calvin harris, future Interview: on software, hardware and hit-making. Ask chart-topping, multiplatinum producer Calvin Harris for the secret behind all of his recent success and he'll answer you with remarkable honesty. "Luck! Pure and simple," he says with a grin. "I'd been sending out demos and CDs for years. I knew my stuff was good enough, but I was getting nowhere. Then, three people - my future manager and two publishers - happened to send one of my tracks to EMI publishing in the same week. All of a sudden, they were interested! "Had those three people not sent the track at the same time, I'd probably still be Nobby No-Mates, pissing around in my bedroom. That was my one bit of luck and it allowed me to get my foot in the door." The 27-year-old has certainly made the most of his limited luck. Currently one of the UK's biggest pop names, he conquered both the album and singles charts, and even managed to reintroduce cheesy '80s synth sounds and euphoric trance hooks into the mainstream with tunes like Acceptable In The '80s and I'm Not Alone. He's also a regular reader of Future Music, as they found out a few months ago when they received a Tweet from him, following their Calvin Harris Get That Synth Sound feature. So, were Future Music Magazine close to cracking the secret of your sound? [Laughing] "Not really. I had a go at setting it up… following the instructions in the mag. Yeah, I suppose it sort of sounded like it, but the approach was far more scientific than I could ever attempt. I'll readily admit that I'm not a full-blown tech-head. I love my gear and I love being in the studio, but I tend to work in a far more ad hoc kind of way. "From what I remember, they started with a sine wave, but I usually start with a preset. I know some people get really snooty if you talk about preset sounds, but, personally, I can't see anything wrong with using them as a starting point." "I can honestly say that I didn't set out to make a trance tune." Seeing as we're on the subject, can we go into a bit more synth sound detail? "Not a problem at all. As you'll see, they are quite difficult to replicate, so if someone really does want to have a go, good luck to 'em! "OK, let's take the I'm Not Alone main hook. It was actually made up of two different synth sounds and… well, first of all, I should tell you that I don't always play a sound from its original source. I'll often sample a synth sound through the mixer and turn it into a new instrument in Logic's EXS24, because that gives me a lot more control over it. "I started off with the new Roland Juno-G and found a lovely preset called something like 'Trance Keys'. I started playing around with it and thought, 'This is a bit of all right'. As usual, I decided to sample a few notes around middle C into the EXS. Immediately, that will change the feel of a sound, because you're not sampling right across the whole keyboard. As soon as you move away from middle C, the new sound starts to take on an interesting character. Like I said, there seems to be loads of control over it in the EXS and I'm very used to working in that environment. When it's all coming from that particular sampler, I seem to understand the sound a lot more. "At first the new sound was a bit pad-y… a bit too washy. So, I adjusted the attack time to give it some more punch. But it was still lacking something. It sounded too much like a background noise instead of a lead line. It needed a bit more bollocks. That came from… oh God, what was it? It was a distorted electric piano from one of the other keyboards. No, it might have been from the Juno-G, as well. "I remember that the distortion made it quite messy. You couldn't play chords with it, but the single notes were OK. When I sampled it into the EXS, I also took the distortion effect off. It seemed to define the sound a bit too much and didn't leave me with much room for manoeuvre. "When I combined those two sounds, it really started to work! I think I had to tweak the release time, because it was a bit too nher-nher-nher. A bit too on-and-off. I added some release, just to bring in some floaty-ness. That was it really: "Instant Trance euphoria!" You're not afraid of using the 'T' word, then? "Trance? Well, that's something that other people came up with. I can honestly say that I didn't set out to make a trance tune. At the time, trance was really out in the cold. Yeah, you'd got your hardcore trance guys who'd been there since day one, but, in terms of the mainstream, trance was old hat. No one was interested. "I was actually quite worried that people weren't going to get it. It was dance, but it was pop, as well.It had this big trance riff, but then it had guitars. It was quite upbeat, but there was a bit of