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Featured Artist: Jens
The 'Featured Artist' is a section on our webpage where we put the spotlight on EnergyXT-users out there. We will feature EnergyXT artists that have cought our attention, and let them share their story and experiences with our products. The second artist to showcase in our "Featured Artist" section is Jens Leuner. He is an all-around producer and song-writer who has been in the game for quite some time. Being one half of the popduo 'Prinzip Hoffnung' their track "Hoch Hinaus" has been on our online flash-player for a long time and he is very active on our KvR forums. So it's about time to get a few words from the guy himself about his music and EnergyXT. To all the readers that havent heard about you or your music, how would you describe it? 
That's a bit of a hard question for me to answer to be honest, especially since I've been doing several different projects stretching from rock to elektro-pop and anything in between.
But I think what all my tracks have in common is my style of composing. My music tends to be the opposite of minimal. Usually I'm layering several different melodies and harmonies in an attempt to 'weave' rich and complex melodic structures.
But I have also set some general rules for myself: I strieve to create as much and as strong hooklines as possible. I love nice melodies one can whistle along to. The term 'pop-music' isn't degoratory in my book but rather describes a certain quality of accessability which I attempt to achieve.
Genres or styles are to me what colours are for a painter - they can be mixed in any appropriate way in a given track. What's appropriate depends on the context of each indiviudal track and also on my mood. In fact anything goes. I love to play with and break cliché s. If some of these points appear contradictional to you then that's as well part of my style. What's your musical background? I come from a family where music never really played any important role. When I was a child I never had any instrumental lessons and in school I always did very bad in music. But I always loved music and it touched me in a special way. At the age of ten I discovered the Genesis album Duke which I totally fell in love with and which, almost twenty-five years later, is still one of my most favourite albums. It was like a door to a fantastic magical world to me, and enhanced my imagination, not unlike good novels do.Then, when I was about fiveteen I got to know a new friend who is still one of my best mates (doing t.v. and film-work today) and he had a keyboard (Yamaha PSR-4500 I think) and already did his own compositions with the internal sequencer. I was very impressed but also a bit envious, especially since I figured that his chances with the girls were much better than mine. However I assumed that I could never learn this myself as I thought I was completely unmusical. His elder brother had a bass-guitar and so it came that my friend had the idea that we could jam a bit together - so he taught me what a chord and what a bar is - terms I previously had not the slightest idea about - I was doing very bad but I was hooked. Thus shortly after I bought myself a cheapish Yamaha keyboard and started to abuse its sequencer and at about the same time I also found a nylon-guitar in the garbage-cellar of the house my family lived in. Then the friend got his brother's Korg M1 and sold me his PSR (which I later on swapped for a Fender Strat). When I was nineteen I took some guitar-lessons (my first instrumental lessons ever, which I payed from my pocket-money) and when I was about twenty I managed to get an old upright-piano almost for free which I then tormented my family with. From there it slowly but steadily grew on its own. So for me it's obvious that there are no 'unmusical' people, but rather just untrained ones. You've been working with lots of different projects over many years now, how did it all start and where has this taken you up until today? 
Well, my first attempts were founding bands with friends and usually they were all about as bad as me. Then later on they lost interest and I had to look for other partners which I found in school and in a youth-club. There I also started taking bass-lessons after I bought myself a bass-guitar and a bit later also drum-lessons.
