Eric Kauffmann
Tell us about yourself and how you got into music? I got into music when I was 14 years old, my uncle came to my dad’s house one day and he brought his guitar, he started playing some songs, and I was like “wow!” How cool is this! And about a year later, my dad gave me an acoustic guitar for my birthday. I remember being so excited when I first got it and I used to play it every day. But it wasn’t until 5 years later when I got interested into electronic music, like, you know, actually creating the music!, so I came across “Universal Religion” Chapter 5 mixed by Armin Van Buuren and I got hooked for life, I was so fascinated with the sounds, the melodies, the rhythms and I said to myself, “I need to learn how to create this, RIGHT NOW”. And then I started my learning quest, I started watching tutorials on You Tube for a while, then I started reading the FL Manual (yes!), later on I got into some courses in groove3.com and last year I did a diploma of Electronic Music Production at SAE Qantm in Melbourne/Australia. Most of what I have learned from the past 4 years has been just me surfing the internet and practicing long hours in FL Studio, some days more than 10 hours in there just twisting knobs and figuring out how to make a sound or how to get good melodies and chords, you just got to be patient until you find the good stuff, it’s right there, trust me. Why so many food names in your recent songs? You released “Fruits EP” and your latest single it’s called “I love Bacon” tell us a bit more… Well to be honest, I thought this was pretty genius, you know? No one is naming their tracks with Fruits names or food names, so I went along with it! On the Fruits EP I released “Mango”, “Kiwi” and “Tomato”, for some reason, people still think that tomato is a vegetable, I had a lot of discussion over social media about this, haha. [ed. Works for us, being a fruity DAW 😉 ] And yeah, my next EP will be called “Tasty Food” and the first track will be “I love Bacon” (already pre released) because who doesn’t love bacon right? It just sounds tasty and funny and I’ve also seen an overall positive response with everyone who has been checking out the “Fruits” EP, which is an electro house and future house fusion, somewhere in between. How did you start using FL Studio & what does it mean to your productions? The first DAW I came across was “Cubase 5” which I used a lot to create mashups, a little later I discovered “Ableton Live 8” which I could never get it to work (haha) and after that I got into “FL Studio 10”, the first thing that came into my mind was, this thing looks like an alien ship! Haha, but trust me, I had the same thought when I first opened Live 8, so to be honest. It took me some time to get used to FL and start creating my first songs, one thing I perfectly remember is that the “step sequencer” was like magic to me, I couldn’t believe how easy I was able to program my own rhythms and melodies, later on, when I started working with the mixer, processing the audio AND using the piano roll, I just never looked back. FL Studio is like this magical universe where I get lost every day, I wish that my ears could just keep going all day without needing a rest (*sighs*) because I just can’t stop, one of the things I love the most is the automation, events automation and playlist automation is just ridiculous! And the native plugins are so good, Harmor & Sytrus are just so amazing, you can do anything with them, I can’t wait for Sytrus 2 to come out! 😀 So, now going back to the original question, FL Studio means everything in my productions and on my everyday life, I don’t feel like there is something unachievable, you can make any kind of music you want and make it sound as good or bad as you want, because it’s all about what you know and how do you apply it to your music. |
Tell us about your production environment & toys? My setup is very minimalistic at the moment, I believe you don’t need more than a decent laptop, a pair of good headphones (monitoring headphones preferably) and your DAW of choice to make high quality music, it’s all about what you know and how you do it, so I’m currently just working with my 16 GB ram, i7 Quad Core Intel 4300 Gen Processor Toshiba Laptop, saving almost everything on my external hard drive and working with my audio interface Scarlett 2i4 along with my pair of headphones SRH 940, and oh! I also have a RODE NT2 – A which I love, I use this microphone to record anything and of course to record the tutorials. This doesn’t mean I don’t like big and fancy studios, or cool analog gear, is just that at the moment, this type of setup fit my needs but when it comes the time to build my own studio I would like to go as hard as deadmau5 went on his brand new studio setup (this may be expensive :P). And for performance I like to incorporate midi keyboards such as the Akai MPK Mini or the M-Audio Oxygen 49-61, I also got a Launchpad S and I’ve been using performance mode a lot lately, whenever I get the chance to do my own shows I’ll be using it for sure, it´s just amazing, all the visual things and how fun it can be when performing music, just look at Madeon or Porter Robinson! How did you get started on making tutorials for the Spanish community and why did you decided to teach? One of the reasons I started teaching was because the video tutorials in Spanish were horrible, there was barely any good video content out there, they were poorly recorded and the information was misleading, I also don’t want beginners to struggle as much as I did when it comes to finding good content about music production. When I started, I found out about SeamlessR and he was extremely helpful, a lot of his knowledge was transmitted to my viewers in my Spanish tutorials, after a while people started calling me the Spanish “SeamlessR” I find that funny and flattering at the same time, still, Stephen is the bass master! I posted my first video tutorial in a Spanish FL Studio group and after 1 day I had like 200 views and 86 subscribers, this was enough to motivate me and keep going forward and that was in January 2014, so it has been now 2 years since I started, I cannot believe how fast the channel has grown, and to be honest I couldn’t have done it without my fans support. Do you have any links you would like to share? My music – theartistunion.com/erickauffmann My tutorials – youtube.com/c/EricKauffmannOfficial My site – erickauffmann.com Social media – facebook.com/officialerickauffmann Snapchat: eric_kauffmann Vine: Eric Kauffmann Eric.
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