In The Studio With: Basic Soul Unit

If there was one person who could dispel the myth that you need to spend shedloads of cash on lavish synths and drum machines and submerge you head in their accompanying manuals before you should even think about entering the production fold, that would be Stuart Li, aka Basic Soul Unit. In our studio focused blog entry below, Li reveals to us that the track that got him his first record signed did not go near a hardware unit; nor was it even made on the more high end computer production platform but with the sole aid of a freebie demo from a magazine. That’s not to say that he came from nowhere and just by magic figured out how to create something special enough to get it pressed to wax: he was a DJ first and foremost, with his head in the output of Trax, DJ International, KMS, Nervous and Strictly Rhythm. He already had the knowledge of that golden era techno to help him to access the kind of groove that is regarded reserved for machine made music, utilizing the sound’s vintage aesthetic to release his creative potential. This isn’t us by any way saying that he’s an imitator; Li’s output has also combined with beat structures from the other side of his record collection, the jazz, funk and soca that are particularly evident on the record Cassy chose to include on her fabric 71 mix. It’s those types of things that we feel make his productions stand out. It’s also part of the reason why we have Basic Soul Unit joining us live on the stage this coming Saturday to mark the release of this latest mix compilation on our series. Read on to learn a bit more about the items that currently help him build his music… “First, apologies but we recently had a flash storm in Toronto that flooded my basement so I couldn’t photograph my set up as I had to take everything down. Luckily none of the equipment was damaged. Most people are usually surprised but up until a couple years ago I was mostly using software. I come from the DJ side of things and although curious about production I spent most of my money buying records as a youth, so it was only when production software became cheap and readily available that I started to mess around with making music. I tried Cubase, Logic, Live (which I also use now) and Reason. Actually, the first track that I ever released I did with free software I got from a magazine!” Basic Soul Unit Reason Somehow in the end I felt most comfortable with Reason. This is actually where the bulk of my sounds come from now (save a few samples here and there). The thing though is I filter and distort the sounds heavily. Growing up listening to and being influenced by machine sounds, maybe Reason felt natural because its basically a virtual rack and seems the most able to produce the sounds I feel. Livid Code Actually before I got this, I had a Behringer BCR2000 (which does the same job and has a great price, but the Code is much more compact, better built and looks nicer). As much as everyone likes Maschine or APC, drumming and sequencing on the pads didn’t really suit my style. I wanted a controller with knobs to twiddle and this is exactly that: a grid of knobs. You can assign the knobs to do anything. It’s also great for my live set because of its size. Mooger Fooger Freq Box Seeing that I like messing around with sounds on Reason, I thought the logical next step was to get some effects units. I bought this used at a local gear shop, hooked it up to my 707 and basically spent hours playing around making rhythmic noise. Custom Analog Drum Synth I got this off Ebay from a guy in Japan that makes custom synths. Basically you tap the bottom half of the box to generate the tone and then as you’re doing that, you can play around with the knobs to change the sound. A fun lil toy! X0XB0X I rarely use this in production even with most of my acid basslines. but I always bring this along for my live sets. It’s just good fun to play with and its always nice to let the crowd see you have fun doing it. Oh, and it sounds great and costs a lot less than the real thing (303). Besides the photographed items I also have an Alpha Juno 2, a Poly Korg 800, a Roland 707, a Launchpad & a Fireface UC interface. All relatively affordable save the Fireface. As they say it’s not what you got but how you use it. Sometimes constraint spurs creativity. fabric Set London has always been a hub of forward thinking dance music. Its sounds have influenced me since the early days and it has always been on my wish list as a place to perform or DJ. I am definitely excited that not only this will be my debut in London but it will be at an institution like fabric and along with talents like Cassy and Norm Talley no less! I booked Norm to play at a small party in Toronto a long time ago, and he’s one of my favourite DJs from Detroit, So I’m looking forward to catching up and hearing him play.