The Joy of Modular Programming: an interview with Stephan Whitlan
Date: Dec 18 2009
Stephan, to get a bit of a better picture of you, could you first of shed some light on who you are your (musical) background?
Well, I was born in London, moved to Sheffield in 1980 to study architecture and having not actually been an architect, I decided to move to Ireland in 1997 to be an architect! Since the collapse of the world economy and the construction industry, I’ve been working as a designer for a firm of Pipe Organ Builders in Belfast, but I still live in a damp and draughty tumble-down farm house in the wilds of Eire.
Stephan playing the organ
I began formal piano lessons at about 6-7 years, following a school recommendation that I had a musical ear. Neither of my parents is/was an instrumental player and there was only minimal music around the house -radio, TV etc. There wasn’t even a piano to begin with! There’s a rumour that my grandmother was a pianist, but no-one ever heard her play. My brother was much more interested in playing rugby so was less than impressed when school presented him with a violin to learn! A few weeks later, it had been replaced with a slightly more likely French Horn, but his interest still waned.
So with just one ‘real’ musician in the family it was possible to provide a synthesizer when I’d reached grade 7 and the ‘end’ of Chopin!
You say you moved to Ireland. Any particular reasons for that, as -as far as I know-there’s not much of electronic music scene Ireland (but you are the start of one!)
Well, I moved because it was time to do something with my life! My time in Sheffield was well spent, but I felt if I didn’t make a proper move, as I would just grind to a halt and be firmly stuck in a rut. It was the right decision, but leaving behind the electronic music scene in the UK was hard -knowing there was none in Eire. Only recently have I made contact with some Irish electronic musicians, and though it is early days, something is starting to take shape….
So how and when did you get in touch with John Dyson & co? What’s it like
to work with John after all and where do you fit in?
I met John whilst I was at University, though he was a Sheffield native with a (horrible) day job through a loose group of friends who used to meet up monthly in a scrotty pub in Hillsborough to discuss synth music.
Paul Ward actually started the ball rolling, John & Dave (Ward Hunt -no connection!) and Shaun D’Lear were regulars, and it was Anthony Thrasher (of EMMA & Surreal to Real fame) who dragged me along.
John was always easy to work with. He always knew when he liked something, and was very vocal if he didn’t.
I started to play with him live after he’d gone solo. I only once spent an evening in the studio with John & Dave as Wavestar, and I didn’t contribute any music. After “Evolution” was released, John spent a lot of time working with Shaun, and as a member of Shaun’s band, I played a lot of keyboard parts. It was these sessions that really taught me any sort of studio technique -at home I just threw stuff down to 2-track. Here was computer sequencing (Pro 24 quickly replaced by Cubase) and 8 track tape (7 with sync). The most interference I managed with John’s work is the “Aquarelle” cd, which has a lot of me on, but mostly I liked to leave John to his own devices.
Although the Shaun D’Lear band gigged a lot, I don’t think any of the old tracks we used to do ever saw a cd release. Some of them were amazing! Lost forever!!
People ask what it’s like to play live with John, and I say it’s an honor & a pleasure. The only way I’d get to play “Evolution” and “Timenode” would be to write my own versions -but it would never be the same.
Some very early gigs we did together were a bit scary, but we all got better, eventually! John used to joke that it was good to have me along in case the backing ‘tape’ broke – I could be relied on to busk for as long as it might take to fix it! Over the years we’ve all
learned to relax and the whole experience now is just great fun.
How hard is it hard to break the chains with John D. in people’s minds?
I don’t think my music really sounds like John’s. Neither of us try to copy -or out-do the other, but we both like a good string pad! I guess we sit under the same ‘symphonic’ label because our stuff has slight classical leanings -structurally or sonically.
My stuff is always ‘darker’ than John’s -he always says he can’t do ‘dark’ and mine is
always informed by a desire to write ‘electronic’ music -not modern music from essentially preset machines.
I love modular programming, whereas John says he’d never managed to get anything from Dave’s (Wavestar) modular apart from static and electric shocks! I don’t like to use synths to imitate real sounds -or indeed have ever used a sampler in anger- I like them to make their own sounds (which you might not get from an acoustic instrument).
I try to avoid building stuff up from a drum part/loop -I see drums much more as percussion and always go on after the basic sequences are done. We do both share a
dependence on a favorite lead line synths -John and his Korg Sigma and me and my Moog/Prophet 5.
So I’m not sure I want to make people separate me from John if they want to. I owe the man a lot, and like to think I’ve been able to give something back over the years. There’s certainly no doubt that the two of us write our own music independently -but make something rather special when we get together on stage.
