Ferry Corsten Q&A
Jul 1, 2003 12:00 PM
Dutch trance and techno DJ Ferry Corsten and L.A.-based Moonshine mastering engineer Christian Dwiggins talked to Remix for a July 2003 “Frequencies” article. Following is the full Q&A:
FERRY CORSTEN
You’ve done quite a few mixes. How was this 5.1 project
different for you?
It’s very live in a club with people screaming and a lot of
stuff happening around you. You have to first do your mix; second, you
have to entertain. My set was recorded at the same time, and five
microphones were in the room. So I had to do this mix from one record
to the other record, which was cool. On the other hand, I also wanted
to have that crowd on the stage, so to speak. I wanted the people who
listened to the CD to really hear what the atmosphere was like in the
club. To me, it was like a really nice project because it was very
interactive. You could hear the crowd all around you, so you could kind
of relive the moment.
I heard an edit that you did to replace a small part of the mix.
The original sounded almost perfect. Are you a perfectionist with
production?
When it comes down to a CD, in the end, you want to put it on and you
want to listen to it. It should sound flawless. It’s like
everything that disturbs you when you listen to it disturbs you even
more the second time you hear it. So when I was doing my mix, this guy
in the crowd bumped into the turntable, and the record skipped, like a
nasty “Cccchhht!” And the whole crowd went,
“Aaaah!” It’s cool if you do it once. But a second
time, if you know that it’s going to happen, it’s not so
cool anymore. So we edited that out. And there was also one mix that I
was really not happy about. Something happened again with the crowd,
and something went wrong with my mix, so I replaced that. He was so
like, “Oh my God, they’re going to take me out of the club
and shoot me!”
How do you prepare your sets to really engage a
crowd?
Normally, I’ll just play whatever idea comes up. I have my
records with me, and I see a record that I think, “Okay, this one
fits with the crowd at this moment right now.” It’s not
like I have a setup format or something. But since this was going to be
a CD and you’re dealing with clearance of records, you’re
kind of bound to a certain list of records that you are allowed to use.
So I wrote down all of the records that were cleared for the CD. From
that list, I made a running order of how my set should sound. I always
play records in a certain category: Where records are slower or less
action or more trancey or more techno, I play in certain categories.
Also, I look at the rising tension and build up throughout my set time.
And I look for the transition records that make my set go from trance
to techno. When I have played all my records in the right position
… I think Ferry Corsten’s “Indigo” is one of
those records that can go from trancey very easily to techno.
It’s one of those records that has elements of both.
What’s your DJ setup?
Three Technics decks and one [Pioneer] CDJ-100 and one CDJ-1000.
Sometimes, I mix with three records, and it’s always nice to have
one CD player.
Christian Dwiggins told me that this was the best Moonshine
Mixed Live edition in the series yet. What made it such a
success?
I heard the other mixes, which were definitely great. The vibe that I
heard in the background wasn’t as explosive, though. In the end,
if the crowd just stands still, I could be the biggest DJ in the world.
If the crowd stands still, then I feel like, “Oh, shit, am I
doing the right thing here?” It affects your attitude toward your
crowd. If the crowd is through the roof, then it’s a lot easier
… you’re more up for daring certain things. You dare to put
on the record that is not very obvious. As we say over here, “It
gives you wings.” They can’t reach you anymore. Before, you
still had to do the right thing, but if the crowd is energetic, you
might play a record that you wouldn’t normally play.
What do you see for the future of surround sound and
DJing?
I just bought a new setup for my studio, which has 5.1 capability, as
well. It’s a new Sony DMX-100. It’s not a DJ mixer.
It’s basically for my studio at home because I make my own
productions, too, to mix them in 5.1. So by the time the clubs are set
up with 5.1 systems, the records that I’m producing will sound
right. I’ve heard about 8.1, where there are sounds above you.
Especially with trance music, you get these weird effects that come
right at you and hit you and bounce off you. It’s really a
virtual experience. That’s probably the future. I hope it will
happen in the next two years. I know people are already experimenting
with it.
CHRISTIAN DWIGGINS
What’s the protocol for recording a live DJ set and mixing
down in 5.1 surround sound?
We record it on a mobile rig; it’s an 8-track digital recorder.
Then, we bring it back here and I rerecord it into my Pro Tools system.
That was Saturday night when we recorded this. Sunday, Ferry and I came
in and edited it all because we have 16 tracks licensed for the CD, but
16 tracks ended up being 110 minutes. You can’t fit 110 minutes
on a CD, so we chopped of 20-some minutes. So, basically, every song
has been edited. Usually, I do [edits] without the artist and then they
approve it later, but he was in town, so we just did it. He
wasn’t completely happy with a couple of the mixes that he did,
so we redid two or three mixes here, and I plotted those in. And since
then, that’s about where I’m at.
