You The Living
Terry Tyldesley
You The Living
Terry Tyldesley
You The Living @ Number 3 London
Terry Tyldesley
You The Living
Terry Tyldesley
You The Living
Terry Tyldesley
You The Living
Terry Tyldesley
Fender Jaguar Special HH
Kitmonsters
Novation Launchkey 49
Kitmonsters
You The Living make compelling darkwave music that fuses post-punk, electronic and cinematic vibes. Their huge guitar sound works brilliantly live, and their tunes have caught the eye of plenty of critics. You The Living are Aidan James Stevens - vocals, guitar, synth, programming, percussion, and Natasha Stevens - vocals, synth, samples, programming, percussion. Their compelling debut album XXXI is out now on Obscure Alternatives Music, and they showed us round their favourite gear, including jaw-dropping DIY instruments.
You The Living make giant complex tracks that penetrate deep, and hypnotise. They fuse massive guitar sounds, synths, layers of atmospheric noise and vocals that are often whispered. Aidy told us more about what he is trying to do.
I try to be a mix of beautiful and ugly, of very aggressive and ethereal and dreamy all at the same time because I love shoegaze and I love post-rock but what frustrates me about those genres is that they can be too nice, they can be too pleasant. It’s mostly like a glass of water, you know, a cool refreshing splash of absolutely nothing in particular. It doesn’t make you feel anything, at least anything of any kind of real emotional depth besides woah, this sounds big.
Natasha relates their sound to some of their favourite artists.
I always say we’re like a mix between the Cocteau Twins and Einsturzende Neubauten, I love that abrasive sound but we also like to be quite dreamy and wishy-washy - Head Over Heels by the Cocteau Twins is our favourite album and you know we’ve tried to kind of put our own spin on things.
Their work is very cinematic, brooding, and emotional. That’s no accident - a lot of the songwriting was informed and inspired by a bleak period when Aidy was very ill, says Natasha.
We couldn’t even do a gig. As Aidy’s health deteriorated we couldn’t do anything, we couldn’t even go out of the house, it just gave him a lot of time to write the music and it got increasingly darker and darker and darker. I would say that last year was the worst year of my life.
But that difficult time battling illness made Aidy intensely focused, and he wrote and recorded a whole album.
If I started writing a song and I didn’t feel it was up to scratch I would abort it straight away. That’s why this album has no B-sides, it’s the eleven songs that I recorded and they are the best ones of the lot - it had to be the best album I could possibly record given the equipment and the facilities I had.
You The Living Kitmonsters
That equipment was compact - including an iPhone, iPad and GarageBand, but the resulting layered sounds are intense. Aidy talked us through his songwriting process.
Sometimes I’ll be sat with my guitar and I’ll come up with a riff and I’ll write everything around that, sometimes I’ll be sat on the iPad and I’ll play with the synth and I’ll come up with something. It generally comes from an idea, when I’m jamming, I mean I’ll flesh that out, or there’ll be a mood that I want to convey. Sometimes I write the lyrics first, sometimes I write the music first. Especially when I was sick, I was really trying to convey a mood of desperation.
Natasha says that things have really turned around since then though, with a string of great gigs under their belt, and support from critics.
He got better in October and since then it’s really given us a new lease of life and we made a lot of changes in our life. I mean, I wake up every morning and I’m so happy to be awake and I’m so excited to see every day and to know that everything is fine.
Natasha and Aidy are married - and got hitched to the sound of Stagger Lee. She says she tried to persuade him for ages to quit his previous band, and strike out in a new direction. Eventually he started You The Living, enlisting her as his bandmate. Natasha and Aidy both sing. She knew how to play cello but had to pick up synth playing very quickly and is experimenting with bass now too, as it’s a key part of the sound.
It’s always been extremely important to me that the bass sounds huge but tight and focused and very dirty as well.
Kitmonsters
You The Living make some of their own instruments and and use some pretty unusual gear, including a vibrator. Aidy told us about how crucial certain sounds are to him, and his multi-layered approach.
One thing that’s really important to me is that I’ve always loved trains and I’ve always wanted to convey, not just actual train sounds, but the ambience of railways and railway architecture. I wanted it to sound like Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s sounding arches in Maidenhead. I want it to have the vastness, the screeching, the clanking, everything that I’ve always loved about trains since I was a kid, I wanted to convey that through the music. And a lot of people who really love trains are really into our music, and haven’t even heard the songs that have got trains in them like ‘31’ and ‘Sleeper’.
