Interview: Noplan, Pulse competition winner

When the jury gathered to discuss the submissions for the recent Pulse PWM competition, it quickly appeared we were all quite interested in knowing more about the songs we heard and the people behind them. So we decided to make it a regular feature: win a competition and you’ll be grilled by ReasonTalk! Here’s Noplan’s well-deserved spotlight!

ReasonTalk – Hey Noplan, congrats on winning Skrock’s Pulse PWM Synth competition! Your song was really elaborate: lots of rythmic variations and breaks, effects, excellent mixing… How long have you been doing music?

Noplan – Thank you. I really enjoyed the other submissions and had fun making my song. Your competitions and the new tools help me get out of my creative ruts every time. I’m 35 now and have made music since I was a kid when I got my first keyboard for my birthday. It did not take me long to figure out how to do a multitrack recording on my cassette recorder by switching the cassettes from deck A to B after recording a track over the last track. But the more tracks my project had, the noisier and detuned it became. That’s why I was always interested to find better ways to capture my ideas. I am an autodidact and I had to figure out everything by myself and had no clue how music production worked. Here is that very first horrible song that I recorded at age of 12 with this technique. I hadn’t heard it for decades. Amazingly, it even bears some resemblance to my song for this competition.

RT – For how long have you been using Reason?

Noplan – Since the first version. When I got my first own PC I came across Rebirth along with other tools. And from there the way was not far to Reason. It was the first music software that I immediately fell in love with.

RT – What did you like about Pulse that inspired you to go full synthwave with this song?

Noplan – Pulse came with a good amount of amazing patches that I used in my song. I opened a patch and intuitively played the initial riff. Thereupon a lightning strike hit my home studio and I went back in time to the 80’s where I had to write this song to travel back to the future! No, seriously, Pulse is currently my favorite toy. It has opened me the door to a new genre that I had not tried before and now I’m crazy about it. That’s probably the best a plugin can do for you. Thank you, Skrock Music.

RT – You were the first to submit your song in the competition, you did it in three days if I recall correctly. Some people like to polish their songs for months, others feel it’s better to wrap them up in a matter of hours. Where are you on that spectrum?

Noplan – I did the song sketch in 3 hours from scratch. Pulse made it easy for me. The next day I polished it up for another 3 or hours, did the arrangement and added some new ideas that came to my mind like the breaks, the vocoder and the cheesy solo that I did using Pulse with my “Instant Guitar Combinator Patch” that you can find here on Reasontalk. But when I made the final mix on the third day it became shit. So I went back to the previous version and submitted it as fast as possible so I could not change anything. I have a habit of ruining my songs the longer I work on them, especially on the mix. Therefore I have learned to draw a line, even if I am dissatisfied or have more ideas. You can hear the chipped sound at the end of the song. This was the prelude to transforming the song into an 8-bit sounding video game outro. But since I was pissed off that I had previously wrecked the mix completely, I made an abrupt end instead.

RT – Are you doing music professionally or recreationally?

Noplan – I make music just for the fun and play bass and acoustic guitar in two live pop bands. “Die Lillis” with my two sisters, “Jack & Joe” and another Rock ‘n’ Roll band, “Freie Fahrt”, with some older dudes. We have our own songs, but we also play covers for the money that runs into our beer supply and rental fee. Before that I played bass in a progressive metal band, the “Artilects”. We share the same rehearsal room and studio in a rural industrial area. It’s just good to have a place where you can go anytime, hang around and be as loud as you want. I even sleep there on the weekends. Here is a little insight into our second home.

RT – What would you like to see in Reason’s next version?

Noplan – A folding mixer would be handy. Not all folks need all the buttons on the mixer at the same time. Why should you not be able to hide something to have a better focus? The same applies to all channels that share a bus channel. Away with it!
And I don`t use Block mode but I use the Block lanes to mark my song parts. I wish I could cut, select, copy and paste whole song parts with these block lanes in song view.
Furthermore, a selectable click sound would be nerve sparing. We’ve been listening to this creepy click for about 18 years now? At some point it is enough.

RT – Where can we hear more of your work?

Noplan – On my Soundcloud channel. But I do not often upload stuff. Most ideas are unfinished and rot on my hard drive.

RT– Thanks, and congrats again on winning Skrock’s Pulse Competition!

 

Listen to “Impuls”, the winning song:

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