GHF Presents the Producer Q&A Series Part 3: Gettin' ill with the queen of the lizard overlords

For the last decade, ill-esha has been an integral part of the North American electronic scene. Beginning as a vocalist, she soon added MCing and DJing to her repertoire, creating a dynamic and unique live show which has headlined alongside artists such as Andy C, Klute, Dieselboy, Vibesquad, LTJ Bukem, Tipper, T-Power & De La Soul. She has performed across North America, Europe and Asia; in clubs, at festivals, and even on TV shows on MTV Canada and the CBC.

In 2001 her first 12” single was released on New York label Breakbeat Science; since then ill-esha has worked steadily as a vocalist and producer on labels like BluSaphir, Haunted Audio, Woofer Cookers & Muti Music; hitting #1 singles download on Juno and #3 in the Beatport Electronic Charts. Her current album on Daly City, "Circadian Rhythms" currently sits at #3 on the Addictech Monthly Downloads and has been blogged on MTV's website. Coming soon are digital EPs on Haunted Audio and Street Ritual, and 12" releases on European labels Dub Police and Subway. ill-esha is currently writing new tunes and remixing everyone, including your mom, in San Francisco, CA.

first off... :: mad respect ::

Now the Q's --

How do you collaborate with other artists? In your past collaborative projects, what has worked and what hasn't?

What's your favorite technique to glitch the hell out of something?

What artists inspire you the most and how has their inspiration affected your tunes?

And thanks again for feeding our brains!

:: mad respect indeed to the illest of eshas ::

1. top 5 favorite plugins?
2. what is the single most important thing you could tell a noob producer?
3. why are you so damn IIIIIILLLLL!?

This is just awsome, thanks for doing this! Ur one of my most favorite producers and i am more than stoked to pick ur brain.

What i like about ur songs the most is they always seem to have a direction/ point/ story, not just a series of loops and quirky automation placed together to create a song. Ur latest Tron- purple legacy release is a shining example. What do you think the key to creating music that has a solid original progression and creates the feeling of a story/ movement?

I hope I asked that clearly enough.

Also if u could explain your workflow when creating remix that would be freakin sweet.

so there is the mastering thread...

but not much on the highly subjective mixdown stage...

dubstep forum has a pretty informative mixdown thread (i think it is called "gain stage and structuring" over at dsf) -

having said that... what techniques or habits do u see yourself using over and over with mixdowns?

how do u treat drums or bass or glitch or leads? how do u approach volume and balance and panning? u hate me for asking! ;p



props on the recent output ill-esha - GREAT STUFF.

Huge ! Thanks for doing it !

My question is about your mad basslines composition, maybe the most successfully completed in the glitch hop scene imo: in each song, the bassline can't stop evolving and transforming. So i was wondering how do you manage this... Could you give some resampling techniques or give some details on your process ? And by the way, do you already know how your bassline will look like, when you're starting a new song, or is it more like total experimentation and you finally keeps what's good ?

BIG UP !!

Who/what are some of your main sources for inspiration?

.....i don't really have many questions, the only reason I posted was to simply ask...

How has your life changed since finding out Android Bishop and I are 2 completely different individuals? haha

Stoked to see the responses from you! Some of the questions asked by other members pretty much covered anything I would have asked at this moment in time.

How do you (from your point of view, as in what you're thinking about when you work on tracks) create continuity within a release? There are things I can hear in Circadian Rhythms that give it continuity but I'm curious how much is conscious on your part.

When do you decide a track is finished? Do you tend to have several tracks (or more) pile up, and then finish them all at once, or do you work mostly one at a time?

What do you do when you get stuck on a tune?

Wow thanks for the questions! I have been on airplanes all day and will answer as soon as I'm up tomorrow. Xo

Just one question: Why do they call you the queen of the reptilian overlords?

How do you get more.. grimy type sounds in synths in the melodies..

