Tom Pritchard, aka Stompp, is one of my favorite sound designers for Reason. His work for Nucleus Soundlab on Synthetic Kits and Filter Research is stellar, and if you haven't picked up his latest free refill, Wonderfill, you need to get on that asap. Now I sent Tom a list of questions and he answered them all, so while this is called "10 Questions", there's a couple of extra this time round.....
- first off, where are you based and what's the music scene like there?
I'm in South East London - I don't actually have a great idea as to what the music scene is like where I live, but I'm quite close to central London, so when I do go see something live it tends to be there; the last gig I went to was to see Biosphere (and I think BJ Nilsen) play some of their ambient stuff. Recently I've missed opportunities to see Squarepusher and LFO perform live, there's some great stuff about. Loads of jazz and classical and all sorts too.
-now that we've gotten that out of the way, there's quite a few questions I want to ask you, sound design questions are certainly some of them, but first I want to ask about your own music. I've checked out your Facebook page and really enjoy your tracks. I'd put them somewhere in the shoegaze/electronica genre... shoetronica? I'm wondering what equipment, both software and hardware you use when making your own music?
Thanks on the tracks, great to hear that you enjoy them! :) Shoetronica... I like that! I have a few different projects on the go, all of which use totally different equipment. Everything on that Facebook page is made almost entirely in Reason. I have a couple of other softsynths, and every now and again I sample patches from them and use them in Reason (mainly Albino 2 presets and my own Absynth 3 programming). But 95% of the stuff on that Facebook page is Reason. The other projects are a mix - all the hardware in that studio photo has never been used in any of the tracks that are online - I have it because sometimes you need a change of scene, so one day I'll write a track in Reason, the next I'll do some improvisation with the hardware, sometimes I'll just write something in ReBirth or using Korg's DS-10, and I have this experimental project called Eigenlicht which makes extensive use of things like granular synthesis and waveshaping in Absynth. I only release a tiny amount of the music I record. It just keeps things fresh, so I don't get fed up with working in one environment. It makes you think about how you write too - the stuff I make with the hardware is totally different to my main Reason work.
- as both a sound designer and a musician that composes music, do you sometimes come up with a patch and think, "oh, I've got to keep this for myself?"
Most of the patches in my free ReFills are actually patches I've made specifically for tracks, and sometimes I think to myself "this sound is really integral to this tune, maybe I should keep it under wraps", but I love to share, so usually I let them go. If I have a sound in a track that I haven't stuck in a ReFill, it's more likely to do with that sound relying on too many other elements in a song - like being particularly sensitive to specific notes and rhythms or being compressed with other parts - so for instance I couldn't recreate any of the sounds in August in any useful way in Combinator form because there's so much layering and compression there that the sounds just don't work on their own. :)
- I really love the track "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" on your Facebook page (I'm a sucker for any track that features the sound of a radio being tuned between stations.-) Do you have any albums out and/or a website where people can download your music?
Awesome! Thanks. :D I used to have a collection of tunes up for grabs called 2008 Collected - all of the tracks that were in it are on my Facebook page. I moved all of my music to Facebook from another site so that I could do all of my online stuff under one website - the only websites where I have any kind of presence are Facebook and Propellerheads.se (anywhere else and it's someone else who decided to stick an extra P onto Stomp). Unfortunately, I didn't realise you can't download from Facebook until after the move - I should really sort that out. I'm always happy to send people tracks if they want an MP3 though! Or even a Reason file. :) To be honest, I kind of have a love/hate relationship with my music. I write music purely for fun, so often concerns about how it's mixed are thrown out of the window while I'm working on it - sometimes I feel a bit embarrased by the quality of my production and composition, and take my music down as a result. I hear what other people are doing on the forums, people like Adam and Josh and Mike (Avatar One) and it's just so professional and so well thought through and beautifully written, and then I hear guys like Luke Vibert use Reason and I think "man, he can do that... and I can only do this... I should pack it in". I never will pack it in, I enjoy it too much, but it's that sense of "oh wow they're all so good" that makes me think twice about putting stuff online. I remember when I was just starting out and thinking "OMG THIS IS AMAZING" and you come back years later and think "oh how did I think this is good?" so I wonder if I'll come back in another few years and think "oh the stuff I wrote in 2008/9 is awful". But then I was 14 when I started out, and I'm 21 now so I'm sure I've made SOME progress in 7 years!
-what's your background in music? did you start off playing synths or another instrument?
I've long had an interest in recording - since I got this My First Tomy tape recorder when I was little. I tried learning piano for a bit, but I gave up as I found it too dull (my sister is now a Grade 8 pianist and when I hear her play I wish I'd kept it up). Then one day a friend of mine showed me this Playstation game called Music, and it was amazing - we used to jam and string together loops and just have a great time, it made music fun again. I ended up taking music GCSE at school, and my school had a little room with some synths in it - an old Proteus 2000 and I think a Korg M1 and an old Lexicon reverb; I didn't write anything decent there but I got the hang of things like MIDI sequencing. I wanted to do it at home, somehow ended up finding out about Reason, and from then on just got more and more into the software. I've only picked up the other software synths and hardware in the last couple of years, for a long time it was just Reason.
- what music inspires you?