We go in-depth with them about their more DIY and eclectic kit here.
Now Aidy is a lot better they are back to regular gigging.
I go crazy onstage I give it all my energy, and Natasha is stoic and angry-looking and people say she’s like the female Ron Mael. And people come up after the gigs and go ‘Oh my god Natasha, your stage presence is so amazing’.
I used to be really concerned about how I played the songs live but that kind of fell away as I started recording more of the album. It’s always been important to me that when we play them live they feel live but towards the end of recording the album, when I was recording these massive, epic tracks like ‘Grief’ and ‘Rituals’ I was just throwing everything in the kitchen sink into it. So the whole idea of it being a live band was less important to me because I’d gone through phases of wanting to get other members in, and then wanting to keep it the two-piece which I think suits us really well.
We really try to not be a laptop band even though we are pretty much a laptop band. So we try to play everything as organically as we can. And I think the only real way to kind of get what we want is to have pretty much absolute control over everything.
You The Living @ Number 3 London Kitmonsters
I love Failure - not actually failing, but the band - Ken Andrews has a mixer onstage where he controls everything and I thought, if they can do it and it works well for them then we should be doing the same thing. We’ve a very similar approach to sounds and sonic spaces even though our instruments are very different. It’s more conveying a mood rather than conveying our performances.
We’re quite different to a lot of bands in that we’ve a silent stage, we don’t use any amps, the sound’s usually very unusual. So the guitar sounds are not guitar sounds, they’re something between guitar, bass, synth, piano, and you can’t really EQ them the same way as you could a regular guitar. Or a bass or whatever. Natasha’s synth sounds weave in and out of our mix.
Aidy and Natasha have two gerbils - they’ve nearly featured on a track, but mainly act as a form of quality control!
We tried to use our gerbils chirping on a track, but this was a bit too happy for our songs. They have an impact on our songs - we have the Little Grey Gerbil Test where whenever we finish a song we show them to the gerbils and if they stand up on their hind legs inquisitively and chirp and get all excited, it’s a good song and we keep it, otherwise we bin it. And every single one of our songs has passed this test. But half of them we chucked away because they didn’t.
The band’s visuals play a very big part in their work, and Natasha creates and designs them.
I don’t want it to just be OK we’re a band and this is what we look like, I want it to be a whole world - everything incorporates together in this world that I created that’s black and white and very visually striking. Even from the very beginning, down to our logo - it’s not some shitty writing like they do with metal bands where it looks like they just chucked a pile of twigs on the ground. I want to do a lot of collaborations with designers, either jewellery or clothing to do customized stuff for You The Living.
Natasha’s dad is a rock photographer and she grew up helping him out.
As a little kid I used to follow him and follow shoots and I’d hold his stuff while he was shooting the Buzzcocks or Dennis Hopper or Björk or David Johansen or Nick Cave. So for me I think the biggest influence is seeing not only these legendary music figures but seeing how art is created. My dad was very good at quickly adapting things and I always use that philosophy in whatever I do. Use what I have, and adapt what you need to in the environment. It’s made me love anything black and white, from old films to really cool fashion photography and portraits.
You The Living Kitmonsters
The band’s musical influences range from Nick Cave and Killing Joke to authors says Aidy, and it was through Reza and Youth from Killing Joke hearing their music, that they got their first gig - Reza asked his friend, Andrew Trail if You The Living could support Black Light Ascension at Electrowerkz.
Nick Cave, he was definitely a big one, also Cocteau Twins, massive influence, Depeche Mode, Mogwai, Sigur Ros, Nine Inch Nails. Marilyn Manson and Muse when I was younger, in terms of my guitar playing Matt Bellamy was a big influence. Killing Joke were one of my biggest influences because Geordie is my favourite guitar player of all time.
Failure as well are a big one. Anything that Steve Albini’s done, you know Shellac, Big Black, McCluskey as well, even Radiohead. In terms of non-musical stuff as well I’d say Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick, HR Geiger, Salvador Dali.
