iOS musician Jinx Padlock has been producing under the streets of London for a year and a half now – picking up initial momentum on SoundCloud and landing on Tactal Hots Music for his debut E.P. Colonisation. Primarily producing inside of NanoStudio, the DAW of choice for many iOS musicians, Jinx incorporates a variety of iOS apps in his tracks, keeping the use of desktop software to a minimum and pushing the limits of what can be done on iOS. His latest release is a remix of Nomean by Newborn, read on to learn about production process for the track and what’s in store for his future…
How did you get the remix rights?
Since joining Tactal Hots Recordings last year I’ve been receiving the remixes emails from the company, always good stuff on there, and pretty diverse. I find remixing a good way of exploring avenues that are normally, sub-consciously hidden from my normal workflow, so I try and do as many as possible. It’s also a good way of keeping my profile active out there!
Explain the process from receiving the media to mastering a mix…
If I’m doing this purely mobile, which is 95% of the time, I’ll Dropbox the audio stems into Auria and from there chop out what I think I’ll need. Sometimes you’ll just get 8 bar loops, sometimes its full stems of the track. If its the full stems its good to get one last listen to the track as it originally stood. I have one simple remixing rule which I never break – once work starts on the remix, under no circumstances must I listen to the original until the mix is final and sent off. I find too closer a relationship with the source material offputting and counter productive – best to let instinct take the mix wherever it sees fit. Once I’ve got my samples roughly cut up, it’s copied into NanoStudio, where I’ll do the real intricate chopping and tuning. I try and keep it neat, I’ll bring most of it into a TRG to sort, then break those into drums, bass, fx etc. Its always a fight if you’ve got a lot of usable stuff to leave room for Jinx Padlock TGS! I treat it like a normal tune, working in the 8 bar loop, getting everything leveled and EQed, then adding parts to it from iOS synths. I sometimes get supplied with MIDI by the original artist but have never used it, I think its better to create something new. I do all my MIDI work in Cubasis, I like the clean approach to hooking synths up. I’ll play stuff into Magallen, NLog, Animoog etc and either directly ACP into NanoStudio, or take them through Audiobus. My main workflow of choice regarding Audiobus is usually going through one of two effects – LiveFX or JamUp. I’ve actually been having a lot of fun with the JamUp amplifier simulations. Great for adding a crispy live feel to sound. Its a perfect device for the DM1, which pretty much takes care of all of my drum needs these days – get a pattern looping and fire it through a marshall stack. LiveFX is great for FX performance – just jamming FX into AudioShare, sometimes you capture some real magic. When I’m happy that I’ve got enough ammunition in the 8 bar loop, and after trying a few dropouts in the mixer, I’ll start to populate the song arrangement. It was pretty clear from the moment I sampled it that the vocal was going to be the hook, line and sinker of this tune, so it was a matter of getting to it in an interesting way, then letting it rip over some building synths. It was a fairly painless arrangement, I was happy to let it fall into an almost standard club tune and resisted the urge to go into crazier territory, it was working and grooving along so nicely – those vocals were getting me quite excited, needed to finish it! The mix took 4 days of commuting to completely arrange and mix, about 9 hours. I was really happy with Newborn from a clarity point of view – impressed with getting this amount of punch and flow out of NanoStudio‘s mixer. I never master directly on the track in NanoStudio, preferring to leave a -3/-6 db headroom and no compression, then get it into Auria to push it through the master bus. I find the key to that process is ignoring any of the preset mastering setups and starting from scratch. Every track is different so every track deserves a individual master. Newborn was a fairly easy final, no need for any extra EQ on the stereo track itself, it all went through the master bus. I tend to then live with a tune for a day or so, listen to it on a few different devices – ALWAYS the car stereo – learned this years ago from a professional engineer, even better than NS10s – if it sounds good on a standard car stereo, you’ve pretty much got it! Once I’m happy, it gets dropboxed to the label and, if passed, off to the distributors. Then, I wait…
Any other remixing in the pipeline?
There is a mountain of JinxPadlock mixes hitting this year, almost one a month, I’ve been really busy with it, almost forgot to get my new E.P. finished! There’s a few remixes that I’m really happy with, both new acts, exciting stuff – Pop-Up Machines, mixed two of their tracks, Fools in a Goldfinger Bond style, the other Good Clean Woman in a more bouncing breaks / house groove, great tracks to start off with, lovely vocal performances. Another is an act called OhBoy, I’ve remixed their track “Berlin”, taken it into a dark techno space, again driven by it being an excellent tune originally. Going to be fiddling with another of their tracks soon. Just finished mixing Eick – “Tattletail” – something that I discovered one day in my SoundCloud stream and instantly loved – pestered Eick for the parts and made a massive acid mess of it! I also plan to have another bout of remixing other iOS / NanoStudio / SoundCloud users stuff like I did last year, it was a lot of fun and quite revealing to see how differently people were using the software. I’ve already got my eye on a couple of candidates! Must finish the new Jinx Padlock e.p. first, not far off now, you’re in for a very loud treat!
You can follow Jinx Padlock on Twitter, Facebook, and SoundCloud to keep up with his new tracks and thoughts on iOS production.
A sub track adds another row to the main sequencer for you to place audio and MIDI regions in, but uses the same sound source (keyboard sequencer, drum machine, audio track, ect…) and FX as the original track. To create one, tap the + button on a track from the main sequencer and select “duplicate.” This will create a sub track but it will also duplicate all of the regions in the original tracks, so you’ll need to delete those.
