One of the most inventive producers in electronic music has only one thing on his mind: Sound. Todd L. Burns talks to Ricardo Villalobos in advance of his appearance at Movement Torino later this month.

absolute legend. no questions asked.

great photo,great read,but ricardo looks very tired in the photo

Legend.

When you hear his sets in Fabric, you know what he means when he talks about sound. It's quite incredible just how different the music he plays there sounds to the music everyone else plays. It's like being utterly consumed in some cocoon of frequency with no gaps on the spectrum at all. Amazing.

is it just my browser or is the second half of the interview layered on top of photos and other info so it's unreadable?

It's not just your browser, I've got the same problems

it's just your browser.

does anyone have a good answer for the marginal difference in 'neutrality' between Logic and Ableton?

It seems to work fine in Firefox but not IE.

"The Berghain has a very good sound, because of the very high ceilings, and the speakers are very concentrated. It's the opposite in Panorama Bar, where the sound is very reflective"
Is he saying the sounds terrible in Panorama?

That's fixed now. Thanks.

Too much thinking, even Panoramasound not good enough, get your groove on man, get your kick equed tight, then your tunes will fuck with every laptop kind bitch of a speaker. No Ghetto setup involved with this Willalobo type of guy, Dilla always mixed only Mpc, his sounds can fuck everywhere on every speaker making pretty kittys dance sexy.

Richie "blah blah blah" Hawtin. Did they have some massive falling out or something? Sounds like it...

I think it's more that their approach to music went in different directions. Richie is pushing new technology and more interested with that aspect whereas Ricardo appears to be more interested with the actual music side of things.

Great read and some of his productions are amazing but at times it seems like too many things are being overly disected.

The Ableton/Logic thing for example.We have tracks that are made solely in Ableton that sound brilliant in clubs and have djs complementing us the sound quality.Its the 0.01% of the population like Villalobos who are sound conniseurs and disect it but the majority of clubbers couldnt care less what its made on once it keeps them grooving and is cleanly made.

I dont think ill ever stand in a club and say 'thats an Ableton song' or 'thats a Logic track' because to be quite honest i dont really care.Maybe thats what seperates the mortals from the Gods eh?

The post doubled for some reason so I replaced it with this!

it's not marginal, it's significant.

Ableton was created for the loop based electronic music. and its sound has this synthetic component that you can hear in every track produced in ableton. and there is nothing one can do about it. it's almost like fruity loops. just more professional.
Logic, on the other hand, has a much broader spectrum of application, like professional multitrack recording of jazz and classical music. it has no sound of its own. it's sterile.

though when it comes to dance music production you can hear this sterility as well. just check Bruno Pronsato & Thomas Melchior.
and even though Pronsato is on par with Villalobos in terms of compexity, sound design wise he is ten steps behind.

great interview.....this dude any good then?

Villalobos speaks with wisdom and conviction, respectable. A lot of shared idealogies. I think his gripe with Ableton sounding music is valid, and more importantly the labels that are not filtering the music properly and putting out music that has not been well produced sound wise. Sometimes it is understandable if the creative content in the music is strong and the piece of music should be released, but there should be more standards by labels. At the end of the day, labels hold the keys of what gets released or not, not the Ableton made track.

And then on the otherside there are very high quality sounding records, but the creative content is not fully there. Some Producers focus so much on the sound, that they get lazy on the creative aspect. They think that the sound can completely make up for everything just because it sounds good in the club for that moment.

So what is more valuable, high quality sound or high quality creative content? Of course both, but a lot of producers AND labels seem to be ignoring the creative content for better sound, so we have a lot of music that might sound good but is not something to hold onto for long.
As a "rookie" producer, I try to focus on the creative content first, and then hope to do the best sound possible...without the search for sound quality getting in the way of the musical ideas. Over the next few months the idea is to achieve the best sound and continue to not have to give up on the musical intentions.

