Jon Hopkins Quotes

When we started there was this element of these experiments we were doing where we weren't really sure how the music would play out because the music was all on different players.

I'm very lazy when it comes to making the original sound. I don't go through amplifiers and different compressors and signal parts. I just grab something, whether its an old guitar or a children's toy that happens to be lying around, and record it straight into the computer.

Music turned to digital, and suddenly you had the possibility to make things louder than loudest, which boggles the mind but it's true, and what you have are all kinds of different ways of distorting your music.

I really like iZotope Trash, which is a great plug-in for distortion, as is Ohmicide, which I love. It's an absolutely crazy multiband distortion, compression, EQ and filter, which pretty much lets you do anything.

I do most of my vocals - aside from a couple of little one-shot vocal samples. I record everything into the Saffire with an SM58 then scratch it with loads of plug-ins. I don't do much vocoding to be honest. All my vocals are usually done with Melodyne and a ton of other plug-ins to make it sound weird.

Well, I think, I certainly used backward music in Sea of Monsters. I can't remember in the Sea of Time. I would tend to do that all the time, you know? I tended to do all sorts of weird things. Just to get effects.

I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds.

They sent me some tapes of the original Mole and I thought it was pretty intriguing. I'm sort of an experimenter; I thought it'd be interesting to play around and see what's there. It was fun. Turned out to be good.

I don't think we'll ever use the same sound techniques.

There's this weird game called 'Blueberry Garden.' For that game an artist recorded some piano music, but evidently he only had a really terrible microphone on top of the piano, and I really liked it and wanted to experiment with that. So, I made piano recording and really mangled it, and kept experimenting with the technique.

To me, finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is kind of an instrument.

I knew absolutely nothing about recording. I had this four-track recorder, and I'd plug my electric guitar right into it, which sounded real bad. I moved any fader that made a drastic change in sound. I thought that was cool - that it was communicating something. I didn't have the skills to do anything subtle. It was just like screaming.

I find it hard to get excited by just a sound. I have to have a song there, then I'll find what used I can make of that sound within the song.

But really important, perhaps most important is the craft; how you make your record, the creation of these sonic worlds you want your listener to hear.

My voice has been very, very produced, and very treated - but then, also, it hasn't.

When I went into the studio I created a sound that I wanted to hear.

Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.

Having the facility to have this multitrack at home, I could try experiments with sort of all of the instruments, giving them different treatments so they didn't actually sound, necessarily, like the instrument itself.

What is auto-tune? I don't even know what auto-tune is.

We had a simple 8-track studio set up in the record store where I worked. And just staying after work and experimenting, realizing what was possible with recording - that's why my project was called The Microphones at first. Because it wasn't even songs really. It was just sound.

Maybe I'm just stubborn about learning new things - I can't stand learning new programs - but any sound I can imagine, I can make with SoundForge. And I'm using the old version, like 4.5 from 1999. I use it for every sound.

I'm not the most technical producer, so the weird mixes and blown-out sound happen naturally.

Every time we go into the studio and use a different engineer or producer I try to look, listen and learn their approach. That has helped with the gear I look for to use live and in the studio.

You can't just plug your guitar in your computer and make it sound like an old record.

Sometimes you can just record anything and slow it down hugely and you'll find all these hidden notes and frequencies that match up really nicely.