cancelling out. In general, when things are regular, you get the biggest effects - if your speakers are exactly halfway between two surfaces, for instance (or worse, if two dimensions of your room are the same, which also goes for room modes!). So it's good to try and have your speakers off-centre, and even make sure they're not halfway between the floor and the ceiling, too.

It's also common to try and place the speakers along the longest wall of the room – as this will keep side-wall reflections to a minimum, and thus won't interfere too much with your stereo image.

There are plenty of other issues caused by reflections and phasing though, and some of them aren't immediately obvious. For instance, if you have your speakers on a desk or table, then there can often be a flat space of hard wood right in front of them. This will reflect sound back up off the table towards you, which will make things sound harsher and more full of high frequencies. If possible, therefore, you should have your monitors on dedicated stands – which will also remove the likelihood of your desk resonating and adding to a boomy sound.

Hard walls can cause similar issues; not only can reflections be harsh and trebly, but they can also cause a "ring" (basically a rapid and high frequency echo). The classic way to test for this is simply to clap your hands and see how the sound dies away. If it rings noticeably, you'll probably need to do something about it. The good news is, that many rooms are set up to avoid this already - if you work out of a bedroom, then the curtains, carpets and bed will absorb plenty of high frequency sound already. If you're in a box-room or similar, then make sure there's a carpet down, at least. A sofa in the corner will help, and after that, you can start thinking about acoustic foam (the modern version of egg-boxes!). Try placing this absorbent stuff behind the speakers, on the ceiling above, perhaps to the left and right of your sitting position, and on any particularly reflective surfaces (painted brickwork is a killer, for instance).

So, how do you know when you've got all this set up properly? Start by making a test on your DAW - get a sine wave, and just make it play up the semitones from (say) C1. Listen out for any notes that are louder than others, or any that are much quieter. If there are dramatic differences, try tweaking your speaker position again. Once you've done this, listen to some commercially recorded music and see if it sounds balanced, the stereo image sounds good, and so on.

It is never really possible to arrange a totally perfect monitoring environment, but by taking some of these factors into account, it's certainly feasible to create a good, balanced setup, that will get you mixing down effectively. And if your current setup falls foul of a room mode, with perhaps a resonant spike at 90Hz or a complete hole at 150Hz, adjusting your monitoring in this way will be the quickest and cheapest improvement to your mixdowns you could ever make! So get out that tape measure, set yourself up some test tones, and see if you can't bring a little bit more of that pro studio vibe into your bedroom or studio room...

Going It Alone!

Over the last five years, the internet has brought about some of the biggest changes in the history of recorded music. Worldwide distribution at the press of a button, instant communication with fans, a world of music at your fingertips. So does that mean the record label is dead? Why not self-release your tracks and stop these middlemen taking a share of your cash? Let's take a look at the pro's and cons...

First, we'll just take a step back for a moment and consider what the landscape was like just a few years back; to get a release, you'd need to get your track signed to a label. That label (or their distributor) would stump up a thousand or two in order to press up vinyl, cover mastering and marketing costs (back in the days when sending the track to the big name DJs meant hundreds in postage and giving away all that precious stock), payments for mechanical royalties and all the rest of it. It was tough for an individual to get involved.

Now of course, it's very different. Put your tune on Soundcloud and the world can hear it; put it on MegaRapidUpload and they can download it; get yourself a paypal account and sign up with Bandcamp, Topspin, or Reverbnation and you can sell your music - just like a 'real' label! Only, this time, you don't pay 50% to the label, and if you're with the likes of Bandcamp, you don't even pay a distributor - just the retailers cut of around 15% (and a smaller cut to paypal).

That sums up several of the 'pro' arguments right there - the potential to earn very much more money for the same amount of sales. But there are more. You also get complete creative control; not just over the music, so you can release whatever you like without someone worrying whether it's enough of a 'hit', but also the artwork and design. You can write your own press-release, to make sure the music is presented as you wish. You don't have to fit in around release schedules, or wait for distributors. For the control freaks, it's a dream come true!

Sounds great, doesn't it. The irony is, however, that the same circumstances that have enabled this revolution - (the internet and new digital technology) have also made it very difficult. Now that everyone can get their stuff out there on a global scale, everyone is doing just that. The amount of small new labels and independent artists out there is multiplying rapidly; so for an artist it's hard to get your voice heard, while fans struggle to find music they like among the deluge.

And this is where we remember some of the ancillary benefits of record labels. They have spent months or years building up a profile and pushing out tunes to fans - they already have a fanbase, and your release will be picked up by these guys straight away. And let's not forget the flipside of control freakery; it's a lot of work! It takes time to arrange artwork, mastering, release dates, and get out doing promo for your release. Some people would be better off just handling the music, and letting others with experience take care of some of this.

PR is another big issue. You need it more than ever now, since there's so much competition, and it covers more ground than previously. These days you need to keep your social networks up to date and engaged, you need to be hitting up the blogs, forums, DJs, internet radio crews and more. And that's just on top of the old stuff - it's just as important to get your tracks to FM radio, magazine reviewers etc as ever. Many labels will have built up these contacts and networks already - and starting from scratch, to find the relevant people, get their details and (most importantly) get them to actually listen to you; it's a daunting task. This author can tell you, from bitter experience, that to start from zero and build a mailing list of reviewers, dozens of forums, hundreds of blogs, and hundreds more DJs - it's an awesome amount of work. And a lot of artistic types will find that it's piteously dull work, too.

It's perfectly possible to pay a PR company to do the work for you, however. You'll need to invest a few hundred up front, which a label might otherwise do, but this may free your time to get on with more important things.

Something else you need to be very careful about - more than normal in fact - is quality control. By skipping out a label, and their A&R process, you can release anything you like. But this also means you can be suckered into releasing something that's not really up to standard, just for the convenience. And that won't help your profile one bit. So if you've been sending your tracks out to labels with no luck, perhaps consider that they could use a touch more work before release. And if you haven't, then remember to get plenty of feedback from friends and DJs first, to be sure you're really putting a quality product into the world. In this age of plenty, it's only the seriously good that stands out!

So, to recap - and once again, this is a subject that could merit a whole book, but we're trying to be concise here - self-releasing your beats offers a very direct way into the industry, and not only that, it enables you to make more money with less sales. On the other hand, it would be more money for a lot more work. Are you ready? Then put on your entrepeneur's hat and let's go...