Hello and welcome to the sound on sound podcast about electronic music and all things synth.  I'm Kara C and in this episode we're talking to Robert Henker.  Robert is a Berlin based electronic music producer who's been blurring the boundaries between club and listening music since the mid 1990s. 

Robert's also a visual artist, working with lasers to create audio visual performances and installations. On top of that, Robert is an engineer, a software developer and co founder of music software company Ableton, where he still plays an active role in the development department. 

To get us started, Here's a taster of Robert's music under his Monolake moniker, produced using no compression, which we'll talk about in a bit. 

Hello, Robert Henke, and welcome to the Sound on Sound podcast. Hello, Carole. Lovely to have you with us. I'm really excited to unpack some of your work. Been aware of your work since I was a fledgling electronic music artist myself. Maybe let's start with what you're up to at the moment. You're working with lasers, I believe.

Yes. For the last seven, eight months or so, I've been working on a quite large project that now is, as far as I'm concerned, nearly finished.  I am actually scoring, I'm providing a visual score for music from someone else. For me, that's quite a new experience  because that's not what I usually do. But in this specific case, I found the project interesting enough to agree. 

And.  It's also a great relief, to be honest, to  not have to think about the overall timing structure, because the music is there. And that means everything that has to do with overall shape and form is predefined.  And I can focus on entirely on my work without having the doubt about shouldn't this part be longer or shorter or any of those structural decisions, because they are made.

And  that, uh, is a surprisingly,  um, liberating experience. Yeah, almost the limitations give you more freedom because it's already there. Absolutely. Uh, because the perception of time in music is such an interesting, uh, thing. It's so non linear,  which means that if something is perceived as too long, then maybe because not enough is going on or too much is going on or the wrong combination of things are going on. 

If I am in a situation that I can't change the absolute duration of something,  then I can only work on the perceptual side of it.  So if something is boring, in my opinion, either sonically or visually,  instead of trying to change the length of it, I try to change the content. Until it matches. Yeah. And as you say, you're actually not working on the sound on music for this particular commission.

However, I know from your Lumiere show that I think I first experienced Ableton Loop or might have even been in Manchester. Actually, it was the sound with the lasers and you were doing both. Can you tell us a little bit about how were they working together? I'm guessing you using Ableton. It's all Ableton and Max for Live and Max.

Yes. My goal at the beginning. Before I started this project was actually to do something that is radically different from what I perceived was the usual practice. Uh, I wanted to have a very asynchronous, syncopated  relationship between visual  events and sonic events. So my idea was there's a bass drum and then as a response comes the visual percussive element.

And then comes the snare and then as a response comes a visual element,  but I very quickly learned that this is not how our brain works  because sound is slow and light is fast. And if there is, uh, these two things, if they are not perfectly in sync,  our brain either  puts these things in sync again, so it's not, no, that's all good.

We are still in sync  or it says it's completely unrelated. So this idea of audio visual counterpoint.  didn't work out at all, and I ended up doing what everyone else is doing,  having really tightly synchronized events,  which was very satisfying. On a technical level, the most significant  strategy I employed was that  I created some sort of,  let's say, meta node events. 

What I mean with that is that I built a mix for life.  synthesizers that  basically can play a different sound for each node  and that have lots of parameters I can control  and I built on the visual side in Max  structures that create visual elements  and basically I tie to the same node a sound and a shape  The connection between those two things is purely according to taste.

So it's completely arbitrary. There's no technical connection. I make a sound that sounds like a bass drum and I decide I want to have this circuit that changes size and color and  a few other aspects.  Or I define a hi hat and I have a different shape in mind.  And. Once I defined those shapes, which go together,  then all I need to do is I create notes in life. 

So, and this note will  just by its own nature, create a visual and a sonic structure at the same time. And that process made composing a very rewarding and fun thing to do.  I didn't think anymore, no, I do the sound first or I do the lasers first.  It's all one  entity.  So I changed the pattern and the pattern defines how it sounds and how it looks.

And did you have to build your own software in order to make that connection between the lasers and the sound? Or was it already out there, if you know what I mean? No, no, that's, that's all my completely self written stuff. You could argue that it's a bit stupid what I'm doing because there's commercial tools out there.

But I am very much into detail and I have a strong idea about how specific things should sound and look like, and especially also how they should react. Instead of trying to force an existing tool with lots of workarounds to do what I want, I say, okay, what is the easiest thing I can build by myself that does the job? 

