| Q:Who are you? | |
| Ian V Jones AKA: KILLMeDJ AKA: Stereo Jones |
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| Q: The Beginnings – When did you start making electronic music? | |
| I started making Electronic music around 1998. I was touring Europe with my band and we had a night off in London, and I went a place called the “Sun” club. From memory it was a warehouse party in the massive old building. There was room after room of different styles of music, nothing was really doing it for me. Then as I was about to leave I walked into the Drum and Bass room. It was a revelation I stood in that room till the place closed, and vowed I would learn how to do it. As soon as the tour was over I went back to New Zealand and started, a Drum and Bass band and started writing tracks. |
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| Q: What or who inspired you? | |
| Apart from my initial inspiration, my main inspiration was Goldie and the metalheadz crew. I loved the energy and the production was amazing! Roni Size was another big influence too.What I also didn’t really notice at the time was that I was absorbing the music of some great house producers as well. Professional Widow by Armand Van Heldon really changed how I saw house music. And if i’m being completely honest Another Chance by Roger Sanchez was a track that I always got inspiration from. Although me and my buddies were playing hard out Drum and Bass, breaks and Garage at the time, so I kinda kept that stuff to myself =) It did plant the seed for my future love of House music though. |
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| Q: How would you describe your style? | |
| I guess “deep house” but there’s a lot of disco influences, and tech house influences. But Deep House seems to cover it I suppose. |
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| Q: How was your grasp of the audio engineering & production at this time? How did you learn producing? Is it all self taught, from the internet and tutorials or mentors and teachers? | |
| I think I’m like most producers and am a bit of a Tech head. I love learning programs, I love seeing how far I can take the abilities of a software DAW or plugin. As far as learning goes, I had a group of like minded friends, and we were all at fairly staggered levels of expertise. So if I didn’t know something then there was a good chance that one of my buddies would, and visa versa, it was a knowledge collective =) Also there wasn’t youtube when this was happening, so if you were losing your mind trying to figure something out you had to leave the house and go to your mate’s place and hope to hell he knew how to do it! |
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| Q: Tell us about your setup. Are you using mostly software or hardware these days? | |
| I run an iMac 2.93Ghz 12GB of RAM Logic Pro Ableton Live 9 NI Komplete 6 sound card KRK V8 Monitors Machine Mikro Basic M-Audio Midi controller UAD Satellite QUAD Waves Plugs UH-e Diva Spectrasonics Omnisphere Nexus 2 Reaktor Massive Xfer Nerve and LFO tool |
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| Q: What are your five favorite instrument and effect plugins? | |
| 1-Omniphere 2-Nexus 2 3-Reaktor 4-Waves 5-UAD |
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| Q: Who are the artists who have influenced you the most right now? | |
| Aeroplane- Always consistently good, and very song oriented. Daft Punk- kind of a no brainer really Audiojack – These guys make me wanna give up they’re so good! Monkey Safari- funky, vibey as all hell, and a great source of inspiration. Dr Dre – Not sure about his stuff now, but his ears and skills were the best in the rap game for years and years, I still get blown away by his records! ans Sebastien Leger – GENIUS straight up! |
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| Q: What is your typical work schedule like? | |
| Monday, Tuesday are like my weekends so I’ll normally do emails and start browsing music, putting a lots of tunes hold bins, that way when it comes to the weekend I’ve got a bit of a head start on my record shopping. Wednesday and Thursdays are studio days, I’ll either be writing, remixing or doing mix downs for other producers tracks. I still play drum’s for artists so there’s normally evening rehearsals and the odd tour to pop off and do. And then there’s the weekend, DJ, DJ, DJ! Sunday included! It sounds busy but in reality there’s a lot of free time and I love what I do so I can hardly call it work. |
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| Q: How do you promote your music? Are there any music promotion services you can recommend? | |
| Soundcloud, twitter, and Facebook | |
| Q: How do you distribute your music? Are there any digital distribution services that worked for you which you can recommend to our readers? | |
| I haven’t really looked much further than Beatport at present. | |
| Q: What social media or websites do you use for music promotion | |
| Facebook. I’m pretty slack in this dept. | |
| Q: Let´s talk about djing and live gigs. Do you remember your first gigs? How were your first experiences with finding and playing gigs. | |
| It was bore out of necessity to be honest. I would write tracks and then on Friday I would go to the clubs and get my friends to play the tracks. If the track sounded a bit crap, I would haul ass home on my bike, tweak the track and then race back and hope the DJ would play it again! It was exhausting! I then decided to do o live gigs with my drums and a very very early copy of Live, this was fun, but impractical for most club gigs. And Live had a habit of crashing a lot back then. Around this time Final Scratch was released and once I got into that I was in the race! Thankfully I already had a rep for being a producer so clubs were pretty open to me DJing, I never had to hustle, thank god. But the reality is that I had already done the hard work and made the effort to go to the clubs with my original stuff and meet promoters and and DJs, so by the time I decided to DJ i was very much on their radar. |
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| Q: Was it complicated finding a booking agency or clubs to play at and how were the first gigs received? What´s it like on tour for you? | |
| Like I said I was really lucky that, I was known, so getting bookings wasn’t really a problem. My forst gigs were great, and thank god they were. Otherwise I would have hibernated back in my studio and never come out!I come from a band background where touring is like going on a massive road trip with a bunch of mates. DJ touring is a bit of a lonely affair in comparison, I still haven’t found my groove with it yet. |
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| Q: If you could only take one piece of gear on the road with you besides your laptop, what would it be? | |
| iPad! | |
| Q: What is your favorite animal? | |
| Cow | |
| Q: What would your personal dream life look like? | |
| It’s changed recently. Once it was very gangsta! Cash, girls first class travel bling bling bling!now my dream life is, make great music, experience life to the fullest and not have to worry about money! So yeah, I still need some bling in there for the last part of my dream! |
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| Q: And what would be your worst nightmare scenario in life? | |
| playing a tune I loved to thousands of people and have them all hate it! (that was an actual nightmare I had!) |
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| In a parallel universe Q: If you weren’t a musician, what would you be and why? | |
| Probably a scientist or something nerdy like that | |
| The Future Q: When we interview you in one year, where do you see yourself? | |
| I hope to be a more successful version of myself now. better at my craft in all areas. And with lots of great releases under my belt! |
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| Do you have anything to add? | |
| Find your personal value, and believe in it. | |
| Put in your Facebook/Twitter/Soundcloud or other Social Media adress in this field | |
| http://soundcloud.com/killmedj | |
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