Jonny Miller - Mastering The Beat

Full transcript: Jonny Miller on London Real

0:36 And welcome to London Real. My name is Brian Rose. With me is the masterful co-host, Mr. Nick Gabriel, and joining us today is Mr. Jonny Miller, as I said on our Facebook, the legendary DJ, electronic music artist, and digital label manager, and also music production tutor.

0:56 Welcome. Thanks, man. I’m not quite old enough to be legendary yet. How old are you? I’m 37.

1:02 Really? You look good for 37. Thanks, man. I work out. You’ve got a young, a young looking face.

1:10 Thanks, man. I don’t even know where to go from that. Before I get into the things you do and all of your talents and how I met you, et cetera, I just wanted to ask you a current question that I was thinking about that I read about recently. It was the Dead Mouse and Madonna spat that came out recently. I was wondering if you could tell everyone what happened, if they don’t know about it, and then tell us what you think about it.

1:32 Okay, well, there’s this in America at the moment. Well, for the past few years, this dance music has just exploded into the mainstream. They call it EDM, electronic dance music. Right, that’s the term they use. I think so. I think it’s electronic dance music.

1:46 What was it used, what term was used before that? I don’t know. Dance music, I guess, or rave. Yeah, but I guess in this dance music, it’s like barn dancing or something like that. Yeah, that’s probably it.

1:56 What’s barn dancing? Barn dancing, like, you know. Like country dancing. What are you saying? Sing it.

2:01 I have hillbilly friends. Yeah, well, I mean. Country line dancing. So they don’t call it house there, right? They do, but as a broader term, EDM, it’s kind of been picked up on and it’s become quite commercial in the last few years. Obviously the Miami conference is like the big dance music festival. I’ve always wanted to go to that. Have you been to that before?

2:24 I haven’t, no, I haven’t. I mean, it used to be a business conference where everyone would meet around the pool of the Radisson Hotel and I think it’s the Radisson and yeah just do business but now it’s this huge festival and I think it’s called Ultra Fest, it’s this big like rave that happens in my head. Have you been to that? No, I actually never heard of it until, so Madonna made that comment at Ultra Fest and it’s always this time of year, April or whatever. Yeah she’s definitely kind of you know jumped onto the success of dance music because she does, she always reinvents herself and that’s I think pretty cool about what she does she’s uh she’s really kind of embraced this EDM thing in what her last couple albums right in the new stuff I think okay um but yeah she she she got on stage she didn’t introducing a dj and she she asked if anybody had seen molly which is a which is a street reference to MDMA right I mean personally I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a great thing to do, you know, to make references like that to drugs so openly. She said she was talking about one of her songs and Deadmau5 came on and started going on Twitter about how it was a bad idea. He hates the association of ecstasy, MDMA with dance music. I don’t know. Even though it’s hard not to see that association, right?

3:43 Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s been part and parcel of it for years. But I think it’s just, I think Madonna’s thing was just a bit too obvious. Okay. And yeah, it’s, it’s never gonna look good, really. But they both, you know, they both know very much what they’re doing. I mean, you know, they both know how to use their name to create a bit of controversy, which, for Madonna’s case, he’s probably gonna sell albums.

4:06 She’s masterful promoter, right? It’s like her eighth album at number one. Her last album, Hard Candy, which I thought was rubbish, was number one as well. It’s getting a bit tired though, right? Yes.

4:15 It’s getting tired, man. She’s getting old. Do you know what I mean? Even the reinventing of yourself. The whole Rollers case thing she did two albums ago, that was good, but she was covering those ABBA songs.

4:25 No, what was it? Was that it? I didn’t remember that. Yeah, that’s the last thing I remember. Time goes on.

4:29 Time goes slowly. So slowly. That was good, right? I didn’t listen to it, to be honest. But we’ll take your word for it.

4:36 All right, but you think she’s played. She is a bandwagon jumper. I mean, she used to be pop rock, right? But she’s always been into dance music. I mean, she, I think her first gig in England was at the Hacienda, which is a famous club in Manchester. So, I mean, she’s always embraced electronic music.

4:55 So that’s no surprise. She actually, I mean, Jonny and I were in the elevator on the way up today and I was just telling them that I’m going to this big dance music party tomorrow night with my favorite DJs at Above and Beyond. And the funny thing about Above and Beyond, I found out last night I was at then at someone’s house and one of them had actually worked with Above & Beyond and they, Above & Beyond got their big break because one of the DJs did a remix of one of Madonna’s tracks and he was unheard of until then and Madonna liked it so much and she put it out and that gave him his big break, which I thought was, that’s kind of cool of her.