Inertial Moments
Before your debut album “Map Reference” came out in 1996, you already scratched the surface with the home-made cd-r “Inertial Moments”… How did that cd come about, did you have any goals for it in mind?
“Ah, no. “Map Reference” was my first cd, and “Inertial Moments” followed a couple of years later. Les & Cathy May of Midas Records in Derby were great fans of the Sheffield electronic scene and for a short while ran a series of Sunday night concerts in a pub called the Flowerpot in Derby.
With the support of BBC Radio Derby DJ Ashley Franklin there was sufficient local interest to make the gigs viable. It was during that period when I was failing to write a follow up album and preparing to move to Ireland, so the material I played was a mix of old stuff and the new stuff which should be on cd two.
Map Reference
Of course, I never finished the second cd, and the finished tracks are still in storage, so actually, the concert and subsequent live recording were the only way you could hear them. Actually, I thought my playing at the gig and the sound were quite poor, but enough people convinced me it should be released. So the tapes were studied and ruthlessly edited -but the result was ok (a rare chance to hear me playing the accordion made it to disc!).
I suppose my compromise was to only do a very limited cd-r run -basically so that those who were there at the gig could have a souvenir. I actually came across five copies the other day, so I might consider a down-load only re-issue…..four unreleased tracks…..who knows?! There’s a video of it too, somewhere…..
After that, years of silence followed, only interrupted by one collaborative release under the Narcosis-moniker. What can you tell about this project, and why aren’t you not very prolific yourself?
Not quite, as there is the K2Project cd which I released in 1999. Again a collaboration, it features a local Irish musician, Keith Corbett -who I’d met on a community Arts program- and the cd was the result of re-assembling my studio after moving. In fact, it was Keith’s curiosity about my studio that actually got it out of their boxes at all. Once rolling, the recording went well and I would usually take one of Keith’s ideas and then ‘arrange the hell out if it’. Some tracks are more successful than others, but I liked them all -even if one of them does have a Prodigy bassline which Keith had stolen but I didn’t
recognize!
Narcosis
The Narcosis cd is quite a different beast. I had been working with Steve Jenkins as Technical/Stage Manager for the Hampshire Jam series of concerts and usually stayed with him and his family for a few days before and after events.
Steve is not a technically skilled player, but does have a passion for electronic music and had started to collect some hardware to try and start making some. He can write a mean sequence and knows one end of a computer from the other.
Over the years, whenever we got together, some music would inevitably come out of the sessions – usually as an exercise in trying to get bits of equipment to work, or
do what we wanted them to do (rather than what they wanted). After five years or so we had quite a lot of music. So we took it to Tony in Cambridge who attacked the collection with his Digital Scissors and before we knew it we had a cd.
K2 Project
The fact that I’m not prolific is because I’m idle! I found it impossible to contemplate an evening in the studio after a hard day at the office. It’s much easier to pound the grand piano for an hour. The weekend was never long enough to finish anything and holidays were spent visiting old friends in the UK. There was never time to write tracks let alone
a cd. I like to work all the way through a piece, not fiddle with it for six months, one note at a time.
I write something quick, then move on to the next one. It was only when I was made redundant last year that I had opportunity to think about recording again. And then it
took a good few months to get everything working again after years of silence.
Once up and running it went really well -I hadn’t intended to fill 80 minutes, but in the end I had 82! So had to trim one piece, and I also had the E-Live concert to aim for. If I was going to play a long set, I should have a new cd to sell. In the end, recording took about three weeks and the cd pressing took another six. Only just in time for the concert after all!
I heard you also are technical stage manager for some EM concerts. What is this all about, is there more to it for you than just make a living?
Well, whilst I was supposed to be studying, I used to work as stage crew, and once I graduated, did it freelance instead of being an architect.
I think, if you are a keyboard player you are much more in sympathy with PA & sound equipment. Much more than a drummer or a trumpet player might be. It’s quite fun sometimes when you gig a really complex keyboard rig to have the PA guys peering at it in wonderment!
It’s also critical that you understand what to ask the PA people for – otherwise neither you or the audience are going to hear the right sound. If you work with backing tracks then it’s vital you can hear them on stage -as a performer, the stage monitoring is far more important than the house PA.
I think Ron Boots is a good technical manager because he is also a musician. With the Hampshire jam concerts it’s really useful that as a musician I can be sure that the PA delivers the performer’s needs….
Live 2005
When you perform a live gig, you also play ‘cover’ versions of old classics (such as the famous “Dr Who Theme”) next to your own music. Can you elaborate?