I am having troubles getting my music away from sounding like 80s synth pop!!

To quote Richard Sweat?

What's the dizzy on the purple yo?

i just have one question:

when will you pay the dead scientists e.g. n.tesla for their inventions which made you what you are today?

thank you, madame - u rockZ

compact

Yes, good choice!

-How / when did you learn to sing?

- At what point during the production of the track do you add any lead vocals? (first of all /a little later etc...) / do you have a collection of finished songs and decide which best fits the track early on etc...

so much respect, always love your shows and your production. my friend pat and i felt a lot better about not winning the shambhala remix contest (as the betternauts) when we found out you were tincantelephone also.

i could pick your brains for hours (mmmmm brains), but what i would really like to know is

1. there was a thread a while back where vespers said something about how if you like prog dont listen to glitch hop. my friend pat and i have a glitch hop aesthetic (womp, glitches, big bass, etc) but with prog elements to our compositions (unexpected structure, jazzy chords and progressions, etc). whats your opinion on how prog glitch hop should be allowed to be?

2. what DAW do you use?

3. how did you get into scoring films?

4. i've always been in love with your pads and the sparkle your music has...could you walk us through your pad/ambience production process just a little?

Thanks so much for doing this, bigup to you on blowin up this year, and much love from your old bwompin grounds.

No questions really, just a 'big ups' from someone who's been following your progression since back in the day

It really depends. There are people I've collaborated with after a chance meeting on tour, there are people I've randomly met online and vibed out with, and then a very few people I've actually gone and sought out after I was particularly feeling the music. Most of the time I prefer to work in person for collabs, because I really get inspired by another person's energy and workflow. I usually only work online with people when I'm either just doing a remix or just doing vocals for them - or we've started a track in person that we need to finish.

It's definitely easiest and most efficient for me to work with people who are less musical and more technical. I find that most people are stronger in one of the two areas; either they came into making music from being super into computer programming, or they are lifelong musicians who have worked on their technical skills. I'm the latter, and for me writing hooks and progressions is easier than fingerpainting, but all the strictly technical stuff I've worked hard to catch up on. Don't get me wrong, I can do it and sometimes enjoy elements of it - but if I'm working with someone like Antiserum who is an EQing genius and great at programming the Virus, then it flows really quickly because I'll write a million parts and then I'll step back, he'll come in and clean them up and add his trademark elements. When I'm working with someone who's equally as musical and equally or less technically inclined than I am, it's more difficult because our melodic ideas will sometimes be very different and we get stuck trying to come to a balance. Then we get to the technical stuff and nobody wants to do it!



You know, I'm kind of over the standard "glitching". I feel like we've all played out Glitch and Effectrix and not only that, but you have all the new generation of laptop djs (god I sound old) with their live glitch effects, glitching over stuff that's already been glitched. Sometimes I hear people's sets and just want to swat their hands away from the controller like a mom swatting away her kid's hands from the cookie jar. Like "Leave it alone for just one bar! So for the odd effects I still use, I'm really down with just plain old audio. It's Dewey dB's favorite glitch plugin "Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V".

Something I will still edit a lot is vocals. And my favorite thing to do with that has to do with breaking apart musical habits that me and just about any other musician has. Everyone has patterns, particular motifs, scales that they like. My friends like to make fun of what they have noticed to be the very trademark ill-esha hook.. So in order to subvert that, what I'll do is sing the hook, then break apart the notes into different keys on my sampler and replay them randomly in time. I'll end up with something that is totally not what I would have sang, but much more unpredictable and interesting! You could apply this same technique with notes in a hook that you'd write, and as long as you're following basic rules of music theory, you might surprise yourself with how different it ends up.



