Synths, synths, and more synths!
Motez
Adelaide-based producer and DJ Motez has been a staple in the Australian electronic music scene for a number of years now. Motez was kind enough to run us through some of the gear in his studio which is enough to make us all pretty damn envious!
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My modular synth rack
This is the beating heart of most of the basslines, synth arpeggios, and even some drum sounds you hear on most of my productions. My production has completely changed since I delved into the world of modular synths and even though my bank account has drastically suffered, I feel like it’s only going to get bigger.
The unpredictability (and sometimes instability) makes capturing the once-off magic so important to my workflow, some things you hear in my music was recorded only once and I found it almost impossible to replicate, here are some of my favourite eurorack/modular units I own.
Intellijel Metropolis
A lot of arpeggios you hear in my songs (e.g. ‘Slow Down’, ‘Give Your Heart Away’, remix for Tensnake’s ‘Rules”‘) are driven by the Intellijel Metropolis which I patch into various synths in the rack. It’s a very simple, but effective arpeggiator which truly signifies the “less is more” way of making music.
The combination of ‘pulse count’ and ‘gate mode’ transforms your arpeggios beyond a lot of two dimensional ones you sometimes hear.
Noise Engineering ‘Basimilus Iteritas Alter’
I found myself using the BIA the most because it sounds incredible, it has so much weight and variation in form that can make it work with more melodic stuff or making some truly gnarly industrial drum and synth sounds, an absolute gem in my eurorack.
ALM ‘Pamela’s New Workout’
It’s the beating heart of my eurorack, it syncs tempos and triggers like clockwork, but also provides some weird and random functions that truly adds that an important element of unpredictability that makes each time you use the synth different to the last.
Strymon Magneto
One of the first units I ever bought and I cannot see myself parting with it any time soon, not only is it a tape delay unit with “tape age”, “wow” and “flutter” that you’d find in any old reel tape machine, but it also has some incredible loop and sample functions that I used a fair bit, especially working on my audiovisual installation ORBIT.
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Sequential Pro-3
A relatively recent acquisition but a synth that’s found its way almost immediately to my productions, the various functions and routing options make this not only a very versatile synth in my arsenal, but it also sounds absolutely amazing.
The paraphonic function is very cool especially when you pair it with the arp function.
Strymon BigSky
I use this unit in conjunction with my Moog Sub37 (as well as my Roland DD-200 delay), it’s the holy grail of reverbs for a good reason. Beautifully sounding both in the studio and live, it brings more life to my Moog, especially the big sounding synth moments like ‘ReSet’ and most recently ‘Get it Done’.
Listen to ‘Get it Done’ here.