So there is this notion of an LFO.  Because LFOs are really nice if you articulate them, if you articulate the speed and the modulation depth.  And the same LFO is present in the synthesis engine for the sound  and in the visual engine running on a completely different computer. And I managed that those two things are exactly in sync. 

which means I articulate the LFO and you hear this kind of wobble sound and you see a perfectly synchronized structure in the visuals running on a different computer. Uh, my nerd brain is really happy about that, uh, because it's such a great technical achievement.  But even if you are not into the technicalities, you observe this, and especially if it's performed live, I strongly believe that it transmits. 

The fact that I can control all these gestures in real time, that I can respond to the moment.  And that this changes the sound and changes the lasers in a very meaningful way together.  There is some power in it. 

Of course, you, you are able to do all the building your own software bits because you've been involved with Ableton. From the beginning, really. So maybe you could tell us a bit about how Ableton came about, really, and your, your part in the development of that. Uh, well, it's a long story. It's  just not a surprise, I guess.

Uh, the, the core is  that I kind of ran away from Munich where I was born  as soon as I could, because it was conservative and boring. I moved to Berlin. I studied computer science. And I met a person again, who I knew from Munich and who also just arrived in Berlin.  We became very close friends and we started making music together.

And in order to do what we wanted to do, we  wrote our own little pieces of software.  And later that person decided to basically found its own, or their own company. Ableton and he asked me to join and that's what I did. At the beginning, we just thought that our concept of a more performance focused sequencing system  would be interested for a small group of people.

So we, we were quite confident  that a very, very small company could survive  based on the customers in our electronic music bubble. And then things just very quickly started to became much bigger than we did anticipate.  So that's the short story. And I have been responsible for a lot of the decisions at the beginning.

I wrote a lot of the early effects. And the one thing I'm most proud of is Operator. That's pretty much my baby. And it was never intended to be a big synthesizer. It was just It's  my take on building a small yet playful FM engine.  I moved myself out of the company at some point, maybe 10 years ago to focus entirely on my art. 

But I came back a few years ago also, because I felt that I am too much  mentally involved in it to let go. And I felt it's important that I stay there and shape the future of it.  And so I'm trying to find this balance between being  an artist and being a software guy.  Yeah. And as you say yourself, you know, we've talked about that thing that  quite often there's so much overlap or doesn't have to be a separation between being an artist and engineer as much as you have to balance that.

I think more and more I'm realizing in order to be, you know, deep in your art or to take it seriously, you have to understand the science of it. I, I think there is some, something going fundamentally wrong in our society and also very much, I believe, in education,  uh, since a long, long time that we,  we tell people that there is a separation between engineering and art.

Yeah, you're either one or the other. You are either one or the other. And this kind of, there's, there's these two completely inappropriate cliches out there.  Um, the one cliche is that the engineer, this is this kind of person in the gray suit in the lab, who is doing something really, really complex that  you need to be a math geek.

And at the end, what comes out is a nuclear power plant.  And on the other side. Or there's hundreds of thousands of engineers developing something together. And on the other side, you have the genius artist who sits in their atelier, beautiful sunlight coming in. Both things are completely, completely wrong. 

Every engineering I admire  is the result of intuition is the result of aesthetic judgment.  There is so much beauty in engineering and so much a need for an artistic mindset.  If you have no inspiration. You're a lousy engineer  because you try to solve a problem in an elegant way. Uh, and you  try to find new ways to approach things and you try to invent.

I remember you saying you're also trying to actually answer the questions, the problems that the user is having for them because they think they want this and that, but actually you're having to understand what is it that they really need? What is it that's missing? Oh, absolutely. I mean,  That's the classic issue with software development, users just request features  and the users usually think they have the right answer for what they want based on how it works somewhere else.

And if you would just follow that  and just add another element of UI, another button, another function, another pull down menu, whatever, you end up with a product that on paper does everything you want.  But practically it becomes no fun to use anymore  and  you stick with concepts that are old.  And if you instead think  a step further and try to think, okay, what is the real workflow that these people have and what, what blocks them with their work, then  the solution is maybe not a technical solution, but the solution is something very, very different. 

I don't have a good example in my head right now, but in general, the idea is understanding what people want to achieve on a, on a level that has nothing to do with technology. I think that's the key. So, you know, just the, the classical Apple iPhone success story.  Okay. People want to browse the web. People want to make phone calls and people want to take pictures. 

