Name: Umru Rothenberg
Nationality: Estonian-American
Occupation: Producer
Current release: Umru's "GROUNDBREAKER" is out via PC Music.

If you enjoyed this Umru interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.  For even more of his thoughts on music, head over to our earlier umru interview.



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

This is nothing new to mention but I think autotune is major for me and the world I work in. I’m not a trained vocalist but the ability to immediately get out stream of consciousness melodic ideas without the training to get the notes right, and of course just the cool way it sounds, is so valuable.

And we’ve moved past the T-Pain era novelty of it, it doesn’t even feel like a controversial tool or anything at this point. It’s so universal and I’m glad for that. And although I’m not well trained vocally it’s not really about that—when working with Charli XCX, inarguably a massively successful songwriter and vocalist, she almost didn’t want to record in my home setup because I didn’t have 2 pairs of headphones so we’d both be able to hear the autotune. It’s just a profoundly empowering effect for some artists …

Before she had ever written or recorded vocals, I was making a DJ set for an online Minecraft festival maybe 4 years ago with Fraxiom and we ran our voices through autotune for fun to sing along to some of the songs we played. This was the first time she had used it and she’s often mentioned how important that moment was. At this point she’s one of the best songwriters I know, and has such a consistent, sincere and singular lyrical and melodic style that’s so special and may not have been explored without the tool.

Sure, those ideas would’ve found a way out regardless. But I really do love tools that remove barriers like that, because the most creative and expressive artists are rarely the ones with the most resources or musical education.
                                                       

Please recommend two pieces of gear or software to our readers that they should know about.

Nathan Blair’s Max for Live device called Hyperspeed is a super simple but immensely time saving little tool for me and artists I work with recently - it’s an attempt to recreate the effects of Logic’s varispeed feature in Ableton.

As far as I understand, Logic is able to simulate in real time the effect of exporting an entire song and then pitching the audio up or down unwarped. Similar to the effect of speeding up tape, without needing to actually export the audio, it does it within the project and works on all plugins.

Nightcore, the genre composed entirely of speeding and pitching up existing music was of course a huge influence on the music community I’m in, and there’s countless artists, most notably 100 gecs of course, who’ve used the Logic feature to shape their entire sound. Being able to quickly record within the project file at a slower speed / pitch, and then setting it back to the original speed, resulting in pitched up vocals that aren’t warped.

There’s an important distinction between this and just pitching up a warped vocal. The performance still feels natural in the context of the song, and there’s a directness that comes with the lack of warping artifacts that’s hard to emulate otherwise.

This Max for Live version does a surprisingly good job at emulating this effect by changing the bpm, auto tune plugin key, and all midi and audio clips in a session at once with a single semitone knob, saving a lot of time (and math) and making it possible to quickly experiment with this feature with little commitment.

I really don’t have any major physical music gear so the only thing I can recommend is the Universal Audio Apollo Twin, which of course is widely known already but it really is invaluable in session work with artists when you’re battling the limitations of your DAW and computer.

When I bought my interface there was a promo on the autotune version that runs directly on the interface and monitors through it, and that combination has invaluably improved sessions for me many times. Recording artists always goes best when they’re the most comfortable, and for many I work with, monitoring autotune in real time is a big part of that, as I’ve mentioned above.

In an empty project most computers can monitor an instance of an autotune plugin and other basic effects but as soon as the project is closer to completion that can become difficult with latency. You can always export the instrumental and record on a new project but being able to maintain control of everything in the song and monitor with zero latency regardless is great, and as annoying as the interface and it’s software is I still would recommend it for that reason. It’s also got some great preamp and console simulations like the Manley Voxbox which I actually usually record through.

The autotune I use just for monitoring and don’t actually record the effect of so I can adjust it later.