darkness in there, too. People didn't really know what to make of it. When it first went to the radio stations, they all said, 'What the hell is he playing at? He's made a trance record!'" Must have put a big smile on your face when it went to number one. [Laughs] "Yeah, it did make me very happy. The main reason it made me happy was because I'd taken a risk with that tune. If I'd have actually sat down and thought about it logically, I probably would have said, 'Hang on, this is trance. No one will take it seriously'. But I just heard it as a song… a good song. I knew it worked, so I went with it. Sometimes, it's better to stop thinking and trust your instincts. That's what I used to do when I first started making music, but, as time goes on, you can sometimes over-intellectualise things." What were you working on in the early days? "Right at the start, when I was about 13 or 14, I only had an Amiga 500 Plus running a bit of tracker software called OctaMED. My brother was big into his computers and, when he moved up to a proper PC, I took charge of the Amiga. With the right interface, you could sample things off CD, so I used to nick loads of loops from Fatboy Slim albums and make my own tunes. "In a sense, I suppose you could say that I immediately went on-board. I was working inside the computer. That computer just happened to be an 8-bit Amiga! I know we get all nostalgic about 8-bit samples, but, rest assured, the Amiga didn't sound lo-fi and gritty. It just sounded… a bit rubbish. It probably didn't help that the only monitors were the TV speakers from the secondhand TV in my bedroom." "My music landed in the hands of the right people at the right time… purely by chance. I was THIS CLOSE to giving up!" How long did that set-up last? "Not long. I moved up to an Amiga 1200 and, at Christmas, persuaded my parents to get me my first keyboard… a Korg M5. That was the great thing about being a kid. You could ask for bits of kit forb Christmas and birthdays. I also managed to get a Zoom 1201 - an amazing little effects box for 99 quid! - and an Electrix Filter Queen. "Without a doubt, that was the best present anyone has ever bought me! Sadly, it broke after about two weeks, but they were the greatest two weeks of my life. A real filter! A filter! I stuck everything through it. Twiddling and tweaking. To my young ears, it made everything sound fucking brilliant! I have to mention the M5, too. I've still got it and I still consider it one of the best all-round keyboards you can get. I sometimes dig it out, just for old time's sake. The piano sounds on it areN amazing. Bizarrely, my early studio setup also included a lot of stuff from school. I had a very understanding music teacher who let me take home things like mics, mic stands, a mixer and an eight-trackN Minidisc recorder. That eight-track was a revelation. That's how I learned to mix." Did the school get a credit on the first album? "No, but I really ought to have thanked them! That gear kept me going for years. As soon as I left school, I had to give it all back and my studio suddenly looked very empty. I suppose that's when I decided that I wasn't going to university. If I went to uni, I'd have no money and that meant I couldn't buy more gear. So, I got a job. Just to earn money to buy more equipment. The music thing had really got me… I suppose it's fair to say that I was obsessed. I didn't go out. I didn't really have many mates. I didn't watch telly or go to clubs. I just listened to music and made my own tunes. It was probably all a bit unhealthy, but locking myself away like that meant I could really concentrate on the music. "I remember going totally over the top with the Akai S950 - I managed to get it off this bloke in Carlisle for 200 quid. I knew every button and every switch. Knew how to get the best out of it. I was mad about trying to get the drums to sound punchy. Chopping and tightening as much as I could. Eventually, I realised I needed some sort of compression too, so I put in loads of overtime at work and bought eight Alesis 3630 compressors! Not one… eight of the buggers! And I stuck one on every output of the S950. "I listen back to some of the tunes I made at the time and they just sound weird. Compressed all over the place, pumping and ducking and sounding terrible. What the fuck was I thinking?" Had you started to send stuff out at this point? Or was it bedroom only? "As soon as I finished my first demo, I started sending stuff to record companies. From the age of 14 to about 20, I bombarded record companies and DJs with my demos. I was desperate to get it out there. Most of the time, I got nothing back. Not even a letter telling me to sod off! "I think the most I ever got was a pack of vinyl from