Nous n'avons pas perdu de temps. A peine l'album tant attendu de bent présenté dans le podcast que Niko Martens a bien voulu répondre avec une rapidité et une précision surprenante à toutes nos questions habituelles des kitchen notes. En route pour de passionantes explications sur la production d'une des meilleure sortie de ces derniers mois dans les domaines musicaux qui nous sont chers. Nostalgiques de l'école texane de la Dark Electro, le graal est à portée de clic.
We didn't waste time. The long awaited and desired album barely introduced in the podcast, Niko Marten has been keen enough to answer with a surprising quickness and precision to all our usual Kitchen Notes questions. Let's go for a captivating explanation session on the production of one of the best release of these last months in the scope of our cherished musical domains.Nostalgic for the Texan school of Dark-Electro, Graal is just one click away.
Gears and software
What gears/softwares did you use for Beat that Body ?
DAW: Ableton Live Suite
The album was created entirely “in the box.” I do have quite a bit of hardware synths around, but I haven’t really managed to integrate it into my workflow in a meaningful way so far. The thing is, modern emulations have become incredibly good and are much more flexible — beyond that, there are also many excellent sample-based VST instruments.
These days, you can convert almost anything, and more and more emulations even offer SysEx compatibility. There are also some great open-source projects built on original hardware firmware.
When it comes to mixing tools, the gap between software and hardware keeps getting smaller. Even compressors have improved a lot, with increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling nonlinear behavior. At this point, the differences are barely audible — especially in a full mix.
For “Renascence” I mainly used vintage hardware emulations — both modeled and sample-based. That includes tools like the emulations from Arturia, Korg Legacy, Roland Cloud, GForce, Falcon, as well as some freeware. I think the freeware Kawai K1 emulation, which also reads SysEx banks, is actually one of the most-used synths on the album.
Your favorite gear(s)/software(s) ?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m drawn to pretty much all emulations that sound very analog, authentic, and alive — anything with real character.The signature “bent” choir sounds you hear throughout Renascence were mostly done with the Triton Extreme, Emulator or the K1. The crystal-clear, liquid pluck sounds — for example in the chorus of At This Place — are usually a combination of the DX7 and the Casio CZ. In some cases, I also used the SQ80 from Arturia, mainly with SysEx banks from the ESQ-1.
A large portion of the bass sounds comes from the MiniMoog emulation by Universal Audio, as well as FM synths like the DX7 or the Yamaha SY-99.
I usually build my drum kits myself using Ableton’s Drum Rack.
Any evolution in your setup ?
Yes, my setup evolves quite a lot — but not in the sense of a fixed system that gradually expands. I usually start each project from scratch, building new chains for every track, including mix bus chains, depending entirely on what the song needs.
I’m very interested in audio tools in general and regularly check out what’s new. I test a lot of trial versions and, whenever something feels genuinely useful — especially if it adds a new dimension to my existing toolkit or pushes my sound forward — I’ll integrate it into my workflow.
Sound Design
Do you use/tweak presets ?
Once you dive deeper into synthesizers, you realize that most bands use presets — and that’s completely fine. For example, if you go through the patch libraries of the Emulator, Emax, ESQ-1, or Ensoniq VFX, you’ll stumble across quite a few sounds that appeared on major hits.
I use presets as well, but I always modify them in some way — either with the synth’s built-in options or through effects processing. I’ve never really counted, but on every track I tend to have long FX chains, sometimes pushing the projects close to the CPU limit.
For tweaking sounds, I especially like the effects from Soundtoys, Eventide, Universal Audio, and McDSP. I also love tape saturation and reverb — for example Phoenix, Taupe, or the UAD stuff in general. There are so many fantastic reverb plugins out there, but the ones I used the most on the album, and that remain my favorites, are from Strymon, Eventide, and Relab.
Do you design you own sound ? On which synth/plugin in particular ?
Yes, I design my own sounds — either by creating patches completely from scratch or by heavily reshaping existing sounds with long effect chains. In the end, the result often has very little to do with the original patch.
