We have some amazing authors at Audiotuts+. Besides being incredibly talented at making and producing music, they’ve made the choice to share their knowledge with the rest of us. And that’s not an easy thing to do – they take hours out of their busy days and nights to sit down and write step-by-step tutorials so that we can learn to do what they do.
We thought a lot of you might be curious to find out more about them. What do they do? What have they accomplished? What do they drink? So we’ll take some time over the next weeks and months to pull back the curtain and let you see. Today we meet Mo Volans.
1. What do you do professionally when you’re not writing for Audiotuts+?
Well to be honest my job is pretty diverse. I contribute a lot of copy to magazines especially Music Tech mag and Music Tech Focus. I also do a lot of online training and teach one to one.
I still try and spend as much time as possible making music, although I have moved away from making so much house music these days and am concentrating more on downtempo stuff for TV and Film. Other projects in the studio include mix down and mastering, when it comes down to it this is still what I know best.
2. Tell us about your studio.
My studio went through a huge transformation about a year ago. I had a large amount of hardware, especially in the form of expensive synths. I also had a lot of DSP driven plug-ins. After realising this stuff was actually slowing me down to some extent, mainly due to wiring, recording, saving patches etc. I decided to strip things down. It’s been really liberating and I’m now running a completely native system, a TC interface and my trusty Dynaudio BM6A’s.
I think a lot of artists and engineers are at this point now and people are starting to realise less really is more. The native software is so amazing now that you can pretty much get anything done ‘in the box’. I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I have just about every software title and plug-in on the market and I have to say … we are living in exciting times!
All this said, I am in the process of buying an Aphex 230 channel strip as I need something to process the huge amounts of screencasts I’m producing. Although plug-ins do a great job, running my audio through software once recorded is just proving to be too time consuming.
3. Have you had any interesting projects this year?
I’ve been working on some really interesting music projects that are still under wraps but apart from that it’s been great to be involved with all the Major Application Focuses at Music Tech mag. We’ve covered just about every Major DAW (some twice!) and I’ve contributed around 25 pages to each one.
I’ve also just become a trainer at Macprovideo.com and produced my first series of screencasts for them. This has been a great experience and they have been really welcoming. I’m very happy with the result, it concentrates on the Kong drum designer in he newly released Reason 5. Feedbacks been good and I’m already working on my next title for them. You can actually check out my first set of videos here.
4. Tell us about some of your biggest audio-related successes.
Well, I’d say having my material included on the CSI:NYC shows has been a great experience from a personal point of view but other than that, I’d say playing top of the bill at the Las Vegas music conference, remixing the Shapeshifters, hitting the UK top ten with a remix of the Three Degrees and producing Tears for Fears have all been memorable moments!
5. What do you do for fun?
Well these days there doesn’t seem to be much time for that! But I love to spend time with family and friends. Also I’m a huge fan of movies and slightly fanatical in that area.
Recently though I’ve become a bit of a keen competition archer, really didn’t see that one coming but thats what makes life fun I guess!