some label and a note saying it wasn't bad for a school kid. That was it… nothing else. I was more or less on the verge of giving up. By the time I was 21 or 22, I was getting pretty jaded. No one seemed to be that interested in what I was doing. "That was when I joined MySpace. Obviously, no one uses MySpace anymore, but back then it was a Godsend. It was a way of getting my tunes out there. Adding loads of DJs and record labels to my list of 'friends'. That was round about the time the incident happened with EMI. "My music landed in the hands of the right people at the right time… purely by chance. I was THIS CLOSE to giving up!" Is it a question you get asked a lot… how do I get my music signed? "It's the question that was always going through my head and I'm sure it goes through the head of every person making music in their bedrooms up and down the country. There is no magic formula. It's just about getting the music heard, but also being objective. I was really hard on myself before I got signed… and I still am. I try to look at every track from the outside. It's too easy to get swept along when you're banging stuff out in the bedroom. You have to stand back and say, 'Is this good enough?' "Thinking back, I was quite wary of that jump to Logic-World. Wary of suddenly having money and endless toys to spend it on." "And I suppose Twitter has taken the place of MySpace to an extent. It's a good way of getting in touch with other people… DJs, people from record companies. Then there's the Laidback Luke Forum. Afrojack came up through there. He does actually listen to stuff." What was the first album recorded on? "All of that first album [2007's I Created Disco] was recorded on the Amiga setup. It was all done in my bedroom in Dumfries, before I got any interest from the music business. "All I had was the Amiga 1200, the Korg M5 provided loads of sounds for the first album, a huge, 32-channel Soundcraft mixer, my 950 - at some point, that was upgraded to an S3000 - the Alesis compressors, the Zoom, a Line 6 echo-thingy, a Focusrite VoiceMaster Pro and a couple of AKG C1000 mics. That was it! "The Focusrite was brilliant, because I could really crunch the vocals up and distort them to hell. That was my mixing technique. Distort everything to hell, then you don't have to worry about things like EQ and balance. Distortion allowed me to work with my limited setup." I Created Disco - a Top Ten album in 2007 - wasall made on the Amiga? "Why not? The Amiga did a great job! Even after things started to take off, I did my best to carry on working with it. We were a team! Sadly, I realised it was probably time to give the studio a bit of a spruce-up. The Amiga - God bless it! - was put on the shelf, replaced by Logic with all the bells and whistles, and a Mac. I'm sure you've heard this loads of times, but that first jump to Logic is pretty spectacular. There I am, in my bedroom, with my trusty Amiga. All of a sudden, you've got a studio setup that's as big as your budget and your imagination will allow. "Thinking back, I was quite wary of that jump to Logic-World. Wary of suddenly having money and endless toys to spend it on. I've heard stories of bands that spend all their advance on gear, then the album tanks and they're left with loads of gear and no cash. I was careful. I only bought the things that I really needed, but I didn't go crazy. I didn't need to. I was having enough trouble getting my head around Logic and trying to start work on the second album." You've spent most of last year working on album three and the singles so far, like Bounce and Feel So Close have been huge. Is it all finished? "Not yet. We're looking at a release date soon. It's been a pretty busy year - touring, producing for other people, remixing - so I've not been able to spend as much time in the studio as I'd have liked. "I think the main thing I've tried to do with this album is not cover the same old ground. It's still sounding quite epic, but that whole I'm Not Alone thing has been done to death. Loads of people have jumped on that sound. I want to do something different. I want to challenge myself and feel in danger of messing up. Sometimes, you need to do that to get the best out of yourself. "I'm lucky enough to have a really nice studio in now. It's all been acoustically treated. Y'know… the works. Logic is still the main tool, of course, and most of the work gets done inside the Mac or on the laptop. "But I have been pulling a few vintage bits of kit off of the shelves too. Things like an old [Roland] Juno-106 and a Korg MS20. All you need is one sound and you're off on your journey. Who knows where you'll end up." Calvin Harris "Rollin" (ft. Future & Khalid) This week Calvin Harris unloaded the details behind his new album Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 . And to stoke that anticipation a little bit higher, the producer has now shared the new song "Rollin," which comes complete with cameos from Future and Khalid. The new album track has now hit streaming services, and you can dive straight into the funked-up slow-roller down below. The song follows the other recent Harris cuts "Slide," which features Frank Ocean and Migos, and "Heatstroke," in which Young Thug, Pharrell and Ariana Grande join forces. If all those high-profile guests still weren't enough, Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 is also to include contributions from Travis Scott, Nicki Minaj, , , John Legend, ScHoolboy Q, Young Thug, D.R.A.M. , Jessie Reyez, PARTYNEXTDOOR and Snoop Dogg. Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 arrives on June 30, but right now, you can stream "Rollin" below. Calvin Harris. Join Songkick to track Calvin Harris and get concert alerts when they play near you. Find your next concert. Join 2,891,907 fans getting concert alerts for this artist. Similar artists with upcoming concerts. Tours most with. Past concerts. Defected Virtual Festival 3.0: Calvin Harris. Djakarta Warehouse Project. Biography. Calvin Harris, real name Adam Richard Wiles, is a Scottish DJ and record producer known for his electropop disco sound, which has seen him surpass Michael Jackson as the UK record holder for most top ten hits from one studio album. Calvin Harris began making electronic music in 1999 where he produced his earliest tracks out of his bedroom in Scotland. After moving to London for a brief period, Calvin Harris began to forge a following and found some success with tracks "Brighter Days" and "Da Bongos". After signing with managers Three Six Zero Group, Calvin Harris released his hugely popular debut album “I Created Disco” in 2007. Singles “Acceptable in the 80s” and “Girls” bolstered the album’s popularity, and showcased both Calvin Harris’s extensive talent and his love of 80s pop. The king of collaboration, Calvin Harris has worked with multiple artists including Kelis, , , and . The success of his collaborations (“We Found Love” stayed on the American Billboard chart for an impressive 41 weeks) has seen his demand within the music industry increase considerably, as multiple artists all scramble to work with him. The recipient of multiple MTV awards, a Grammy award and an Ivor Novello award for 2013’s Songwriter of the Year, Calvin Harris has certainly come a long way from his early music-producing days in his childhood bedroom. Now a regular feature on the touring scene, Calvin Harris has played on the same stages as the likes of Rhianna, Deadmau5, Skrillex and Groove Armada, in addition to touring his own work on solo trips around the world. In 2014, Calvin Harris achieved a first and obtained two consecutive number one hits for the singles “Summer” and “Blame”, which both feature on the album “Motion.” With tracks co-written and performed by the likes of Gwen Stefani, , Haim and John Newman, the versatility of Calvin Harris’s style and sound is once again made evident. It is this versatility that has no doubt constituted a large part of his enormous success. Live reviews. Calvin Harris. Calvin Harris is an artist atop of his game at the moment. Having released a record breaking album in the form of '18 Months' where every single lifted became an instant hit on both sides of the Atlantic, the Scottish DJ has quite a feat of creating a live show to match his accreditation. Luckily, armed with four albums worth of A-game material he has no trouble in performing a mammoth 36 song set. His own personal hits including 'Bounce', 'I Need Your Love' and 'Under Control' featuring Kelis, Ellie Goulding and Hurts whip the crowd into early frenzy before he is also able to unleash wave after wave of collaborative efforts. These include global hit with Rihanna, 'We Found Love' as well as the triple threat collaboration with Florence + the Machine as he plays 'Spectrum', 'You've Got The Love' and 'Sweet Nothing'. One of his earliest hits from '18 Months' does not feature an A-list guest feature, 'We'll Be Coming Back' achieves roars from the crowd as the mass raving and dancing continues below the DJ's stage. As the final reverberated notes of 'Summer' fade, the streamers land and the lights dim the audience leave having experienced a world-class dance party. Let me start by saying I’m not even that into EDM. But going to see Calvin Harris is an experience in itself. Yes, you will hear songs you know. Yes, you will feel the bass flood through your body. And yes, you will absolutely dance your ass off. I went into this show thinking I’d have