My bass-teacher sold me an old AtariST with a copy of Steinberg 24 (before anyone asks: yes, I'm rather sure it was a crack). Then friends collected money and bought me a nice Notator Alpha box for my 22nd (I think) birthday. That's where music-production kind of started for me. Instruments would come and go such as a Korg Poly800 which I still regret selling for little money. Whatever keyboards/synths I had I would line up in a midi-chain and trigger with my Atari and then put on tape - sometimes I would record it to one channel of my tape-deck and then use the other one to record guitar to it. At the same time I've been playing (mainly) bass-guitar in various bands, ranging from progressive rock to hardcore/crossover and avantgarde. The avantgarde band was the one I played in for the longest time which was about three and a half years until I finally got bored of it. I then started playing keys in a progressive-rock band and also attempted for a very short time playing lead-guitar in a punk-band (after I had bought an electric guitar again after several years without one) and suddenly got completely bored with the whole band-thing. 'Why having a bass-guitar player and a drummer who both hardly keep the timing at all?', I asked, first myself and then the singer of the avantgarde band. 'What about programming it instead with my Atari and just adding guitars and vocals live?' So we started a new project and wrote about ten songs, just using the Atari and the singer's old Ensoniq EPS for anything apart from guitar and vocals. But we soon had to agree to realize that it was more of a studio-project than a live project (it was forced upon us as the singer who was unwilling to perform our songs live without a real band - I'm sure he regrets this decision today - and I was unwilling to form a real band for it - I regret this decision today) and so we thought about how to realize our own recordings. This eventually ended up in me buying my first PC ever in late 2001 and also a good soundcard (EMU APS), condenser-microphone, etc. . From that time on I started learning all the DAW stuff. We were relatively good in writing songs, and in starting to record them, but never too good in finishing them and releasing them. Completing an album and sending off demos was always our aim but we didn't succeed yet for various reasons - lazyness and a constant change of direction being amongst the major ones. Over the years I unavoidably became better and better in realizing what I had in mind and now I feel almost completely free to produce whatever I want to produce. There aren't many borders anymore, I can go almost whereever I want. This is fantastic and without computers and programmes such as energyXT it would be a whole lot different. But also playing in bands has become more attractive to me again than it was five years ago. You're not only using software for producing, what other gear do you use in your music? I've got a nice collection of (cheapish) guitars and bass-guitars which I all use pretty regularly. But I usually don't use any outboard-synths or effects, apart from a (loan - one of my musical partners bought it because he wanted me to use it - nice!) Danelectro Spring King which is a real spring-reverb, something that appears be hard to simulate convincingly.Also I got a few percussion-instruments like darbuka and castagnets which I sporadically use. But as you can record and use anything which makes noise so also my kittchen and my bathroom aren't safe from harm. E.g. I love the modulated noise it makes when you press a bottle of shower-gel while lifting its lid and also it gives nice results when you hit a plastic-bottle with a drum-stick - the sound's pitch depends on the amount of water it contains. But often I'm too lazy to record it - creating your own sample-libraries is often a comfortable alternative. The master-keyboard duties are taken resonse of by a Yamaha DJX. There are many people out there thinking that you need a pro studio and lots of experience of recording when using real instruments in their productions. Could you explain the process from your ideas to recording, editing and the final mix? 
First of all please let me say that I think that whenever someone tells you that you need this or that to achieve good (and perhaps professionally sounding) music then please take it with several grains of salt. It might be that this person needs it. But that doesn't mean that the same has to apply to you. Only you know what you need and you can achieve good results with everything. What's always a good thing is if you manage to develop your own style and odd sounding stuff you use in an individual yet attractive way can do a great deal in helping you to achieve this.
Yes, experience can of course help. But it's odd - sometimes you run into problems which simply didn't exist when you've been a naive beginner. Some of my best acoustic-guitar recordings I did when I used a very cheap microphone and had not the slightest idea about miking-techniques - and I have no clue how I did it. Of course expensive gear often might sound in a way which is generally considered 'better'/ i.e. more pleasing than some of the inexpensive stuff but often the differences are marginal and also it's always you who's got to use your own stuff so let your ears and your needs dictate what you buy - not others who tell you what you need to have. I really think that today you don't need to spend a lot of money anymore to achieve great results. But I surely have the occasional wet dream involving expensive studio gear (please don't take this too literal). That all being said I'm probably very conservative in my approach. I jam alone - either on guitar, bass-guitar or with some keyboard-sound (usually piano or e-piano) and when I play something I find interesting and if I'm not too lazy then I start working on it by laying it down track by track (in no special order and according to what comes to my mind) in energyXT while the part is playing in a loop - this means I compose as the loop is playing. Sometimes I'm too lazy to record a guitar-idea (especially if it's difficult to play properly) and to keep the idea I record it with piano/e-piano instead - and when I'm halfway satisfied with the result I start to create other sections - often by mutating the first one. There's no general rule as to if and when the lyrics and subsequently the vocals come in. I constantly mix and remix. There's never a point when I say 'that's it' and I need an at least halfway appropriate sound to keep going so the current mix is always close to my currently achievable optimum. What does your studio consist of (other than the instruments already listed)? Mainly stuff I rarely (if ever) use.I've got an old Dynacord MCX 24.2 (24 channel analog-console), an art TubeMP (cheapish tube mic-preamp (around 40Û these days) a Hughes&Kettner Fortress (tube bass-preamp), a few mics, etc.. For recording guitar and bass-guitar, crucial for me is my Johnson J-Station guitar amp-simulator/preamp from which I go into my Echo Mia via s/pdif. (for the gear fetishists: amongst the stuff I never use is a BBE 422A, Alesis 3630 and a Tascam 34B (8track tape-machine), an Oberheim DMX, a Yamaha DX9 and TX81z) . My monitors are Alesis One Mk2 passive - however the pros will inform you soon that they don't suffice. The computer I use runs on an old Atlon XP2600+ an has got 768mb of ram and the soundcard is an Echo Mia. How do you use energyXT2 ? I use the standalone version. The internal synth/sampler, drum-track and effects may sometimes come in handy, but it's actually the sequencer itself I'm interested in. This is what always has been special for me about energyXT.When did you first hear about EnergyXT and started using it? 
