STUDIO SECRETS - JOHAN HUGO

Posted on Thu 10 May 2012 in entries

]({static}/uploads/2012/05/Johan-Hugo.png)We find out exactly what makes producer, remixer and DJ Johan Hugo (and his studio) tick…

Here in Johan Hugo’s East London studio, Dance music collides with West African beats, Hip Hop rubs shoulders with House, and folders on the laptop screen reveal work in progress with artists as diverse as Diplo, Jake Shears, Cocknbullkid and Bruno Mars. We stop by for a closer look at how Johan works, to dig for some top tips and to grab one of his mean stove-top espressos!

[caption id="attachment_3824" align="aligncenter" width="584" caption="Johan Hugo in his Studio"]]({static}/uploads/2012/05/Johan-Hugo-in-studio.jpeg)[/caption]

Your music and studio are littered with nods towards African music and culture. Where does that come from?

When I was about five, my Dad played Paul Simon’s Graceland one Christmas Eve and I just wanted to hear it over and over. Even though I didn't realise it for many years, I know that was the day I fell in love with African music. Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s voices are so beautiful. There is something very special about that kind of singing; those melodies and harmonies are so damn gorgeous.

What was the first record you bought?

My first record I got when I was eight - it was by Snap!, the album with Rhythm Is A Dancer on it. I always liked all kinds of music though.

But you admit to being a bit of a Hip Hop nut as well?

I’d learned guitar and flute as a kid but music was never a big interest for me… until I was 12 and some friends of mine started a Hip Hop band. One of them showed me how to make beats in FastTracker, which was this old DOS-based PC program, I think it was Swedish actually.

So I started making sample-based beats, usually very weird stuff. I was listening to a lot of Hip Hop, like EPMD, BDP, Wu Tang Clan, and then I got into the whole 'backpacker' Hip Hop scene. I still think Company Flow's Funcrusher Plus album is one of the most innovative albums ever made and it really influenced my music-making back then. But I figured I was never going to be a musician. I was into photography and I always thought that would be my job, but music slowly took over after I moved to London in 2001.

When and why did you move to the UK?

When I was 18 a few of my friends in Sweden were living in London and squatting, which sounded real fun to me, so I stopped my job as a photographer, packed a little bag and went to London. Then I ended up staying here - it's been 11 years now. I came to London the day after 9/11.

In London, did your music career take off straight away?

Back then I was working as a photographer but soon got into the music scene. In 2004 I met Etienne Tron and we started Radioclit, DJing all over the world, remixing and producing too. We worked with Diplo on the Bonde Do Role record in 2006, which was great fun. Another highlight was doing the Divine Gosa track for Switch & Sinden’s label in 2007. The Switch remix got pretty big and definitely did a lot of good for Radioclit back then.

Radioclit helped you indulge your passion for world music…

We always loved Dance music from all over the world, especially music from very poor places. It seems that some of the best dance music often comes out of the hardest environments, whether it’s the favelas of Brazil, the townships of Africa or the ghettos of America. When you start going deep into Dance music and Hip Hop, and into its roots, you sooner or later find yourself back in Africa. Even though I had heard a lot of African music earlier in my life, this was when we really fell in love with African music, new and old.

We started DJing a lot of African dance music, like Angolan kuduro, West African coupe décale and South African kwaito. There was just so much good music that wasn’t getting any exposure over here.

Around the same time we met Esau Mwamwaya, a singer from Malawi running a junkshop near my studio and we started to make music with him. That project became The Very Best, which since 2010 has been just me and Esau.

And that got a lot of airtime?

We did a mixtape that got close to a million downloads, after which we put out the Warm Heart Of Africa album, which we worked with M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend on, and toured a lot off the back of it. We’ve just released a new single/video called Yoshua Alikuti and there’ll be another single and album to follow later in the summer. The album (MTMTMK) is a real mixture of Electronic, Dance, Pop, Afro, whatever… We worked with so many people on it including K’naan, Mnek, Amadou & Mariam, Baaba Maal and Seye Adelekan. We also wrote two of the songs with Bruno Mars and Taio Cruz, so there’s a real mixture of things going on!

Another side to your music is the House vibe, isn’t it?

