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If you want to read up on a bunch of the software he uses, try the full Native Instruments interview found here. If you don't want to read the whole interview, here's the section that deals the most with the software.
posted:Interiewer: NI software seems to be at the core of your musical work. How were you introduced to it?
Trent: Around the time we were working on the "Fragile" record, we ended up getting a PC hooked up just to run Generator, the first version of Reaktor. It was quite a battle to get the right interface and to get it to work, so we really just used it as an occasional sound design type thing, but it seemed like the most amazing tool that we'd ever come across, because of being able to go to levels deeper than you ever imagined you could. It made a lot of the things that we were messing around with at the time seem like they were going to be obsolete.
For the last two albums we used Battery exclusively as the drum sampler because I just like the way it works, it's set up the way I think, and it's an easy drag and drop tool. When Kontakt came out, I would primarily use that as a sound design tool less than for the meat and potatoes of sampling, because we had already started in another format. In Kontakt pretty much any sound will sound like a really interesting sample within a matter of minutes. I think that audio software really has come into its own right and is not just an emulation of hardware, but a truly great musical instrument in itself.
Interviewer: Guitars and distortion have always been a focus of the "Nine Inch Nails" sound. How did you create those sounds for your current album?
Trent: For a large portion of what we did, we treated Reaktor like a guitar pedal, like the ultimate distortion box. Instead of having an array of pedals on the floor, a lot of the pedals became virtual in Reaktor. We went out of Reaktor into the amp head for most of the record. Running it through a real guitar amp and miking it up brought it back to sounding less like science fiction and more like real world. Some of the sounds were like "Wow, I haven't used it that way before". We had a lot of flexibility in the tone.
Interviewer: You chose to use Reaktor rather than Guitar Rig?
Trent: Well, eventually Guitar Rig worked its way into the process. Sometimes we'd make a very clean patch that only utilized the amp simulators or different arrays of speakers and then take whatever we might be using as the front head and run it through the amp simulator in Guitar Rig. In the studio we had two Apple G5's, one running Pro Tools hosting Guitar Rig, and the other one with Logic hosting Reaktor, so we could suck as much horse power as we needed and then just digitally transfer it to the computer with the main Pro Tools system. We didn't swamp the computer too much, but those were two instruments that kept coming back up. Even most of the synths on the record this time around were made or edited with these tools. What I wanted was a low tech sound, the opposite of what "Fragile" was loaded with.
Interviewer: What other software have you been experimenting with?
Trent: I have gone down the path with Spektral Delay a lot and really like messing around with Vokator. But opposed to my first album, where I only had an Emax sampler and knew every possible trick, it’s impossible for me to keep up at that level with everything today. |