I'm tempted to list everything, but I don't want to send everyone to sleep if I haven't already - so mostly downtempo, atmospherc and unusual electronic music. Stuff I'm particularly keen on includes Oval, Brian Eno, LFO, Boards of Canada, Bibio, Christ. (Christopher Horne), Luke Vibert, Darrel Fitton (aka Bola & Jello), Aphex Twin, Voafose, FlyLo, Clark... just about anything released on Warp, Rephlex, Planet Mu, Ninja Tune, Benbecula, Thrill Jockey etc... I like more dancey stuff too, so Chemical Brothers, Klute, Propellerheads - basically if it's been in any of the Wipeout games I love it, that inspires tracks like Vector. Some of my friends write music too which is always amazing - Adam Fielding and Joe Rhead in particular, both of whom I'm sure have great musical careers ahead of them, always inspire me. I love a lot of classical music as well, Ravel and Debussy are my classical heroes. Oh I nearly forgot Vangelis! Probably the very first electronic music I really got into, the Bladerunner soundtrack is still one of the best albums out there today. I couldn't pick a favourite artist or album, but I think Memories of Green is my favourite track ever. Just so astonishingly beautiful.
- how did you get into sound design?
All thanks to Reason and wanting to make sounds like the ones I was hearing all over the place in electronic music. At first I used to just stack hundreds of Screams and RV-7000s together and make this terrible noise, and for a long while I was just twiddling knobs with no idea of the outcome - I actually wrote some really cool music, ambient music doing that! But over time I just wanted to be able to make specific sounds so I taught myself how to use synthesisers, with a lot of help from guides in magazines like Computer Music. One day I realised some of the sounds I was making were pretty cool and thought it would be nice to share them so that's when I released my first free ReFill, it's still on the Props site I think.
- I know your work primarily from NSL's Synthetic Kits & Filter Research refills and only recently put two and two together that you also release refills under the alias Stompp. Do you do sound design work for other platforms besides Reason and/or any other companies besides NSL?
Yes, a little. Most recently I did some replacement music and additional sound design for a film called Shooting Robert King, a docmentary about a war photographer. It's going to be shown on BBC Four apparently at some point which is quite exciting! It's a great film, really worth watching. I also did a demo song for Reason 3 which was a great opportunity. I think it was a really bad track so I don't think I'll be asked to do any more music haha! Though through NSL I have contributed a handful of patches to one of the record FX soundbanks. A few years a go I did some work for a guy who scores some pretty big TV shows, but I really didn't get on with the work - I was asked to recreate some very specific sounds, and unfortunately I'm terrible at that and I found it really stressful. It happened to coincide with a pretty low point in my life so I only did it for a few weeks but it didn't work out. One of the things I like about programming patches for NSL is that I actually have a huge degree of creative freedom. However, I'm also a student, and I'm about to go into the final year of my degree, so I'm unlikely to do any commercial sound design in the next year while I concentrate on that. I'll be looking for all the work I can get when that's finished. I love programming patches for my hardware (esp. MFB-SLII, microKORG) and Absynth 3 and Albino 2.
- what's your favorite kind of patch to design?
Drum sounds and massive one-key-press pads. Thor is brilliant at both. I think my contributions to the Synthetic Kits stuff are my best patches to date - they work so well with the effects from Filter Research too. And I hate working with samples - I like to work from scratch. Sound design wise that is - I love using samples in my music. :)
- who are your favorite sound designers?
Pretty much the regular Propellerhead and NSL crowd - they're all so experienced and they really know what they're doing, some of the patches people put out are jaw dropping. Special mention has to go to Ed Bauman, just because his patches are so technically accomplished and unbelievably useful. I also really like Rob Papen, Albino 2 is the only synth where I'll allow myself to use presets these days as some of them are just too good to miss. His Access Virus presets sound great as well, but I've never actually used a Virus so I'm only going by the demos.
- any tips for would be sound designers and those that want to roll their own patches?
Start with subtractive synthesis - it's much easier to understand than FM, additive etc... and you can get great results really quickly. Master one synth at a time - don't buy buckets of stuff only to find it's too overwhelming to get into. Something like Fabfilter One on CM's cover disc or one of the many fantastic free VSTs or Reason's Subtractor - start with one of them (they're immensely powerful) and just learn it back to front. So many synths are subtractive that you can easily transfer skills from one to the other. It's also worth reading guides and tutorials. I guess the main thing is to take it easy and have fun. :)
-what are you working on now & what can we expect in the future?
I was working on an album this year but I don't seem to have enough tunes I'm happy with that I can bring together as a coherent whole so I guess that plan's sort of faded. I really want to get another free ReFill out, but I have a few other hobbies - photography, fractal flames (I love Apophysis), I make (really bad) films with my friends (although I did a pair of music videos for Adam which came out looking cool - one is on Youtube (see below), and I'm slowly teaching myself to draw cartoons, so I can't make any guarantees as to how soon. I mean these things are all competing for my free time when I'm not with friends and family, and until I've finished my degree that has to come first before all of the above, so... I have no idea what you can expect in the future sadly haha! Hopefully more patches at SOME point, anyway. :)
Official video for Adam Fielding's Aurora. Video by Tom Pritchard. Click here to watch in HD.
Thanks for the great interview Tom!
Stay tuned for another edition of "10 Questions" later this month with a surprise guest you won't want to miss...
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