ARKTKT Interview

SoundShock: What drew you into making music? Were there any specific musicians or non musicians that influenced you in the beginning? 

The whole family is musical in some way.  My older brother used to DJ in our basement, always playing Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest. Eventually he bought an MPC 2000xl and started making beats. At the age of around ten I used to watch him in awe as he chopped up samples and made new songs, thinking to myself, "I wanna do that too."  Then I started taking piano lessons and begged my parents for a Digidesign Mbox for Christmas. The rest is history...

How do you mix your tracks? What does this process look like Do you mix as you go? Are there specific decibel ranges that you aim for with the certain elements in your track? Do you start with setting volume ranges, then move on to EQing? 

I definitely mix as I go.  I'll spend a lot of time making sure the drums feel a certain way before I even move on to the rest of the song. I guess I'm more inspired to finish the track if the drums knock right. There's no particular order for me, just whatever I feel the tune needs.

What are your go-to effects and processing chains at the moment and how do you use them in your tracks?

There are too many to list, but my top 3 are: Transient Master, Guitar Rig and the stock Logic Pro Ringshifter. People sleep on that ringshifter. You can use it to duck the signal as well as get some interesting modulation. Transient master is amazing because of it's simplicity. You can tame sounds easily with the turn of a knob. I use guitar rig for it's effect chains however, it can be really easy to get lost in a wormhole of perpetually tweaking sounds. 

When starting a new track, at what part of the arrangement do you start at? Also, how much of each section in the arrangement do you complete before you move onto the next section? (Until you the main theme across, until you are inspired enough? Do you bounce from section to section just building small parts of it?)

Lately, I'll just loop 8 or 16 bars and just jam. Half the time I'll program some drums first then pull out some synths and see if I can come up with a progression that I dig. Then the layering starts. Once I feel it's dense enough I'll copy it over a few times and pull elements out. This is what I've been doing lately but it's really easy to get side tracked and just end up with an eight-bar loop that I won't pick up until a year later. If I have an idea of what I'd like the final track to sound like then I'll do some jumping around. It really depends on how I'm feeling at the time.

All your tracks seem to tell a unique story.  What are some ways you go about creating a specific story and vibe and how do you arrange out these ideas into a whole song?

I studied songwriting at Berklee for years. Arrangement is everything to me. Since most of my music is instrumental, I tend to think of all the different synths as different instruments in an orchestra. There are moments in a piece where the wind instruments don't play and just let the strings rock, and vice versa. For me, It's like building a puzzle except the final picture is constantly evolving.

Your songs include a lot of intricate and subtle pieces of ear candy as well as complex beat work that flow together seamlessly. How do you go about writing these elements and making them work together so they don’t sound like a bunch of random sounds that were put together?

Going back to that puzzle analogy, I just pull pieces out that I feel are redundant. I also spend more time than I probably should on these songs. I've spent days or even weeks just getting a drum groove to feel 'right', then I'll put the project down for a while and come back to it. The bulk of "Do Re Me Soul" was written in 2012...