You The Living Terry Tyldesley
You The Living have just launched their debut album XXI as a digital download, and are planning a vinyl release.
We want people to be able to buy it and for it to be a work of art that they can listen to as well. The artwork that Natasha does is extremely layered and detailed and I want that to be conveyed in everything we release.
The possibilities and challenges are very appealing adds Natasha.
I think more and more bands are releasing things on vinyl and they’re also adding little secret things here and there like a download code or stickers or something interesting to make you want to have that physical copy. I like the fact that downloading and piracy has almost made the record labels and the industry step up their game a little bit more because I think they were getting a little bit lazy, sitting back and waiting for the money to come in and now they have to try a little bit harder.
You The Living @ Number 3 London Terry Tyldesley
My main guitar that I use is my Fender Jaguar Special HH. It’s a Japanese model. For my sound it’s really important that I have something with humbuckers and something that’s going to hold its tuning very well. So it was perfect for me in that it’s got dual humbuckers and the stock tail piece as well rather than vibrato, even though I’d love to have the Jaguar vibrato it’s perfect the way it is.
I put really thick strings on there as well, I’ve got twelves on there at the moment, but I’m thinking I’ll put a set of elevens on there and it’ll go down a little bit because they don’t really fit in the string slots that well and bending’s a little difficult! For the very bassy stuff it sounds fuller and thicker and in general it’s got a more piano-esque ring to it.
Aidy has a very unusual guitar technique and he gave us a demo.
My guitar technique - I’m kind of a failed pianist. I wouldn’t want to be a pianist so I tune my low E down to D so I can play in a root fifth of the octave with one finger, it’s a power chord. On the lower three strings I form the left hand, the piano, and play melodies on the upper three strings with the other three fingers and just strum it across like that so it forms something like the right hand of a piano. so my technique’s become very much like a piano.
So I put those strings on there to get a piano like tone and just so it sounds thicker on the lower strings like a piano does. I love how it’s got the bass kind of circuit. It’s a rhythm circuit. So if you’re playing a song like ‘Precipice’ using the Blue Box or a lot of low-octave stuff I can cut pretty much all the high end out and pretty much mimic the bass with the octave stuff going on with the Whammy. And it has what’s called a choke switch as well, makes it sound very trebly, so on the contrary if you want something that’s very cutting for one of the solos, I can switch that on.
Fender Jaguar Special Edition HH Perfect for me, dual humbuckers Read More
It’s got to a point now where these features, I can’t see myself playing anything else other than a Jaguar even though I would love to get another guitar, I’d like a Rickenbacker or some kind of hollow body, it’ll have to have those features on it, it’ll have to have the choke switch, it’ll have to have the rhythm circuit. I’ve kind of got myself stuck with that. And it’s black of course.
Aria Diamond Kitmonsters
Aidy also has a guitar that looks like nothing else!
My other guitar I’ve got is a 1970s Japanese Aria Hi-Flier copy, same factory as the Univox that Kurt Cobain played. It’s been modified loads, originally it had two pickups on it as well but I ripped one of them out to make it really basic. So as you can see the guy’s added a sawn off Fender Mustang tailpiece to it that he’s bolted down so it can’t move, and a Mustang bridge here as well which is really haphazardly put on with a couple of broken screws.
You can’t adjust it at all. And it used to have a Floyd Rose or something that you can see the riveting there. And the paint job is auto paint. You can see the primer coming through where the paint’s worn off: I think that looks really cool. It’s got the most amazing flamed maple neck that’s been rubbed down and oiled - it feels and looks incredible.
I bonded with it straight away, it’s got these massive jumbo frets on it and it feels effortless to play. But because it’s got this weird combination of hardware it feels very different to anything else and I used to use a cello bow a lot. It’s just a joke carting around a cello bow!
Aria Guitars Diamond Massive jumbo frets, feels effortless to play Read More
It didn’t sound like anything else, as well. It’s always sounded huge it’s got this Di Marzio Super 3 bridge pick up. I’ve got another one that I took out of the neck. It’s so reliable live, it looks like crap, it looks like a mass of duct tape and wood and metal but it’s just so reliable. I love how unique it is. I just love that it looks like it’s had so many owners and it’s been so well loved. And yet so abused as well. It looks and sounds like nothing else. It’s fantastic.
