Interview With Tom Vek

Got the chance to catch up with Tom Vek, whose album We Have Sound Remixed [link] celebrates 20 years! Time does indeed fly, because I remember when this came out and it doesn't feel like it was 20 years ago. He talks about his early go-to gear, mixing techniques, graphic design and more.

As part of SH5.

Without futher ado...

Tom in his Margate Home Studio.

Synth History: When did you first start getting into music?

Tom Vek: I think I recall that weird tingle that songs on the radio gave me. “3am Eternal” by KLF, I remember quite vividly being on the radio in my parents’ car, and just listening to the radio, hoping they’d play it again. I must have been around nine. My dad had done some record production and had some instruments in the house, but I was most compelled by a 4-track cassette recorder he had, and recording guitar parts over each other and hearing harmonies come together. I got a bass guitar in my early teens and bass was my thing. Then I wanted to play drums and ended up trying my hand at most things that would get me a grunge track recorded.

Synth History: Your Nothing But Green Lights 12” was one of the first vinyls I ever got at the Virgin Mega Store in Times Square NY when I was younger and just getting into vinyls! What was it like hearing your own music on vinyl for the first time? 

Tom Vek: Woah really? [laughs] The main draw of vinyl for me was the large artwork and the feeling to have “made it,” getting something pressed up, but I’d never been that enamored with the listening experience, so crackly [laughs]. A few years earlier I would have been staying in a hostel round the corner from Time Square on an art school trip to NY, my first trip to the states, I’d bought Play by Moby on CD and was walking around listening to it, that was very memorable to me, and in terms of sonics, it was all about CDs for me, so much pioneering rock production going on too, like I studied “My Own Summer (Shove It)” by Deftones, trying to get that level of sonic width. I found out after a while that our cheap studio monitor speakers were out of phase, so I learned about that the hard way.

Synth History: What about on the radio?

Tom Vek: Yeah, I mean, again, it’s “I made it” territory, but I’d get very distracted by how loud the radio jingle was before they played a track; it really gave me a love-hate relationship with mastering and limiting. Getting played on the radio, at least certain UK stations, back in the mid-00s did feel very much like it had a lot of people’s attention and was notable. Zane Lowe’s Hottest Record and stuff, doing interviews, that was all very validating.

Synth History: What were some of your early pieces of equipment? Do you still use any of it?

Tom Vek: We had this early Sony cassette recorder, portable supposedly, but the size of a small briefcase that my dad had wired up to record ideas, and I would use it a lot for quickly recording drum beat ideas, it had an ‘auto level’ switch and the compressed tape sound was so good. The sort of genesis moment of the ‘Tom Vek sound’ was taking the tape recording of the drums into the studio with Tom Rixton, a producer I’d been introduced to by Tim Love Lee at Tummy Touch records, who had put out some of my early recordings, and being like “I want to loop this up and build a song around it”, which he did in Pro Tools and that was my first experience with cutting and pasting sound, which I’d heard so much in the late 90s production and wanted to achieve. I’d end up learning Pro Tools myself in order to make my second album.

Synth History: How has your music process changed over the years?

Tom Vek: I started on reel-to-reel, which I think gave some good discipline, maybe, in terms of needing to get takes right and stuff. Spending ages capturing the perfect mix-down on a desk. I think I’m much more impatient now [laughs]. But yeah, I’m still basically using the same setup that I built in like 2008, same iMac, same version of Pro Tools, it’s rock solid. I’ve gotten into various grooveboxes over the years. When working on Leisure Seizure, I picked up a Yamaha  RS7000, which I really loved for its 16-step layout that also served as a keyboard, and its awesome master FX. For the longest time, my process is usually to mess around with something, get a loop going, usually at some decimal place tempo, and start building up an arrangement around that. I’ve loved doing remixes and found that to be good practice with opening up old ideas and applying a “remix” approach to it, not being too precious with the sounds. I usually have loads of unfinished projects on the go. I remember for my third album, once I’d got to “untitled 100,” I was like, the album’s in here somewhere, and went into, “try to finish things mode”. 

Finishing is always the hardest part, of course. I tend to record vocal melody ideas pretty early, and the hardest part is the discipline to get a vocal take that isn’t total nonsense words, although sometimes they do get left in.

Synth History: What are some of your current go-to pieces of gear?

Tom Vek: Currently, I’m enjoying a Roland MC-707 I picked up, it feels more restrictive than the Maschine I originally bought for live and ended up using in the studio quite a bit, but I like how it’s laid out in channels, like an old school mixing desk. Getting an extra audio interface with in-built compression–Focusrite Octopre–sped up my workflow a lot, because recording drums, man they sound so bad compared to using software, but with loads of compression, and yet more in Pro Tools, I get to a good sound pretty quickly. Mostly, it’s about having things set up ready to record, so an amp is always mic’d up and a couple of keyboards are plugged in. My main keyboard is an Alesis Micron, which I mainly loved how it looked. It has three octaves, full-size keys, and a load of sounds ready to go, with a few cryptic knobs and sliders to play around with. Another small thing but I spent a while tuning my room to “the opposite of a good mix” to force me to add the frequencies that make it pop out, using a stereo EQ.

Synth History: Do you design a lot of your own art, and how important do you think it is for artists to be involved in that aspect of their work?

Tom Vek: Looking at vinyl covers as a kid made me want to be a graphic designer, and I think it also excited me about being a music maker, that you could control the whole look and feel of a body of work. I ended up studying at St Martin’s in London and, in the true art school trend, lots of us also made music, they seemed to go hand in hand. So yeah, naturally I’ve always done my own album art. I worked with my illustrator friend Ferry Gouw on the cover for Luck, but most other art I’ve done myself. I’m very fond of the We Have Sound art. I’d just gotten into  “vector” design and op-art stuff, the idea of basic shapes that could still cause a sort of organic effect with phasing when slightly offset. As to whether all artists should do it, I think it’s different for different artists, there are so many elements of making a recorded work, that you just do what interests you, and everything else—you still know whether it’s right or not, there are a lot of great album art designers out there that add a lot of depth and outside perspective on music presentation. What most artists have to do these days is be full time marketing people, which is less attractive to me, despite being a visual format a lot of the time, the sheer amount needed seems to cheapen the art of visual design that I find frustrating, I loved growing up with iconic sleeve art and that being all you got to go on.

Synth History: If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?

Tom Vek: This is a tricky one, because I know the younger me was very bad at taking advice, especially when I thought I was sniffing out jaded opinions. But looking back, I think I would have benefited from getting more music out sooner after my debut, I would probably suggest being more open to working in more environments, instead of getting bogged down with “setting up a new studio” which I essentially got nothing recorded in, and saw that I had maybe trapped myself a bit. Having said all that, when I did finally get together my second album, I had learned so much, the hard way and it really was a process that led to me continuing to be pretty independent and just enjoy the process of making music that I felt full ownership of, so yeah, drink lots of water, and strive for new experiences.

Synth History Exclusive.

Photos by Albane LeClerc (Hessia Studio)

Interview conducted by Danz.