Seismic Crew

How did you get involved in creating music ?

I've been involved with music from a very young age, singing in choirs since I was 5 years old, and playing piano since I was 8. When I was about 12 or 13, a friend of mine got a Kawai keyboard from his parents for Christmas. We fooled around with it a lot and had a great time writing silly little songs with the limited sequencer. That was the beginning of my insatiable gear-lust, which continues to this day !

Jeff Beck

Stu MacQ

Professionally, my first real success with music was in the late summer of 2001. I'd done a demo remix of a Craig David track with my partner Jeff Beck under the name "Seismic Crew". The import vinyl of that track had an a cappella on the B-side, which we used to do a trance-style remix of "Fill Me In".

Through contacts made at Promo Only where Jeff worked, we were able to get it into the hands of the VP of promotions at Atlantic Records. Though the record was old and the remix wasn't useable at the time, he was impressed enough to commission some more remixes for other Atlantic artists. And things snowballed from there. Oh, did they ever!

How did you end up using FL Studio ?

I used the demo of FL a lot back before I was making any real money with my music. I had been using the old software drum machine Hammerhead, but FL offered endlessly more flexibility and power. At the time, I was spending everything that I'd earned at my day job on keyboards and other pieces of noise-making hardware.

I was using FL to build drum tracks and loops one at a time, and then assembling them in (then) Sonic Foundry's Acid. After I sold my first remix, I bought a FL license. It is without question the best money I've ever spent on any music making tool ... software or otherwise!

What does FL Studio mean in your current setup ?

FL Studio is the core of all of my drum tracks. Everything that I program as a rhythmic element is programmed within FL Studio. I use it as a VSTi in Cubase SX, and the power of this combination is nearly limitless. One of the best things about it is that it has SO many layers. I can make a very basic drum track in a matter of minutes, or I can roll up my sleeves and really get dirty in the complexities of the routing and automation. The depth of the program is incredible. Automate everything from anywhere at any time! What more could you want?

What are the advantages & disadvantages of using hard- & software ?

I currently have a love/hate relationship with hardware. On one hand, I love it because it sounds great, and there are certain pieces that currently have no software equivalent. On the other hand, it's a PAIN to use, as the MIDI timing can be sloppy, plus I have to record tracks one at a time, and the effects routing is limited to what's onboard the keyboard/module.

Software has no disadvantages. I have total recall of EVERYTHING, I can export tracks at greater than real-time, and I can mix with confidence knowing that what I'm hearing is what the final product will sound like. The only thing I have against software is that its performance is contingent on the hardware that runs it. However, with computer hardware falling in price and increasing in power exponentially, the future is looking very bright for computer-based musicians of all kinds.