Hi Deniz, please tell us a little secret of you. Where do you let YOUR songs mas ter at?

Which mastering studio do you prefer? Please give us the very best adres s/name you know! Thank you very much for your honest answer! I do everything by myself, so I don t send my tracks to any mastering studio. I d lo ve to give you a recommendation for a specific mastering studio, but I really ne ver tried any so I cannot tell you which one is good. Exactly, how do you master? And which program(s) are you using? I do everything within Cubase with no additional program for mastering. Also I d o not really master my tracks in a strict sense. In most cases, all I have on my master channel is a limiter, that s it. Sometimes I might apply one EQ for light adjustments (UAD Cambridge), but all the real magic happens within the mix on th e individual tracks, not on the master channel. When you do everything right wit hin the mix, you don t need to bother about any mastering at all I can promise. So don t get fooled by all the false hype that s being made around the mastering topic , but instead focus on learning everything about mixing and try getting to a pro fessional level on this field. There s a DVD from Steinberg called Internal Mixing w hich I can really recommend to get started. What VST do you use for your synths in "Hertz" and "Tung"? This is classified information :P. But to give you a rough idea, the actual sou nd is just a simple raw sawtooth (you can use any VST), which I then processed h eavily with different types of distortion and EQing. So it s about the processing, not the synth itself. What VST did you use to produce "Hydra"? Hydra is an extremely simple track actually. The whole sound only comes from one single patch I created on the Virus TI. Then there is one more synth only for t he bass which is the Rob Papen SubBoomBass, and the rest are only drums and effe cts. What are your favorite plugins and synths? That depends on the purpose. For synths, my favorite VST for simple and quick pr ogramming is the Sylenth. For more complex sounds and a wider range of possibili ties my choice would be the NI Massive. If I look for really unusual weird sound s I go for NI Reaktor. If I just quickly want to pick a standard sound Nexus is fine. Then I also like the plugins from Korg and Arturia. But in general, don t ma ke the mistake to get hundreds of different VSTs but instead keep the amount low and learn everything about a few of your favorite ones so you really know how t o handle them.For effect plugins, I especially love all the stuff from UAD. I ha ve a UAD-2 in my system and I m using it a lot in my projects. Then I also really like the plugins from Sonnox, Sonalksis, Soundtoys, Camel Audio, Sugar Bytes and more. When it comes to effect plugins for sound design, there are basically no limits and you should try to be as creative as possible. I see a lot of people asking "which vst plug-ins do you use". So I think it's fa ir for all to know if you really use digital plugins for your basic sounds, or t he main thing comes from a Virus etc.. Also what do you use for reverbs? Lexicon or something like that? Thanks! =) The only hardware synth I have is the Virus TI and I don t use it often. Else ever ything comes from software plugins. The Lexicon Native reverb is amazing, but it s very expensive (as a software plugin). If you cannot afford it, don t worry at al l. The internal reverb plugins in Logic, Cubase and Ableton are all great as wel l. What kind of studio did you have when you produced your first tunes? The studio you see on my pictures is the new place where I work now, but before I had a simple home studio where I made all my productions in 2011 including Tun g!, Hertz, Hydra, the remix of James Blunt Dangerous with Johan Wedel and my Kas kade Turn It Down remix. I had nothing really fancy in there: my studio PC, good

monitors (Adam P22), a 30 screen, a controller keyboard, one Access Virus TI and some absorber panels to improve the acoustics in my room. That s it. What audio interface do u use, and do u recommend it? I have the RME HDSP 9632 in my system plus a Motu 828 mkII firewire interface, t hough I prefer the internal RME cos it s a bit faster and more stable than the fir ewire connection. Your Synth lead lines typically sound really full and epic, but don't conflict i n the mix with other parts. Can you explain a little bit about your synth lead l ayering process to get that really full "uplifting" big synth line without confl icting with percussion, pads, or other elements of your track? Most important rule to keep in mind here is: less is more. The number of synths you use in your project should be as low as possible and as high as necessary. B efore adding another synth layer, think twice if you really need it. Maybe the r eason why your sound is not fat is not the synth, but the notes you play cos you r harmonies might not be rich enough. Then if you decide you need to add another synth layer, don t just copy the same full chords to the new synth but try to sep arate the notes in a way it could make sense. So for example you could play the base notes of your chords with one synth, the topline with another one and the r est for extra harmonies again by other ones. This way the mixing gets much easie r and you avoid having multiple instruments playing on the same frequencies, whi ch can cause phase cancellation, gain problems and other ugly issues. And finally make sure you do a proper EQing to keep your mix clean. Low-cut all your lead sounds to at least 120hz, filter out the high frequencies on some of y our sounds and boost them on some others. Try to find out which synth does the b est job on what range of frequencies and limit them to this, but make sure in th e end you fill out the full frequency spectrum with all your sounds together. What do you use for kick drums? Samples or a VST? I always build my kick drums by myself from scratch to really make it fit the tr ack. The attack can be cut from any sample, but for the rest I hand-pick the sin e waves one by one to build exactly the envelope I want to have. I do that with audio samples of clean sine waves, picking one specific frequency for each one a nd then pasting them one after another. There are plugins though which do a simi lar thing. Bazzism is a good one or the Vengeance Metrum. I wanna know how you keep the punch of your tracks? Mastering is the only thing I m stuck on :( As I stated before I don t do any serious mastering on my tracks, it s all done wit hin the mix. What I do though is I put the limiter on my master channel from the start on, and then I always make sure it does not do more than 3db gain reducti on. If it does a lot more, then there are too many elements clashing together at the same time so the overall energy is too high. And when that happens, you los e energy in the sub frequencies and your track becomes flat, so you lose the pun ch. That means keep an eye on your limiter and if it does too much gain reductio n find out what is the cause and either compress that element to soften the peak s or lower its volume. How do u go about compression, do u compress each track individually? I use compression only for very few things. On single synth sounds it usually do es not make any sense cos you have much better control with the attack and decay parameters inside the synth. What I often do though is I compress a group chann el (bus in Logic) where all my synth leads come together, to control their volum e before they hit the master limiter. The only material you definitely have to c ompress is everything that is live recorded, e.g. vocals or live drums etc. How do you compress the low end? I don t compress the low end at all. I just make sure the balance between my kick and bass is right by adjusting the volume only (just with the faders), and then