Some people can point fingers and say it’s because your own music is rubbish! A whole set of copies of other peoples stuff would be pretty poor. I say it’s good to play covers because they are fun. Why does an orchestra play the “William Tell Overture” as an encore? Because it’s fun to play and the audience are familiar with it.
When I put together a cover, I try to make it a bit different from the original, but still recognizable. Sometimes it’s possible to merge two or more tunes together -I have one which goes from “Midnight Express” (“Chase”) to Yazoo’s “Don’t go”, and then ends with Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”. And my version of Vangelis’ “Pulstar” includes bits of “Blade Runner” and “Nucleogenesis part 1”, before playing “Pulstar” pretty much straight.
John Dyson has a secret life playing Shadows covers & Shaun D’Lear used to do that amazing version of Gary Numan’s “Cars”. (and before that Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain”, and Adam Ant’s “Antmusic”!).
I don’t see anything wrong with doing covers -the exercise of analyzing the original and putting together new versions is as valid as writing new stuff. I used it as an excuse to blow the dust out of the studio before getting down to the album proper.
How do you look back on your live gigs on E-day and E-Live 2009? On the last occasion, I heard you also had a technical problem during the concert..
The E-Day & E-Live gigs went really well. I was really happy with the sound, and very well practiced (so I knew the music thoroughly). I actually enjoyed myself so much, I did a couple of really wild thing I hadn’t rehearsed (like the parallel two-handed lead lines in “Dr Who Theme” on Moog and Prophet and the keyboard swapping on “Arabella’s Trident”).
E-Live 2009
The only problem I had was with the Prophet -I didn’t have the right sound really, and didn’t manage to change it so it was, without it producing a bass drone which lasted through the next four numbers! (but you can’t hear it too much on the recording).
For E-Day I had all my own gear (and sounds) but for E-Live I borrowed all the gear from Ron Boots and Bas Broekhuis (thanks guys!). The Moog was fine, because it’s pretty much a copy of an old Mini Moog -except it stays in tune and doesn’t have quite the same modulation options.
It was the Prophet 08 which I struggled with -I use an old SCI Prophet 5 at home and I’d
hoped the 08 would be an updated version, but it isn’t!!
During rehearsals, I struggled to edit up anything close to the raw snarly sound of my old 5, so settled for something close (enough). Then on stage, trying to gently open the filter it kept changing preset or returning to the un-edited value. And it has horrid spindly floppy knobs! Ugh!! Mind you Ron’s Electro 3 nearly came home with me -a lovely instrument. Great pianos, organs, strings, ‘trons etc…
So what do you enjoy more: playing your music live on stage or recording in the studio? What inspires you?
I don’t really do a great deal of either! Recording is that process of creation where you try and realize ideas, whereas live is showing your music off to the public. Only when you do completely live improv are the two processes similar. I really like doing live improv but the hassle of transporting and setting up my favorite instrument -the huge
Modular synth- usually means the event can be more stressful than enjoyable.
In terms of inspiration, when I’m writing I’m often more interested in Brian Eno’s ‘System music’ than committing a tune I’ve been whistling for a month. Brian says set up a collection of bits of gear, push the ‘go’ button, retire to a safe distance and see what
comes out! A lot of times it will be rubbish, but sometimes something really interesting will appear. The skill is to be able to tell the two apart!
Anyway, I’m sure that any musician will say the reason they write is that they hear other people’s stuff and say ‘Ooh, I like that, but I’d not use that bass sound, or that drum pattern…and it needs some Hammond…..’ before you know it you want to re-write it
your way. Maybe the trick is to disguise the original enough to avoid fingers being pointed!
In my review of your album “Triangulation” I mentioned you planned this album as you were invited to play at E-Live 2009. This didn’t seem among the truth…
Ok, I thought you’d inferred that I’d written “Triangulation” specially to play at E-Live. I would not have considered playing the whole cd live, as some of it is really difficult to play! I think by playing a spread of my favorite tracks from my other cds you got a
more varied program. I think I was more relaxed too! It’s true though, that I did use the concert as an excuse to record some new music and make sure it was available for sale at E-Live.
Triangulation
How did you start work on this album after all? What territory and ideas did you like to investigate on this new venture?
The start point was to thoroughly survey the equipment in the studio and find out which bits still worked!
Then I had to see if I could remember how to operate Cubase (I still got the non-audio version on my Atari…). Then sit down and list some possible ideas of what to try and write. I was fairly certain that I wanted to use the Modular as the rhythmic foundation of the new music, and in theory this would have to be recorded to tape and then Cubase sync to it (because of the on-the-fly manipulation of the Arrick & Doepfer step sequencers).