5:30 I mean, you know, even though she’s a bit played out, that’s still pretty cool. Yeah, definitely. She does know how to sell herself, right? For sure. kind of you’re cool that she’s with EDM now and I’ll be honest I don’t really know too much about what she’s doing I haven’t heard any of her new music I mean I think it’s natural that she’s gonna she’s gonna move on to whatever’s cool and whatever sells and at the moment what about dead mouse I mean because you’ve been working with EDM quote-unquote for a long time right yeah but I’ve never called it EDM okay yeah I’ve been working with electronic music for 20 over 20 years now okay so but yeah dead mouse again I don’t know all that much about him to be honest you’ve heard some of his tracks yeah yeah I think I mean he’s got to be one of the most mainstream guys now especially the states yeah he’s smashing it and good you know fair play to him good luck to him do you think he was just a right place right time and he made it enough mainstream where a lot of people kind of caught on to it I think sometimes with artists there’s a little bit of magic you know where whatever they’re doing just strikes a chord with with people you know with like the chemical brothers and Prodigy and more recently guys like obviously Dead Mouse and you know they just they strike a chord they just doing what they do and it just goes you know and there’s that little bit of magic there that helps it along. Is it hard

6:44 Seeing you must see guys that have as much talent as Chemical Brothers or the Prodigy or Dead Mouse you know in your business and they don’t get the breaks and you must be like it’s just a kind of cruel business. I mean I’ve I think that’s what we’re really talking about here is mainstream success and you know for every one dead mouse there’s a hundred other producers that pretty much do the same thing where you know they they might get known a little bit and have a bit of success independently but they just never hit those heights. Do you think so do you think it’s because A they don’t work hard enough or B they just weren’t in the right place at the right time or a combination? I think you You know, some producers work amazingly hard, I mean the guys that I’ve met over the years who I’ve spent time with and who’ve influenced me have all worked amazingly hard, you know.

7:35 And there’s this sort of thing where I think I’ve always said to my students as well, there comes to a point where you make a choice between really getting serious with your music or just doing it an hour here, an hour there and going to the pub with your mates. And you’d have to have sacrifices, something I’ve always said to all my students over the years as a tutor is that to a degree to make it you’ve got to sacrifice certain things it might be going out, it might be when all your mates go to a party or a pub or whatever you stay in and you make tunes and you stay in on a Saturday afternoon and make tunes. You switch the TV off and you make tunes. That’s what it takes. You can’t watch East Eastenders three times a week and become a successful producer.

8:23 You just can’t. You need to focus on your music as much as you can. The music business is strange because you see all the stories of the famous musicians, the Motley crews and all these people, Janice Joplin, who seem to be partying all the time because it’s not like a business, it’s not like maybe martial arts where of course you have to have the right diet, you have to put all the discipline, but music is always this weird kind of thing because it’s like art and science and discipline.

8:49 I don’t know, do you see a lot of musicians that have that discipline? Or do you see something easily fall into that? I’m famous, I mean, you guys are playing in clubs. People go crazy in clubs and drink in clubs and do drugs in clubs. Yeah, I think if you reach a certain height, sort of certain profile, then certain things are taken out of your control.

9:09 You’re just gonna live with it and you end up living really odd hours. Especially traveling, you see a lot of airports hotels and your time zones get messed up, especially for the guys who are in international. But yeah, in terms of time spent making music, you know, during the week or whatever, it’s, you know, you’ve got to be pretty dedicated. But there’s also people out there that just managed to just roll them out, you know, make a tune in a day, you know, and it seems effortless for them every once in a while, I meet somebody like that. And, you know, that’s, that’s the The Holy Grail really, if you can just spend six hours and you’ve got a finished track.

9:49 And I have met people like that, but there’s other, for everyone else mostly, it’s a hard slog getting a track kind of started and progressed and finished. Does most of your work come from creating your own tracks and putting them out, or is it a lot of remixing work? Well I’m fairly lucky, I do a number of different things. I teach music production. I used to teach DJing, which is how I met Brian, a few years back, and I don’t really do that anymore, to be honest.

10:20 Is there not the demand? I don’t know, it just, there’s definitely less demand. When I moved to London, I was doing some, when I met you, I was doing some DJ tuition, but it’s just kind of slowed up, and DJing has become a lot more based around a laptop, and less, I don’t know, less maybe about manipulating the player, like a turntable or a CDJ, I mean people still do that but you can pre-set everything a lot more these days and that’s fine. It just means you can prepare more and there’s nothing wrong with that but yeah in terms of tuition I just don’t do it anymore, I don’t know why.

