Interviews
TF: What were your expectations for your performance this year?
Honestly, I had a lot of expectations prior to the festival. I wanted to do a set that progressed from tribal and electro into more tech house where I could just hand things off smoothly to Stryke and let him do his thing. Once I got to the fest and got into “stage manager” mode, I didn’t have time to think about what I was going to do or anything. Fortunately, I had a few days to watch the crowd to see if they had changed from last year and to focus on my set. In the end, I played what I felt like playing which turned out to be more electro than anything. Once again, I was shocked to see how fast and hour and a half passes.
Dave Richards had the pleasure of opening up for Stryke on Thursday. We had some technical issue that night, but it didn’t stop Dave from dropping a great combination of tech house, tribal and electro. We sat down with Dave shortly after to discuss his set and his music.
TF: How was your set this year different then your live PA last year?
Well, that’s it. Live PA versus a DJ set. I was controlling sixteen audio tracks at one time last year versus controlling just two channels of audio this year. I enjoyed myself because it just took less effort and was more stream of conscious in nature. Of course, the crowd helped too. With my unscheduled live PA last year, I had like four ten year old girls dancing for an hour. I pulled in over a hundred for my DJ set this year though and then Stryke finished packing the house. The odd thing about it was that despite all of my preparation to prevent technical issues, I still encountered them in the form of a dead battery in a wireless microphone. Until Will, our sound engineer, finally figured out the problem. So, we had static in the system throughout my set and Stryke’s.
TF: What was going through your mind before and as you played, knowing that you were opening for Stryke?
Well, we were trying to figure out the microphone problem around 10 pm. We already had a crowd gathering outside and I was just testing the sound one last time. About ten after, the crowd kind of muscled their way into the barn and it was all over. I could either go with what I had playing at the time and call that the start of my set or I could have cut it off like a jerk and tried to tweak things around some more. I wasn’t being much of a jerk at this point during the week so I just kept going. So, part of me was concerned about the sound. Was the static in the monitors or out on the floor. It was a bit frustrating to deal with, but I survived. The second thing that was going through my mind was Stryke. He had gotten caught up in holiday traffic and road construction. Apparently the State of Illinois shows no mercy, even on the fourth. So, the other half of me that wasn’t concerned about my track selection and that static problem was wondering if Stryke would show up in time. Fortunately, he did. The only issue is that by the time he was ready to go, I was ready to keep going. Oh well. I wasn’t the headliner and I certainly don’t hold a candle to his skills.
TF: So what are you going to be producing for the foreseeable future?
As most of the people on Tastyfresh know, I’ve been really busy working on the next version of the website and with some freelance design work as well. There just hasn’t been much time for me to write music since last September. The good news is that I need long breaks and they only make me come back stronger as a musician. Well… I think they do anyway. So, I really haven’t written much of anything since last September. One of the main things I decided to do last year was to stop using Cakewalk’s Sonar and move into Ableton Live. I’ve always been a fan of the loop creation system in FL Studio. It’s been great for drums among other things and Sonar worked better for synths and arranging. The problem with this setup is that it had me working in basically two different DAWs to write a track. Ableton’s loop creation ability and session editing mode really freed me up and allowed me to work in an ideal environment.
So… that led me to producing two tracks before Cornerstone. The first is Pushing 2 Hard and it is on the Afterhours Vol. 1 CD that we gave out during the festival. The second is Free My Soul. Free My Soul has yet to see the light of day on anything, but I did play it out on my Cornerstone set and the crowd loved it. I can’t wait to get one more created and to shop them around. Hopefully Next Dimension will pick up one of them and I’ll get another label or two to take on the others. The other thing coming down the pike is a remix of Reborn’s Freaky Filthy, another track off the Afterhours CD, which will be released by Oneel’s new TekTak Records.
TF: In production, what is the one thing that makes your music different then everyone else? What is unique to Dave Richards?
Well, there is the cowboy hat, either leather or straw… it is the one thing I get all my creativity from, without it I would be absolutely horrible. Seriously. No, not really.
I don’t really think there is anything that is specifically unique about my music. There are plenty of guys that are better than I am. Heck, I just opened for one. They’ve also been doing it longer then me so how can I say that I have something unique or better. Then again, I did start producing just about ten years ago now. Wow… I’m old. What I do have is an addiction to drums. I love percussion. I love tribal beats. In just about every track I write, there’s a little bit of tribal. Sometimes there’s a lot like in the case of Hear the Drums. The tribal influence is coming out a bit differently right now though with Free My Soul and Pushing 2 Hard. The other thing that comes to my mind as a signature sound are really nasty, overly compressed baselines. Usually, I’ll write two and use them to counter each other. Once you through some distortion and compression on ‘em, you have pure sickness.
So what’s unique about Dave Richards? Well, I’m the only one.