Sticks Magazine interview 2015/1 page 2

- It started at the age of 13 which was quite late compared to many (others), but I started earlier with the piano at the age of six taking lessons for 7 years. Then I switched to drums. The first electronic gear I bought, I can't remember when it was exactly, but probably around 1985, it was a drum synthesizer, very similar to the first Simmons drum synths, just two independant analog channels. You could connect any trigger, any drum pad to them. It was made by a local manufacturer here. The first digital gear I had was a horribly inaccurate and a hardly usable Casio Trigger to Midi converter. I think it had 10 input channels. It was very cheesy, it worked. But the parameters that could be adjusted were very limited and it had all those unwanted effects like crosstalk and double triggering. There was no way to eliminate that, but my second piece of gear was a Roland sampler, an S220, the rack version of an S10, it was really pathetic instrument, you know, it had 4 memory slots, so only 4 samples stored in the memory, it used these 2,5“ floppy disks. It took ages to load a simple sound. I remember I had a drum solo in a really well known progressive rock band (called Mini) I used to play in at that time, and those 4 sounds were not enough for anybody so I remember I had to load 4 new sounds during the solo, the floppy disk was already inserted in the reader and during the solo I had to press „Load“ and after that it took about half a minute to load the new sounds so I had to play other stuff in the meantime. I would say that was really heroic to tackle with all those rudimentary digital equipment. It was a long long evolution until I finally reached my system. You know, my current system is really unique. To be honest: If someone could fully understand what it can do and is interested in digital drumming in general, that person should be very excited about it at least, but the major problem is that most people don't even understand the basics und don't know why it is different from simply triggering sounds from a sampler or any sound module? It is quite an effort to make people understand that this is a quite different approach.

- It's definetely hard for your audience to distinguish whether you are just jamming to a sequencer or playing more or less all by yourself. How do you try to convince them?

- A very good question... Because I know exactly what I am doing! For me it was not quite obvious that the audience should be „informed“ about what's going on in the background. It was the idea of the owner of the record label who put on this brilliant Blu Ray 3D video. We had visuals on Stage. You might have seen the setup because I am facing the band instead of the audience. Sometimes you can see there is a semi transparent projection screen in front of me. Sometimes I am totaly invisible when they project on the screen, but when they switch the projector off and put the lights on me , then the projection screen disappears virtually as if it weren't there at all. .And because we had this visual system on stage anyway, he said „why don't we use the other projector?“ which is above the band, „why don't we project some information about what's going on on my computer?“ I thought that was a really good idea so we did another custom made plugin which is rather similuar to those I use but whoch was specailly designed for the audience. It only shows some key messages which were projected on the screen during the gig. The same plugin or image was used for the final concert version. Some clips show some green titles which the audience saw as well. If someone reads that, I wouldn't say that it makes it fully clear what's going on, but it will give some indication. It's a pretty free and improvised kind of structure that we have on stage, so basically there are some points when the decision is up to the band where to go, so I would say the next piece could be a Saxophone or trumpet solo with a differen musical background instead. These green tags appearing on the screen sometimes indicate that. So sometimes it says „Trumpet Solo“ or „Sax Solo“. Or I might play some drum fills. The next thing would be I break down so the Screen would show the structure which is improvised in many ways but it will display what the next part will be. The message will always what the next part will be. These messages are always controlled by my interaction with the computer. I hit a control pad and that's how I control the whole system. Previously I had a much more fixed structure within the songs and the other band members had some screens in front of them so that they could see where we are. I realised that they didn't like it. I can't expect every musician being interested in digital equipment (laughing...) and I can't expect them to be interested in using computers and so on. So in this new setup it was a very important idea to take this load off the band members. So they can play as if there is absolutely no computer on stage and that's the good thing about it and that's why they like it because, let's say, if they decide to finish the solo before the actual cycle ends, for example we hae a 16 bar loop for a solo and for any reason the trumpet player get's bored and he decides to finish up the solo half way after the 8th bar he stops playing: It's no problem, I can follow them as if we had no computer on stage and I can make the computer follow this change in the structure. For them, it is as free as playing without a sequencer. It's all up to me. I serve as an interface between humans and computers. If I translate the messages well, everything is fine. We give signs to each other like in any normal band. When I misunderstand anything, we can of course end up in a huge mess. But even that can be fixed. Even if I trigger something totally wrong, I can still step backwards and trigger the right thing. So for the other band members the whole beauty of this project is that they don't have to deal with the whole thing at all.

- Let's go back again to your roots. Did you deal with electronic gear right from the start?

- I had a classical background on the piano. When I started to play drums I started with Jazz drumming right away. I was interested in electronic music since day #1. It was one of the things I first noticed in the mid seventies. There was all this excitement about Jazz Rock and Fusion, Weather Report, Return to Forever, George Duke and all these names. They were pioneers of using synthesizers. That was a natural interest for me and that's the music I grew up on. And of course Rock, but that's a different angle, but I still love it and I still love music which is dominated by guitars.