There was also the idea of the Modular generating random notes and sending these into a loop generator & seeing what came out (hello Brian!).
I eventually had a list of eight ideas, and actually none of them actually got started, because I came up with stuff not on the list! The random note idea is actually the spine of “Last words of the Prophet” and actually the only bit of ‘hard’ sequencer action is in the third part of “Twin Distortions”.
Over the years I’ve learnt as an architect that you have to have a plan…..what I fail consistently to do these days is follow it!
The longest track on the album falls apart in three sections, of which the middle one is totally strange….
Yup, it’s my favorite bit of the album. It was written outside the main project -actually a couple of years ago, and I deliberately constructed the whole new cd so this could be part of it.
It’s not the sort of thing you can just plough straight into, so the rest of the music on the album frames this piece of utter strangeness. I can also say it was really hard to write! No tune, no harmony, no rhythm. How do you keep it moving without repeating yourself? How do you stop it being utter drivel? I listened a lot to Vangelis’ “Beaubourg” (which a
lot of people can’t!) and just set off….
There’s also a track that you submitted for the special “E-Day 2009” cd….
Yes, it’s the piece “Out of the Box”, which is another real favorite of mine. It’s actually a Narcosis piece, though it’s about 95% me and not much Steve Jenkins! He said it’s ok to use, as he doesn’t like it at all! Like all the Narcosis stuff, it’s a single live take. This was actually recorded in Ireland, so I had all
my stuff to hand and it as just a case of set the sequencers off and then run around the studio from synth to synth. It’s great to drive to, though Ireland doesn’t quite have the roads for it!
You still had a great passion for vintage gear and only occasionally use computers. How come?
I grew up with the vintage gear. I still don’t understand computers. Or more likely, I’m not prepared to change my way of doing things to suit them. Either they do it my way or they go in the bin!
Unlike some musicians, I don’t have a turnover of gear. I have a slowly growing mountain of stuff I really know well. I will do research if a new piece of kit looks promising, but am ruthless if it doesn’t do what I want. The Blofeld looks cool, but I don’t like the editing system, and actually I don’t like the sounds either! Same for the Virus Ti, V-synth, Andromeda, Motif……
An all-singing, all-dancing synth with 3000 sounds and endless pages of menus to tweak just doesn’t appeal.
Give me an old (but working) Mini Moog any day. Not polyphonic? Ok, make that a Prophet 5! With old synths I really have to know what I want a sound to do, and how to get it -and that might be out-board processing or stuff it through another synth. Modern synths are simply not offering what I can dig out of my old monsters.
Mind you, I do want an Electro 3….
So are analogues here to stay? What’s you opinion on the retro revival which has been going on the last 1,5 decade or so?
They are for me. I don’t really care about the revival, because only very few musicians are writing retro music to go with it -FSP, Brendan Pollard for example.
I’m grateful that an interest in analogue has made it commercially viable to release retro gear (the Electro again!). It’s not all good though -you get turkeys like the Moog Little Fatty (farty?) or indeed the full Moog Voyager -which has too many bells and whistles, and 1000 sounds only 10 of which actually sound like a moog (and only two I’d use….).
My problem now is that the original synths are now 30 years old, and they simply don’t work reliably anymore. I have made peace with my PC and it runs Arturia’s virtual synths -mostly their Mini Moog, although I only started to get really nice authentic Moog sounds once I’d turned off all the extra features a Mini never had! And those bloody presets -who are these twats who make these sounds? There you are with the worlds fattest monster polysynth; the CS80.
And your programmer presents you with the nasty nasal twang of a Hohner pianet. No! Where are those huge Vangelis brass patches? Nowhere!! Did no-one at Arturia play “Spiral” to these guys. Aarrrghhhh!
How does you (home)studio look like, what’s the stuff you’re particularly proud of, rely on and use intensively?
My studio is in the attic, so it has sloping upper wall and only a narrow strip of ceiling. This makes it better acoustically than an cube-shaped room, but limits how high you can stack up the gear! The slope also allows stuff to stand away from the walls allowing you to be able to get behind to wire up. This is the real bind with cube rooms, because you tend to push stuff out against the walls and then if you need to change the wiring you have to really rip the studio apart to do it.
In Sheffield this was so, and as bits of wiring gave up, I just moved onto another bit of gear! Most of the modules are in racks -including a custom half-U rack to take those bloody budget ones, and the synths proper are on Ultimate Apex stands (the best -I
hate to use those old ironing-board ones anymore). The end wall is completely taken up with the Modular -again in rack cases for when needed for gigging. The bottom row -in 2 cases- are the Korg mono series: MS 10, MS 20, MS 50, 2 x SQ10 and a custom patch panel.