I've been doing more mainstream House stuff under the name We Don’t Belong In Pacha, remixing Coldplay, Emeli Sande, Lana Del Rey etc, so it's exciting days for me and Dance music too, I'd say. We Don't Belong In Pacha is me dabbling with my secret passion for big House and Trance music… but mainly over the last year I've been trying to focus more on production for other people. It's been a really cool year - it's so different going into proper production for people's albums, especially things that you might call 'Pop'. I've been lucky enough to work on albums for people like Wynter Gordon, L Marshall, Seye Adelekan, Cocknbullkid, Jake Shears and others.

Tell us about your set-up here…

I have Pro Tools 8 HD with an Omni interface. I usually only use Pro Tools for recording vocals and instruments. I make most of my beats on Ableton 8. I've been working on Ableton for the last seven years I think now. Before that I was on Logic and Reason but Ableton is just so fast for me. I also tend to use audio a lot more than MIDI and the Edit functions in Ableton just make more sense to me. I'd love to be as fast in Logic as I am in Ableton, but it's frustrating learning a new DAW when you're already used to one. So for now, I'm trying to stay away from Logic.

What about plug-ins and other software?

The iZotope Ozone is a plug-in I couldn't live without. Some of my favourite plug-ins within Waves are definitely the Maserati Harmonizer, the V-EQ, and I love the R-Vox compressor and use it all the time. The new H-EQ is amazing too. I'm pretty visual so I like that I'm able to see the frequencies on it. I love the Soundtoys plug-ins and use them on every session I do.

[caption id="attachment_3826" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="iZotope Ozone Mastering Software"]](https://www.absolutemusic.co.uk/store/computer-music-46/software-4613/audio-midi-recording-46131/izotope-ozone-5-complete-software-mastering-system-46951)[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3827" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Maserati Harmonizer"]]({static}/uploads/2012/05/maserati.jpeg)[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3828" align="aligncenter" width="413" caption="Waves Renaissance RVox Compressor"]]({static}/uploads/2012/05/renaissance_rvox.jpeg)[/caption]

In terms of software synths, I like the Cameleon 5000, Sylenth, Gladiator, and I use all the analogue emulation synths like Korgs, Rolands, Moogs, etc. It all depends on what kind of music I'm making.

How does your set-up change when you're travelling around to work with other people?

I tend to be pretty portable, often recording in not so conventional places. The new The Very Best album was recorded in Malawi in a very basic studio and I just took my Focusrite Liquid Channel mic pre, MBox, MacBook Pro and a mic.

I’ve just come back from Sweden where I was using the same kind of simple set-up, writing and recording for L Marshall’s album with Invisible Men (producers for Jessie J, Sugababes, Conor Maynard and DJ Fresh). We were in my parent’s summer house in the middle of the forest with no internet or phone. Just a laptop, Pro Tools, Ableton, Logic, a mic pre, some simple monitors and a Sontronics mic that I was beta-testing (more of that in a minute!). I like working in this way as much as I like being in my studio in London or any big studio around the world. You definitely don’t need a ton of crazy expensive equipment to make good music.

Tell us more about the hardware.

I used to have a lot of analogue synths but I sold them all. One, I just wasn't using them enough and two, they were taking up a lot of space in the studio and three, I knew someone else would appreciate them a lot more. So yeah, these days I’m pretty much ‘in the box’. I've got a Focusrite Liquid Channel mic preamp, which I love, even though I only use it on one of the Neve preamp and compressor settings all the time! If something sounds good, I can’t be arsed to mess around! My preamp goes to the Pro Tools HD Omni interface, and that's it really.

What about recording?

I record guitars and bass straight into the Omni interface. I’ve been using some cheap mics here for the last six years and never really though too much about it. I've tried a lot of supposedly 'amazing' mics in other studios but never been that impressed. Recently, however, Paul Epworth (Grammy award-winning producer and co-writer with Adele, Plan B, Florence + The Machine, etc.) recommended Sontronics to me and I got hold of their Saturn mic. I was also involved in beta-testing a prototype for one of their new mics, which was amazing! It's such a shame I can't say more about it but I loved it. I used it on sessions with Cocknbullkid and Jake Shears and we were blown away by the sound. I also used it on vocals and acoustic guitar for Seye Adelekan, L Marshall and Invisible men and for the first time I've appreciated how amazing a mic can sound. I didn’t want to give it back! I’m now waiting for it to be launched so I can buy one. After that I’ll invest in some new monitors!

Apart from the new Sontronics mic, is there any gear you couldn't live without?

