Dave Audé

By Randy Alberts

	Dave Audé

Audé and DJ Dan recently collaborated on a track called "That Phone Track," on Dan's new record on Subliminal Records, as well as a new "Transformers" theme song they remixed using Pro Tools for the popular Saturday morning Animators series.

"I haven't reached the point yet of playing my live sets with a laptop," says Dave Audé, DJ, producer, and remixer extraordinaire. "I'm still playing vinyl — that's how I was raised. But some DJs are integrating Pro Tools into the actual performance of their live sets. There are people using Serat o Scratch and playing and triggering sound effects live with Pro Tools, too. It's cool that they're taking it to the next level, but most dance music is still on vinyl. Personally, I don't care about scratching when I DJ — I just care about playing good records. Technology is changing the way we DJ, but there's still something very special about the way vinyl sounds and feels."

	DJ Dan

Audé produced the majority of the label's prodigious output of house, techno, trance, and breakbeat tracks in Moonshine's Pro Tools suite, and released seven mix LPs himself. During his tenure at Moonshine, Dave produced dozens of compilation projects like Speed Limit 140 BPM, United States of Ambience, Big Dirty Beats, and the Mixed Live series. Since then, he's moved on to other projects, adding his sonic thumbprint to works by Sting, Madonna, DJ Keoki, Faith No More, and even tango legend Astor Piazzola. Clearly, those thousands of hours on the decks, turning knobs on synths, and making magic in Pro Tools are paying off for Audé.

Fire Up "That Phone Track"
At first, Dave was hesitant to prescribe any tips or pro techniques. It's not just that the song is more important to him than the technology behind it, but that his organic vinyl approach is a key part of his approach to Pro Tools in the studio. Despite his huge bag of Pro Tools tricks, he makes it clear that the song still comes first. As an example, he cites "That Phone Track," the new song he worked on with DJ Dan. But once he gets on the subject of "That Phone Track," it doesn't take much time to get this busy producer talking about the track and tossing a few tips our way.

"The song chugs along here for eight bars and then, OK, right here is the break I'm talking about," Audé explains as the 130-bpm track suddenly chugs down to a halt and a reverb tail hangs. DJ Dan plays his Technics SL 1200 decks and vinyl as a "live" stereo track into Pro Tools when recording with Dave, and it's a spot in the middle of this track where the song comes all the way down for a long one-minute break. "The signature element of the song is where we break it down and have these crazy busy signals, dial tones, and other phone sounds going off for a minute. I helped Dan make those ideas and sounds part of the song with Pro Tools. Signature sounds like these make it easy for people at clubs to associate people like DJ Dan with a specific song and a specific sound."

Audé at the decks

Audé admits he had a blast creating the main break section of the song, which features a heavily filtered operator's voice and busy signals panning around together dub-style. The song takes off again before another break slows everything down. A phone-like keyboard sound, which has been dramatically altered with McDSP Filter Bank, comes in to play a short melody that feeds back on itself using Echo Farm just as the song builds back up to 130 bpm and launches full-on into the beat again.

"We filtered the hell out of it," laughs Audé, referring to the innocent little keyboard melody he and Dan tortured. "We filtered it so much that it turned this simple little melody into an acid line before the song takes off again. All I'm doing in this part of the break is using the basic McDSP EQ as a filter, and manually automating the low-pass or high-pass frequencies to create all these moving filters. Then there's the part where it goes back to the funky house song, with lots of little breaks where we're doing just really weird, weird things. Lots of chopping! Crazy! It's a really interesting and fun track."

"Click the 'Auto' button in Echo Farm to automate all the repeats in order to make them start to feed back," says Audé. "You'll want to send a pretty good level to the Aux from a bus on your vocal track. And here's the trick: Don't hold back on the repeats! Crank those up to 100%, or at least until you start to hear the vocal feeding back on itself in the various taps — then re-adjust your Output level knob, as mentioned before."

Pro Technique 2 — Creating moogerfooger beats
Audé's second tip is for those who want to create something a little — no, a lot — different from the norm of drum loopsville. "Again, not a genius kind of trick here, but one I think is cool," Dave offers. "Find a drum loop or beat, or even better yet a bongo or conga line you really like, and insert a moogerfooger low-pass filter on the audio track."

As a starting point for the experiment, he suggests setting the moogerfooger plug-in's Mix control to 10/100%, the Envelope to 3, the Resonance to 6/5 or 7 or so, and adjusting the Cutoff filter range to somewhere between 100 and 250. The two red switches on the moogerfooger interface are toggled to "Smooth" and "2 Pole," respectively, and presto: new beats!

"Play your track, and find a nice sound somewhere between those settings that fits with the feel of the song's beat without filling up the rest of the track. That's what happens with a typical drum loop you might grab from a record or sample disc and toss over a rough track just to fill it up," Audé concludes. "And if you want, you can adjust the Mix knob to get a bit of the original loop sound to come back in."

www.daveAudé.com
www.djdan.com

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