DJ/Producer Lorin Ashton, better known by his marquee moniker Bassnectar, has spent more than

a decade producing independent albums and EPs, such as the recent Vava Voom, that juxtapose
panicked and blissed-out time signatures, submerging audiences in a sonic bath of dubstep, drum
‘n’ bass, ragga jungle, glitch-hop, and digital hardcore; basically, anything with a breakbeat and a
pulse is structurally valid. Here he takes a moment to discuss the value of ergonomic MIDI
controllers and online collaborations, the best way to achieve overdrive without burnout, and how
making complex sounds can be a simple process.

Over the past couple of years, the media has trumpeted the emergence of a new rave generation.
Where do you see yourself in the contemporary bass-music arena?
You know, I’ve been at this for a long time . . . I don’t follow a lot of rules, and the ends justify
the means for me. I’m self-taught in a lot of my musical knowledge, and I’m shamelessly into
collaboration. I started to take guitar lessons when I was 12 or 13 and learned [Nirvana’s] “Smells
Like Teen Spirit,” [Metallica’s] “Enter Sandman,” and [Black Sabbath’s] “Iron Man.” I stopped
taking lessons after that.

I basically learned how to play “Iron Man” and then started playing it backward, and learned how
to play different parts of it half as fast, double-time, and then tried to put the Nirvana riff over it.
Everything I’ve done since has been some kind of mutation or remix of what I hear around me.

I allow myself to be fearless with my choices because sometimes I might choose something that
isn’t impressive to geeks at all. It might be called dumb, but to me it’s just powerful or groovy.
Maybe it’s just that F-note sub, but turned upside down.

What would you say is your typical workflow from concept to completion?
I truly have no format. I tour full-time; I’m probably home no more than a month out of the year.
When I am at home, I usually have several computers open with several projects . . . going back
into ten-year-old Reason programs, scouring through DATs that I recorded in the mid-’90s at
University of California, Santa Cruz when I was there for an electronic music minor and working
with full-sized E-mu synthesizers, looking for samples for remixes and my DJ sets, going through
my record collection to put out an a cappella from a song and mess with it, playing with a new
glitcherama plug-in someone sent me.

Tell me about the technology that has been key during your musical development.
Honestly, I wish I had immediately followed the advice of my teacher, who said once you find out
a good way to make music, you should cancel your subscription to the music magazines, find what
you know and don’t ever update anything, just let yourself get creative. I’ve worked with a lot of
different tools over the years. I’m friends with Josh [Hinden] from Twisted Tools . . . I have a good
relationship with Native Instruments . . . and I’m sure I could make amazing noises with a lot of
new soft synths, but I’ve got so many noises already. I could never synthesize another song and
still have albums of ideas just from the samples I’ve collected over the years . . . you could take
away all the synths and I could have fun making remixes of existing material all my life.

I used Opcode [Systems] Studio Vision, and then moved into Cubase really early on, working with a
Kurzweil Synthesizer and a Yamaha mixer. Then I would use the studio up at UCSC for the most
insane f**king synthesizers, all patchbay galore. I don’t even remember the models, but I would
record them to tape and physically cut the tape up myself, then transfer it all that to ADAT. And
every record that I would buy, because I was a pretty avid record collector for ten years, I would
digitize so I could sample every kick, every snare, every little breakdown, every synth stab . . .
collecting sample libraries like baseball cards. Then I switched to ReWiring Reason into Cubase,
and that was really the breaking point for me, being able to have everything in one piece of
software. That’s where I first simplified and felt a lot of liberation by confining myself to that one
program. My friends using Logic would always tease me that my stuff was too low-fi, but I just had
fun doing it. I loved hitting the tab button all day, looking at the wires shake; it was just inspiring
to me, being able to make things quickly manifest. Dylan [Lane, who records as ill.Gates] was the
one that gave me a reason to get into Ableton Live, because he worked with me for about a month
to simplify in another way, building a template based on ideas that I had for creating and DJing
with clip packs.
Is this before Max for Live and other customizable environments?
They were trying to teach [Cycling ’74’s] Max to me at UCSC and I was kind of at the point of my
university career where I was so sick of being in class and I just wanted to make gangster noises. I
really wanted to make psytrance, and my professor wouldn’t let us make that kind of music. He
wanted us to explore musique concrète and old-school electronic composition. I appreciate that
now; it was the Mister Miyagi technique. Max for Live, though, it was just a reflex for me to avoid
it. The nerdier it is, the more options, I just get scared. I just want to really reduce all those
options if it’s possible. Even DJing, I just worked with Sixty Works Controllers to develop a simple
controller for easily busting out customized live remix DJ sets [paired with ill.Gate’s modified
DeeJayus Ex Machina template for Trigger Finger].