You re all overcomplicating shit guys. If you have Soul and Groove And your Kick is Equed tight there never will be a problem with shit. Logic, Ableton, Pepsi, Coke, Amiga, Atari, Nintendo, Sega youre guys talk shit......9th wonder producing for Badu, JayZ, Dre solely producing in Fruity Loops 4. Selling Millions of records. Now you Little Techno Bitches come over saying nah program no good, I mean cmon wake up and shit Youve got no Soul, no Groove no programm will ever help you, If you have Soul and Groove you can produce tunes on a Gameboy everybody will recognize your talent and shit..Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Dilla, Derrick May, Saunderson they gave a shit about you little Computer Proggis, they wrote songs...

nice feature. why is this guy pretending to be Omar S?

Was wondering that myself.The main thing im taking from what Omar there is saying is make sure your kick is EQd tight!!

nice feature. why is this guy pretending to be Omar S?


Dont wanted to mix up Shit. Omar F, seen...

interesting interview =)

"If you have a good turntable and good speakers, you can hear it is made in Ableton. Logic, for example, is very neutral in sound but Ableton...you can hear it in two seconds."

Heh, I am talking about this for a long long time...

Indeed, Ableton's audio decoder is very poor and every sound you pass thru it loses its clarity.

!

maybe it's the return of plumzine on a ghetto tip.....

just delete him already!

"The Romanians—Rhadoo, Raresh, Pedro—because they are studying all the time"
interesting
btw nice article

funny that "omar-s" is posting to RA while, to the best of my knowledge, omar-s is currently somewhere in the air between detroit and poland...

dragons mouth - i'm not sure that melchior is the example you're looking for, as for years he was using a purely hardware setup, and i'm pretty sure that since the last album he's been producing in logic. so whatever you're hearing in the sound of his productions, i doubt that it's due to ableton.

i do think that there are some pitfalls to producing in ableton, generally stemming from poorly warped samples. (my personal rule: if you can't warp a sample without that telltale warble, find a different sample.) but i'm not sure that the differences are necessarily as stark as ricardo makes them out to be, either.

funny that "omar-s" is posting to RA while, to the best of my knowledge, omar-s is currently somewhere in the air between detroit and poland...


Omar F man

stop trolling.

Don't want to bog this down in OT geek stuff, but this is actually rubbish. Every scientific test confirms DAWs/sequencers reproduce sound exactly the same.

The difference lies in how easy these newer programs make it to produce loop-based music. When things are hard, when you're using lots of different pieces of gear in different ways, and working manually, you are forced out of the box and that's when interesting things happen. Ableton and the like just make it so damn easy to stay IN the box (both literally in the sense of the computer, and more importantly, creatively.) That in itself allows lazy producers and the creation of generic, soundalike music.

But that is the ONLY difference here, the producer and his methods. Nothing whatsoever to do with inherent weaknesses/differences between production environments.

i believe dragons.mouth was using Melchior and Pronsato as examples of Logic productions, rather than Ableton. But he can clarify that better than I...

yes, Philip, you're right.
so to make things clear - i was talking about his last album.

let's quote the man himself:
"As opposed to Ricardo and Zip, who have full-on "gear" studios, mine just has a computer and a mixing desk. The one thing I think is really important is something really simple and cheap: the Korg Electribe. That's a machine you can really get into. Everybody should have one. Instead of getting a laptop, just get an Electribe. [laughs]"

Yeah, but when your kicks are tight, that's not a problem.

yes, i was talking about Logic.
i thought it was obvious...

Yeah guys now the Ableton Logic software, Hardware shit is going to start, who uses this and that, which sounds better shit...You dont get it, Guy willalabo has his 40.000 dollar system at home, its an elitist type of thing. Like Hi End Audio Magazines, If you have Soul and Groove you can lay down your Grooves on each piece of Kit and Software. Too much thinking.

Whateva.. The Kicks should be equed tight..

Stop trolling.