Part 1

Name: Sobolik
Nationality: American
Occupation: Producer, DJ
Current release: Sobolik's Update EP is out February 17th 2023 via Kindergarten.
Gear Recommendations: Slate + Ash Cycles and Choreographs, they’re so deep and work so well together and almost always sound good no matter how you turn the knobs. Pretty much everything I’ve made since I turned in the new record is basically just a study of these two plugins.

If you enjoyed this interview with Sobolik and would like to find out more about their music, visit them on Instagram, twitter, and Soundcloud.



What was your first studio like?

I was a big guitar head in high school and spent a lot of money I made working in restaurants on pedals and such … I had a little looper pedal so I would sit in my bedroom for hours and just record endless looping jams with various textures and melodies. I never recorded any of it but this was my first experience with making music using electronics.

At the same time I was branching out from guitar-focused music and getting more into electronic stuff. I think Nicolas Jaar’s Darkside project really helped set me on that path. I’m not super into that record anymore but at the time it was my absolute fave. At the same time (around age 17) I was really into 90s hip hop and had just discovered Flying Lotus and his scene in LA. So I eventually decided to start trying to make electronic music.

I sold some of the guitar stuff and bought a pair of 5” KRKs, an interface, and a copy of Ableton. I had a keyboard my parents bought when I was much younger and briefly taking piano lessons which thankfully had a USB MIDI output, and I had a turntable I had been using to listen to vinyl from Urban Outfitters … Like a year later a friend of mine very generously gave me his extra license for NI Komplete so I also got to use all their synths, Kontakt instruments, effects plugins etc. So I was doing pretty well!!!!

I started buying cheap old records and trying to chop them, add drums and other instruments, and often I would play guitar over the top. It was very much like Tom Misch vibes even though I wouldn’t discover his music until a few years later …

All of the music I made back then was extremely stupid and sounded terrible. It took me 3-4 years to start making things that I kind of liked …

How and for what reasons has your set-up evolved over the years and what are currently some of the most important pieces of gear for you?

My setup got slightly bigger in university—at one point I bought the Korg monologue and was using it for little basslines and melodies and things like that. I never liked the sound of it but it helped me learn subtractive synthesis and step sequencing in a more tactile way. I also got the AKAI MPD-32 controller because I saw that a lot of beat scene artists were using it to control their software samplers and perform live sets. I used to have a lot of guitar pedals, but I mostly just ran the guitar through them and never really favored them over plugins.

For years my workflow was primarily sample based—I would load in samples from vinyl and chop them on the MPD, and I would sprinkle guitar recordings, Kontakt pianos (particularly the Rhodes), NI synths, and a lot of u-he Diva over the top. I developed this workflow over maybe the first 4 years of my music production journey, and then gradually started digging deeper into sound design as my focus shifted away from jazz, hip hop, rock and R&B related pop sounds and moved towards a more textural approach rooted in instrumental beats and dance music.

At around 21 (so like 2018), I kind of lost the drive to continue studying the guitar. It had been my main thing for 11 years but it wasn’t compatible with the music I wanted to make anymore. I was pulling my hair out trying to learn more advanced jazz comping and improvisation but I was feeling more inspired by the possibilities of making music in the DAW. After graduating college, I wasn’t in any bands or school ensembles anymore and the guitar became a thing I just did for fun—I still really value it today as something that I’ve liberated from any expectation of musical productivity.

In 2019 I sold most of my pedals and bought the only two synths I have currently, which are the Moog Mother and Elektron Digitone. I used to make a lot of little jams with just those two pieces and then record it into the DAW later on to sample. Some bits from these machines did make it into my first releases.

“Gnocchi”, which is a track I’m super embarrassed by now and the first one I ever released, has a main melody from the Mother. “Camille”, which was the second track I put out and the first one to get any club / radio play, uses a lot of Digitone for the melodies and I think some of the percussion also.



There’s a lot of Digitone on the Call EP as well. It’s really fun to program and has a certain sound that I was into at the time.



Some see instruments and equipment as far less important than actual creativity, others feel they go hand in hand. What's your take on that?

Being completely honest I would say even back then, and especially today, none of this hardware is important at all to me.

