i was recently asked by my good friends at migrashun to do a podcast for them. although i saw this as a good opportunity to try and piece a mix together in ableton for the first time, i ended up using my trusty serato with vinyl control. doing podcasts with ableton just brings out the perfectionist in me in a bad way: rather than concentrating on the records, i worry about putting them together in the most perfect way possible, completely forgetting about the flow of the mix. too close to the edit, so to say.

well, not exactly new, but these all came out while i was in hibernation.

last week i finally got to meet suruba head honchos delmar and alvaro, and learned where the mysterious letters on my latest suruba x ep came from. i thought it was an exploration of the border between typography and abstract shapes, but it turned out to be much cooler than that.

if bruce dickinson – yes, the bruce dickinson – had been a dance producer, he no doubt would've asked for more kick drum. in a previous post, i detailed some of my techniques for getting kick drums, and now i'll share an operator kick drum patch with presets and a bit of explanation. because if bruce dickinson wants more kick drum, i should probably give him more kick drum!

suruba x, a sublabel of the spanish suruba label for which i recently did a remix, has released my new 'back to móstoles' ep. it features 2 tracks, and is in a sense a continuation of what i did before and a breaking away from it.

if you're tired of using the same old analog drums or south-american percussion samples, have a listen to what fm synthesis can do for your drum parts. long cherished by monolake aka robert henke, it left a big mark on the minimal techno genre. but it can do much more than just those high-pitched, eighth-note toms with tons of swing.

leeds based label 2pin records released my remix of d'tolio's track "extraopus" awhile ago. i have a feeling it got a bit lost due to the summer break, but i could be wrong. and nowadays, when most tracks get nicely added to an artist's beatport list, it can always get a second life when the artist gets some attention.

i recently bought arturia's prophet-v, a plugin suite containing emulations of both the sequential circuits prophet5 and prophet-vs. i mainly bought it for the virtual prophet-vs, but the software prophet5 is a nice bonus.

yesterday, my remix of 'the ride' by spektre feat. chelonis r. jones got released on the spanish suruba label. i'm in good company, as kreon, gorge and the label owners themselves did the other remixes.

for years i've been the not so proud owner of a korg se300 tape echo. it's hard to find any info on it, but people who own it, generally prefer it to the hallmark of tape delays, the famous 1973 roland re-201 space echo. my own se300 sounded pretty lame though, so i didn't understand what all the fuss was about. until i had it repaired last week.

after getting deep into the korg polysix emulation, i took some time out to give the korg ms20 emulation a good work out and create some presets for it. that the original is loved by many and has become a classic is quite surprising, considering that its sound isn't exactly pleasing. but what it lacks in beauty, it more than makes up for with character.

after doing presets for korg's polysix and sonic charge's synplant, i'm working on presets for korg's ms20 emulation. always eager to reflect upon what i do, i offer you some of my thoughts on the process of making synth presets.

i spend the best part of yesterday working on my web 2.0 credibility. sites like myspace and soundcloud are nice to keep your fans informed, but it's quite a drag to keep everything up to date everywhere all the time. ideally, you would just have to update one site and have the update automagically mirrored on all other sites. so that's why i tried to replace the default myspace music player with soundcloud's. while in theory this should be easy, it made me feel like a hacker. delivery pizza and all. but the result makes me proud.