Currently, your primary workstation is Ableton Live and a custom MIDI controller?
The MIDI controller is strictly for live performance . . . and, since I’m not a pianist, I’ve been
mousing in my MIDI notes since Cubase in the ’90s. I move really quickly like that. I just need a
laptop and headphones, really. I’ve got so many of my songs and albums into Ableton that I’m able
to remix and sample myself a lot, which is a massive time saver. Every year I update the
Vengeance Sound kicks and snares I’m using and then use them all, the same ones, for every song.
Around 2004, I started calling things “muscle beats,” and I would use their stock kicks and snares
and hats and create a beat that had all the power of the frequencies I wanted. I’d cover it up with
bright, sharp, high-passed tops, a bashing snare, just giving a different personality to the drum
sounds but basically using the same sub with Reason and in Ableton, just a massive synth sine
wave. That speeds things up immensely.

As your methods have changed how has your relationship with subbass changed?
My relationship with subbass has been transformed by several things. I don’t actually think of
music competitively, but I really need tracks that can at least stand up to the previous few tracks’
drops in a DJ set, so the bass note has to be an E, an F, an #F, maybe a G. And I toured with my
own sound system, which meant I get to play E notes, because few club systems could really
reproduce an E. With this record, I started using D, and went down to C for the Pennywise remix
just because the systems that I’m on are finally reliably able to reproduce that kind of signal.

In the past I was more worried about whether I could perform sounds, not so much how they all
went together. I would just f**k around, hitting my mouse on the synth to find a note that I liked
and just play it. Now I think about what I want to combine melodically into a range if I want it to
be a heavy drop track. I’ll mirror my sub with a synth pop to make a cohesive bass sound where
the sub is isolated just by itself in a pure sine. I’ll use 808 subs and boom kick samples when I need
an atonal bass line and I’m trying to figure out the tuning of the song and how it can stay thick.

One major thing for me was learning how to use sidechain compression and properly duck my sub
out by my kick, and making sure that the kick is sitting on the right frequency for the track to
deliver the power that it needs without competing with the sub . . . I remember seeing Datsik, and
he used to physically cut out the sub by hand everywhere the kick was. It’s funny seeing different
people’s techniques for trying to get rid of the competition there. Also, duck from the snare . . .
do a layered snare with kicks and midrange synths and all kinds of stuff that goes away for a
perfectly tuned crunch. Having a dive on your [hit] that sits out and allows for the split-second
before you drop a heavy, steady F-note covered with high-frequency and midrange synths while
your beat plays, I don’t think you can really get a heavier sound than that.

But the way I work with subbass has also been transformed by mastering. I have a full-time
mastering engineer for [personal label] Amorphous Music who was at first brought on just to
master all my music. Lately, however, I’ve been having him remaster my old record collection
because even two-year-old tracks couldn’t compete anymore. Now that I’m going back I’ve been
able to re-incorporate some real gems from all genres, like Nu Skool breaks is just a goldmine.
He’ll remaster a track, then I’ll highpass it and put in my own sine wave, my own kick, my own big
muscle snare, and basically crash hats or something, fill in some high frequencies, and just use the
original record as a midrange, almost like a lead. It’s allowed me to revitalize my own record
collection and make it contemporary.

At one point, you were doing a lot of your own “remastering” of tracks for your DJ sets, just
applying compressors and limiters. What would you consider your indispensable techniques?
If I’m going to drop a track in three hours, I’ll use PSP Vintage Warmer or a Waves L2
Ultramaximizer, but I’d always prefer to send it off to my mastering guy. If you have the luxury, I
would always recommend that you learn your synths and dial in your samples and all of your
techniques, but when it comes time to sit it all at a certain level, send it to a mastering engineer.
I mix on Mackie HR824s, first mixing the kick and snares, focusing around 110 to 120Hz and making
them as loud as I can stand, then working with the hat, keeping it bright, then putting in the sub
before I mix everything else up as quiet as I can keep them. Then I offer it to the mastering
engineer with a kind of limited sound mix: kick, sub, snare, and the rest of the track.