I am still absolutely dumbstruck by the phenomenon that is Imogen Heap. She plays a bunch of different instruments, and some things that we wouldn't even think of as instruments - and then samples and twists them. On stage, she is a dynamite force, and will run around the stage recording and looping everything from a clear glass piano to some PVC tubing wrapped around her arm. She's really got not only the engineering know-how (won a Grammy for her engineering!) but also the artistic innovation and insane performance skills. I'm so sick of people looking at their laptops! Her influence really pushes me to continue using weird instruments and household objects in things I do.

Eskmo is also like that. His trademark snare comes from a recording of stepping on tree branches, and he uses so much complex organic layering to create his percussion. I would have to admit that Dewey also encouraged this as well - him and I used to have these great sessions in our studio in Vancouver where we'd just record anything. Copper pipes, wooden blocks, plant leaves ripping, glass chess pieces, camera shutters clicking.

I also adore my dear friend Aaron Vibesquad. Everything he does has a huge amount of swing, funk, groove, soul, whatever you wanna call it - there is such a joyous, vibrant, LIVE emotion in what he does. The movement and rhythmic syncopation of his bass patterns has definitely inspired a lot of my programming. Oh yeah, and he's possibly the nicest and most genuine person in the entire world, which inspires me in a whole other way.

thank you!

1. OK, just going by what I use the most...

FAW Circle
Spectrasonics Omnisphere
PSP Vintage Warmer
AudioDamage DubStation
Izotope Ozone

runners up go to Alchemy and PSP Nitro.

2. Don't put out every single half finished idea you've come up with. Don't slay your favourite producers with IMs and Facebook Chats asking them to listen to stuff. The best thing you can do is to work your ass off until you can play your track next to your favourite producer's and it at least compares sonically. THEN put it on Soundcloud and start sweating your way up the chain like the rest of us.

3. Because I'm a girl and girls are better than boys! Ha ha. Um.. I plead the Fifth.

Well, the Tron track was kind of cut out for me. Daft Punk wrote a really great soundtrack with some subtle but always evolving progressions, and for that track the hardest part was not how to move forward, but what to cut out from the original because it was all so good!!

When I'm making original stuff, I think it's important to have a good understanding of music theory. As tedious and annoying as that seems to those of you who don't come from a musical background, I can't thank my parents enough for forcing me to take piano for 8 years of my life because I now have an instinctive comfort with scales and progressions and can assess harmonic relationships in split seconds. Which means that if I'm noodling around on a keyboard, I don't need to think about where the progression is going, it seems to take itself there because my brain is so hard wired to know every possible answer to the question the first chord poses.

It is for this exact reason that my biggest problem is usually having too many melodic parts. I think a lot of tracks on the market in every genre of electronica rely too much on simple repetitive motifs in overly basic patterns. I would say if you don't know enough music theory, listen to old jazz or classical symphony records and trace over some of the musical progressions they use. Some tracks I hear make me wince because the melody hook will just go up and down three adjacent keys on the keyboard, as if your cat walked across the keys. There is SO MUCH you can do with music and its various progressions to create emotional tension. My biggest pet peeve is people who make everything in G because "it hits the hardest on the subs". Well yeah, okay, that's like the years of my life where I wore nothing but black. It worked, and it does work, but how boring is that? Why would I want to paint every song one color?

So what I usually do is write the basic chord progression. Then write a harmonic lead line that moves between different intervals. Then I'll write more parts that will either harmonize with that, and I can flow into them throughout the song, or maybe even build a "bridge" - this is a simple songwriting device that barely anyone seems to use in electronic music. Basically it just introduces a new, different chord progression that is harmonically connected to the first. The best example of this in my own music I could show you would be my song "Zephyr" with Antiserum - it's got an extremely hooky/poppy main melodic progression and then switches to this bridge/B-Section of a new progression.

And that's basically the story. Progression is the name of the game. That being said, I think it is entirely possible to tell a musical story without a super melodic center to it - Loops Haunt does a great job of storytelling with his sound design, as do a lot of other sort of non-melodic producers. But that's still building a progression, maybe just with noises rather than chords.


