Introduction
I remember always having some type or form of music playing at home when growing up.
My father has always been a music fan and particularly a Hi-Fi aficionado so there was always a record player, cassette player, radio or reel-to-reel in any given room of the house.
He was always trading music with his friends so, even though his music taste was more towards easy listening, some gems would eventually show up. Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Peter Gabriel, etc., were things that would occasionally show up and made an impression on me.
I'm from Barcelos, Portugal, a small town in the north of the country that, in my teens, had an abnormal number of bands. I guess that being small there really wasn't much to do so we would make bands to pass the time.
At one point it was referred to as "the Portuguese Seattle" because of the number of good bands coming out. I started a few and played occasionally with a few others. Everyone was just having fun.
I mostly stopped making music in my 20's & 30's, just the occasional collaboration with friends, until about 5 or 6 years ago when I slowly started to make music more regularly but just to enjoy myself, as a hobby really.
I have a very dear friend with whom I occasionally jam (he lives abroad) and I thought it would be a good idea to have a place online where we could have a diary of sorts, of little bits and pieces that we would do together. One would make a video and the other one would do the music and then the other way around.
Have we d(r)one this before was just a play on words because I knew we would so lazy and disorganised that we would probably forget or make the same things twice :).
Unfortunately, shortly after, the pandemic happened and schedules and time just got weird.
At some point I decided to just start filming the jams I was doing and share bits of them. Lots of people were doing the same and I really enjoyed listening to them and learning from them so I thought maybe someone will enjoy mine.
Eventually it became a fun habit and something I would do that really helped to turn off from all the confusion that was going on.
It still is.
I work as a graphic designer and photographer at a digital media company. Doing mostly UI/UX these days with the occasional print catalog or event branding. Photography is mostly product focused with the occasional event.
I'm married and have two daughters, one is studying piano for a couple of years now and the younger one wants to be a singer!
They sometimes want to play with the synths but it's not easy going all Frozen on a modular I guess.
I really don't have much of an answer to that. I just like to make music for my enjoyment, as a hobby if you will.
Production
I just start really. After the kids go to bed and not having any other plans I just start messing about, usually with the modular.
Everything is one button away from being ready and that I think is important. Not wasting time with technical stuff or other audio routings. Everything is plugged in and pre-routed.
The modular is the obvious exception. I’ll unpatch whatever was patched before and start over (even if I end up with a similar patch). There’s something quite relaxing about it. It also makes me feel a bit more connected to the whole thing. And the Sine Patch Cables (shameless plug :P) make this even more enjoyable with the clever color coding. It is weird, but I never had so much fun, or made so much music, before turning my attention to modular synths.
It feels like conducting an orchestra twice: first you lay out the musicians, tell them where to go and then you tell them what to play or set the rules for them to improvise with.
Generative composition is something I very much enjoy, setting the rules and general feel and then being surprised by all the wonderful combinations that arise from it.
The camera is also always ready and after an hour or two of jamming I’ll press record and make a note of the parts that I like best and later cut them to 1 min videos.
I don’t think so. There aren’t any modular shops in Portugal but being in the EU makes it easy to get anything you’d want. Unfortunately there aren’t that many people using modular here, we’re so few that we kind of know each other by default!
Inspiration & Collaborations
Musical collaborations are something that I would very much like to do more but I’m also aware that my usual available time for that is very limited. So something to work on in the future.
Regarding brands and gear, if it is something that I find interesting and useful then I’m open to it, but never in a review or advertising kind of way. It has to be something that I genuinely want and can use to make my music regularly.
I don’t have any one person or artist. I listen to many genres, from post-rock to experimental, the only criteria being the quality and feeling I get from it.
When making music I always have a tendency to mix more pleasing melodic lines with some weirder and experimental textures, trying to balance the whole thing. I prefer the grey in-betweens, not black or white.
The easy answer is the modular. If I’d have to choose one module I’d say the 4ms Dual Looping Delay. I use it almost exclusively as a looper and it is a brilliant execution. It is reliable, flexible and a great way of finding happy accidents or easily add more voices to the system.
Reel-to-reel records are also pieces of equipment I cherish but I have mostly a love-hate relationship with them, especially when using tape loops. The juggling needed to just get a loop recorded and played back properly sometimes drives me insane (I don’t have a lot of space for laying out tape or adding stands or clamps and whatnot) but the end result of slowing down a loop (or a whole track!), with its warmth, noise, wobbles and inconsistencies, is nothing short of magical. You can’t get that on a plugin and I’ve tried many. Especially not the part of setting up the whole process and sometimes wanting to throw it out the window!
Guidance
I don’t see myself as having a channel or being a content creator really and I also don’t have any type of planning and just make music whenever I can (this past week, for example, I haven’t touched the synths)
I guess I like watching what other people are doing and sharing in electronic music and maybe someone will also enjoy what I’m doing - that was and still is the main idea.
I also enjoy helping people out when they have questions about the process or how a module works. It is a way to keep moving: create something, record it, share it, move on.
If you like to make music then do it for YOUR enjoyment. And there will always be someone that will enjoy it too.