The techniques that I would say have been crucial in the last record are more in the earlier stages,
when I think about what I’m putting on top of the sine wave in each song. Like, in “Butterfly,”
there’s a churning reese [bass synth sound] and it’s the same I used in the [Ellie Goulding] “Lights”
remix but there’s three of them. On one of them, I’m holding down a slow-motion wobble, and it’s
got the highpass cut at probably 400Hz, and it’s basically like a ghost. You mute the sub and it
sounds like this thin, frail synth track. Then there’s this thing I call “the dog,” because it makes a
“woof” sound. It’s what would have been a wobble bass in [Native Instruments] Massive but with
the resonance turned up so high it’s basically just the sound of resonance on the filter. Talk about
positive distortion; the sound has been so overly processed by Ableton’s compressor that it gives
the 200Hz frequency to the “bass line.” And then there is a key-tuned saw wave with a little bit of
motion; you can do it in the Voicing tab in Massive, where you can control the stereo presence. I
love turning on the Pan Position and f**king with the spectrum fader, going into the Unisono
Spread and taking it up. I’ll have that be the third component in the top notches on the sub, to
give it a prickly little feeling to the ears even though what listeners are probably hearing most is
that low-pass, high-pass, midrange chunk and then that woof, which pops through all of the
different speakers even when the sub isn’t there; it’s kind of the “ghost” sub. [Techniques] like
that are how I make a strong reinforcement rhythm section. On that track, there’s like six drum
groups and an insane bass group with so many stacks to get that sound.

But then using that same exact kick, that same exact snare, I can make a song like “What,” which
is a totally different song, with its own balls-out, laser-y, dubstep drop. The rhythm section is
identical to “Butterfly,” but what’s happening on top is totally different. Something like “Vava
Voom,” that dubstep drop at the end there is the same exact sine patch, using one of these three
kicks, and one of three snares, but then just masked by a whole different texture on top.

Letting myself dial in the rhythm section and then keep the same rhythm “guitarist” for every song
as I play different leads on top of it is what allows my mastering to go so quickly. There’s no real
mystery; there’s always that same perfectly tuned and thick gelled-together rhythm section. And
there’s a parameter in the compressor in Ableton when you activate the sidechain called the
Model FF1, FF2, or FB, and it opens up to FF2 by default. But I think it just sounds better on FF1
when you’re doing sidechaining. There’s a lot less rubbing, so I use that and a hella-fast attack, a
hella-fast release, a pretty aggressive threshold and ratio. I set up two different devices to duck
the sub from the kick and a little less from the snare.

What would be your number one pointer for developing a custom sound?
I really advocate simplicity. Pick your five kicks, pick your five snares, pick whatever your subbass
signal is gonna be. Pick a couple of atonal dives. Create them in Massive or pull them out of a
sample kit, put ’em in a drum rack, save that drum rack. Save a channel strip. Pick one synth.
Then just try to make a couple songs, whether it’s Massive, [Tone 2’s] Gladiator, [Rob Papen’s]
SubBoomBass, or Albino, just pick one sampler. Pick just one folder of samples. Then box yourself
in with one sequencer and just work for a while. You don’t need to worry about constantly
updating, constantly upgrading, constantly getting the newest, latest thing, because if you do
that, it’s blindingly possible that you may never get a single song written because you’re so busy
trying to keep everything updated. That may fly in the face of your magazine, but I believe it to be
true.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Nirvana and Metallica lately, watching Netflix documentaries and
shit. I’ve started to meet some of my heroes, like hanging out with Dave Grohl in Brazil, and Les
Claypool [from Primus] asking me to remix a track … and there’s just this joy I’m feeling from
getting to engage people I listened to and supported when I was wearing a flannel around my waist
20 years ago. That feeling is what I consider the real spirit of music; it’s not geeky and it’s not
technical, and that is the role of the artist: to channel emotional and inspiring whether you’re
John Lennon or Mozart or Jimi Hendrix or Ice Cube or Dr. Dre or a DJ. Like, it’s so easy to tease a
DJ because for all you know they’re just standing up there with a click track playing, but in reality
having the musical taste to select songs that can bring 10,000 people on a journey, seamlessly
weave together songs that were created other people into a cohesive blend, that is an art. It’s one
of many arts that to me are really fun to explore even though there’s a lot of people doing it. I
think what I would encourage people to do today is to get personal, to get creative and not so
much focus on perfectly replicating the techniques you need to make yet another laserstep,
dubstep or trance track, or whatever. As an individual, I am really responsive to shit that I hear
that feels like there’s heart and vision behind it even if it’s not as well produced.