10:57 I don’t know but I’ve just got more into music production and teaching that and that’s kind of one of my day jobs but yeah I do produce, I run a label called Sonar Pilot Audio and I produce for that. What’s the label called? Sonar pilot audio sonar pilot sonar pilot pilots. Okay, you were talking about the traveling lifestyle and stuff I mean, did you have some crazy years of your early career where you were traveling to different places DJing and really?

11:23 I mean, I’ve done it in bits, you know, I’ve traveled and I’m traveling again I mean, you know this year actually and doing quite a lot going to Luxembourg in a couple weeks time and then going back to South Africa Where I go fairly regularly now wait, it’s that Cape Town Johannesburg Johannesburg. Yeah, hopefully Cape Town as well. I’ve got friends in Cape Town, but yeah, mainly Johannesburg and Soweto. Why and why there? Is there a big demand for it? Or you just know people? Yeah. I went over there a few years ago with my partner whose family lived there.

11:55 And because I made tracks and she knew some music people over there, I hooked up with a guy who DJ’s over there called Kid Funk, who’s really cool. He’s kind of like the Charles Peterson of Johannesburg and he does all the sort of cool music events chilled Sunday he kind of laid back parties and mixes up with different genres so he kind of got me a couple of gigs the first time I went over there and I’ve just gone back a few times and done parties with him and now I’m going back on my own actually before it’s been me and my partner have gone over there and seen her family and done some gigs at the same time but but now I’m going back on my own for two weeks in the end of May. What’s that like how many gigs were you doing two weeks in? I don’t know I mean we’re definitely gonna do Johannesburg and Soweto we just it’s all kind of in the works now but Cape Town maybe Durban as well just depends what he can hook up you know. Is that something you get psyched up for doing? Is it hard work?

12:58 Yeah I love it I love it I mean South Africa there’s a really special scene there for I mean it’s a it’s a house music nation house music for them is like it’s like pop music okay so it’s in every car stereo is pumped up house music something else is that true yeah I mean it’s working for my for my experience that’s that’s true you know Jonny I wanted to ask you something so you know it’s a classic story of someone who turns one of their passions into a career and then they find that they they just don’t enjoy it as much after a a while like do you I know for me music is one of the things I love most in the world and I’m sure it’s the same for many people probably use you as well Brian I like it yeah but I mean if it was your job like do you think you get burnt out on it and my question to you is like have you ever been close that stage or I’ve been lucky I’ve never done one thing to the point where it’s gotten boring I mean I know guys who are international DJs who travel every week and I speak to them and I’ve spoken to them in the past and they’ve said to me back to the airport, you know, another airport, another hotel, another gig and then back to the airport again and it’s like, you know, I sort of sit down with them and I say, man, I know kids that were killed for your job and they’re like yeah and they’re like well I’ll tell you what, you do it three times a week for six years and it becomes work and I mean it’s great because you when you

14:24 Travel you know you do get to see places but you might not get to see enough of the place I mean I went to you know I’ve traveled I did Prague I went to to Rio last year to do a not to not to DJ but to actually do like a music conference workshop thing but I was there for I was in Rio for like 24 hours and it’s like I managed to squeeze a few hours to have a walk around on my own but then it was back to the airport and it’s kind of like you know I really wanted to sort stay and 24 hours and you’re back here literally it was it was weird I do that every once in a while but I know guys that travel all over the world every week and it’s like yeah it’s worked for them it’s still a blessing you know they say that it’s it’s brilliant to be able to travel and play music and not have to get up at 9 o’clock and go to an office but it still works so yeah it’s I’m lucky I’ve never got to the point where I’ve done enough of the same thing over and over again to burn out so it’s still when I go away it’s still fresh it’s still I get excited and yeah on another note I want to know how good Brian was a DJ man he was really good we did like two days right it was two days we had you had the CDJ going on right yeah I didn’t have a turntable there no it was just CDJs you know those things discs and stuff if people don’t know and yeah what did you start me I mean I don’t know what we started at the beginning we did with counting if I remember it was two days and it was a

15:50 Kind of crash course wasn’t it where we went through in eight hours a day or so yeah you did you did like a little recording at the end of the the two days that was your that was what you had to show for it was this mix yeah and I brought a bunch of my stuff in a bunch of my hip-hop and other music stuff I did well man it was but it was like it was I think we started by just learning to count bars and sections and understanding how the music was phrased on on the tracks I tried to beat mix ones and I just could not do it yeah It was interesting because I kind of understood how a lot of EDM or you know music was composed because you know it adds a little bit in slowly and also it layers in and layers out and so it helps a lot on those when you mix out and mix in but just the whole syncing the rpms and getting the whole thing down was it’s quite it’s like you know what it’s not like rubbing your tummy and chewing gum or whatever it’s like a lot of things going on and it’s all live and if you screw it up then you just grew it up. Have you ever messed up a set like a live set? Oh sure yeah.