On top of this -in three cases- is a vast Doepfer set up including five twin oscillator voice racks, three step sequences, two with special controllers, 6 x quad LFO’s random voltage sources, logic & gate switching etc. etc. mixes, VCA’s, pans and lots of weird little bits which I still don’t quite understand!
On top of this is a pair of Arrick 960 step sequencers. These are the Moog clones with the skip-step option, and as such are the ONLY ones to offer it. There are lots of step
sequencers out there, but only the Arrick will skip. Again, lots of people add too many clever functions -and forget the vital ones!
Each of the racks/areas have a 20 channel line mixer (4 in all) and there is a digital summing desk to take these feeds. The final mix goes to Minidisc or Mac if I want to multi-track. The master midi keyboard for data entry (into the Atari) is the Kurzweil K2000 which I only use for its Mellotron sounds (which you can stuff through the modular filters and the loop generators……. (part 3 of “Twin Distortions”)
Stephan, please share your opinions on nowadays music distribution, hard-copies vs downloads, and how you think the niche market of “our” electronic music can survive within all this…
I like hard copy. Maybe it’s my age, but I like to buy other peoples music and see it on the shelf. I also then rip it into iTunes so I can listen to it on the move, but if the laptop loses it, I can always rip it again.
As an artist, I invest a lot of effort in making the cd package look good, and in some way link to the music. I like to think when people buy it, they get something more than a tune. I also work hard to make sure the sequence of tracks and the gaps between them make up a larger piece of entertainment. I can’t see why you’d be happy with a postcard of the Mona Lisa if you could have the real thing?
We’re told that download is the way, and that no-one buys cds anymore. Maybe it’s because the shops have given up selling them and you can’t find them even when you want them. And it seems that download consumers are not concerned with audio quality, so no need to stay HiFi. It’s an inevitable decay and I think the only way to survive is to maintain that original quality in this particular niche market.
Ok, yes, I can see that NOT offering product as download -as well as hard copy- is probably commercial suicide to any artist. What I’m saying is that all that effort in making the whole cd product says to the customer ‘I have confidence & pride in this (music) and hope you respect my efforts’.
Otherwise, it’s the downward spiral of descending to the lowest common denominator ‘mass market’ pap which the music industry as a whole insist you want, because its all you can hear, and all they can be bothered to sell.
I tell you, I have no problem not being part of that. I’d rather sell 300 cds to people who really like the music, than join the fray out there trying to sell 3!
Through all the years you’ve been in the Em-business, what’s the difference between the scene in the UK and over the Channel (looking East & West)?
I’ll discount America first, because I never really paid any attention to EM from there -don’t know why really, but it never really appealed. Mainland Europe is of course the place of its birth -ironic really, when you consider the hardware was American!- and has probably seen the steadiest development.
The UK has always been more insular and self-centered. A couple of dozen artist are responsible for staying the course -they were there at the start, and will probably carry on until they die! It’s also an age thing. There are younger artists coming up through the ranks, but it seems to me that very few have a mature enough voice or commitment. So the old fogeys will just shamble on – Ian Boddy, Mark Shreeve, David Wright, Michael Shipway, John Dyson etc.
It amuses me that with the exception of FSP, the real hardcore modular ‘return to basics’ movement was entirely UK based –it’s as if the continental movement considers this as a ‘we did that 30 years ago’ kind of thing.
The response to Brendan Pollard et al at E-Live was polite and respectful. Two weeks later at Hampshire Jam, it was not far short of riotous (and with a smaller audience).
Have you planned any new music or collaborations in the near future?
I’m working closely with an Irish guy called Electrocelt at the moment, and things could go anywhere -lots of possibilities. I’ve also said to Keith that I might use a new K2Project album as an excuse to research doing a cd with just my PC -Cubase audio and virtual synths only! It will depend on how strong my resolve turns out to be!
And there’s a possible collaboration with Ron Boots penciled for March 2010. We connected really strongly when I was over for E-Live, and I’m excited to see what we could do musically. Or we could just sit around all day drinking Guinness and talking history and sound systems!
Anything else you’d like to share with us?
If anyone can suggest where I can get my two Mini Moogs, Prophet 5, Prophet T8 and two Arp Odysseys fixed for less than the price of a small house I’d be very grateful!
You say you moved to Ireland. Any particular reasons for that, as -as far as I know-there’s not much of electronic music scene Ireland (but you are the start of one!)