OK. Creating a remix?

Well, for one, I often tend to change the tempo of the original just to be extra different. I didn't do this with the Tron remix, but I've done it for most of the other remixes I've done. So the first thing to do will be to timestretch it to whatever I want to do.

I never use anyone else's drums, and I usually don't use their bass either. The one exception to this is in my Mindelixir remix, where I was trying to teach myself the EXS-24 sampler, and decided to experiment. I sampled one note of one of his original basses and then through using filters, portamento and voicing really changed the sound and made it my own. That's another thing, I'm constantly teaching myself new techniques and plugins so depending on what I'm learning, that itself might be one of the inspirations and central focuses for a track.

Then I'll go through the elements and sample whatever elements of the stems I might feel like using, little bleeps or chords. I almost always will write my own lead line and atmospherics to harmonize with the original productions, because I love to write a whole new composition inspired by someone else's building blocks. Often whatever I've written will push itself to the front and I'll end up using very subtle, super morphed tiny elements from the original to flesh out my new Frankenstein!

I'll write the bass patterns, and I'm always mixing as I go so by the time I get to doing fills, risers, and other finishing effects, theoretically the track is almost there. But yeah, the core of it is that I usually only use about 15-25% of the original source material and just try and use it as a stepping stone to a new track that pays its respects to the old.

Hope that was somewhat clear. I sure am a rambler.

hah no mate that's what this thread is all about!!

There are definitely shortcuts I use for the mixdown process. For one, my track template has my drum sampler already bused out to different outputs, which go into a master bus. The bass is also already triple bused, split into Low, Mid and High. So I use this aux bussing system to have more control over my EQing and post processing. I always throw a PSP Vintage Warmer on the drum master bus, and lately I've really been digging using it as parallel compression. I'll overdrive the hell out of it with a steep, spiky attack and then turn the mix down to 50-60% so that the original transient dynamics poke through. I also usually throw the Logic Adaptive Limiter on my snare bus and sometimes my Sub Bass bus, because I'll be feeding several different signals into each bus and the levels tend to wildly spike and throw my mixdown off otherwise. I like overdriven kicks as well, and I'll often sidechain my kick to my bass which is pretty standard, just to create more room in the mixdown.

HxdB taught me to "Eq Everything" and I still stand by that as the best trick. The Logic EQ has a spectral analyzer built right in, and I think Ableton has a built in one too, you just throw that on each and every channel - even the ones you don't think are causing any problem - and you'd be surprised at, for instance, the nearly inaudible low end noise that comes through. It made the biggest difference just sweeping all my channels and ruthlessly cutting everything unnecessary out - I do believe that's what's responsible for so many people referring to my mixing as "clean". There really is no escape for unwanted frequencies in my tunes, they get nuked pretty quick.

As for glitching, as I said in a previous answer, I'm using plugins less and less and just using audio, or automating parameters of filters, delays, reverbs and any other post processing plugin to create a really moving and morphing sound. The plugins I am enjoying automating are Camel Space, PSP Nitro, Logic Filterbank and AudioDamage Dubstation. I do a LOT of automation and sometimes will bounce it if I'm running out of juice, and do something else to it.

Mixing leads is always really tough. They sound hella loud on laptops and terribly quiet in my "den" studio with the sub blaring. I find that the leads are the elements I have to constantly change when doing a mixdown. I guess just scrupulous usage of spectral analyzers and metering plugins really tells me if something's poking out in particular. And I EQ them ruthlessly just like everything else.