I could probably do everything I do with just a laptop and Ableton, Waves and Soundtoys plug-ins. Even though I have a Mac Pro in the studio, which is faster than my laptop, I could cope with just the MacBook. Gimme a laptop and Ableton and I could make this work on a desert island... as long as I had some solar panels to power everything!

Any top tips or shortcuts you want to share with the absolutemusic masses?

1) One of my favourite things to do (and I do this on 99% of my sessions) is use the Waves Maserati HMX on a bus and just bring Spread up to the max then take away the reverb. Then I feed almost everything apart from kick drum to it. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but I almost always give the HMX a little bit of signal. I love doing this on bass especially. I know you're not supposed to widen bass and all that, but for me the HMX just works amazingly on bass. It warms it up and puts it floating in the middle of the mix as well as keeping the bottom end nice and full. For me the HMX on bass is one of my best tricks but yeah, it will give life to any sound that you feed it.

2) Another thing I love doing is to sing little melodies into Melodyne, then tweak them and export as MIDI and let synths play them. I'm not an amazing keys player so sometimes this is a much quicker way for me to get a complex melody idea down. I also like doing the same thing then treating my voice until it sounds like a weird synth.

3) My other top tip would be ALWAYS BACK UP! I lost 2 songs I did with M.I.A. and Santigold back in 2008 because my computer crashed three days after the session and I hadn’t backed up. These days I have three parallel backups in the studio and every time I go to Sweden I take a backup drive and put it in my dad's little fireproof safe. I don’t want to ever lose something important again just because I didn’t make sure I backed up. This becomes even more important when you work on other artists' albums and you're dealing with major labels and singles etc. You just can't afford to lose anything!

4) Something else that I feel is missing in our industry a lot of time is SHARING. Share your knowledge, your tricks and ideas. I feel that a lot of people are very secretive and scared of helping each other. The more you give the more you get back, it's so simple but so true. I love working with other people and learning from them and I appreciate it immensely when someone is kind enough to share their wisdom with me, so I try to do it as much as I can too.

OK, it's time to plug some projects…!

I've got the new The Very Best MTMTMK album coming out on 17th July. The new Yoshua Alikuti single is out now and another one called Kondaine is released in June. There's more info at www.theverybestmusic.com

I've got some new We Don't Belong in Pacha singles and remixes in the pipeline too: http://soundcloud.com/wedontbelonginpacha

But my main focus is on The Very Best and my production/writing work. Projects with Seye Adelekan, L Marshall, Cocknbullkid, Afrikan Boy, Wynter Gordon, Mnek, Invisible Men, Den Svenska Bjornstammen, Jake Shears and others will see the light of day later this year and into 2013.

I'm also trying to put together this youth project 'From Streets To Beats' where I want to work with kids in London, setting up a professional studio where kids can come in and watch real recording, mixing and production sessions a few times a week. Basically I want to have the studio set up like a small auditorium where the kids can see and hear what's going on but without disturbing the session. It's still at a very early stage, but I'd love to do something like this and have big-name producers, writers, singers and rappers come in and work on things. Something where young people who want to learn and get into the music industry can actually see first-hand how tracks come together.

I'm also planning on building a house with a studio in Sweden, on my parents' land in the middle of nowhere. I've recently realised, taking artists there, it's such a unique and amazing way to write and record, away from all the distractions of city life. Just making music, being close to nature, enjoying good food and drink and finishing every day with a sauna!

SOME OF JOHAN'S FAVOURITE TRACKS

The Very Best – Yoshua Alikuti

Coldplay – Every Tear Drop Is A Waterfall (We Don’t Belong In Pacha remix)

Radioclit – Divine Gosa

Emeli Sande – Heaven (We Don’t Belong In Pacha remix)

Lana Del Rey – Video Games (We Don’t Belong In Pacha remix)

The Very Best – Warm Heart Of Africa feat Ezra Koenig (Vampire Weekend)

The Very Best – Get It Up feat M.I.A & Santigold

We Don’t Belong In Pacha – Badboy Tonight

Cee-Lo Green – What Part Of Forever (Johan Hugo remix)

Radioclit – Mature Macho Machine feat Tinchy Stryder, TTC, Skepta & Ears

Brodinski – Bad Runner (Radioclit remix)

Britney Spears – Circus (Radioclit remix)

No Surrender – Silver Hall feat Tunde Adebimpe (TV On The Radio)

Terry Lynn – Steppin Out

Maskinen – Dansa Med Vapen

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