Fender Bassman 70 Silverface Kitmonsters
Aidy’s favourite amp is his vintage Fender Bassman 70 Silverface.
I don’t usually take the bass amp to gigs. I used to a lot - I’ve had this Fender Bassman 70 head, a Silverface, since I was 19 just turning 20. I tried one out in the studio in Nottingham at Crash Factory, Mark Elmore he’s an amazing engineer. And he makes pickups now, the Crash transducers.
Anyway I always loved how it sounded amazing with pedals, they have this percussive attack and then they just sound so big on the decay and they’re so clean too because ultimately the transformer just made every pedal that I put through it sound huge so I had to get it. I found it on eBay for £320 and I had to go and get it within the next few hours because the guy was leaving the country. That’s how I got a good deal, so I jumped on a train from Cambridge to Southampton and I was changing at Waterloo Station and I got mugged and he just nicked my iPod but not my money so I didn’t care, I just got on the train and got the amp and went home. I haven’t changed the valves in it or anything in the past six years. It’s always been perfect.
I’ve bridged the two channels over the bass and normal channels so it’s almost like I’ve got a massive EQ that covers the bass aspects of my sound and the guitar side of things. I sometimes turn the deep switch on and the bright switch so I get massive bass sounds and I get really crystalline highs as well. And unlike a lot of Bassmans it’s got a master volume too, so I can turn the bass side up and the treble side down for some songs and vice versa, but keep more reined in on the master volume. I just haven’t found an amp head that does it for me like that. I’ve tried so many but none of them sound like a Bassman to me. So that’s what I’ve used forever.
Aidy is a fan of the sound and dimensions of the Marshall 1936 Cabinet - it comes in standard and Vintage and he has the Vintage version, with Celestion G12 speakers which he thinks beats many other cabs.
It has a bit more focus and a bit more mid-range which is important for bass because it doesn’t have any mid-range control. So it adds a bit more of that and it’s always been absolutely perfect.
Marshall 1936 Cabinet Always been absolutely perfect Read More
Aidy has a mighty pedal board and some clear principles when it comes to getting his sound recorded, including no overdubs. His TC Electronic Ditto Looper helps him achieve what he wants.
In ‘Naked’ and ‘Precipice’ I used the looper to play over the chorus, but it’s very important to me that for the most part aside from the looping bits there’s no overdubs, that it’s all just one part. It is partly because it’s a challenge for me, partly because I want to be able to play it live, and I don’t want to go over the top with overdubs because overdubs always sound really synthetic and fake to me. If it’s all one big guitar part it all melds together and that was always important to me, I sussed that out straight away.
Sometimes at the end of a gig, making loads of noise, I’ll loop the noise, from any of the pedals and make things go over each other and it’s great for that. It’s good for writing songs too. If I like a guitar part a fair bit I’ll record it onto a looper and get the drum machine out and write a song to it. Great compositional tool. It’s really cool.
Aidy loves experimenting with pedals and rotates things regularly.
I change my pedal board more than I change my underwear! At the moment, starting at the front of my signal chain, I’ve got a Zvex Fuzz Factory because I’ve always been a massive fan. It’s one of the original hand painted ones too, which is great.
I love how I can go mental and make weird sort of oscillating noises and I’ve always loved really fuzzy guitar sounds like Muse Origin of Symmetry, which got me into Fuzz Factory when I was like 11 or 12 and I loved Queen Adreena’s first album, Taxidermy. The fuzzy guitar sounds on that were amazing and again it’s that velcro fuzz sound which is still absolutely massive.
ZVEX Fuzz Factory I can go mental and make weird sort of oscillating noises Read More
Getting bass sounds on a guitar required some crafting, and the Digitech Whammy is a key part of that.
I’ve got the Digitech Whammy 5, the latest model, which is polyphonic, which is great. That is the bread and butter of our sound. It gives us our bass sound for guitar, it allows me to not have to pick one side in my eternal war between the guitarist and the bass player in me. It gives me both, and it gives me crystally upper-octave stuff which is a huge part of our sound too.
It’s my favourite pedal. Always has been, always will be, I’ve had a few of the older Whammys and I kept selling them for stupid reasons and buying them again. The 5 I bought forever, because it’s such a huge part of our sound. And when we went to Canada it wouldn’t work because power is different there, it’s only 120 volts. And because it wouldn’t work we couldn’t record in Canada. No Whammy? No You The Living. It’s as simple as that.
