Grouch

Tell us about yourself and how you got into music?

Hey people, my name is Oscar aka (Grouch) born and raised in New Zealand. I have been a passionate hand percussionist for about 17 years which has influenced my production quite a bit.

The first time I played around with electronic music production was back in 1997 with a program called impulse tracker but it wasn’t until late 1999-2000 that I really found my groove after bring introduced to fruity loops. I never intended to perform any of my music I just really found myself in love with the creative process.

It wasn’t until around 2004 that I started being asked to play at some small outdoor festivals in New Zealand. Until that time I had been writing mainly experimental down tempo, drum and bass and hip hop. after being exposed to some peak experiences at the festivals in NZ I started to write minimal progressive psytrance and psy breaks, it wasn’t long after that I was headlining festivals in locally and within a year I was getting bookings in Australia which really started to kick off my career.

In 2011 I went for a 3 month tour of Europe which turned into 4 years of non stop touring all over the world playing at some of the best festivals in the scene including Boom Festival, Ozora, Burning man, Universo Parelello, Rainbow Serpent, Earthcore, to name a few.

Some artist I have collaborated with or remixed include Juno Reactor, Hedflux, Perfect Stranger and Knobs to name a few.

I have released my music with Zenon Records, Interchill Records, Enig’matik Records, Cosmic Conspiracy Records, Broken Robot Records, Luminous Music, A-List Records, Up Records, Solar Records, Bassweight Recordings, Diskonecta Records, Funtazula, Occulta, Soundcraft Records, Native Harmonics Records, Estuary Records, Arkona Creations but am thinking of going freelance and using Bandcamp in the near future.

More recently I have moved to Melbourne Australia where I have set up a Killer studio where I have much more time to work on loads of new material with an album coming out on Zenon records in May next year and a few EPs in the pipe lines.

Tell us about your live performances?

Once I have finished a track in FL Studio I bounce it into 7 stems. Kick, Bass, Percussive synths, Atmospheric and melodic Synths, Snare, Hats, And percussion/other. Once rendered I Do a quick premaster of the stems in Audition and then bring them into Ableton Live where I Cut them up into loop-able sections. I have created a control arena on Lemur for my Ipad which controls everything in Ableton from effecting each stem individually or together, looping parts, glitches delays etc. Some times i will bring a darabuka to jam on and also and I use my X Station and Korg Monotron to play live synth.

How did you start using FL Studio & what does it mean to your productions?

Actually it was my sister who introduced me to Fruity Loops, she has been a house DJ since the early 90’s and has been a massive influence on me. Although I Basically started with Fruity Loops I have spent a lot of time using other software including Cubase, Reason, Logic, Ableton Live and was trained on Protools during my Audio engineering studies back in 2003. After all this I found myself back in love with fruity loops around version 5 or 6 and have never looked back. Since all of the massive developments FL Studio has made I’m totally in love with it again. I find its like an open source area where you are free to be creative in how you approach almost every aspect of producing. I love how there are so many different ways to do one thing and how many hidden secrets there are lying beneath the surface, I’m still discovering shortcuts and tricks even now.

Tell us about your production environment & toys?

My studio in Melbourne is in the Double Garage at my house, its 6x6m(20ft x 20ft) one of my Audio Engineer friends helped me Design and build everything in the room. Everything from from the floor and desk to the massive bass traps (one of which we build a door on so we can use the inside as a recording booth) and panels. It took us about 3 months to design and build but it was worth every second a cent. Hardware wise I have Dyneaudio bm6mk2’s and a matching Dyneaudio Sub and a pair of Neumann monitors for reference. In terms of hardware synths I have a Novation X-Station and a Micro Korg. Im also using an Alesis air fx and Kaos Pad 3 in series as an outboard fx processor. The gear side of things is always a work in progress so i will be adding to it over time. To be honest though I’m really comfortable with software synths and use a lot of the native FL Studio instruments but my all time favorite VST is Zebra that thing is a weapon.

Do you have any links you would like to share?

facebook.com/grouchnz/

soundcloud.com/grouchnz

grouchnz.com/

grouchnz.bandcamp.com/album/further

Grouch