I recommend working with other people for a lot of reasons, including being able to save your ears
from unnecessary destruction. For example, I have someone else master tracks because I’m
already spending two-and-a-half hours a night on these stages with concert-level systems where
the bass is rattling my eyeballs and I’m doing it 16 nights in 19 days straight. It’s very dangerous to
my ears. So any time I can not spend doing the technical side of final mastering, the better.
Especially taking into account that I want to master basically every record in my collection and
every record that comes in and that I’m on airplanes and at hotels, having someone at home who
can just say “Yep, bass has been checked,” it’s been the most liberating shortcut. Normally I can
do it myself, but at the cost of my ears and having enough time to do it. I would recommend that
artists allow themselves to be as creative as they want, but when they have their song totally
finished, mix it down without the kick and without the sub and send it off as those separate parts
… and you can only do this if you know the mastering engineer and you have a serious relationship
with this person, because you don’t want them making any mix changes or any creative
interference. This is the full technical surgery. Having those separate components allows the
proper ducking system to be controlled and properly tested at all the right levels of volume to
compete on a laptop, headphones, on a club system, on a concert system.

The whole trick is you’re trying to maximize your weight, your volume, your evenness of volume,
and looking for anywhere that you can carve away once you get into that final limiting. Every one
of the songs that you hear on my final releases it’s the 49th or 50th go, because you’ll go through
several dozen options at the very end just trying to get rid of that final bit of burnt overdrive on
certain frequencies without losing any power. It changed my life when I decided to bring in
someone full-time who could provide another head and ears so I could be more productive
creatively. If someone’s trying to do it all themselves, it’s like when are you going to stop? Are you
going to market it, distribute it, drive the truck? At some point you have to say, “Here it is, here’s
what I’m going to do, here’s my art,” and then know when and to who to turn it over.

If you want to be doing everything and you don’t want to collaborate with someone, even if you
want to be mastering it yourself, you need to approach it like playing the different roles as a
different human. Play the role of the rhythm section as the drummer, and then put on your rhythm
guitarist hat and then your lead guitarist hat.

Sometimes I miss being in bands, I miss the personal and interpersonal resonance of crafting with
someone else. Collaborating with someone like ill.Gates is like working with yourself but there’s
two of you, because we’re really similar, stylistically, similar skill sets. Shit gets done really
quickly, literally in one day a lot of the time. I can just take my files over we can quickly get a
song fucked up and retuned. Collaborating with Mimi Page, though, she’s doing things that I simply
can’t do. She sings and plays the piano. She’s a musical genius and her theory is incredible. I sent
her old material of mine, and asked what her thoughts were, to just send me back something. And
she did, and then I took the piano part and transposed it into MIDI and played it kind of differently
and sent it back to her and had her do a version of it. So, we got that, made a bassline to it, filled
the beat around it, sent it her back to her as a song that’s basically this crude bass beat with her
piano, she sang over it, then we retuned her vocals and had three bars, four bars of her vocal and
cut the third bar. I used some plug-ins on her vocal to give her an idea of where I wanted the
melody to go; it didn’t sound good in quality, but got the idea across because I couldn’t sing over
the phone to her. We worked on that song for two months, back and forth like that, and made like
four different songs. I kept changing my mind, she kept getting new ideas. And in the end we
made this one song and it was just such a sexy make-out song. I almost thought it was R&B, and
there was no place on my current record for it, but it was a natural flow. So from that we opened
up all kinds of potential areas to explore later, which I love.

When I first started I had to prove I could do everything in a song and make everything. I even
mastered some of the songs like “Blow.” If you hear it you can tell that I mastered it myself
because it sucks. I don’t know what year that was, maybe 2003 or 2004. It was important for me to
prove to myself I could do everything. Now that it’s proven, I’m over it. I don’t care what part I
play in song creation, I just want to see the music created. I think more in terms of filmmaking. If
this is a film, I wanna be the director more than the actor. I wanna be the Dr. Dre more than I
want to be the studio engineer who’s recording a band. I’ve done it, I’ve had patch cables flung
over my shoulder and producing the electric signal of the most insane rip-off of R2D2 or whatever
alien sound direction you wanna go. At this point – partly because so many of the sounds have
already be created and you can buy This Is Dubstep Vol. 3 sample and patch collection to make
and emulate any sound you want – I’m more interested in reworking my old ideas or inventing new
takes on the idea of other people by collaborating with them or having someone remix me or
remixing someone else. I feel like that’s where a lot of the future of music’s gonna go because so
many of us are control freaks that we wind up all by ourselves in this lonely universe where we get
to make every decision and control the song from beginning to end. While that’s cool, that’s
probably why I’m not hearing the same energy in music that I did in 1992. There’s less
cooperation, there’s less cohesion in the process of multiple individuals excelling at what they do,
what they’re most excited to do. Still, I admit pretty much every collaboration I’ve done over the
past year has been over the Internet, almost half of them without meeting the other person in
person, because the timing is just so tough with my touring schedule.

