Porter Robinson

Porter Robinson is one of the new breed of producers who rose to fame on a wave of social media generated by the raw quality of their work. No marketing team needed here! We caught up with Porter and asked him some questions about his music and FL Studio.

Porter Robinson

Tell us about your hit track 'Say My Name'

Say my Name was the result of an effort to make an aggressive, fun, and ultra-detailed electro house track that sounded distinct from what the greats at the time were doing. I think the big-sounding hook and the incredibly goofy vocal ("say my name and you can say it with honouuurrrr!") created a compelling combination that resonated with people. When Say my Name hit #1 on the Beatport Electro House charts, I was absolutely blown away. My original goal with that track was to enter the top 100. #1 was unthinkable.

What were your first impressions of FL Studio and how did you come to use it?

At first, FL stood out to me just because it was vastly more intuitive and usable than ACID, the program I was producing with before. I had no idea what i was getting into, though. I discovered FL through the recommendation of a friend, and the fully functional trial was integral to helping me get a feel for the program before I took the plunge. I use FL for virtually everything. I'm programming a majority of my bass sounds with Sytrus and 3xOSC, and it's because the slide functionality of FL's piano roll is amazingly useful. I would pretty much always prefer to manually sequence a vibrato using slides than use an LFO. God, there's way too many awesome FL features to list. I'm going to forget tons. I definitely couldn't live without Parametric EQ 2. Its visual component is absolutely irreplaceable. The new playlist, that eliminates pattern blocks, is incredible. It's the change I'd been wishing for for years. Edison is also absolutely critical to my workflow. Hard cuts are crucial to the complextro style I produce, so processing audio with Edison and using its linear phase equalizer to get all my chops to roughly the same color saves me so much time.

Tell us about your production environment & toys?

I'm (was) using some terrible, inaccurate $100 Logitech speakers I bought years and years ago that I know like the back of my hand. My workspace is roomy. I use basically no hardware, although I did spring for a Roland JP-8000 a few years ago (that I never used once in a production). High-end, lofty audio bullshit is fun and whatever, but software dominates these days. Our minds are so good at convincing us that we can hear differences that don't exist - we think we can distinguish WAVs from 320 MP3s, we use meaningless words like "warmth" to describe a sound simply because we know it came from an analog device, and we depart from the listening devices we're intimately familiar with in favor of multi-thousand dollar flat rigs. I don't subscribe to any of that. Any advocate for image-line's awesome sequencer know that FL is often the victim of the fallacies and biases of lofty audio elitists. It sucks so much. It's time that we do away with this archaic attitude

Ahem. I got a little preachy there. Anyway, my production environment is simple, hardware-free and very functional.

Porter @ work

Do you have any links you would like to share?

- http://www.facebook.com/porterrobinsonmusic

- http://twitter.com/porterrobinson

- http://soundcloud.com/porter-robinson

- https://www.beatport.com ~ porter

2 Power Users in one hit!

Porter remixes Tim Berg/Avicii

I love FL Studio!

Porter.

We asked some of our 'Power Users' how they got involved in music and how they use FL Studio.

Porter Robinson

We asked some of our 'Power Users'
how they got involved in music and how they use FL Studio.