What’s the setup?
We have a mobile rig that’s all in a big case. We have
everything as far as cables and connectors inside of this. Aside from
the microphones and cables, we tie in to the back of an 8-channel
preamp. It’s a digital preamp, so it converts to digital, goes to
a digital converter to convert it to TDIF, which is a connection for
the Tascam DA-88. It’s a Panasonic WZ8096M. That goes to the
DA-88, and depending on how many microphones are set up, I use all the
way up to eight. But at a minimum, I’ve been at six. Tracks 1 and
2 are usually from the DJ booth, and any number of microphones up until
eight channels. For Ferry, I used five microphones, so I had seven
channels. I had a stereo mic at the center of the room facing toward
the DJ. I had one mic hanging right in front of the DJ for all the kids
that were right around the booth and then two off the side in the
middle between those. I know that club really well and know where the
action is, so I kind of hang the mics accordingly. And it seemed to
work really well; I’m really happy with the way it sounds.
You factor everything you know about recording when you go on site. And every venue is very different. You have to keep in mind where the speakers are. You don’t want take up too much of the speakers, but you don’t want to hang [the mics] too low so you’re just getting one conversation all night. But you don’t want them too high so you’re getting nothing but music and no crowd. So it just kind of depends. Once I get on site, I just get a feel for the room and understand how it’s gonna sound, and I just put the mics accordingly to how I think it’s gonna sound best. The club there was really noisy. And you can hear it. It’s a very industrial-sounding room. With Baby Anne, the room sounded very nice. The crowd wasn’t very loud. So you hear that. Spundae was probably the best we’ve had. It was a perfect mix of lots and lots of crowd, and the room sounded really good, and I had plenty of mics. I have an assistant who helps me and makes sure the red light is on the whole time. And I pretty much step away from this so I can see the bigger picture, make sure the DJ’s sorted up front, make sure there are no technical problems in the booth, make sure the needles are working, make sure there are no mixer problems and take notes if there are any skips. That night, actually, there was a lot of action over the booth, kids reaching up and going, “Hey, Ferry!” One guy swatted the tonearm by accident, and it was a record that was playing, so it was a big skip and jump. Everybody freaks out because it’s a recording and it’s pretty awful, but everything can be fixed with Pro Tools seamlessly.
What’s different about this series of mix CDs?
What’s different about mix live than any other compilation is
that you can’t hide behind Pro Tools too much. I have crowd mics,
so it’s not like we can go back in there and change track orders;
I can’t really Remix the records if they really fall
off, because I can’t re-create the room tone, the crowd, all
that. I can add crowd, but I can’t re-create what we recorded
through those microphones, so I’m limited by that. I can’t
change things too much. But within those limitations, we can do a
couple things. We shorten things up. If the actual mixing of records
falls off just a little bit, we can come back in here, Remix
it at exactly the same cue points, make sure that the mix is the same
but make sure the beats are a little bit tighter and slot that in,
which we did here with Ferry. He decided to do that on three of the
mixes.
What mics do you use?
A couple of condenser mics, a bunch of different ones so I can get
different sounds. Two condenser mics, and a stereo pair mic. I
don’t really like the stereo pair mic. The whole setup was
designed by my teacher when I was in engineering school. He works next
door with Dave Audé. He bought those microphones, and that’s
just kind of what we’re stuck with. The stereo pair mic is
usually my rear mics, and I use an SM57 sometimes up front near the DJ.
Sometimes, we have DJs speak, so I put a microphone on there. Dave
Audé spoke into the mic; Carl Cox talks into the mic; Donald
Glaude loves to scream into the crowd. But the DJs I’ve been
working with lately, Baby Anne and Ferry, they are very more just into
mixing the records. So I just threw that mic up for more crowd
sound.
Could you tell me a little bit about how you work with surround
sound?
Because it’s still such a new format, there’s a whole lot
of confusion about this on the consumer side. And because it’s so
new, it’s not very cut-and-dry at the moment. There’s 5.1,
7.1, 10.1, 20.1, and there’s DTS, Dolby Digital, all these
different formats. Typically, what you’re hearing in surround
right now is 5.1: five speakers and a subwoofer. 5.1 was designed by
the movies, and it was the five speakers: you’re left, right
center, left surround, right surround, and your subwoofer was the .1
channel, but it was just a channel designed not for bass, but a
separate channel for big explosions, big effects. It’s typically
called the LFE channel, Low Frequency Effects. But that was adopted for
audio, the same format. The .1 channel is now considered the subwoofer.