I first read about it virtually the moment it was born. It was on the old Massiva-forum (Massiva is the predecessor of energyXT 1) where a user (was it perhaps Soma?) had the idea to combine a traditional sequencer like Massiva with a modular-enviroment like it's e.g. available in Buzz. Jorgen (the developer) answered that he liked the idea and would see what he could come up with.
I always liked Massiva in theory and followed its development but it had some shortcomings which were showstoppers for me. So of course I also followed the development of eXT with excitement and tried the demo of about every new beta-version until I finally decided that all the for me crucial features were in and that was the time when I moved from Tracktion (which I was more and more unsatisfied with) to eXT. To those people out there which are brand new to EnergyXT2, how would you describe it? Well, that's really a hard one - due to its modular architecture energyXT could always be used in a variety of very different ways.To me it's a great midi-/audio-sequencer which makes recording and arranging music really easy. And when I say 'arranging music' I mean creating content along a timeline which plays back the way I intend it after I press the play button. But of course it's also a standalone/vst-synthesizer, -sampler, -drum-sampler and -multi-effect. What's your first step to do when producing a brand new track in EnergyXT2? Do you have any "routine" ? I usually load my default-project which contains all my favourite settings, pre-configured standard-tracks, and standard plugins.What is your favourite feature in EnergyXT2 ? When I cut audio in other sequencers I have all these little snippets on the timeline - and I have to cut audio a lot (e.g. to correct timing-errors, to reduce fret-noise and finger-noise for guitar and bass-guitar and breath-noise and sibilance for vocal-recordings, etc. ).In eXT however these little snippets all stay inside the audio-part which I just need to double-click to open its editor - it's the same as with midi-parts. With the sequencers I used prior to eXT there was always a lot of zooming in and out involved instead. Also all these snippets on the timeline make it very untidy and also difficult to arrange. In eXT audio-parts are like containers and in eXT 1.x they even can have an unlimited number of channels i.e. lanes on which you can store, arrange and edit several takes without messing up the timeline. Each channel also has got it's own volume- and pan-control (and also mute- and solo-buttons) and so it's also great for panning two or more takes left and right without needing to use further tracks for it. eXT is in my opinion by far the most tidy sequencer of all the ones I ever tried. And tidyness is very important if the sequencer is supposed not to get in your way. When I open an older project after several months I can't remember anymore what I did and how I did it (often I even forget that it exists at all) and I'm also not very consequent when it comes to describing and naming stuff - again I'm too lazy for that. In the other sequencers I worked with this is a kind of a nightmare - I open the project and am lost - I can not easily get back working on it because I forgot the complete process and I don't know anymore what is where - it is usually very frustrating and so I close the project and decide to work on something else instead. In eXT however I open the project and everything is almost instantly transparent to me. It is easy to get a quick glance of the whole song. Many tracks and several timeline-minutes fit on the screen without it being too small. Thus nowadays I usually go to the length of exporting my old songs from those other sequencers to eXT instead when I want to work on them. But let's get back to the audio-parts for a moment: eXT has, like some other sequencers, the great (optional) feature of ghosted copies - you edit one part and all the copies change accordingly. And this also works with the already mentioned audio-parts which is just fantastic. Do you have any tips for EnergyXT users? Yes, but it would depend on what they're trying to achieve.The best thing a user can do is to use the forum to ask questions, discuss methods, etc. - the community is very nice and helpful so that would be my tip. Also: explore the software you use, don't go just with one way of doing your stuff without really getting to know all the existing features. This includes learning the keyboard-shortcuts which can be huge timesavers. Links to artists and projects Jens is involved in: Tracks from Jens and his projects (XT-User): http://www.xt-user.com/audio/user/403 Torpedo Torpedo: http://www.mp3.com.au/artist.asp?id=13004 Torpedo Torpedo (MySpace): http://www.myspace.com/torpedotorpedo Rusty Magic: http://www.myspace.com/57595571 |
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