Pro Techniques from Junkie XL

By Randy Alberts

"In musical experimenting, there is a lot of standing up and a lot of falling down." – Tom Holkenborg, a.k.a. Junkie XL

	Tom Holkenborg, a.k.a Junkie XL

Holkenborg, a devout Pro Tools|HD user who lives to improvise with sound, has a studio partner in Amsterdam keeping all the digital gear and analog tubes 'n' circuitry warm for him during his current Los Angeles living and recording experiment. Jason Bentley, a DJ at KCRW/Santa Monica and a music supervisor with whom Holkenborg worked on The Matrix movies, recently convinced him to move to his present location, near the border of Venice Beach and Marina Del Rey, to work on a dynamic range of new projects. The traffic sucks, everyone is tan, and it takes hours just to drive somewhere for a beer with your buds — but so far the warm sandy beach right outside his door and LA's diversity of life and music suits him just fine.

"A new single for Sarah McLachlan, the music for Cat Woman," he says, "and the music from one of the scenes from that movie turned into a remix single for Britney Spears, too. It is good to know that all these varied artists and projects are interested in my sound for their songs. That's what I admire so much about the Neptunes and other producers: It doesn't really matter who they work with because they're just bringing their sound and style to those sessions. I think that's really cool."

Working as Tom Holkenborg, or as Junkie XL, or JXL, or DubZilla 3000, since the '90s this busy producer, remixer, and musician has worked with artists as varied as Mudvayne and BT, Chuck D. and Gary Numan, Sarah Brightman and David Gahan, and many others. Like his outlook on life, Holkenborg's philosophy of sound is rooted in the distilling of as many tracks (or people) as he can find into one mono track (voice) that says it all.

So does he consider the Pro Tools mixer an instrument?

"Oh, yes, for sure. I do many sessions that are entirely recorded, created, and mixed within Pro Tools. Much of my sound design is done with Pro Tools, too. Sometimes I have an entire session to generate just one sound with a lot of auxiliary sends out to gates, compressors, a lot of stuff going on, like a full session really, but used just to create one mono sound. It's very unique that you can use Pro Tools for that sort of creative process while benefiting from its superb sound quality. Just loop-record it and start automating EQ settings and plug-in parameters. I often use Pro Tools in this way to generate sounds on its own, very unique sounds too. It is a lot of fun to work like that."

Holkenborg is happy with the sounds and sound quality he hears in his audio experiments with Pro Tools. He points out the sample-accurate timing of his Pro Tools|HD rig, along with the perceived analog-like tape saturation he's able to get with his system.

"I like the timing of pure audio. The precision and accuracy of Pro Tools is why I haven't been running MIDI for a long time. I also really like the saturation of the Pro Tools busses, which is what I use a lot on the drums. The saturation of the system itself. I really like that in Pro Tools."

Holkenborg suggests the following two great tips about the big bottom when it comes to a certain dance and remix music sound for which he's becoming well known.

Pro Technique 1 —
Creating massive kick drums with nudges and EQ phase
"For a 12-inch dance kick drum you need a serious amount of low end," says Holkenborg. "But you need the warmth of a kick drum as well, that area between 200 - 300 Hz. You also need the hard punch of the kick drum, which is more around 800 Hz, and then you also want a nice high end on your composite kick sounds." He always relies on the audio precision of Pro Tools, but at no other time more than when he's copying and pasting a funky 2-bar reggae kick loop ad infinitum across a 12-minute club remix session.

"If you copy a part over, say, a ten- or twelve-minute mix, it will be exactly the same loop down to the sample level for the course of that entire song. That's what I love about this program. Pro Tools allows me to create massive kick drums. And it's not at all about just lining up six kick drums, bouncing it down to mono, and then you're through. You need to develop over a period of time experimenting with sound, which is what I do."

First, import anywhere from 20 to 30 kicks and find the best samples for each of the kick's three composite frequency ranges — low, mid, and high. Then narrow that group down to five or six that work. Place Pro Tools in a two- or four-bar loop record mode and begin shifting the EQ's "phase" button for the low kick sample a hard 90 degrees left or right. Holkenborg says you'll hear, and feel, the difference right away.

"You can hear immediately when something works or it doesn't, because your kick will sound either very strong or have no bass in it at all. For some of the high frequency range kicks you won't need any of the low end at all in that sample, either, so start filtering out the low end until you hear the remaining low end of your first kick drum stand out more. You can also nudge the individual samples within each track around by one sample or by ten or 100 samples to get the right attack and release."

Pro Technique 2 —
Curing dissonant bass lines and kick drums
Holkenborg places his new 100 Hz-and-lower frequency kick drum composite in the center of the stereo image. He then pans his high frequency composite mono kick sound hard left and his new midrange composite sound hard right, and leaves everything sans chorusing or flanging of any sort. He spreads his various kick sounds across the stereo image while leaving the low end intact in the middle before applying some TC Master X or McDSP Multiband Compressor to everything, pre-mastering.

"I would compress 100 Hz to 400 Hz; take the 400 Hz sample and compress that to 1.5 kHz and everything that comes on top of it. When I do that, I just noodle about with the attacks and releases of every frequency separately and then remix the frequencies again. When you've experimented with things like this you'll end with just a massive, massive kick drum. This is unavoidable!"

Holkenborg explains another low end anomaly: that of kick drum to bass melody dissonance. "The bass line in today's clubs over these huge sound systems is very important, and needs to work very well with the kick drum. But there are many, many dance albums out there that have this problem of dissonance in the low end. If you've got a kick drum with a frequency of A at around 50 or 60 Hz and the bass line on top of that is A#, it's going to sound really weird. So be aware of this in your mixes and be sure to tune your kick samples to the bass lines where needed."

www.radiojxl.com
www.roadrunnerrecords.com

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