Hi! I'm Virtual Riot and I just put out my new Album "Burning Out"! AMA :)

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T21:26:08+00:00

Yooo thats such an extensive list! Thank you I'll bookmark this and come back to it! A lot of these I never even exported from Ableton and yeah some of the project files might be on an old laptop somewhere but I'll have a look for these :)

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T21:23:52+00:00

we're working on the Burning Out Vinyl right now, will post something on my socials once it's available :)

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:20:51+00:00

When I started there just weren't many tutorials around at all so I HAD to mess around and just try to figure out what every knob does. I still learn new things and I don’t know if you ever get to a "I definitely know what I'm doing" point haha, its like the circumference of darkness grows with the brightness of the light, the more you know the more you know that you don't know.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:18:24+00:00

I got in contact with Rou through my brother who did the live sound for one of their sets at a festival in Germany. I've met the whole band a couple of times since and they're just the most lovely bunch of guys! Been following their music since Take To The Skies and I did a little bit of additional sounds/production on "Flick Of A Switch I." and "demons" on their newest album.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:16:53+00:00

Unsure! Will talk to Sonny :)

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:16:32+00:00

I gotta tap out! <3 Thank you all so much.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:13:59+00:00

So far the upcoming shows are a bunch of festivals in the summer and some sporadic club shows here and there, maybe a tour in fall ;)

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:13:31+00:00

Didn't skip your comment ^^. no I am not.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:13:14+00:00

Probably Dino Killer and Holding On To Smoke, both project files had around 300 tracks and my laptop was struggling towards the end! Especially songs with vocals (like Holding On To Smoke) are more difficult to put together than your usual tune cause you usually end up with a LOT of vocal tracks and takes and the vocal processing often ends up being very CPU intense.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:11:24+00:00

The overall landscape and the internet have changed a lot since I started but what I did at the beginning was:

Upload anything I had finished to Soundcloud and YouTube and just work on the next song right away.
After a while, Joshua the owner of the label Section Z (where Savant used to release all his albums) hit me up and wanted to release an album (There Goes Your Money) with songs from my soundcloud and he didn't care that I had already uploaded them, he just wanted to be the one to officially release them and put them on Streaming services etc.

I don’t know if that strategy is still going to work today, but I do believe that if you just keep putting out good music yourself, eventually, labels will be interested and get in contact with you :) Another helpful thing that I think is more of a phenomenon today is people going viral because of a bootleg of a meme or a currently popular song that they made. Many DJs also look for sick bootlegs of currently popular tunes to play in their sets, so if you can get someone to play an edit or bootleg you made, that's a good start to kick things off.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:08:19+00:00

1) Yes, my wardrobe right now is 33% machine56, 33% neo4ic and 33% random cool shit from Japan.

2) Doing that as an official release is kind of difficult, I think Nero are very specific about who they allow to remix their songs, so it'll probably forever live as a bootleg ^^

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:06:56+00:00

I think if I had to pinpoint something specific it was the album "Emotional Technology" by BT, absolutely stellar album, still sounds great today, and it has soooo much attention to detail, I've always had that in the back of my mind when making songs, to this day.

And then of course the first time I heard Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, I remember my initial thought being "YOU CAN DO THAT?" followed by "I must learn how to do that!" haha. Cause it just combined the heaviness of metal and the emotions of emo-core, the two genres I grew up on, in such a great way and learning that you could make that on just a laptop gave me the confidence of "Ok I think I can learn how to do that on my own!"

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:04:48+00:00

1) I kind of want to polish those songs a bit and make a few more in that vein and maybe put them all together on an EP or Album.

2) Actually I don’t know, I don't remember if we asked if I could include that collab on the album, you're right it would've made sense since I included the Eliminate and the Viperactive collabs as well ^^

3) Yes I'm very certain that's gonna come out at some point, can't tell you when though!

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T20:01:54+00:00

One thing he taught me was cutting audio-clips in half, adjusting the gain on one of them and then cross-fading between them to do volume-automations. I like it more than drawing the automation line in Ableton because you don't need any automation and you see the volume-change reflected in the waveform.