16:52 Like how badly? I think the worst one was when I was very young I was in Spain playing in the, this is like I think my first international gig actually. Well I was just on holiday and I took some music some records with me and flagged some some DJ gigs. I think I took the needle off the the wrong record. It was about probably getting on for a thousand people in this club on a dry riverbed. I was like, how old were you? I was like 15 or something, 14 or 15. I think it was around 1990, maybe 89 or 90. No, it was 91 actually, I remember now. So I was 15 I think. They let you play in front of them. Yeah, it was just like the MC got on and I say, hey, this kid’s from London, he’s on holiday, yeah, give him a round of applause.

17:41 And I just played for like half an hour. But I remember, it’s never left me my memory. I took the needle off, I did like a mix, and thought, okay, a mix is done, I can just find the next record. And I took the needle off the record without thinking. Everything just went silent.

17:56 And I sort of looked up and everyone had stopped dancing, was kind of looking up at me and quickly put the needle back down. And you pretended it was something you meant to write. Yeah, yeah, I just like, beep, beep, beep, beep, go. just try to you know just carry on but yeah that’s I think I think that’s about the worst I’ve got I’ve never had any sort of really devastating situations because I don’t use a laptop when I DJ and that’s the biggest fear I think now for any DJ because most DJs use laptops their music is on their laptop and to have like a hard drive crash or something you know you’re dead yeah like the blank screen comes down the computer and that’s the biggest nightmare because, you know, you’re screwed.

18:34 I just use CDs and records and so I’ve, you know, it would take something really catastrophic to stop me from DJing. Have you seen guys’ computers go down or have you ever been? You know what, I watched a YouTube video recently of Skrillex, this guy Skrillex, who’s huge at the moment. Yeah, right on. Yeah, he’s kind of taken dubstep to just stratosphere.

18:53 But he, I think he was doing a big show and his computer, his computer died basically. So he did the like right I’m gonna trash it so he gets it and he smashes it on the floor and he gets a chair and starts like beating this computer the chair and of course then starts crowd surfing and throwing this dead computer around and there’s no music yeah it became part of his act and I thought that was pretty cool man to sort of flip it it’s like the equivalent to smashing a guitar and absolutely yeah yes you know kick the drum kit over this kind of that rock rock and roll themes, you know, for a DJ is smashing the hell out of their computer if it fails them. It’s probably like a fifteen hundred quid MacBook Pro or something.

19:36 Hey, it’s cool, he’s Squirex, he can do whatever he wants, you know. And then go crowd surfing. I thought it was cool. Is dead air the worst thing if you’re a DJ? Yeah, I guess, but again, I can’t remember having a really bad instance, I don’t think so anyway.

19:51 Is a crowd usually pretty forgiving? Yeah, I have no experience of it, but I’d imagine so, yeah. I guess it depends on many drugs I’ve taken out. Yeah. I mean, if you’re DJing in any club, I mean, what is the right mix of drugs in clubs?

20:05 Well? I’m serious. I don’t know. Is that a crazy question? That’s a cool question.

20:10 I don’t know. I mean, I’ll be honest. I’m not a big drinker, so I never really drink much, especially when I’m working. I just want to keep clear-headed and when I do DJ, because I don’t DJ as much as I used to. week in bars and stuff and, you know, as a job, you know, I don’t really do that anymore.

20:30 I’m kind of pick and choose my gigs a lot more now and fix things up that I really want to do instead of just DJing for the sake of it. I’ve kind of done that, you know, been doing it for a long time. So yeah, when I do DJ, I tend to just keep pretty focused and not go too crazy, you know. What about your audience? Do you care if they’re drunk or sober or on drugs or not?

20:53 I just don’t want them to come up and ask me to play some trance or play something that I’m not going to play, you know? Okay. No offence to trance, but I just, you know. I told them I like trance on the web. Yeah, sorry, dude.