Digitech Whammy Pedal My favourite pedal. It gives us our bass sound for guitar Read More
Aidy also customises pedals if he feels the need.
I’ve got the MXR Blue Box and I got that in Canada because I love Roland S Howard and Blixa Bargeld’s guitar sounds. I’ve modified it inside as well, I ripped out the 11th capacitor and it opened it up a bit more. I put my Hot Tubes on with it all the time, I use that in ‘Precipice’ because it puts a sound which is two octaves below your normal sound, with the octave sound and the regular fuzz sound. It just sounds massive, very kind of synthy and gloopy.
I have these covers on so I can control it with my foot, they’re just like tread grips. They’re mostly on the blend knobs so I can have more of a fuzzy sound. If I put it that way. And more of the octave if I do it that way. They’re just out of the way so my pointy shoes can get in!
MXR Blue Box It just sounds massive. Read More
Next in line is the Electro-Harmonix Hot Tubes.
This is a pedal I wanted for ages before Electro-Harmonix reissued it. It was like the Placebo pedal - it’s got that slightly breaky-uppy fuzzy overdrive sound. Because I like my overdrive to be a bit rough round the edges, I don’t like it to be very amp-like or smooth like a lot of guitarists do. And what this does, it sounds like a cross between a fuzz and an overdrive while still being very low gain.
So it sounds very trebly and cutting but it’s got just enough grit to make it sound big which is a big thing for us, it’s just fantastic, it sounds huge. I use it on ‘31’ a lot when I don’t want the guitar sound to be too gritty but to have just enough edge. But it’s got a special kind of edge to it which is really nice. Electro-Harmonix pedals seem to be very individual and inimitable and that’s why I like that one.
Aidy uses Mooer pedals for distortion and delay, including a Black Secret, as well as other delay pedals.
It’s my favourite distortion pedal of all time. So it’s got the original LM308 chip which was in the White Face Rats that made them so amazing, apparently. I’ve got the Vintage mode on all the time, and there’s a Turbo which turns on LED clipping if I ever fancy it. It sounds a lot louder and slightly cleaner.
Mooer Audio Black Secret Distortion My favourite distortion pedal of all time Read More
The Mooer Ana Echo is their copy of the Boss DM-2 which is an analogue delay. I’ve tried loads of analogue delays but this just blew them out of the water. It’s fantastic, tiny, and it does all the mad oscillate-y stuff too, which is great.
Mooer Audio Ana Echo Delay Fantastic, tiny and does all the mad oscillate-y stuff Read More
A further selection of TC Electronic pedals are on rotation, and Aidy is a big fan of their TonePrint system that means he can add custom sounds to pedals like his Hall of Fame Reverb.
TC Electronic sent me a load of stuff a few years ago, all the Tone Print range and I love it all to bits. I use the flanger sometimes, I use the chorus sometimes, but this is my reverb and the advantage of the Tone Print pedals is that using an iPhone app I can just zap new sounds into them from my pickups.
I’ve got a really spacious reverb sound at the moment that Harry McVeigh from White Lies made and it sounds huge, so a lot of our sound involves reverb and space. Reverb’s on everything in our sound. I mean it’s got to have reverb but not so much that it becomes one big pile of mush. There’s a blend control and a decay control, I can control how long the reverb is. And I can control how much of it there is and these two together have a great synergy. And the tone control as well can make it really cutting or really backwards in the mix. Which is great - I haven’t found another reverb that has that kind of flexibility, and it makes it all easy to rein in.
My long delay, is my TC Electronic Flashback. I’ve got a kind of tape echo at the moment as my TonePrint, another Harry McVeigh one which is called Unfinished Business. It’s just a fantastic-sounding delay in every single one of these settings. It’s great in the mix.
TC Electronic Flashback Delay Fantastic-sounding delay Read More
Aidy also uses the TC Electronic Polytune and was one of the testers for Drop D mode.
It’s one of the other pedals that TC Electronic sent me when they first released the TonePrint range and I was one of the testers for Drop D mode that they released - I said to them, I play everything in Drop D. It’s served me well, and it’s a mute switch sometimes so if I need to mute a loop I just go boom and everything stops!