And yeah I use analyzers a LOT for checking balance and panning. I usually heavily pan any atmospheric and SFX elements in my tunes, as well as hi-hats and rides. My sub bass bus is always in Mono, as is my kick. I use the Ozone analyzer a lot as I finish the mixdown process just to check that something isn't really out of phase, and also to see if there's too much stereo or not enough going on in my tunes.

oh! the most important tip. I don't understand WHY all audio programs default to have channel faders at 0, because that very quickly creates a volume buildup and suddenly your master is red lining like crazy! I believe they should all start at -10 or lower, and that's how my template is set up. I mix everything as quiet as possible and just push the volume up in the mastering stage. A good friend of mine told me that the algorithms work better when everything is summing quiet instead of loud, and again, I think the clarity I've been achieving in my mixes lately speaks for it. My tracks sound much better when I use this technique.

Well, one thing I recently learned from Opiuo, hopefully he won't kill me if I tell you, is the beauty of the Logic EXS 24 sampler or probably any other sampler for that matter. There is something different that happens when you automate a pitch bend in a sampler using audio versus doing it with a synth that is creating the sound in real time digital processing. A synth pitch bending is too "perfect" and will replicate the same sound exactly as it pitches up and down, whereas a sampler processing audio behaves slightly differently at each stage. So a lot of the time now, once I make a really good bass I will bounce it out and resample it. Previously, I was always choking my computer with too much real time MIDI stuff, because I'm so deathly afraid of commitment.

It's hard to really explain but I tend to hear rhythmic patterns in my head for bass. As I said before, Vibesquad was a huge inspiration, and when I was first learning I really studied his music to figure out exactly why it would move and affect me so much more than other people's basslines. The answer really lies in syncopation. So I don't necessarily know what patches I want to make, but I'll hear a rhythmic pattern in my head that syncopates with the beat and after humming it out loud for a bit, "bom, bicka-bom-bom, wallaga-wallaga-bom-wickety-bom" hehehhee.. you know what I'm saying. I'll play it out roughly with one bass patch, then make another one, sometimes make up to eight of them. Then I'll bounce each pattern to audio and manually cut back and forth between them.

Sometimes the bass itself will have enough movement, or I'll want it to be simpler to not take up too much space in the track, and in that case I might just use one patch. Sometimes I hear melodic bass patterns instead of just rhythmic ones and I'll make it the melodic centerpiece and all the other parts fall to the background.

I don't usually start a song hearing a bassline without having heard the beat in my head first or at least in conjunction, so I always make the beat first and then play the bassline in. Syncopation and "swing" are key here, and another thing I do is to always play my basslines in and not quantize them if possible. I think just being in the pocket, just being slightly late and early with your bass and beats, is what really makes a track get to the next level. What REALLY bores me is the proliferation of producers these days who make their one wobble by slightly tweaking the Brutal Electro Massive preset, and then think that just by changing up the rate of time-synced wobbles that they have a solid track. Screw that! Make different patches, play things in live and beautifully imperfectly, and the other thing is to use LFOs and Envelopes to do more than just modulate Filter Cutoff. You can use a wavetable synth and use an LFO to oscillate between two different wavetables, or automate the number of oscillator voices, or the overtones of harmonic partials. Get creative in your routing! But just make sure you use some good compression/limiting at the end to tie it all together, you still want your basses to sound like siblings and not random strangers to each other or else it doesnt give the impression of movement.

A lot of the final decisions as to which patches appear at which moments is purely trial and error, cutting and recutting with my scissors and mute tools. But the rhythmic pattern is my architect, and the bass patches are the building blocks that come after.

oh my god, well, i ran a huge conspiracy theory website about android-sweat and the implications thereof, and started a massive cult and then i saw the two of you and it completely fucked my whole theory, now i'm penniless and have been expelled by my followers, thanks a lot dude.

Funny enough to you I must admit Circadian Rhythms was not originally an album, it was a title I'd been saving up for about two years (Damn you Jack Sparrow for releasing an EP with almost the same name three weeks before mine!).. and then when Mochipet told me he'd like to put out an album, him and I went and selected from a huge pile of standalone tracks that I had on the table. What I think the continuity you're hearing comes from has to do with my burning need to always be learning and always be incorporating new techniques, so often when I work on tracks these techniques come to the forefront. The tracks on Circadian Rhythms for the most part do come from a similar timeframe and there are probably some similar techniques I was working on mastering that are in there.