I check how they fit in the whole mix together. If you get the balance and leve l right, there s no need for any compression. Any parallel comping? No I never do parallel compression. What plugins do you use to widen up synths? The plugins I use for this are the Cubase internal MonoToStereo and StereoEnhanc er, plus the Brainworx bx solo (which is freeware). Else in Logic you have the S ample Delay, or you could get the Sonalksis StereoTools or the Waves S1 Imager. They are all good. How the hell do you create such massive builds? To create the typical builds you hear before the drop, you have to do a lot of d etail work. It s a combination of effect samples (uplifter sounds, noise etc), rev erbs and/or delays on your synths, maybe some drum fills you can create from sam ples as well, and low-cut filters on group channels (busses) and/or on the maste r channel. They all need some heavy automation so everything builds up and incre ases until the climax before the drop. Do you start off with kicks and then make your synths when beginning a tune? Or vice versa? Depends what type of track I want to do but usually I start with a synth and som e melodies to get a hook idea first, then I would add a beat. Do you have any musical training (i.e. theory, instruments played), and if so, h ow do you apply that knowledge to your production and songwriting? I did have piano lessons as a child for some years. I m not sure though if that r eally affects my productions today. And I don t know much about music theory to be honest. I m convinced it s not necessary to have any (classic) musical education at all to create dance/club or pop music. You can learn it by just listening to al l kinds of music as much as possible, get inspired and use your intuition to be creative. How do you come up with melodies or chord progressions? A tip here for beginners: Listen exactly to some tracks which have melodies and chords you like, then pick a simple sound and try to find the notes and replay i t yourself, just for training. You will have to listen very closely and you migh t have trouble finding all the notes at first, but after a while you get it. Whe n you do that regularly, it will help you a lot to understand how these chord pr ogressions work. Train this for a period of time and you will become creative yo urself later on and easily come up with your own melodies and harmonies. That s at least how I learned and trained it for myself. How did you get your music noticed in the beginning? Like whom did you send them to? At the very beginning when your productions are not on a really high level yet, try to find a small label to work with without reaching too high, just to have some first releases and a contact. The small and not super-hot ones should respo nd to demo emails which you find on their websites. You get in touch with the mu sic business the first time then and see how basic things work.Then once you hav e the right track done, you will get noticed trust me. In my case, at the beginn ing I did not have any contacts to famous DJ producers or big labels either, I d id not know anyone. What happened was that Fedde Le Grand received my track Grun ge (from early 2010) from one of his friends. He liked it a lot and that s how I g ot things rolling. At what age did u get into producing & how did u learn most of it? First time I got in touch with music production was at the end of high school wh en I was about 16. Though that was just a little bit of fooling around on my com

puter with nothing else than Reason. I made a more serious approach with about 2 2, and turned it into my fulltime job when I got 24. I learned it all by myself, mainly by just experimenting and reading and watching a bit here and there. Mos t important however is your attitude and commitment. For two years I spent at le ast 10 hours a day in my home studio with only little breaks until I reached a p rofessional level. What are the best tools (software & instruments) for beginners? Especially at the beginning I recommend to keep things simple. Start with the i ntegrated tools in your DAW and learn how to use them instead of going for the f ancy plugins right away. For a starter synth I recommend the Sylenth.Then regard ing your choice of a DAW, it depends a bit what type you are. If you like to wor k in detail and you are more technical I recommend Logic or Cubase, and if you l ike to have a more creative environment then try Ableton or for the start maybe Reason. What s the best way to compile your ideas to one track? Often it happens to me I h ave a couple of ideas but in the end the result is not what I had in mind. Try to find out what is really the main idea of your track, the theme or hook s o to say. Then only build upon this main idea, and don t hesitate to delete stuff that does not fit in. You can still use those ones for another project later on.