Some of my favorite tools for sound design are preamps, saturation, filters, distortion, creative delays, and convolution reverbs. Over the years I’ve built up a huge collection of my own impulse response libraries, which I use extensively.
A good example is the track Dogma, which is driven almost entirely by FX like the QuantX.
Any particular synth history ?
Many of the trademark sounds on the album actually come from very old 32-bit VSTs. Getting them to run was often a real challenge — the whole bridging process is pretty clunky and unstable at times.For example, Iridium Flare is built largely around synths that have completely disappeared from the radar today and only still exist as 32-bit plugins. I’ve always loved digging up forgotten software like that, because those old instruments often have a very unique character that’s hard to recreate with modern synths.
Writing/composing method
What would be your main writing/composing method ? Do you start classical rythm/bassline then arrange around it ? Do you already have structure in mind ? Do you improvise, record sessions then select ? ...
It’s very different from track to track. Sometimes I already have a clear idea in my head, other times I’m inspired by experiences or even by hearing something on the radio. Quite often, songs also emerge while I’m simply testing gear.
What’s usually consistent, though, is that the biggest part of a song happens during the very first session — most of the arrangement, structure, melodies, and ideas for vocals are already there. After the first evening, the demo is often around two or three minutes long and already feels quite complete.
After that, the tracks usually sit on my hard drive for months, sometimes even years, until I find the right way back into them and continue working on them.
Most of the time I start with bass or atmospheric layers rather than drums. Stonehenge is actually a good example of a track where I started with the drums first.
Producing/mixing method
Do you produce/mix in the box or do you use mainly external gears (effect/comp/eq...) ?
The plugins I use most are from Softube, UAD, Schwabe Digital, Metric Halo, Apogee, and Plugin Alliance. I also think the stuff from Acustica Audio is fantastic, and I really love the compressors from MixWave.
For mastering, I especially love the native Weiss tools, the Sontec EQ from Metric Halo, the Maselec emulations by Relab, and the plugins from Massenburg.
What is your most painful / enjoyable step in track production ? Sound design, arrangement, mixing, mastering ?
The biggest challenge with Renascence was that many of the songs and projects were very old, from a time when I basically had no real mixing skills or technical understanding yet. The workflow back then was sometimes pretty adventurous, and a lot of the tracks contain wildly improvised plugin chains that make me shake my head today.
Completely rebuilding everything from scratch was never really an option, because a lot of the character and vibe would have been lost in the process. At the same time, I didn’t want to go through every single track one by one and fix everything directly in the sessions — even if that probably would have been the “correct” approach from a traditional mixing perspective. It simply would have been far too much work.
So for the album, I ended up doing a lot of quick-and-dirty corrections on the stereo bus and mix bus instead. In some cases I used pretty drastic EQ moves just to bring the songs back into balance and make the mixes work as a whole.
The part I enjoy the most is definitely the magic and creativity of the very first ideas during the initial session — those moments when I’m completely in the flow, everything starts connecting naturally, and ideas slowly turn into actual songs.
The mixing stage is also a lot of fun, especially when working with disruptive tools that can suddenly push a song or sound onto a completely new level.
Niko's tips
Basically, it all comes down to the fundamentals of mixing. If you follow the basic rules, not much can really go wrong.Keep your projects clean and well organized, focus on proper balancing, and pay attention to gain staging, panning, sidechaining, and the core principles of bus processing. I also think it’s important to work with sends whenever possible — not only because it creates a more cohesive sound, but also because it helps save a lot of CPU power.
A personal bent production tip: in almost every project, I use plugins as send FX that emulate the degradation and artifacts of early digital audio/16 bit. It really helps to push the sound into a more analog-feeling, harsher, more retro and gritty territory — and at the same time it can actually make things feel more defined and focused.
As a default, I also always have a Vulture Culture-style saturation emulation on a send in every project. Especially for drums, it’s a great tool, because you can blend it in subtly or more aggressively depending on taste, and it instantly adds character and edge without destroying the original signal.