Do people want to take around three different units? Um, probably no, if they could have it in one unit. Did typing on a keyboard turn out to be the most elegant thing to do? Uh, can you combine a camera and a keyboard? Can you combine all these functions in one device? And if you want to do this, perhaps maybe let's get rid of the keyboard and use a touchscreen for everything. 

Uh, that type of thinking.  That says, okay, we cannot just build this one thing by adding new things on top. We also have to get rid of things or we need to rethink stuff. Yeah, and there's so much. Imagination in there as well. And I think, especially with tech music technology, um, it's a, it's kind of about getting the tools, the technology out of the way in a sense, isn't it?

As much as possible. So you can just be, cause music is about humanity. It's about physicality. So it's able to more than anything has helped to bring that back, obviously with all the MIDI compatibility and all the other ways you can control. I think simplicity is a, is a very important value. Probably very difficult to achieve. 

Oh, absolutely.  Having something that is simple yet expressive requires a lot of intuition, smartness, experience. I mean, if you think about the TR 808, there's so little things that you can do with those sounds, but the sound synthesis in itself, in all its stripped down ness, is so much to the point that there's not much to improve there. 

And the thing became iconic  Not despite the limitations, but it became iconic because it is exactly what it is.  And to me, this is a great example for a design where the reduction  created all these fantastic things that people have been doing with that thing. Yeah. And do you know why or how it came about that Ableton came up with the clip arrangement as well as the standard linear? 

Um, arrangements, windows, because that's to me felt really, really different when that that was the main thing about Ableton and when I first encountered it. I think that we can, we can say that we invented that. The reason why we invented it was a mix of necessity  and desire. So  the fact that this was audio loops. 

was simply due to the situation that laptops were slow.  So the idea to have eight tracks with effects and synthesis, uh, forget about it.  To have eight simple granular time stretch playback units for audio clips,  that was within reach. So that's what we did. The original idea for that came really out of our own music making practice.

Because we wanted something that does not require recording.  I mean, both Gerhard and me don't have a formal musical education and the thing we liked and still do like a lot in electronic music is the fact that you can control a system and that system does the task of actually playing.  So the beauty of a drum computer is that you can program something and whilst you program it, it runs  and  Our tools and the stuff we wrote for ourselves were always some sorts of depth sequencers and drum machines.

And what we did is we were just jamming with those tools in the studio and we're recording the results of that.  And afterwards spent long tedious hours editing those endless sessions into meaningful context.  And the one experience we made very often is that  there was always this one sound or this one element.

It was too much  and there was no way to get this out of the recording or had the wrong tuning or whatever.  Just these things that at the end turn out to ruin your, your session.  One of the ideas of the first version of life was, okay, there's the session for you where you can jam with your material and can try out combinations and create something new in a flow.

And whilst doing so, you hit this record button for the arrangement.  And magically you get a protocol of everything you did.  And afterwards you have the liberty to say, okay, it's all good, but this part needs to change that part of the change. But the, the conceptual idea was really that the,  the beginning of the creation is this playfulness and interaction with the machine that does not require playing an instrument in order to get something on tape for us, the idea of performing was. 

a mode of expression, not so much a distinction between, okay, that's stage slash studio. I mean, most of our users are not using live on stage, but in their home studios.  And from the very beginning, we thought this idea of playing as a way of creating is what we aim for. And playing for us, non musicians basically was having a system that There are some  sound creations, some structure creation by itself, and you're conducting how this creation works.

I think there's still obviously lots more that needs to be done, especially, I think, accessibility in terms of visual impairment. But how do you feel it's kind of hopefully helped or contributed to a bit more inclusivity, a bit more accessibility, a bit more diversity within who's making electronic music from when you kind of started out, let's say?

It's a bit ironic that of course we have been blamed for  some sort of,  uh, mainstreaming unification of electronic music. Uh, so, oh yeah, everything sounds the same because it's all made in Ableton. So there is some voices that say we, we reduced diversity, at least in style and output, which is of course, you know, to a certain extent true.

Uh, every tool that simplifies a process.  Also suggests a certain outcome workflow as the easiest way to do it. On the other hand, this is by far,  uh, outweighed by the fact that we, as you said, enable people to express themselves musically that are not formally trained, that  don't consider themselves musician in the first place.

So this idea that, Hey, there's this tool with which you can just fool around and have fun.  Then you do this and you figure out actually that fun is so significant to me that I like to dive deeper.  I mean, this is how usually careers start. You start  because you enjoy what you do and at some point  you see a path of turning this into a profession to a certain extent.