TC Electronic Polytune Keeps me in tune. I was one of the testers for Drop D mode Read More
Aidy got a special pedal for his birthday from Natasha.
The Akai Analog Custom Shop Phase Shifter was my birthday present last year - thank you Natasha. This one’s got a few different settings that are really cool and go between phase 90 and 180, 270 and 360 degrees of phasing, they sound very different. I use it in very obvious modes, 360 because I put it before my dirt pedals so the peaks and troughs end up getting grittier as they get more obvious. But I can turn it to a more subtle one for my clean sounds like a phase 90. Or I can make it go completely mental. I try my modulations before my distortions, that’s what changes.
Akai Analog Custom Shop Phase Shifter Different settings that are really cool Read More
Aidy loves his vintage Bassman, but the iRig and iRig Stomp have become crucial for both recording and live.
So the iRig has replaced amps in our live setup. I use it with my phone - we recorded our entire album with this iRig which is my original one.
It just allowed me to plug my guitar into into my phone and that goes out into my iPad or headphones or a PA system. And it was great, it was simple, it worked for the first few gigs.
Recently I bought the iRig Stomp, and that allows me to control the volume from my pedal board. I can plug into two amps out of the iRig and it will have the sounds from my phone and I can turn it on and off from the pedal board too. It’s just given me so much more flexibility because I can now use the amp and the iRig with the phone, and the amp can be from GarageBand and I can go out to both PA and amp.
It’s just been night and day with the new one, it’s incredible. The few gigs we’ve played with it have just been so much better. The amps I use with it are the same ones I use on the record, the exact same settings, so the guitar sound you hear live is exactly the same as it was on the record to the tiniest little detail.
Sometimes I’ll lay a different amp simulation on the Bassman and there’s a Hiwatt that I use live and a Marshall simulator and an Orange. Mostly it’s the Hiwatt, it’s just brilliant.
Recently Aidy has been trying out the iRig 2 and says it’s a key to a whole new world of sounds.
IK Multimedia iRig2 Key to a whole new world of sounds Read More
You The Living Terry Tyldesley
You The Living love experimenting with sound and instruments, and that means everything from using bits of metal found in the street, to trains and things that buzz, as Natasha explains.
We make our own instruments. If we can’t find a sound that’s sufficient on the laptop, we go outside and try and find it.
We’ve got in quite a bit of trouble sometimes because we used to go for midnight walks in Kentish Town and there was this one time I found a really cool stick and some metal sheets behind an estate in Kentish Town and there was some dirt on it so I was just scraping it against a wall to try to get it off and this lady three floors up is staring at me, she goes, ‘You look like you’re gong to stab someone with that! Are you going to stab someone with that? And I was ‘oh no no no, I’m in a band, I’m trying to just find some instruments and some cool stuff’ and she was like, okaaaaaay… And I saw some cops trying to find us - oh shit she called the police on me!
You The Living Kitmonsters
Re-purposing gadgets is also something the band gets up to. Aidy had been using Natasha’s cello bow to get more interesting sounds from his guitar, but was looking for a new device she says.
We went to see Einsturzende Neubauten at Koko and the guitarist came out with a shiny metallic purple vibrator and I saw he was playing guitar with it and I went, that is really cool.
Aidy knackered my wonderful, very nice cello bow on his guitar and now I can no longer play my cello. But we decided we would try to see how a vibrator would work with his guitar. It’s something to do with the motor inside that reacts with the magnets in the pickup - it makes amazing sounds.
Ann Summers Rose Gold Mini Vibrator It makes amazing sounds Read More
The band use what has to be one of the biggest instruments ever on their recordings - in the form of a metal screw on a railway bridge, that makes a metallic clanking sound, and also different trains that run on the tracks underneath. The sounds feature heavily on their track ‘31’ says Aidy.
We use a lot of trains, it’s important to me to get the different individual sounds of different trains so we have a Class 390, a Pendolino, on ‘31’. On ‘Sleeper’ we have a Caledonian Sleeper, which is how it got its name. I used to listen out for it every night because it only goes past once a night. When I was sick it used to be my sign that I could give up on the day and go to sleep. So it was a Class 91 locomotive with a rake of Mark 2 coaches. That’s what the sound is.