Also there are definitely trademark elements that I have that keep showing up in tunes. I love writing strings, which is part of why I love writing for film so much, and I often fill out my tunes with layer upon layer of orchestration. I love using real instruments, and almost every track I make, if not every track, has something organic in it - a guitar, a vocal, some household percussion, etc. And I sure do love jazzy pentatonic leads. So does Joker, haha. When I first started playing out my tunes I'd drop 'em at shows and people would scream "JOKER!!!" and I was like, "NO, ME!" and I think that's also been a driving impulse to use more real instruments, because he often sticks to really synthy sounds and I really wanted to create a more obvious discrepancy. As much as an inspiration as he is to me, I don't want to be his clone.

I used to always work on at least two or three tracks at once, because I hate repetition and usually can only do about six hours on a track before I'm burnt out on it. Working on several tracks enables me to pull longer productive days because switching to another tune will give me fresh inspiration and energy. That being said, I've been so hectically busy with touring that lately I've only had time to work on whatever remix project is hovering over my head. And now I'm getting more agile and quick with finishing tunes so it takes me less time, so these days I'm balancing my life a little bit and not just spending 12 hours a day on tunes. On a good day, I'll pull a 6-hour day and I can finish a tune in two sessions like these, and I really love finishing tunes, and I'm pretty precious with my tunes so I'm not really good with just farming out piles of music. My good friend Ben Samples is a machine, and will constantly write five tunes a week, but he's told me he doesn't keep all of them. I keep every single thing I finish and it's because I won't work on anything unless an emotional little piece of my heart tears off and weaves itself through the fabric of the tune. Last week I finally had some time and finished two tracks over four days, but I did it one at a time because I was super inspired. If I'm less inspired, I might start something, get halfway, start something else, but I really try and finish everything I make and these days if I spread myself too thin on tunes I won't finish anything.

When I get stuck on a tune? Well, if I'm just screwing around and I can't come up with anything good within a couple of hours, I'll just leave it and start something else. These embryonic projects are REALLY great to come back to at another time when I'm super musically inspired and don't want to spend any time setting up a drum kit and getting a project going - I'll just dive back into it and work from there.

If I am really stuck in the studio, I've seriously found the best thing you can do is to get out of it, leave your house, and go hiking, walking, go to a cool cafe, hook up with a really interesting homie, and actually do this thing called experiencing life. Way more inspiring than 40 hours over 3 days in your parents' basement!

Because my android-like countenance is the only controlling antidote to the epidemic of lizard people that are quietly subverting our innocent society into a galactic annihilation. Pssht. Silly question, easy answer.

Hey, what's wrong with 80s synth pop? Me and B. Bravo say, NOTHING!!!!

I know what you mean. Well for one, if you're talking strictly musical, something I learned how to explain from jazz theory is, using harmonic intervals of thirds and fifths, anything that makes a "regular" sounding chord, is very predictable and.. harmonious. Pop music is all about using these predictable and harmonious intervals. If you really study what makes an interesting moody jazz chord, they will use minor 2nds, 4ths, 7ths, 9ths, 13ths, etc. I tend to write really poppy melodies too, and what I'll do is let myself record whatever i'm thinking, then play around with changing some of the notes to create these less predictable and more emotionally tense and interesting intervals.

If you're talking about sonically grimy, well any kind of distortion is your friend. I like Redoptor, and also any kind of Bitcrushing plugin works well. You can automate the mix, downsampling, tube bias, and other aspects of these things to create interesting movement within your leads. Something I tried just the other day was using four very similar patches in Sugarbytes Unique, and then applying various effects to them, then bouncing each one to audio and cut between using two of them at a time. Every few notes it changed to be two different patches, and really created different levels of distortion AND movement within the lead.