Corroded Pulse on Swell

Moyens réduit pour efficacité plus qu'honorable, c'est le crédo de Corroded Pulse pour son premier album Swell, et le résultat est des plus encourangeant. Jakob nous décrit sa conception plutôt juste de l'EBM  dans ces Kitchen Notes.

Minimal means for more than honourable effectiveness, that's the principles for Corroded Pulse on this first release Swell, and the result is very promising. Jakob describes us his quite fair conception of EBM making in these Kitchen Notes.

 Greetings! This is Jakob from Corroded Pulse, and I just wanted to take a moment to express how humbling it is to have been invited to answer this questionnaire – I never, in a million years, expected my music to reach this far, let alone so early in my endeavors as a musician, so for those that are taking the time to read this; from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much.
Truth be told, all of this positive attention is very surprising to me. I never intended to get into music in any capacity. I’m not classically trained, I never paid attention in my music classes in school, and I never even cared about music until my very late teens. With that in mind, if I’m using any terminology incorrectly or anything like that, now you know why. I digress, though; let’s get into this thing!

 

Gears and software

The meat and potatoes of the Corroded Pulse studio are my laptop, FL Studio (all plugins edition), a microphone, and an audio interface. I couldn’t go so far as to say there’s been any evolution in my setup. If anything, it’s been a process of de-evolution! I say this because there was a MIDI controller involved in the very beginning, but it was accidentally left in my car for too long during the Arizona summer, so it no longer works. Truth be told, I actually never found much use for said controller to begin with, so it’s yet to be replaced (if it ever will).
 

Sound Design

With my lack of formal music knowledge in mind, this also means that I’m not savvy on synthesizers. Don’t get me wrong; synthesizers are cool as hell...I just don’t have a clue what everything on a given synthesizer actually does, and I don’t have the time or patience to sit down and learn, haha!
It’ll probably be of no surprise to anybody that I use presets pretty much exclusively. Granted, I try to tweak and bastardize them enough that I make them my own (which means I keep twisting knobs, pushing buttons, and adding effects until it sounds cool), but everything I do in terms of synths is based from presets. Whenever I start a track, I beeline straight to the Sytrus plugin, purely on the grounds that the default preset is exactly what I need for the basslines.

Writing/composing method

I’d like to start this with my personal philosophy on Electronic Body Music: when all of the superficial layers are peeled away in any given song, the foundation of a great EBM track ultimately boils down to a great bassline with a catchy beat. When any artist in the scene has secured those elements in a track, the rest of the song will gradually write itself.
Once in a while, I’ll come up with a beat or a synth line first, but most of the time, a Corroded Pulse song all begins with a bassline. Sometimes, I get a great bassline stuck in my head and rush to FL Studio to put it down. Other times, however, I’ll have a general idea of the overall structure and cadence of a song in mind, and I’ll put something down, but then I’ll play around with the bassline and keep doing so until I’ve got it catchy. The way I look at it; when I’m jamming and dancing to my own basslines as if it was somebody else’s music, that’s when I know I’ve got something worthwhile.

Producing/mixing method

All of Corroded Pulse’s music is mixed and produced at home within FL Studio. Mastering, however, is being taken care of by Eric Oehler (Klack, Null Device) at Submersible Studios – I desperately tried to learn how to master on my own, but I just couldn’t get the hang of it.
My absolute favorite part of track production is sampling. Firstly, I’m a huge cinephile, but music has taken so much of my free time that movies have unexpectedly taken a back seat in my life, so making the kind of music I do allows me to still keep in touch with the art of film that I deeply adore. And let me tell you; the satisfaction of not only finding a great sample, but finding out it fits in that one part of a song perfectly is absolutely unparalleled.
And my least favorite part is recording vocals. It’s cliché to say this, but I hate listening to the sound of my own voice pre-distortion, so vocal sessions become a form of torture.

Jakob's tips

This is hard for me to answer. I’m still very new to music-making, so I’ve still got a LOT to learn myself, but a couple of things I’d like to share with aspiring artists:

• As far as technical aspects go, mix quietly. I know it’s tempting to want to make it loud, but a quiet mix will give your song much more room to work with during the mastering process (big thanks to Eric Oehler for this tip).
• This next point pertains more to general creativity, but because it was the most important lesson I learned during ‘Swell’; always, ALWAYS stay busy. A part of why ‘Swell’ took so long to complete was because I would focus on one song at a time, hit a roadblock, and eventually (inevitably?) sit around waiting for creativity to spark. Finally, I said “Fuck it; I’m going to work on something else”, and the second I did that, the gears started turning again.

 

Contact info

Corroded Pulse can be found and contacted on the following:

FACEBOOK: Corroded Pulse
INSTAGRAM: @corroded_pulse
GMAIL: corrodedpulse@gmail.com 

For what it’s worth, I also DJ as DJ Sado_Naut, specializing in Industrial/EBM/Electro/etc.:
FACEBOOK: DJ Sado_Naut
INSTAGRAM: @djsado_naut
GMAIL: sadonaut242@gmail.com

Finally; for anybody interested, I’m planning a power electronics/harsh noise side project called Foremost Practitioner, so keep your eyes and ears peeled if that’s your kind of thing.
 
(While I keep an eye on all my inboxes regularly, contact me via Instagram for the quickest response)