My last record for All Centre, my new one for Kindergarten, and all my other singles and remixes have been made 100% “in the box,” and 99% in headphones. I started producing almost exclusively in headphones in 2020 which honestly lead to leaps and bounds of improvement in my sound design and mixes. I think of my DAW as my main instrument and most of the time I don’t even sit at a desk when I work, I’m really just laying in bed with my headphones on. Looking to change this soon cause I’m starting to get back pain. (laugh)

I guess in this day and age we shouldn’t define “instruments and equipment” as just being ones made out of metal and plastic. To interpret this question to mean “does creativity transcend the tools you’re using, and should a real musician be able to make music with whatever is at hand,” I would say it’s clear to me that everyone’s relationship with their tools and the practice they form around them is inextricable from their art.

“Creativity” is kind of a meaningless idea outside of the context of a working practice of artistic craft and decisionmaking. If you take away all the tools, and leave only “creativity” you just have ideas, and no actual music. Making computer music is a journey of discovering, learning, and inventing sonic practices that speak to you and help you naturally articulate yourself.

But the only thing that matters is that you find tools and methods that are accessible (financially, physically, mentally, emotionally) ... nobody’s toolkit is objectively better than yours.

A studio can be as minimal as a laptop with headphones and as expansive as a multi-room recording facility. Which studio situation do you personally prefer – and why?

I like to be able to make music anywhere, anytime and with as little effort as possible. (laugh) So naturally I almost always work with just my laptop and headphones. I’m constantly on my computer to begin with, because I have a computer job, computer friends (some of whom I know IRL and others who I’ve never met), social media addictions, computer-based hobbies (reading the news, watching films and TV), a computer-based DJ practice (I have to spend hours and hours every week digging for tracks and rekordboxing them), … my whole life is mediated through this box. In some sense, it’s a part of my body, and I’ve been permanently wired to use it with complete intuition, over thousands of hours and like 15-20 years.

I’ve tried other interfaces, like pad controllers, keyboards, hardware synths, but they all feel like they take some immediacy away from my expression vs just clicking and typing in the DAW. The new record was definitely made completely in this mode—I never even tested the mixes on speakers.

That being said, I’m starting to feel like it’d be worthwhile to slow down and add more angles of perception to my practice. I miss testing tracks in my mom’s car, and I understand that I need to start mixing on speakers and testing tracks in the club to keep leveling up my technique and making songs that sound better in their intended habitat.

I’m also feeling like I would benefit from something to slow me down in certain stages of the process because I tend to manically overcrowd tracks with dozens of interlocking parts, and this tendency causes lots of problems when I’m trying to arrange and mix. As a DJ and listener I’m often more attracted to songs that feel elegantly clear, focused, and “reduced” as the Hardwax people like to say.

I’m about to move into an apartment that’ll have a spare room for a studio and I plan to get a nice desk, an ergonomic chair, and a good set of monitors. But I’m tryna be careful not to go too far in the direction of the Instagrammable bedroom studio with perfectly clean surfaces, tasteful gear choices, and well-kept house plants, because I don’t want to make squeaky clean 2-bedroom Kreuzberg flat type beats …

From traditional keyboards to microtonal ones, from re-configured instruments (like drums or guitars) to customised devices, what are your preferred controllers and interfaces? What role does the tactile element play in your production process?

I wish I was doing more work into creating interesting, bespoke, or novel musical interfaces. Maybe someday that’ll be something for me to get into. I’ve been thinking about eventually performing live, but I would never want to spend the majority of my set just launching clips. I’ve been mulling over building a modular synth as a kind of lead instrument to build a live set around ... it would thread the needle between a melodic instrument and a drum machine and I’d be able to just jam on it and generate lots of loops on the fly that I could dubmix and send in and out of the computer.

As I’ve mentioned I don’t use any physical gear right now but I often consider the tactility of my DAW practice. I try to do things like write parts, automate stuff, and arrange tracks in real time with the playhead constantly moving, and then edit down the results later.

I’m envious of producers who can click in MIDI patterns in this fast, flowing way. I had an era in lockdown where I would watch lots of Nick Mira streams for example. His practice is extremely formulaic and seems mainly designed so he can make the maximum number of beats in the shortest time possible.

But watching him work, it’s clear that he has the same level of tactile control of FL Studio that a professional pianist or guitarist has over their instrument, which I think should be the goal if you want to really express yourself naturally through this medium—by speeding up and tactilizing your workflow, you make it easier to follow your intuition.