Lab

The Ambika is a six-voice synth from Mutable Instruments. Each voice is its own card, with two oscillators and a sub oscillator, and each voice has its own output.

We used it to create the sound on Baby Steps Dub. On that track the Ambika played the skank chords, which I played in myself on the KeyStep with a sound I'd tweaked ("I've changed the sound a bit, save my patch"). It also played a bass layer and the dub siren. The drums were samples. A few days later, on 13 October, it played the drums on Baby Steps Dub while the MPC played the rest, all locked to the computer's clock. That same day we ran it live through our own tape echo, and I said it "made my day".

So we thought we'd see what we could do with it. "I bought a second Ambika." It arrived on 14 October. Two of them make "a 12 voice, 24 oscillator, but it's also got sub oscillator as well… synthesizer with 12 outputs. It's like an insane synth."

On the first night with the second one, I edited one of its sounds, a sparse little tip-tap part, and saved it on the machine. "I could make tunes with that sound all day."

"And the OS is open source, and we're just driving the whole thing via the ADAT card." In plain words: Claude sends MIDI to each Ambika from the computer's sound card, an RME RayDAT. The twelve voice outputs go into my Alesis HD24, which passes them to the computer over optical cables. On 16 October I set the HD24 to 88.2k. At that rate it records twelve tracks, which is one per voice. "We want the best system possible." We're currently trying to render everything at 88.2 kHz.

"And we're just getting into sound design and making some drum sounds, and it's really exciting." Claude builds a drum sound on the Ambikas, records it, and compares it with the original at the same loudness, then changes it until the two match.

My MPC 1000 is one part of the studio. I use it a lot on its own, and it's at its best when the Cirklon is triggering it. For four days in October, Claude drove it.

Not a plug-in, not an emulation. The actual machine on the desk, buttons and all.

The idea is simple. The MPC can be told to treat incoming MIDI notes as button presses. So we gave 115 of its buttons and functions a note each: play, stop, the cursor keys, the F-keys, the modes, the track mutes, the number pad. Those notes are Claude's hands.

For eyes, we fixed a small webcam over the screen. Every press goes the same way: look at the screen, press, look again, and check it landed where it should. Nothing destructive gets pressed blind.

Then came the map. Claude went through the whole operating system screen by screen, about 190 screens and windows, and learned where the cursor goes from every field. That was the real goal. A camera over the screen isn't practical day to day, so it had to know the MPC well enough to find its way round blind.

On the 11th I sent a break in, Claude sampled it, chopped it onto the pads and played it back jungle-style. "You're a chopper now," I told it. On the 13th we played Baby Steps Dub with the computer as the master clock. The MPC followed along for the whole song while my Ambika synth played the drums, locked tight. Claude set up the MPC's own reverb and delay by remote, and when I heard it through the speakers all I could say was "that is power".

Play Baby Steps Dub · 85 BPM · Dub 0:00 / 2:50

Not everything worked. While it's sampling, the MPC ignores remote buttons, so stopping a recording still needs a finger. In the evening, under the lamp, the camera lost the picture until we fixed its exposure and put a bit of card over it as a shade. And the tiny digits on that screen (a 1 or a 2, a 0 or an O) are beyond a webcam. We got round that with the MPC's own screenshot feature, which saves an exact picture of the screen to the card.

It works best as a duet. Claude drives, and I'm the eyes when it matters. If it gets lost, I put the MPC back on the main screen and say "home".

What's next: the computer does the sampling and the MPC does the playing. The kits we build go back onto the card for my live set.

After Tracker Takeoff, we started learning about mastering together. We agreed every master gets compared with real records at the same loudness: late-'80s singles. And we learned to leave the sounds alone: fix the mix, not the master.

Then we took it into the room. I played our track from the MPC through the speakers and recorded it on my Tascam DR-44WL: two tracks from its own mics where I sit, two straight from the amp. Then my records, Ride On Time, Big Fun, at the same loudness, all in one pass. On headphones everything sounded beautiful. In the room it sounded cheap; the rim was banging and the levels were all wrong, and the records sounded amazing on my crappy speakers. So I mixed it on the MPC, pulling the faders in the room, and Claude copied my levels back into the song.

Then we started making our own mastering chain. There's a desk: a channel strip on every part, like a classic big console, with EQ, compression and a bit of colour, then a bus compressor to glue it all together. And there's a "cutter" that treats the top end the way a vinyl cutting room would. Then we turned them into REAPER plugins. I don't own any plugins, and now we have our own: RB Desk Channel, RB Desk Bus, RB Cutter, RB Tape, a dub echo, a spring reverb, a plate, a dub filter, even a dub siren. The first time I heard the Desk Channel on a snare, I said it made it punchier. They're not for sale and we're not sharing them.

The future's here, we can do anything. We can build our own tools now: whatever you think of, you can just do it. How exciting is this?

And when Claude measured it, my levels on the MPC had changed the sound more than any plugin. Which made me think: hey, let's get the MPC going.

After the Mega Brain, the first project was getting Claude into my music software. We set it up with Renoise, the tracker, and with REAPER through an MCP, a bridge that lets Claude work inside the program. Claude can write patterns, load my sounds, change things while the song is playing, and render and measure the result. I listen, and I tell it what I want in plain words.

Before any music, I gave it a house induction: how I program, and my tips and tricks. Those stay between us.

Then we made Tracker Takeoff. I sent Claude's first five ideas back. One sounded like a nursery rhyme, and the others were cheesy or naive. Then we worked live: Claude built a start on my drums and loaded it, and from there I steered by ear: "next… next… the one before… that's it." Swapping its synth for my own 303 sounds brought it to life. At one point I said "think more dubby, like King Tubby", and in went the echo throws. By the end of the day I said "this is a good song now", and I gave it a name.

I spent a long time building up the Mega Brain in my spare bedroom studio. We built it in 2019, and it was down by April this year: I've had to pull it apart, because I've moved house. It's the end of an era.

My dad helped me build it. He'd been helping me build things since I was a kid: we put my bed on stilts so there was room for a desk and my equipment underneath. We designed the Mega Brain together, and built the frame that held it, the racking and the table. It was one of the last things we built together. He's passed away now.

Most of the tracks, from Thanks Barbara all the way up to Alpha, were made on parts of this rig.

It was a beautiful thing while I had it, and I'm going to miss that setup. The wiring was insane, a real mess, slightly embarrassing: a hive mind that kept growing and growing and growing. One day, perhaps, I'll put it back together.