And this whole process of enabling people is something that is very. Uh, dear to us. Yeah. I think I can speak for the company as such that this is something which is at the core of what we like to achieve is that we enable people to do things and that we try to not suggest a existing practice, but empower people to say, Hey, extend what you do, try what you like to do.

There's nothing, you can't break anything. It's software. Just. do whatever you like to do with it and do it in whatever context. There's also always the discussion there about  how much does the structure of that software favor certain types of music expression, uh, and makes it harder to find other types of expression. 

And these are discussions are quite valuable. With the release of Live 11, I think, or a little bit later, we released this Max for Live microtuning device, which kind of stirred a lot of people's some discussion about what is the appropriate dealing with different tunings. And that discussion had some interesting aspects to it.

We kind of were accused a little bit of doing it all wrong. But my conclusion at the end of this discussion is that by offering a next for life device  does not tell users here is the right practice,  but just say, okay, tuning means you're Here's your notes, here's some tuning values,  change it.  This is pretty much the most open way to deal with tuning, in my opinion,  because you can import your own files.

So if you are into a specific  non Western musical practice, no one is keeping you from doing it.  But if you say, well, I like everything to be normal, but the F sharp needs to be  15 cents up because I like it like that, then go for it. If we can manage that, we create tools that have this openness, then I believe we have a good chance to enable people to create their own vision.

And in this context, I believe the integration of Max in life is quite essential.  I can clearly say that none of my works, like really none,  would work without some part of Max.  My laser control that relies on Max for Life devices.  My performances rely on Max for Live devices for the seemingly boring but highly important task to generate more complex MIDI mappings. 

So that I have visual feedback on my MIDI controllers that I designed by myself.  I have  complex mappings where several parameters influence one target and the other way around.  So Max does not doing something.  that seems to be super exciting,  but it's very fundamental for the freedom of expression I have.

So the fact that it allows people to  extend something that might feel a bit limited in itself  into whatever madness you want to extend it to, I think that is not only a technicality, but this is also a mental proposal.  Actually, we not only accept that you do weird things, but we deliberately encouraging you to do it. 

It's a challenging one to be honest, uh, both for,  for a company  who has to deliver certain standards to be accepted in a competitive landscape,  but also for an artist where,  uh, there's always the quest for unique expression. But at the same time, there is standards.  I mean, so, so much discussions happening about how to tune your bass drums right, how to master correctly, how to do it.

Honestly,  I think we had a very luxurious situation in the early 90s that there was no canonical practice,  which means everyone did what they found was appropriate.  And the result was sometimes going in questionable directions, but more often the result was truly unique discoveries. Yeah, which is what a lot of the pioneers, you know, the Sisters with Transistors film covers from Suzanne Ciani through to Laurie Spiegel through to all these women saying that it wasn't defined.

It wasn't defined. Therefore, it was especially welcoming for those women because they didn't have, um, mainly, um, other people telling them what they should sound like or what they should do. And I felt that myself when I started out, I was in a room on my own, so no one could tell me what I should do and shouldn't do, which was, yeah, how I, how I defined my sound.

Absolutely. I mean, I can only say from, from early monolithic days, we did everything wrong. And if I listen to this old stuff now, then  I'm scratching my head and thinking, I should do more things wrong again. Yeah. I mean, I remember interviewing you when I was at sound engineering school, actually here in Manchester.

And, um, I was really quite enchanted by the fact that you'd produced silence, um, your Monolake album with using no compression was what I heard. So therefore I had to find out more from you because at the time I was being told about, well, on every signal chain or most signal chains, you'll put EQ, then you'll put compression and then on the master bus, you'll do this.

And it was so refreshing to hear from you. Why and how you've done that? I think there's two problems of our  time. The one problem is the internet and the other problem is the abundance of tools. The internet makes it really hard to find peace in your own mind without being exposed to everything else.

If you start with any artistic practice  and your social media stream is full of photos, soundbites, whatever. of all the other people worldwide doing similar stuff. Why do you even bother to start? There's always someone who did exactly the same that you wanted to do, but much better already. That seems to be quite disencouraging. 

And the other thing is that you can spend  probably your whole life being afraid of not having the right bass drum sound. If there's no internet and you have this drum computer that you found for cheap on a second hand shop, well, then you don't worry about your bass drum sound. Or maybe you figure out that if you raise the gain of your mixer, uh, it distorts, that this is more how you want it.

