Sean Booth Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Production-wise, I've always stuck with Ableton Live and there's really no reason to switch to something else at this point.

I write and do all my arrangements on my Mac. And um, I use Logic Pro, which is a great software program.

One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing was taking raw sound from locations during the film, like the candy machine, and writing pieces of music to go with them, which is totally unnecessary within the context of the film, because they have their own logic.

I think I have a basic sound aesthetic that is in most of what I do.

Nowadays you can record on your laptop with Pro Tools, which I do quite often.

Well, I don't really use MIDI that much. But I do record audio around me a lot, and just layer it up and see what effect it has, without any aforethought.

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.

To me everything is a material, and everything is subject to change. When I work with found sounds, I'm trying to figure out how do I make this come from me?

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.

If you're working on a computer and you're editing bass, it looks like a warm curvy, sort of feminine object.

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.

Today, computers help us making the music. It's really a tool.

Pro Tools was invented to quicken the recording process.

There's a lot of stuff you've gotta know about Auto-Tune before you can start using it, because it's the hot thing to do.

For my second record I had gotten ProTools (program) and started to familiar myself with hard disc recording.

Writing in the electronic world, you imagine a sound, and then you have to go and find it. It's not like imagining a flute and then making that sound materialize. That's easy!

I take sounds and change them into words.

This is something special. You can attempt to have a kind of non-living music.

When I was 12, I went to boarding school, where I discovered the computer, which meant I no longer had to write something down and get someone to play it, I could just type it into the computer and hear it back.

All my vocals were recorded at home, which was great for me. You can actually have a studio in a computer program called ProTools. I did half the record with ProTools.

Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you've had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff.