Part 1

Name: Emily Jones aka Echo Juliet
Nationality: British
Occupation: Producer, DJ, percussionist
Current release: Echo Juliet's Abandon Reality is out via Invisible Ids.
Recommendations: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (this helped give me the confidence to pursue music); Guerilla Girls - The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (this poster is above my desk)

If you enjoyed this Echo Juliet interview and would like to stay up to date on her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in production and technology?

One of my earliest musical memories is playing a Bontempi organ which used to belong to my mum when she was a child in the 70s - it lived under the bed at my grandparents' house in the original cardboard box.

My mum was a single parent for a while so I spent a lot of time at their house while she was at work, and I always used to enjoy playing with it then. If you’re not familiar, it’s a reed organ driven by an electric fan (so it was electric not electronic) but it made this strange wheezing sound with a pitch bend because the fan inside was dying!

My grandad was a forklift mechanic and was always buying new gadgets so I definitely inherited some of his interest in technology and understanding how machines work too. My grandmother on my dad’s side also learned play electric organ when she retired (she got her Grade 8!) so I remember sitting at the keyboard with her and pressing buttons as a kid.

But some of my other early music experiences were playing the recorder and drums, and watching my step-dad playing in a marching band, which is all very low-tech!

What were your very first active steps with music technology and how would you rate the gains made through experience?

My first active steps were oddly passive! I had learned to DJ and was really enjoying the creative possibilities of it when my boyfriend asked me whether I would ever consider making a remix.

My immediate reaction was ‘there is no way I could ever do that, I don’t know how to write music’. In hindsight that was insecurity talking because I had studied music at university, but somehow came away believing that I couldn’t compose. Thankfully my boyfriend ignored me and bought me a copy of Ableton as a surprise!

I did some online lessons through MPW but actually a producer helped me finish my first track which was super valuable and got me hooked. Learning through experience is really important but I still actively seek out online workshops, production blogs, artist interviews etc because they often have tips and tricks I would have taken years to discover myself.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches, and musical forms you may be very familiar with?

Since the very first tune I made, I always start tracks with some kind of percussion loop, which I use instead of a metronome. I find the groove of a percussion loop elicits more ideas than a metronome might, and Splice has a vast amount to choose from so it’s different every time, bringing an element of surprise to the process. Sometimes the loop stays and sometimes it gets cut later.

I’ve been getting more into portable music-making gadgets, which are great for just messing around in spare moments rather than reaching for my phone. I was given a Pocket Operator Sub which always surprises me, and then my boyfriend recently bought me an Orba 2, which lets you layer drums, bass, chords and lead loops in a very tactile way.

I also really like the Ableton ‘One Thing’ video series - there are loads of experimental ideas in there which often come out with unexpected results.



For your own creativity, what is the balance and relative importance between what you learned from teachers, tutorials and other producers on the one hand – and what you discovered, understood, and achieved yourself? What are examples for both of these?

I feel like my development as a producer has been a balance between the two, more often being taught the technical things and discovering the creative things myself.

I think I picked things up pretty quickly (this was the first thing I made after about 6 months of producing) but in the early stages I definitely leaned heavily on lessons and advice from others to allow me to advance quickly.

Most of what I learned from others was technical, although there were some brilliant online classes I attended led by CDR where Tony Nwachukwu covered some really creative ways to sample and re-sample in Ableton and I still use those techniques now (you can hear them with the kalimba in “We Move” and the lead melody in “Burnout”).



Most of what I have discovered and understood for myself has been the less tangible things, like honing my sound, how to develop ideas throughout a song without throwing loads more layers in, how to write a B section which is connected to the A section but different, how to arrange.

Those things are equally important as the technical stuff, and as I have discovered myself, much harder to teach!

How and for what reasons has your music set-up evolved over the years and what are currently some of the most important pieces of gear and software for you?
 
I started out purely ‘in the box’ with Ableton and occasionally using an Akai MPK Mini to play in chords, which worked well for me because it’s so portable and I used to commute on the train a lot.

At some point during lockdown I had the idea of buying a Malletkat (a midi vibraphone) which I had to import from the USA. I can’t really play the piano and am more at home playing tuned percussion so it felt like a natural development. I probably wouldn’t have done that if I wasn’t stuck at home saving money on other things.

Once I was playing that, I realised that the Ableton percussion sounds I’d been using weren’t that close to the real thing so I invested in a couple of the Soniccouture tuned percussion sample libraries which I used in “Red Sun,” “We Move,” and “Eating the Rich.” The marimba sound is incredibly realistic.



I’ve used the Malletkat to develop a pretty unique live set with Ableton and a Roland SPD-SX drum pad which I use to play in the drums on my tracks, plus a Novation Launchpad and Launch Control XL.

Now that I have the Pocket Operator I’ve started thinking about adding some other synths into the mix. I’m trying to choose carefully and save some money first but I’ve got my eye on a few things after trying lots of gear at Machina Bristronica recently…

Have there been technologies which have profoundly influenced, changed or questioned the way you make music?

Ableton has been transformational for me.

I learned to play drums as a teenager and was classically trained on percussion. I wanted to be a professional musician and applied to study percussion at several music colleges, but got rejected so instead, I studied an academic music degree. I somehow came away from it with the idea that I couldn't write music, so for 10 years I got another job, worked in an office, and didn't really make music at all.

It wasn't until my boyfriend bought me a couple of copy of Ableton that I suddenly felt like I had the tools to get the ideas out of my head, and I think it's the ability of the software to help you experiment, test and iterate ideas in session view that made the massive difference for me and has most influenced the way that I make music.

Having a Malletkat has also changed the way that I write - often I'll start tune by jamming on it with a percussion loop and I’ve noticed that what I write is different because of the way that I'm playing the notes in - obviously I'm limited to only being able to play for notes at a time because I have four mallets so I end ups with different chords and voicing that I would have done playing a keyboard.

Already as a little kid, I was drawn to all aspects of electronic/electric music but I've never quite been able to put a finger on why this is. What's your own relationship to electronic sounds, rhythms, productions like – what, if any, are fundamental differences with “acoustic“ music and tools?

I remember, as a kid, going to the local library and taking out CDs for a pound each. I just borrowed a bunch of things that had cool covers with no idea what any of it was.

One of them was a Ministry of Sound compilation which I absolutely loved. It was also around that time that UK garage was really big, so I feel like I was brought up on a weird combination of UK garage, Ministry of Sound classics from the early 2000s, and jazz and R&B. One of my other favourite CDs from the library was a Stevie Wonder compilation, which I listened to obsessively and eventually bought.

For a long time I put my interest electronic music to one side to focus on classical music, and it was something that I only listened to for fun, until I started taking DJing more seriously. Somehow despite that early interest in electronic music, I had also got the idea that I didn't like house music and found it boring. It took quite a while for me to re-educate myself on that once I started DJing, and now it’s a core part of my sound (e.g. “Red Sun”).



One of the biggest differences I notice between electronic and acoustic music and tools is groove and swing. When I started producing music I found it a very strange concept that groove and a sense of humanity was something you had to add manually as part of the creation process. Particularly because, as a drummer, you often feel like you're fighting against being human while you’re trying to play to a click and play in a slightly more consistent, robotic way.

I think that’s one of the reasons that I loved the early Four Tet albums like Rounds, because they balanced the sound of a human drummer with electronic sounds and glitches.



That's a line that I still try to tread in my music now balancing the organic and electronic.