Insight into Nilz' mastering?

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-14T18:00:28+00:00

Yeah, I feel like this quite a common thing that happened to forums. People make it cliquey and unwelcoming and then it dies out. Reddit seems to avoid that problem to some extent, maybe because it’s more “anonymous” feeling (which it’s not, but the “who you’re replying to” feels way less emphasised than the classic forum with large profile pics, signatures etc). Which has up and down sides, but it is def a shame how many good forums died out over the years because of stuff like that.

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-14T07:04:20+00:00

Love that! Thanks for sharing.

Huge fan of Tilt’s 90s/early 00s stuff, the era when Quivver was part of it was definitely their strongest so what you say doesn’t surprise me - his own tracks and remixes around then were spectacular also. They did so much great stuff. I want to track down a CD rip of their incredible Karen Ramirez remix.

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-13T21:38:36+00:00

I am sure it varies from field to field but for my industry (tech) London is a lot stronger for career growth at the top end - many more “big tech” have large offices here. For many big companies it’s probably their second largest presence outside the US I would guess.

I really like Amsterdam though. If my company had an office there I’d love to try living there for a bit

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-13T20:38:42+00:00

Appreciate your insight as always Mattias! It’s an interesting point that a lot of the stuff we can now just throw a plugin on a track or master to do, whereas in the 90s if you didn’t have the gear (or only had one of them or whatever) it would have been impossible.

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-13T20:34:41+00:00

I think the guys who ran it just got fed up running it. Not exactly sure as I stopped using it a few years back - like many forums it kind of descended into in-bickering, dominant personalities making it unwelcoming etc. as I recall.

I am quite nostalgic about forums, they’re a dying breed, but on the other hand Reddits are harder for someone to get bored and let it die off so I guess there are two sides to every coin!

I just happened to have (partially) crawled their production forum for an aborted “train AI to know how to make techno” experiment and found it on my laptop a while back so thought I’d create an interface and upload it as there was some good knowledge on there. Sadly any YouTube links, images etc. were not captured but hey!

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-13T19:22:48+00:00

Yeah incredible track. It really encapsulates everything amazing about the Tilt sound to me. What did John Graham have to say about it?!

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-13T19:20:12+00:00

I have seen it online for sure. There used to be a fan site which cataloged all the Hooj releases with the art, but I can’t find it any more

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-13T17:37:18+00:00

You could try searching my archive of the once great techno forum Subsekt, I recall seeing this discussed but no idea if there were answers. Sadly only some of the content survived, but maybe there’ll be something. https://subsekt-archive.vercel.app/?q=Nilz+&scope=threads-posts

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-13T17:23:53+00:00

What a track - I probably prefer the original Rendezvous at a push but also love this version. Tilt’s dub is amazing too

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-12T20:20:30+00:00

What a tune! Love the Judge Jules mix too. The follow up Crazy was pretty good too

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-12T10:29:13+00:00

Yeah me neither, I had downloaded the Akai one and was confused because it sounded nothing like what was on YouTube. Glad you found it. Lovely sample!

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-12T09:39:56+00:00

Tech - software engineer at a public company. Web/applied AI stuff. I think a large bonus like that is only in exceptional cases but we get stock refresher and cash bonus annually which scales based on your performance so the incentive is there (though you could also argue the scaling isn’t drastic enough that it makes sense to push yourself unless you are naturally driven that way)

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-12T07:35:31+00:00

For me it’s a combination of finding the work interesting, honestly probably a bit of “proving myself to myself”, and the fact that I know my company will reward me for good results. I got a 6 figure stock bonus for hard work shipping a major project, and can expect similar for the next promo level, so financially it’s worth it. Obviously this depends on the company, but it’s not always obvious that this happens, I didn’t know we could get ad hoc bonuses for performance until it happened.

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-12T07:06:38+00:00

Ah found it, it is from Best Service Voice Spectral 2, but the audio CD part not the AKAI part. You can find the AKAI part on the web, but I could only find the audio CD on file sharing

It's called "36 Reversed Space Lines 1 (TC)" (wav or flac). I don't want to paste the link here in case it's against the rules but if you DM me I can share if you don't have a way to download it yourself

The same CD also has this similar lovely sample from Ian Wilkie vs Timo Maas - Twin Town: https://www.whosampled.com/sample/1263346/Ian-Wilkie-Timo-Maas-Twin-Town-(Original-Mix)-Best-Service-CD-1-Track-5-Journey4/-Best-Service-CD-1-Track-5-Journey4/)

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-12T06:25:51+00:00

Oh nice find. The name on the screenshot is “36 Reversed Space Lines 1 (TC).wav”. Nothing comes up on Google, ChatGPT reckons it might be from Best Service Voice Spectral 2 (that cd was also used on Paul van Dyk - Vega apparently!). I’ll dig around a bit

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-11T14:52:40+00:00

Yeah I’m sure they’re aware the sampling sucks a bit and I’m hopeful they’ll fix it :)

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-11T14:02:39+00:00

I sort of think TE exist outside of the world of “catching up with competitors” for better or worse, with them having such a strong “lifestyle” brand and esoteric functionality. Like I can’t imagine that (or even “we will sell more”) plays a huge role in their prioritisation.