But that's it. So instead of being concerned for  a long time about the right sound, You say, okay, that's my bass drum. And you figure out how to actually create your groove in a meaningful way. I have a tendency these days to enjoy working with limitations a lot  because the limitations guide me. In this regard, the project from which I learned most was the thing with these old computers that I started. 

Almost six years ago. Wow. Time flies. Yes, I wanted to ask you about them. But first, I want to hear about the Silence album that you made for Monolake and why you decided that you would make an album using no compression. Uh, I like dynamics. And  I always felt, this is a personal aesthetic choice, that transients just sound so much better if they're non compressed. 

I remember this situation that when, when I was a teenager, I played at a band and as the engineer, it was my job, of course, to take care of the mixing desk and the amp.  And I had this small Roland TR 505 drum computer.  And I took an incredible amount of satisfaction from  just cranking the, the amp to the max and also the mixer to the max.

And just hitting this one single bass drum  and just feeling this impact of their silence. And then there's this bass drum, then adding some very low level, um, drones from a Juno six, uh, with a bit of reverb below.  And the physicalness of that impact of there's this kind of pianissimo drone. ambient background.

And then there's this space drum where the transient is really moving the membrane. So you feel the transient physically.  I couldn't imagine the same impact if everything would be compressed to zero dB.  Um, then it would be just, here's the pad, here's the bass drum, here's the pad, here's the bass drum. 

Boring. But  there's the pad, which is almost inaudible. And then it comes just BAM!  Right there.  And then.  There's this pad in the background. I mean, that's powerful. So I never felt the necessity for using compression.  The interesting thing is that we are all so  educated that there's a certain amount of guilt involved.

Four or three times in my life, I bought compressors  and I bought like hardware compressors, nice, big, expensive hardware compressors. And I bought them because I felt  I have to have them  and I have to use them. I sold them all  right now.  There's only a few occasions where I use compression and where I find it really helpful. 

I have some physical modeling synthesizers that  tend to have some,  um, very unexpected, uneven bursts of loud transients that I cannot really control.  that makes a lot of sense to compress those, or where something happens on a very low level in the decay of the sound that I want to have much louder. So there, using a compressor as a specific tool to, to shape a sound or to tame some synthesis, that is meaningful.

But if I have any type of synthesis where I have control over the envelopes and where I can shape the  evolution of the sound over time, simply by the envelopes.  I can achieve much more interesting results by spending a bit of time tweaking those parameters. So yeah, I don't see a need for compression there.

And  if I make a mix that sounds great without compression, then it just sounds great without compression. And at the end, of course, we need to adhere to certain standards. So if I do something that is supposed to work in a club,  In the, in the mastering stage, of course, I add some multi band compression to glue it all together and to reach the loudness level that I want to achieve.

But I'm very happy that Spotify and all the others agreed on, I think, minus 14 loudness units. And that's a type of density in a mix that I can agree on also. So I try to reach that, that level on compression when I do mixes. So for a club mix, that would be my,  my, my goal to be around minus 14, maybe minus 12, but that's about it. 

And for everything else that is in a more concert situation, environment, or listening environment, then I'm happy if the average is even lower.  And at the end of the day, if everyone compresses everything, then you can stand out by not compressing.  Or you can stand out by compressing it in a different way or whatever.

It's just one of the aesthetic choices you have.  As long as you, as you stay aware of the fact that you have a choice here. I think that's the main point. And this is why I think sometimes all these online tutorials are a two sided thing. You can learn a lot from those. I think that's You watch these tutorials and you think, Oh, okay, that's interesting.

I didn't consider that, but you should probably, the best advice I could give to anyone who starts to do  whatever artistic practice is, if you really want to learn what other people do,  understand that this is what other people do. It's good. If you, if you get an idea of what they're doing and why. Yeah. 

But it does not mean you should do the same. Yeah, it's a creative decision. Exactly.  Because in the arts, there is just no right or wrong.  And being unique and being yourself is much more important than sounding exactly like Artist X who you admire.  I think there's always the pressure to be popular at the same time though with art in general.

And I think that's something, again, you have to navigate yourself. It is very difficult and it doesn't get better if you are becoming more successful, I believe, because the more successful you get, the more people you have who have expectations about what you deliver. Yeah. Um, let's go back to the computers.