A lot of the consumer-type machines that you get, they’re all
pretty much what’s called “bass managed.” It takes
all the speakers, the whole range, but cuts 80 Hz on all of them and
takes all that and shoves it down the subwoofer. So you’ve seen
the Bose systems with those little tiny satellite speakers, and
you’re wondering, “Well, how can I get these speakers to
play so loud when I have all this bass? They can’t reproduce
it.” Well, we’re going to cross it over, and they only have
to do the mids to high frequencies, and we’ll dedicate a
subwoofer to handle all the bass. So when we mix here, it’s
actually a problem hat I’ve had over and over again. I would
rather mix just five channels and let the bass management handle the
subwoofer channel. And that’s the setup I have here. I have to
draw this out to explain it better. What happens is, the first time,
when I mixed Tall Paul, I did pretty much a 5.0 mix. I didn’t
send anything to the LFE channel because I know that everything the
consumer listens to is bass-managed. So if I mix normally in all my
speakers and it sounds good, when it plays on a cheaper system,
it’s going to be crossed over and sent to the subwoofer anyway. I
got e-mails when we first put it out, and they’re like,
“You know, I have a 5.1 Dolby Digital setup, and I’m
listening to it as a discrete 5-channel mix, and I don’t have
anything in my LFE channel. Is this a defective product? Did you guys
not mix it correctly? I feel like I’m getting gypped.” So
after that, we decided to put something in my LFE channel, and
I’ll mix it bass-managed, as well, to satisfy everyone so they
don’t feel like they’re getting gypped. But, typically,
that’s not the best way to do it. What happens is this: We have
five channels of information: left, center, right, left surround, right
surround and your LFE. If I mix information just on these and they are
crossed over, if I mix just in these speakers and I don’t worry
about this LFE channel, when it goes to the consumer player, it goes
left, center, right, left surround, right surround, crossed over 80 Hz
and sends all that information to the subwoofer channel. If I mix this
in 5.1 with information sent to the LFE, now I have information sent
here, and all of this information here is still crossed over 80 Hz and
added with the information I have in the LFE, essentially doubling the
bass, which is not accurate. So that’s what I’m kind of
dealing with.
How do you set up in the club in order to mixdown in 5.1
effectively.
The idea when I’m there on site is just to get the best amount
of crowd noise because I understand that here, I can reshape it anyway
I want. As long as I get enough source material, enough crowd, enough
room tone, then here, I can mix it anyway I want. If I want the room to
be bigger, and I have my rear mics and I want it to sound as I’m
sitting here, bigger, I can delay the back two speakers so that it
sounds farther away.
When you set up a new session, you set it up in 5.1, and it knows that the I/O, right here in your I/O setup, instead of stereo—which would be left, right on channels 1 and 2 the way you have it set up—I have 5.1. My interface has eight outputs. This is an 888/24, so it’s 24-bit-capable, eight in, eight out, eight digital in and out. So here are the eight channels I have to work with: 1 through 6 are my surround channels, 1 being left, 2 being right, 3 being center, left, right surround and LFE. Seven and 8 are left for stereo if I choose to use it. And then when you open up a new track, you can create a mono track; you’re outputs automatically snap to stereo, but if you want it to go 5.1, then you go 5.1, and you have this panorama. Here’s my 888, and I come out of that and into this M&K bass-management box, and this allows me to mix just for the consumers who are going to be listening to it bass-managed. I’m running full range out of channels 1 through 6; they go into the bass management as left, center, right, left surround, right surround, LFE and comes out of this LFE4 studio bass-management controller bass-managed directly to my speakers.
How do you EQ differently in 5.1?
I cut out at 150 Hz on pretty much all of them because, otherwise, it
gets too messy. Here’s without the filters. Do you hear the
subwoofer now working? The microphones picked up 10 Hz below 80 Hz. So
the bass management is taking all that and shoving it to my subwoofer.
But when I run my main channel, I want to send just this music and
everything 80 Hz to the subwoofer. All the microphones I want just to
be ambience. So if I don’t filter it and remember that the
microphones are always delayed from the direct line, that I’m
getting bass phasing in the subwoofer because it’s taking 80 Hz
delayed, throwing it with my bass from the direct mix from the records,
and it’s doing all kinds of crazy things in the subwoofer that I
don’t want it to do [it sounds muddy]. So I’m just going to
cut out all the bass in all the microphones. It cleans it up.
How is editing different when dealing with surround-sound
live-DJ-set mixes?
Well, here, for example, is piece of mix that we did but haven’t
dialed in perfectly. The drums are slightly off. The crowd mics never
changed, which is the difficult part. Now, if I soloed these crowd mics
in the same section?actually, it wasn’t off enough that you can
hear it, which is why we can get away with replacing this section. If
he just totally wrecked really bad, the beats just fell way off, then
the crowd mics would have picked it up, and there’s not a whole
lot I could have done here fixing it because you still would have heard
it in the crowd mics. But because we’re in 5.1, even though
it’s louder, when you’re sitting here, your ear is still
listening to what’s happening back here, so if this is different
than this [points to two different speakers], it screws you up.
