Gear Guide: Step Inside Daniel Brandt’s Studio

New album 'Eternal Something' is out now...

Daniel Brandt has always allowed his music to tread its own path.

As a member of Brandt Brauer Frick he helped push avant garde ideas into the mainstream, before deciding to focus on his own work.

Progress was slow but steady, taking him from a cabin based in the German countryside with access to nothing but cymbals, to being surrounded by guitars in Joshua Tree.

"The initial idea was to make a cymbal album," he said recently. "I wanted to surround myself with all types of cymbals. I locked myself into my father’s cabin in the woods for three days. That was the moment I realised it was not possible for me to make an album just with cymbals because other ideas and instruments imposed themselves on me."

"I had a clear sense of what I wanted to do now. The intention was to let the songs evolve by themselves and not edit too much, keep it raw and have an explosion-like energy to them. I wanted to create a different sound, songs that build up like dance tunes but don't feel like club music at all."

New album 'Eternal Something' is out now on Erased Tapes, and it's a fascinating return. As ever, technology plays a key role, so Clash invited Daniel Brandt to guide us through some of his most cherished pieces of kit…

– – –

This mixing desk, which is not mine but my girlfriend's, is the core of all of my recordings. At least if I'm not travelling.

All of the songs from the album went through this at some point and because I got something wrong with the inputs for quite some time there's a lot of nice crackling in some of the recordings. Jan Brauer then eventually showed me how to use it properly and my recordings became better. I generally enjoy building effect chains e.g. with a delay, a filter, ring modulator and distortion or other effects and then run some of the recorded tracks through them.

Anyway it's much more hands on then if you're doing all that inside the computer.

The two Moog Moogerfoogers are just great to add a little extra something to everything. I had them with me wherever I recorded something for the album and if I didn't use the actual effects I was just using their great ability to drive the signal and make it more raw. They don't look as dusty in reality as on the picture but I should have cleaned them.

Also one element that appears on the record many times is a tuned bass drum from my Akai Rhythm Wolf which I have tuned on the fly and added the Moogerfoogers live through the effects chain. You can hear that very well at the beginning of 'Casa Fiesta'.

Another dusty machine. This one is on many of the songs, you can hear it very well on 'Eternal Something' in the last part. It's a pretty cool drum computer and pretty easy to make a nice beat with. Of course it's good to let it breathe a bit when you run it through a nice distortion effect.

This one is my favourite Moog synthesizer. All the synth bass lines on the record are either made on that one or on a Sub 37 which I borrowed while being in California using the same setting.

I really like the brassy sound of the bass on that synth. On a couple of songs I combined the sound from the Sub Phatty with the sound of an actual trombone played by Florian Juncker. Check the break in the middle and also the end of 'Eternal Something' and you'll hear it.

This Duesenberg guitar was my first encounter with a guitar two years ago after unsuccessfully trying to play some guitar when I was 10. Back then I had a deal with my parents that if I'd be able to play all the songs of Peter Bursch's Guitar Book, I might get an electric guitar. Even though that was a pretty cool outlook, the songs of that book were so boring that I never made it past the first two, so no electric guitar for me.

This Starplayer TV guitar belongs to my girlfriend and it was much more fun to just use it as an element for my album than rehearsing with the stupid book.

– – –

– – –

'Eternal Something' is out now.

Buy Clash Magazine

-
Join the Clash mailing list for up to the minute music, fashion and film news.