Yes, I've not experienced this show, but there's, um, Um, via your Instagram feed, lots of pictures and videos of, I think it's about six or eight 1980s computers sitting on a stage. What's happening there? It's five. It's only five, which is already a pain to transport.  Uh, they are Commodore CBM  8032 machines based on a CPU from  1976, clocking at one megahertz. 

And these computers have been built in 1980. Yeah. I have a historical connection to them, that is, I learned programming on those machines at school, back in the mid 80s.  And I came across one machine in early 2016,  and I bought it on eBay, and I started exploring it, and realized I really like this extremely limited  graphics I can do with them. 

Uh, just some characters, 2000 characters on a screen and there's some graphic symbols and it's all green phosphor on black and that's it.  At some point  I figured out that if I'm a bit smart in my assembler programming skills, I can create graphics that are almost fast enough to count as video.  I also learned that I can do some audio routines that are interesting. 

Those machines don't have a built in sound card,  but they were meant to be open designs, so all the circuit diagrams are publicly available. And I added a quite simple 8 bit digital to analog converter board and started exploring what kind of digital synthesis I could do with those machines. Well, long story short, at some point I decided that this is serious and that I need five machines in total to get a show on stage.

five machines because three of them doing sound. One machine can only do one voice at a time. So I have basically three voices. Uh, one machine is doing video and one machine runs a  step sequence application. And  I developed our own network protocol because this, these machines don't have MIDI or any standards network connectors. 

So it's just a eight bit parallel network. Uh, interrupt driven for those who know  and yeah, we started programming so I can say that this project is 100 100 percent  our own 8 bit assembler code. So there is no operating system running on those machines during the performance  because all they do is running our code.

Um,  The fascinating aspect of it was that I learned so much about music again. You think having three voices is a limitation, but every voice can be something like, I have 250 notes or more, 252 I think. And some of these notes are percussion sounds, like a bass drum sound, a snare, a hi hat, a short, long.  Uh, other notes are bass sounds, um, or melodic sounds or things like this.

And in order to create a drum pattern,  I can use one computer, but then it means  at the same measure that can only be either this one or the other sound. So it's very similar to how trackers work. Here's my bass drum, here comes my snare, here comes my hi hat. Uh, I have to make a decision,  I have to make a decision which element comes when.

Here's  And then I have two computers left over so I could use one for a bass note. So if one is playing the bass line, another one is playing the drum pattern, then I have just one computer I left over for doing something else.  And the great experience to me was that this is sufficient.  And it's partly satisfying also because these rough 8 bit sounds, they have all these nice edges.

So they sound cool. These days where everything is kind of tamed and nicely rounded, people start to discover again the, the niceness of this old 8 bit sounds.  I mean, the reason why, let's say something like a PPG wave sounds great  is not despite the fact that the wavetables are so small. It is exactly because of that.

There is some grit, there is some dirt in there, and so this, this whole concept, concert is quite radical in a way. It's one hour of a projection of green ASCIs,  like just green, nothing else. And there's these five computers on stage,  and it's a completely satisfying audiovisual performance. 

Fantastic. It sounds like you've had lots of fun with that. I definitely had lots of fun, despite the fact that it was so much tedious work. I learned from this. on an artistic side, like understanding that within these limitations, there is so much possible. And I learned on a very pragmatic technical side, I didn't do, uh, print boards before. 

So I learned manufacturing electronic components basically on a level that is much higher than I had before,  which also means that if I have another project now coming up where I need electronics, I can either do it by myself. Or I'm much better able to communicate with someone who does it, uh, because I did it once before.

So I, I know what is possible. I know,  I just know more stuff. Yeah.  I think if there's again, one overlap between engineering and artistic practice is in order to be successful with what we're doing, we have to learn new stuff and we have to embrace that. Yeah.  It's not like, Oh God, I need to learn that, but it's okay.

Cool. I need to learn that. I have the opportunity to learn it. Exactly. It's an opportunity. It's, it's a gift. It's a gift that I have. I mean, of course it depends on the tools. There are some tools where the joy of learning them is debatable.  Hopefully you'll see it with hindsight.  Brilliant. Lovely. Well, thank you so much, Robert.

It's been really interesting to talk to you. Thank you very much and all the best with your continued adventures in art and engineering. Thank you so much. Was a great pleasure talking with you. Help people inside.  Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for further information as well as links and details of other episodes in the electronic music series.

And just before you go, let me point you to sound on sound.com/podcast so you can check out what's on our other channels. This has been a Karo C Production for Sound On Sound.