to suffer through a few hours of the same electronic beat drops we’ve come to know, getting shoved up against some ravers who didn’t realize I was even standing there. How wrong I was! From the moment the show opened, with every special effect known to man; streamers, lasers, strobes, smoke, moving platforms; until the finale, I was transported to another dimension where I couldn’t stop moving my feet. The music was varied enough to keep my attention, but similar enough that I knew most of the songs. The people in the crowd were happy, smiling, and friendly. It’s definitely an experience that I’m glad I didn’t miss out on and I’m looking forward to the next time he comes around as I’ll definitely be purchasing a ticket to his show as well as convincing any friends of mine that they would be dumb not to join. From the moment that the lights shone from the stage right till the end, Calvin Harris's performance was live! The lighting effects were crazy and added to the amazing set he had. He really knows how to work a crowd and had everyone on their feet and jumping making the atmosphere just how you want it to be at a live concert. I saw him when he was the opening act for Rihanna and can safely say that he was just as good as her. Each song he played was well known and his mixes were amazing. If you're looking for a party, then he is the best DJ you could ask for out there. Knows how to work a crowd, plays good music and has the best light display which all equates to an awesome night out and best DJ ever! Recommend to anyone. Well what a way to bring in 2016 with Calvin Harris at omnia Vegas I've saw him before but OMG he was outstanding playing some of the best tunes outside how deep is your love summer and much more a set of over 2hrs was well worth the money omnia it's self is truly amazing the lights the moving chandelier outstanding just made the set even better highly recommend I will be back in Vegas and omnia to see Calvin again Amazeballs x. Love Calvin but Omnia is super crowded so it's tough to see him. I feel his set was a little too crowd pleasing but overall it was decent. Omnia has an incredible centerpiece that is the biggest attraction besides the talent. Brillante ! But overbooked , can't enjoy with such a amount of people, came from another country for the event and despite of the effort to enjoy Omnia was packed , sell less , make people enjoy more .. Most amazing night of my life! The Omnia was incredible and Calvin Harris didn't disappoint!! Will definitely be seeing him again! Drinks were expensive but strong, and the music was crazy loud! I would have loved more of their songs and less remixes, but I enjoy it. The OMNIA is a great club, a little expensive but it a great place for a Vegas club experience. The show was amazing, worth the visit but the venue was extremely packed and there were numerous cases of pickpocketing on that night so just be aware of large crowds. Calvin Harris Sees NFTs As The Future Of Music Revenues. The Grammy award-winning producer has teamed up with music video director Emil Nava on five NFT artworks titled Technofish, currently up for auction, and Harris spoke to Clubhouse program Good Time Show about the NFT prospectives for the music business as a whole. “When I first realised the scope – I mean, I haven’t really realised the scope of what an NFT can be, I don’t think any of us really have,” he said. “I thought ‘wow, this is a whole new tool for creativity that isn’t policed by radio or streaming, or someone from the label or any of this stuff. It’s a whole new avenue that you can really just put out whatever you want, and that’s kind of how music should be but it really isn’t,” the hitmaker went on. “Initially that got me super excited. The fact that smaller artists can have ownership over their music and literally just make what they want and then let the people decide,” he enthused, adding: “It seemed like such a great, direct way of doing it.” Explaining that he was inspired to become further involved, Harris shared: “We need to make this a bigger deal, and we need everyone to do this.’ I think it can completely revolutionise the music industry.” Stream Top Podcasts. She’s a cultural phenomenon whose real-life saga is capturing the headlines, again. If you can never get enough true crime. Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Take yourself back in time. back to high school. The ups and downs, the loves the losses, the struggles the triumphs, being together with your friends. feeling every emotion of it. Is 23 more than just a number to you? Do you respond to people by saying I don't wanna be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately? 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