Toy Story | Deadmau5

Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef

DEADMAU5 TINKERS WITH CRAZY CONTROLLERS, MYSTERY PEDALS, MULTIPLE MOOGERFOOGERS AND A GIANT BLINKING MAU5HEAD FOR HIS NEW ALBUM, RANDOM ALBUM TITLE

What constitutes true “you have arrived” status in the DJ dance-music market? If you are Joel Zimmerman, aka Deadmau5, your very own giant-eyes-strobing Mau5head is just one sign of your increasing popularity and power. The 28-year-old Toronto native wields the Mau5head like some Daft Punk genetic mutation, but his music is anything but derivative. Deadmau5's second artist release, Random Album Title (Ultra, 2008), confirms Zimmerman's growing rep (as if his numerous Top-10 singles and globe-hopping club schedule didn't) as a shape-shifter of enormous melodic progressive trance skill.

Humble, carefree, possibly bored, Zimmerman is a big gear head who matches analog synths with an array of recording platforms — it's all part of his need for change. But this mouse refuses to be trapped. He defends soft synths while adhering to Moog machinery. He prefers tactile knobs and switches to drawing with a mouse. He likes “mystery tin pedals” and PC computers, but his collaboration with Steve Duda, Tommy Lee and DJ Aero as WTF? is cutting edge. In apparent tribute to his namesake dead mouse (discovered inside his PC one smelly day), Zimmerman talks the talk and walks the walk.

Random Album Title (which includes the hits “Not Exactly”; “Faxing Berlin”; the Deadmau5/Kaskade collaboration, “I Remember”; and new material) surrounds your brain with unexpected surprises and pleasures. More likely to praise Squarepusher and Aphex Twin than some slick superstar DJ, Random Album Title sounds typical at first, then its Mau5-marks appear: massive filter sweeps that morph before your ears; melodic phrases comprising odd note groupings; breakdowns where the beat disappears and the synths turn into sonic jelly; unerring, ethereal melody and a continents-spanning groove. This versatile template is derived partially from Deadmau5's old-school technology fixation.

MYSTERY ACHIEVEMENTS

“I am big fan of mystery pedals,” Zimmerman says from a San Francisco hotel at the start his latest world tour. “I like those gray tin boxes with knobs, and you don't know who made it or where it came from. I find them in these shops in Toronto where they sell these strange pedals. You just feed something in, and it comes out sounding a lot different.”

Soft synths be damned, Zimmer-man uses a combination of Minimoog Voyager, Moog Little Phatty, Minimoog, Roland Juno-106 (“the chorus is crazy”), Sequential Circuits Prophet T8 and “a cool German one called ‘MSB synth.’”

“I am hard-pressed to listen to any piece of music and know exactly what they are using unless it is obvious presets, which does happen a lot in electronic music,” Zimmerman muses. “But the whole thing with analog versus soft synth sounds: You can totally synthesize everything and have it sound different depending on how you process it. I've spent money getting a sound that was probably very achievable by doing something else, but I like a knob in my hand. Not so much the mouse and drawing. The filter sweeps and the crazy synth rises in my music — it's all handcrafted. I turn the knob. You can hear the mistakes. They're not mistakes, but you will hear it dip and rise accidentally if I wiggle my hand.”

Those wiggles can be heard in “Sometimes Things Get, Whatever.” After a breakdown, an ugly Moog Voyager line rises like a grinning, ghoulish monster. “You can't get that by drawing a line from zero to 127 in Ableton,” Zimmerman declares. “It'll just be perfect. I like using hardware and mystery pedals and crazy LFOs that aren't bang-on synced with the application. A lot of my LFOs I guessed at or got it as close as I could and cut it later.”

THE MAU5 & THE MOOGERFOOGER

Moogerfoogers — all of them — figure prominently in the Deadmau5 aesthetic. As with his Moogs, Mau5head and Monome 256, Deadmau5 refuses to leave anything alone, befitting his early years as a programmer.

“I have three MF-107 FreqBoxes and doubles of other Moogerfoogers for stereo,” Zimmerman says. “The 107 is an FM modulator that takes in a carrier or outputs an oscillator. It's really neat. The idea with the Moogerfoogers was to build a modular system, so you could spend two hours wiring to get one sound, but you can never get it back. The only way to save a preset is take a photo. But it is nice to make one feature sound for the whole track. The sound in ‘Hi Friend’ is that, a chirp, or noise on every upbeat. That was the result of me mucking around with the Moogerfooger and running an oscillator through another synth through it. It's a great sound.”

Deadmau5 uses multiple sequencers, including Ableton Live, Propellerhead Reason, Steinberg Cubase and FL Studio. DIY seems to be the Mau5-mantra, using whatever works to make his music unique. “I use Fruity Loops 'cause it's really quick for some things,” he explains. “The piano roll is so fast, and drawing in notes in Ableton or Cubase seems like such a chore by comparison to FL Studio. I use Reason for its effects and embedded instruments because they don't support VST, but I ReWire it if I want to use the Thor or Subtractor synths. They're just extra toys to throw in the mix and make little clips that you can add to your production.”

DEADMAU5 LIVE

Speaking of toys, the Mau5head is yet another element in the Deadmau5 arsenal; it lets the naturally shy Zimmerman hide out incognito. Of course, the Mau5head's strobing eyes are the result of tinkering.

“There is a guy named Bert Schiettecatte who founded Percussa, a music hardware and software company whose first product is AudioCubes,” he explains. “The cubes by themselves interact with each other and trigger different clips or patterns via proximity or color, and there are a couple of LEDs inside. I had the wiseass idea to buy a couple cubes, rip them apart and use the LEDs in the chipset and put them in the eyes of the Mau5head. My head is USB powered, which is perfect. I do light sequences that are in time with the music. They are controllable through MIDI, so I just chose different sequences from the [JazzMutant] Lemur to tell Live to send MIDI to the AudioCubes that light up in my head. They match the music; I write little clips that match the song.”

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