You see all of these tracks here, which are just our faders and pans and my inserts for effects, this is our actual mixing portion. Out of these faders, the signal flow comes in to your effects; it goes to your pans; it goes to your fader; then, it goes to your pans; then, it sends it out to your master fader here. Your master fader is determining if it’s going left, center, right, left surround, right surround. So there’s big matrix inside of here that you don’t see, but your pans are sending essentially whatever track you want to that channel of my output, and then that channel goes to whatever speaker it’s hooked up to. So we can have as many tracks as we want. I can add five more mono tracks; we can set a microphone; you can talk into it, and you can put that anywhere in this mix right now.
Remember, what I’m sending to the LFE is also in addition, because, right now, I’m bass-managing this. It’s already being sent to the subwoofer through my bass manager, which is what you’re going to hear when you go home. So everything that I’m adding here is just cake, just for those people who are listening to a discrete system, which is not bass-managed, and they want to see the LFE channel work. And I have to find a medium between bass management and LFE.
How did you deal with the situation editingwise when the guy
swatted the tonearm and the needle flew out of the groove?
[Wiggins points to that section on the screen] Ferry was smart enough
to know to restart before the buildup. So we can essentially cut from
here to here. Hit “Shuffle,” and every time you make an
edit, it closes it up. Instead of moving this manually and moving in
and getting to two parts really close together, you just hit Shuffle.
See how it’s blinking on that line? It snaps it right together.
Grid mode is dependent on the tempo that you’re dealing with. If
this isn’t a DJ mix that we’re dealing with?it’s only
a song, and I know my song is 120 bpm over here on the transport
bar?then you’re Grid mode, starting over here at the very
beginning, is broken down into 4/4 time, and you can zoom in. If you
look down here, two measures, four measures, eight measures, you can
change it into eighth notes, quarter notes, and all of your edits now
snap to grid. If I place it here, it automatically snaps to grid. So if
you’re perfectly on tempo, like a lot of dance music, Grid mode
is fantastic. If you copy a part, it’s going to automatically
copy it at the grid marks all the way across. If you’re moving
things around, it automatically snaps to a grid. TCE is your time
compress. If I’m not in Grid mode, it goes wherever I want to put
it, and it will time-compress there. But if we’re in Grid mode,
then it’s going to snap to the grid.
How have people reacted to the 5.1 club series?
What I get a lot of criticism about is that it’s not really 5.1
because of the music. They think that the music needs to be mixed in
5.1, and we can’t do that because it originates in stereo, so
there’s no way of doing that. But when I mixed the crowd mics
around in 5.1, now we’re getting the appearance that you’re
in the club. Until DJs start mixing with DVDs and with surround itself,
there’s nothing really we can do. It would have to be a DVD
player, and the player would have to be a 5.1 player, and you would
just have all six channels coming out of one DVD player and six inputs
on a mixer and another one that does the same thing, and that mixer you
mix all the channels together. So for now, this is our 5.1. It’s
re-created the club sound.
I don’t see an external hard drive in the studio.
I transfer back and forth between my two systems, so this one has an
internal 80G. I have 75G of internal IDE, essentially a FireWire drive,
and I shouldn’t be running all my audio on it because it’s
not the best idea to run all your software and your audio all on the
same drive, but it is what I’m doing just for simplicity and for
cost’s sake, but I do have a 120G FireWire drive that I bounce
back and forth in between my two systems. So I’ll put that on
here, and I’ll work on it; then, I’ll take it over there,
and I’ll edit on that and bounce back and forth.
Where do you think the future of surround sound is
headed?
I’m really excited about the whole process because I think this
is where the industry is gonna go. I think that multichannel music is
definitely what we need to start thinking about selling instead of
stereo. I think we’ve pretty much screwed ourselves as far as
stereo goes with CD-Rs and MP3s and all the copyright crap. I think
this format is so much better than stereo; everyone who’s heard
surround sound versus stereo loves it. And that’s where it
starts: If we find something that everyone thinks is better,
let’s reset, start over, start selling multichannel information,
and you can give away stereo all day long. CDs can go. We can give away
MP3s; it doesn’t matter. It’s all promotion because what
we’re selling and what they want to buy now is multichannel?as
long as we protect. Before we decide on it, we have to make sure that
nobody writes software that’s going to crack it. And the music
industry is powerful enough to do these kinds of things.
Everybody’s fighting over the next format for multichannel
information. Is it gonna be Sony SuperDisk, is it gonna be DVD Audio?
They want the copyright. Sony had the copyright for CD when it came
out, so every time a CD was manufactured, they got a royalty just on
the copyright on the CD material. So that’s what they’re
fighting over right now. Who’s going to get control of the
format? Who’s going to make money on it? Meanwhile, the record
industry is just dying.
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