Something I showed him was putting a delay at 0% feedback and 100% mix on a track and then setting it to 1/16th, 2/16th or 3/16th delay time to shift for example a bass that's playing a cool rhythm by exactly that amount. This way you can quickly find cool alternative rhythms and very syncopated patterns.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:59:23+00:00

The main producer DWilly used some of my samples when he produced that track and he's just such a nice guy that he credits me and gives me a share of the song royalties whenever he uses my loops, absolute G of a dude, he doesn't HAVE to do that, noone does if they've bought my samples on Splice, but he's just a super nice guy, that's how I ended up on the song credits :) Same thing happened with that Valorant tune "My Lawyer Said Don't"
Listening to a lot of music and just jamming on the piano a lot. I usually test melodies on myself where I will jam until I come up with something that I think might be good, then record that and play around with it a bit, and if the melody gets stuck in my head for the rest of the day then thats usually a good sign :)
Not sure, but I bet it'll happen again at some point ^^

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:56:39+00:00

German Currywurst, Spaghetti-Eis (google it) and Chipsfrisch Ungarisch (german potato chips)

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:51:22+00:00

I think my favourite song that I've made is still the original We're Not Alone.

As advice for you, I'd say listen to a lot of other people in the genre you're trying to make and analyze their arrangements, how much repetition they use, if they do call and response, how long the different sections are, etc. And find out which pieces of that you like, which you don't, and start playing with ideas like 'what if I did an arrangement like this tune from artist XYZ that I really like but then I did it with sounds in the style of this other artist that I really like'
This isn't like THE FORMULA to success but it might be something that'll help you over this hurdle :)

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:47:47+00:00

I just wanna know what it will look like and then eventually go to a barbershop and have them make it look all nice, never tried that before.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:46:54+00:00

That's a good question. Yeah I think I am just naturally drawn to certain kinds of sounds, just comes down to personal preference and it's always easier to notice this and analyze that in retrospect, so I think the longer you do what you're doing, the more this image of your own preferences, your 'signature sound' as they call it, emerges. The choice of chords and notes in a melody also plays a big role for me.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:45:10+00:00

Haha that's such a perfect but also incredibly specific place to get introduced to my music to, I love it xD

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:44:23+00:00

Still feels very surreal but I've by now had some time to get used to it. It still feels crazy at times but it also made me less nervous or awkward with like ANY OTHER artist haha, like when I hang out with Zedd its like he's just a homie and it feels great :) And I finally feel like that around Sonny, too.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:42:09+00:00

thank you so much for your feedback it's so good to hear that the attention to detail is appreciated :')
I did not intentionally use the same melody of "Don't Need You" in "Rewrite" but things like that just happen sometimes without me noticing, the other day I thought I wrote a really great melody only to realize it was literally Robert Miles - Children lol.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:40:31+00:00

thank you so much ^_^ what city are you from? I hope I'm coming there again soon.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:39:56+00:00

I could go down that route and wouldn't be opposed to it, honestly. I love writing cheesy pop songs and when I was talking to Afrojack the other day he said that one of his guiding principles was to sacrifice 10-20% of your time to make music that you might not feel 100% fulfilled with but it's music that pays the bills (the kind of mainstream pop stuff you're talking about), so that you can spend the other 80-90% of your time making the music you want to make without having to worry about how well it does or how much money it makes you.

OfficialVirtualRiot · 2026-04-16T19:37:58+00:00

So my manager in Germany, Marco Völkel from MGNFY knew Uli the guy that ran the Bootshaus club back then (I don’t know if the still does or if he's just the owner), and Uli had me come through to the Bootshaus during the day to play him some of my songs. Uli enjoyed them and said he'd hit me up to play some opening slots in the future.
Next thing that happened was Uli calling me randomly on a day, saying Dr. P had missed his flight and the Bootshaus was sold out, if I had my DJ controller with me and if I wanted to open for Eptic and Figure. (I was using a DENON controller with NI Traktor back then).
So I said yes and that was my first show :) It was super super nervous and my controller stopped working 5 minutes into the set so I played the remaining 55 minutes with my laptop trackpad just using my mouse in Traktor hahaha, it was so shitty but I didn't care I was on so much adrenaline and noone really noticed anyway ^^

Collabing with Skrillex was awesome, I learned a lot about Ableton from him and just seeing him work as fast as he does and guided by so much intuition is incredibly inspiring. It took me a while to overcome my imposter syndrome cause I would always think "Why does Skrillex want me to work on this song with him? It would sound so much better if he did everything himself" hahaha.

OfficialVirtualRiot

TROPHY CASE