- Did you study drums?

- I studied drums for 6 years. Then I had an arthritis in my elbow. It took 1 ½ years and I had to take a break. During this 1 ½ years break I was admitted to university to the faculty of Maths and Physics. So I said if I can't play the drums right now I should rather do that and I graduated as a teacher of Maths and Physics. But in the meantime I started to play the drums again and luckily I didn't have any problems with my elbow since then. I would say this 1 ½ years break was like it directed me to a different direction. I used a lot from that knowledge I acquired those days. Of course when it comes to physics, we are dealing with electronics, we are dealing with sound. So it's a good thing to have a firm background of these disciplines and also the approach „think“ about these technical things, that's a very important thing. The custom plugins we developped, they are all invented by me. They were not developped by me because I would have had to learn so many different programming languages through the years, so I said I don't want to know everything, life is too short for that. The Native Instruments Kontakt Player has a very powerfull scription language. I started to dig into that so before developping my current system, I wrote some Kontakt Scripts myself for this new setup. I know it takes a really long time to become a master of it and it would take years for me to become as good as someone who is already there. When Ableton launched Max for Life and I realised that this is the break-through for me because before I couldn't use Ableton at all because it was not capable of doing what I needed. So I started to talk to Max for Life Developpers. I specified the plugins that I needed and I started to collaborate with these guys and we developped all the plugins I need right now. It was a conscious decision for me not to become a Max for Life expert. I didn't want to get involved in that because it would have taken probably twice or three times as long if I had tried to develop everything myself. Now I have some more ideas for some plugins to be done which will probably happen in tze next couple of months, still I am quite happy with the system I have right now. Before that, it was absolutely vital to get those plugins. Now it's not the question of life or death, it's more like refining the system. Some enhancements or to make it even more capable of doing special things but the currently used plugins are absolutely vital for doing the performance.

- So your setup is completely based on your personal ideas?

- Yes, absolutely. I have never seen anybody doing anything similar to this. I obviously followed the developments of electronic drumming. And to be honest: I was very very upset about how things were going in the last 20 years. The major manufacturers will absolutely hate me for that, but I would say what the big companies do in the field of electronic drumming is absolutely pathetic. If we consider what was available 20 years ago and what is available now in other areas of life, let's say smartphones, I am talking about all kinds of digital equipment that surrounds us, if I look at that, then it is absolutely pathetic how little progression was during these 20 years in the field of electronic drumming. It's not just my personal oppinion. I can support this oppinion with facts. I would say I was a real freak who was very much into using electronics, but never used any of the mainstream stuff. It was a really kind of akward situation. I'll give you some examples. Let me add some personal experiences. When the first commercially available physical modelling synthesizers came out in the mid 90s, made by Yamaha or Korg, many people thought that will be a massive break-through instead of using stiff samples. You know, a sample is just a snapshot, a moment an instrument was played. Instead of that, we can use a much more organic way to emulate real instruments. That was the time when the first Korg Wavedrum came out. Obviously they had to face some severe limitations. Simply because the hardware which was available on the market at that time, for a sensible price of course, was not strong enough to make very heavy computing tasks. The first release of the Wavedrum sounded really shitty, but the playing surface was absolutely unbeatable. It reacted to anything. It was not like a dead digital drum. If you started to cuddle it, if you started to scratch it, if you did anything to that box, it already generated some sounds. It never missed a note, there was no double triggering, there was no feel of a digital playing surface excepzt the sounds. The sounds were really crappy. It was mostly used for synth sounds. There are still many people using the first generation of Wavedrum because it is still capable of doing special digital effects. But they are not good in emulating acoustic drums. That was nearly 20 years ago. A single Wavedrum cost about 4000 DM. If you wanted to make a whole kit with 5 pieces, that would have been 20000 DM, but it still sounded like shit. If you look at the progression of other instruments, for example guitars, everybody uses digital Line6 equipment now, digital effects, digital guitars, digial amplifiers, preamps, whatever... They are actually pretty good now. Many people use them happily on stage and not just for budget reasons. If you look at the same developments in drumming: We're still triggering samples, we are still using piezo sensors, with the same problems: crosstalk, double triggering... There are only a very few pieces of equipment which sound even close to acoustic drums. That's what makes me a little bit upset and that's why I never ever used digital drums on stage for replacing the acoustic drum kit. If you look at my videos, I play an acoustic kit. It is full of electronics, but the acoustic kit is the base of the whole system. A very new addition to my system is the Drumit5 module by 2Box. With the pads that I have, that gave me some promising results. I wouldn't say it's as good as an acoustic kit, but I played some gigs with my Rock band and I was quite happy, but if I had to make a choice and there were no technical limits, then I would obviously choose acoustic drums. That's no question.

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