My advice to anyone who’s producing music who cares what I think is really simple advice: have
fun, get creative, take chances, try things. When I was working on “Ugly” with Amp Live, we made
an agreement that every single moment we reached a crossroads, going left or right, we’d ask
ourselves “what are we more likely to do” and then we’d go the other way. With a track I’m
making right now with ill.Gates … we always started off, since the beginning, with the drum beat.
These days, as a rule, I force myself to make the song first before I add drums or bass, then go
back and play the bassline along to it, and then go back and play the drums along to it. It’s just a
new approach and makes a more melodic personality, not just a videogame composition of
explosion and laser. For me that’s important because it’s something I never did. If that’s been
your approach all along, try starting off making a drumbeat. In some way, get creative. Play
outside the box. Collaborate with other people because they’re always gonna have weird ideas and
help keep you in check if you get stuck in some random loop. I feel like, go back to the mentality
of slapping a guitar over and over and standing there awkwardly in a room while your friend is just
starting to learn drums and you’re in your parents’ garage and just 1, 2, 3, 4. Play music. Don’t
just reproduce the same thing that you’re hearing. I mean, I think it’s healthy to learn from what
you’re hearing, just don’t stop at the first level. I remember reading an interview with James
Hetfield and he’s talking about his influences. At that time I expected him to say Slayer and
Megadeath and Pantera. Other than Black Sabbath all the bands he listed were bands I had never
heard of or bands that, off the cuff, I didn’t care about or didn’t like. I didn’t understand for a
long time that that is the meaning of influences. It’s something that influences you to make
something new. I can tell these days when a producer has been influenced by dubstep, I can hear
that. Whereas when I was making dubstep I was influenced by doom metal and black metal and
’90s electronica and the downtempo room and acid jazz and drum ‘n’ bass and ragga jungle and
Aphex Twin and Squarepusher and on and on and on; all these influences that I don’t necessarily
sound like, but that influenced me. I’m not making dubstep because I’m listening to someone like
Excision, because I was making dubstep before I even met or heard Excision, before Excision was
making dubstep. His dubstep, I assume, was heavily influenced by drum ‘n’ bass, videogames, and
whatever else was influencing him. He has a very distinct noise and made it before anyone else
made it. It’s not a replication, it’s an influence. Creativity can be really choked if you emulate and
don’t push the emulation part of it into some kind of mutant form. Which is why I don’t want to
say, “Here’s how to make a standard dubstep track.” I’d rather encourage creativity.

I don’t want dubstep to becomes too strict on itself. There was a point where it defined itself too
specifically and rejected anything that didn’t follow or adhere to the direct rules. The only things
that were celebrated and accepted were the same things and same rules by a few select
producers. One way you can talk about drum ‘n’ bass is BPM, that range of 170 BPM give or take. If
it’s 130 BPM it’s not drum ‘n’ bass; it’s specific to tempo. I remember before I even heard the
word dubstep, not its 2002 incarnation but the second wave in 2005, Dubstep 2.0, well before that
I was trying to contact drum ‘n’ bass producers to request that they either move their snare off
the 2 and the 4 and put it right on the 3 or let me do that. Can I remix your track but just move
the snare? I want one snare in a bar, not two, I don’t want to be on a fucking treadmill. And
overcompress your rise and your hat so it starts rushing [makes noise] and send it back to me so I
can play it. Of course, not a single one wrote back. I wanted to hear the drum ‘n’ bass that I loved
so much but in an alternate way. Same tempo, same force, double-time bassline, half-time drums,
full power. That was before I heard the word dubstep and well before drumstep. It was a creative
idea. Do your thing but tweak this rule. I felt the same thing when I heard dubstep. All the drum
‘n’ bass producers made dubstep. Why don’t you guys just make this music at half time, 87 or 88
BPM. It was like pulling teeth. Years would pass before they considered it. By the time they were
onto drumstep I was sick of that as an idea and already made “Bass Head” and “Teleport Massive”
and all this shit. The reason that all this happened is a lack of interest in pushing the boundaries
and thinking outside the box and being open to new ideas. I don’t think dubstep is going to have
that problem, however. People compare dubstep to drum ‘n’ bass because of the intensity, but
it’s too wide-spectrum now. There’s the gentlest and the most creative and the most stock and
standard and the most robotic … I think that we’ve overcome the tempo hurdle and we’ve
overcome all the hurdles that at the time drum ‘n’ bass couldn’t overcome. Now, drum ‘n’ bass is
still one of my favorite genres. I make it and play it. Producers that I used to love their drum ‘n’
bass are now making all different kinds of genres. I don’t think that dubstep or music in general is
at that risk. Collaborations and thinking outside the box and prioritizing creativity are going to
ensure that continues.