Railway bridge instrument Kitmonsters
Railway Bridge and Trains We use a lot of trains Read More
Aidy and Natasha have been doing some recording in the legendary Alan Moulder’s studio. His credits include Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Arctic Monkeys, and Royal Blood. In typical YTL DIY style, they found yet more metal to experiment with.
When we wrote ‘Flood’ in Alan Moulder’s studio we used a big Illy coffee can, we hit it with a drumstick. I think it’s for beans or something, and they attach it to espresso machines, but we got one of those from the cafe up the road in Belsize Park and made some really wicked sounds so we wanted to experiment with that.
We re-recorded ‘Reprobates’ there, just to see how it could sound in a big studio production and the main drum track on that was recorded with the coffee can.
You The Living @ Number 3 London Kitmonsters
You The Living use a lot of apps for live and production, but Natasha was adamant she wanted a good-sized keyboard.
When the band originally started and Aidy wanted me to play live with him, I didn’t have the Novation keyboard at the time and I actually started practising in the app on the iPad and my fingers are really big so it was difficult to do that and I was like, I’m not going to be the asshole playing the iPad on stage darling, I’m getting a real keyboard!
She got the Novation Launchkey and also still uses the accompanying app on an iPad. Aidy told us more.
Natasha always has full control of her sounds, and our entire setup down to the live band, our mix - she’s so good at controlling our sounds. She controls the amount of distortion, her reverb and there’s a kind of tremolo effect as well. If she wants to do a bit of fine-tuning she can do it on the iPad, and she really does like to ramp up that distortion knob sometimes!
Aidy revealed that most of the album has been recorded using an iPad and GarageBand.
We use GarageBand to record everything, basically we use it as virtual tape. So there’s no EQ, no deep editing and it’s like virtual tape or a canvas really, so as you can see I can’t get things to fade in or out. It forces me to do it all myself physically. And I like that challenge in a way, I don’t like having something that’s going to be a crutch. I don’t like knowing that I can put in a bad performance and, OK, I can edit this later.
In a way it’s made me a much better musician. It’s great, I like it, it just needs to be simple. I don’t like my recording software to have lots of kind of odds and ends and bells and whistles.
Apple GarageBand I use it to record everything Read More
In live, just out of the necessity of using a different device I use Logic - we can have more control over things like compression in certain tracks, we can EQ things for different rooms, we can add other effects if we want to. It works great live, it’s a lot easier to use than GarageBand.
Apple Logic Pro It works great live Read More
Some of the key apps they use are synth ones like the Korg iMS-2 and iKaossilator. They use Audiobus to link them.
I use a Korg iMS-20 which is an iPad app which does the best impersonation of an MS-20 I’ve ever heard. I use a lot of square wave and sine wave bass sims. The sine wave bass sims are great for the subsonic ambience, because you don’t really hear it much, you just get the overall feeling.
And I’ve got an app called Phawuo which I used in ‘Reprobates’ - it’s kind of this rumble, this growl, it sounds like stomach spasms, like gastro-intestinal spasms!
We use DM1 for all of our drum machines. It’s just mad!
Korg iMS-20 The best impersonation of an MS-20 I’ve ever heard Read More
Fingerlab DM1 We use DM1 for all of our drum machines. It’s just mad! Read More
Korg iKaossilator Kaossilator effects and looping in an app Read More
Audiobus App Enables music creation apps to work together Read More
The band use a vintage Alesis Quadraverb for their vocal effects, especially live, which they have modded by adding a Quadraverb Plus chip.
We use different settings - one setting per gig, it’s going to take a while to figure out which one we like best! We use Concert Hall 2 quite a bit and we use reverb algorithms that are made for snare drums or guitars. This one’s been working really well for us. We’ve modified it with the chip from the Quad Reverb Plus which gives a few extra settings
Alesis Quadraverb Makes our vocals sound massive and spacious Read More
It just makes our vocals sound massive and spacious and we prefer to have reverb in our own hands than live with a sound engineer because they never get reverb right. It’s nothing personal towards them, they just don’t have the right equipment for it. And it allows us to add delay, chorus and loads of other stuff to make it sound as big as we like it. So we never have anxiety about going to a show and reverb not being as we like it. It’s always constant, exactly.