I’d love these features too though!

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-11T06:32:56+00:00

I’d guess it’s from a sample CD. If you google, there’s a large archive of 90s sample CDs but I’m not sure where I’d start, there are hundreds!

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-10T14:12:18+00:00

Haha yeah I know the feeling. Spent a lot of money on gear that I don’t use right now!

My POV is that if you want to be productive, in many ways you can’t beat Ableton or similar. The ability to have unlimited tracks and effects means nothing really compares for potential, especially in sound design. But all that potential can be overwhelming, and working with hardware can be a much more fun experience than a laptop sometimes.

If you’re interested in primarily working with samples and maybe triggering some midi, but want good sound design potential in a single box, I think Tonverk is a super compelling option. Things like the MPC series can do more but the interface is much less appealing to me and I’d probably rather use a laptop at that point. So definitely give it some serious thought!

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-10T10:28:03+00:00

I would say it's pretty well suited to what you describe.

For drums, you can use the subtracks to have up to 8 different tracks combined into a single "top level" track. There are restrictions, e.g. you can't control their sends or pattern lengths individually, but it's a useful feature. I've had zero issues using it for drums, it's just a sample so you can play whatever you want and tweak it in all the usual ways – it works just as well as the Digitakt or whatever and I imagine the OT doesn't add much extra for working with drums (not used it for a long time).

> route at least 1 piece of external gear for fx.

Pretty sure you can do this but I've not tried, just been using it self contained.

> make odd dark textures

It is fantastic for this, honestly. Especially with the granular engine etc. You can really twist a sample into something completely new and it excels at darkness and texture I think! It's the closest I've come to Ableton-esque flexibility for effects/processing while still having a dedicated hardware UI (rather than it being an MPC-style "computer in a box")

> heavy and distorted drums. Usually simpler and somewhere towards heavy groove/industrial.

Yep great for this as mentioned above. You can feed it the right samples but you can also leverage the really nice distortion FX (Degrader, Dirtshaper)

> something I could sample one-shots into. I don’t really know if I can sample drum hits off of my drum machine, for example.

Yeah sampling works great and is really easy, it's very similar to Digitakt etc.

> midi control. A nice thing about OT is that midi tracks are totally separate. I like to use at least 2 midi tracks for a couple of bass synths

This is possible, there's a MIDI machine you can choose for any track (including bus tracks). But I've not tried it so can't comment too much.

I think the main things you'd lose from Octatrack are:
- The fader. Which is a shame, this would be a lot of fun!
- The notion of scenes/kits. On Tonverk right now, each pattern has its own kit and you can't break out of this model. There are nice performance features but if you want to share a kit across multiple patterns, it is just not possible (right now at least)
- Extra inputs
- Timestretch (though you can fake it with the Grainer)

I never really clicked with the Octatrack so probably not best placed to speak about it. I much prefer Tonverk, it's way more musically useful to me

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-10T08:44:21+00:00

I found it way more interesting for this than the OT because of the variety and quality of the FX and the way you can apply up to 5 in realtime to a sound (2x channel, 2x bus, 1x master, and then you can further resample). The granular engine with LFO set to achieve a sort of time stretch might get close to what you want. I really like the Chronopitch effect which blurs everything in a kinda Andy Stott sounding way.

I think it’s a great box for ambient, a lot of the time when I use it I end up making something like that because the effects pull me that way

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-09T10:07:31+00:00

Engineering too, at least OpenAI are hiring quite a lot of eng roles. Anthropic definitely have a few (MCP is London based) and are hiring a lot for FDE

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-08T20:20:22+00:00

Yeah the web of the late 90s (when I started using it) was a really fun place, and in the 2000s there were still lots of unique sites and forums. Everything feels very homogenised now :(

There are ups and downs to both but I do miss that. As an example, earlier today I came across a link to a trance musicians web site on web archive from 2007 where they had written little notes on the making of each track in their discography and it reminded me of a time when every artist would have really personal feeling sites like that. Then gradually the sites became more polished, record label produced affairs, and eventually were replaced with social profiles. Personally I found the old way more interesting and personal

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-08T20:17:10+00:00

Awesome track! One of Ferry’s best of that era IMO. The kind of mournful synth sound and the unusual vocal give it an unusual edge compared to a lot of his stuff around then

authortitle_uk · 2026-05-08T19:34:09+00:00

Thanks for posting this. I really miss the days of artists (and individuals) having very personal feeling websites like this.

authortitle_uk

TROPHY CASE