21:05 Sorry, man. Is trance just not your thing? Is that a really different culture? No, I’ve got a lot of respect for it, you know. I used to play progressive house in the 90s, like Sasha and…

21:14 Yeah, Sasha’s one of my favourites. Amazing. Yeah, but I think the sort of pop trance has kind of put me off a little bit. Yeah. I mean, if I’m DJing somewhere, I’m not going to play that because that’s not what I do. I play kind of soulful music and underground music. And so it annoys me when someone comes up and says something like that. But again, what do you tell them? I just, uh, I just tell them that’s not what I do. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I got a question for you. Actually, just real quick before you do that dubstep, cause we have people in the States are listening and I don’t think they know what dubstep is. Oh, they know what dubstep is. Trust me.

21:46 Do all of them even my grandma they do now okay now I can you give us a definitely identify myself dubstep what is the definition that’s okay I would be able to give it up to the new drum and bass kind of dubstep is bass music it’s bass driven music so it’s it’s all about bass and it’s kind of come from what we know is dubstep today is really kind of evolved out of a few different things like in the UK we had Speed Garage and UK Garage mix in the drum and bass element as well the sort of clever programming and sonics of drum and bass with a dash of reggae you know dub reggae is a heavy influence of course hence the dub in dubstep but the step in dubstep comes from two step which was a UK garage thing sort of like a brand of UK garage music known as two step When you say it’s all about the bass, is that because the bass is making the beat as opposed to like a snare or a drum or a percussion instrument?

22:45 It’s just a wall of bass, you know, wall of, and most of… What does it sound like if you had to do it acapella? It’s some, most people call it a wobble. So imagine like a bass sound wobbling. So a big heavy bass that modulates, yeah, exactly, you’ve got to start the show like when you edit it with some dubstep.

23:05 If you have some Samos that you suggest, I’ll start off with some dubstep. Yeah, it’s got to have bass in it. And how many beats per minute, how fast? Pretty much 140. 140, okay.

23:15 140, so it’s kind of, you know, with a snare on the three, so it’s got a kind of half-time feel to it. It’s pretty fast, right? But not ultra fast. Feels fast, yeah. I mean, the actual sort of template for dubstep in inverted commas used to be a lot smaller. Now, I mean, there’s this thing now called post-dubstep, which is kind of bass music, but it doesn’t necessarily have to have a dub influence in it.

23:38 So, and it’s just blowing the doors wide open. I mean, there’s one person’s dubstep is another person’s, you know, post dubstep. And it’s just, it’s just weird now. It’s just wide open. There’s so many little sub genres and strain, different strains of dubstep or bass music or whatever you want to call it. There’s 10 different names, you know, people in the States know dubstep because there’s Americans doing it now, or they’re just listening to it?

24:03 Yeah, there’s a few, I mean, obviously guys like Skrillex have kind of taken the term dubstep and crossed it over into a lot, you know, into and introduced it to a lot of people who didn’t know it before and might not necessarily know about, you know, the South London roots of dubstep, you know, but it’s, which is 10 years old, you know, it’s really, it’s an old scene. But yeah, the Americans definitely are into it, there’s some really cool artists coming through the States. I’m going to have to listen to some.

24:35 I wanted to ask you, so you’re out at a club playing your set and there’s a thousand people dancing to the music that you’re spending. That’s a big gig. Okay, 500, whatever. You’re at 15 when you did that. Yeah, I tend to do small ones.

24:49 To be honest, I tend to just do small things now. Is that just your preferred or just the business that comes up? It’s just the music. Like I don’t really play big commercial music. So I’m never going to play in a, you know, a big club.

24:59 But then again, you know, this place is like fabric and they’re huge, but it tends to be that the, the sort of, you know, bigger names in the scene play at those big clubs. I’m not a huge name. I don’t have fabrics from London and it’s, how big does that get in there? Thousands man. Okay.

25:13 I’ve never been, you’ve been in fabric. Yeah. I watched Sasha there. So I wanted to ask you, so how, how much of your set is, Do you stick to a plan or do you go according to the feel and the energy of the crowd? A bit of both.

25:30 I think all the DJs that I know anyway who I’ve known over the years tend to do the same thing which is they have a collection of new tracks and they know roughly they’re going to choose from this pool of a few hundred tracks whether there be a couple of bags of records or with CDs or on a laptop or whatever. got this pool of music and it tends to be that you’re booked to play a certain style. So I play soulful underground music, whether that’s, it might be a soulful house, it might be a soulful dubstep, which there is, or it might be disco or jazz funk or 80s groove or whatever.

26:11 So I know I’m going to play that music that I have in my collection and what I tend to do when I do DJ now is go to the gig. It depends what time you play as well. If you play early, you’ve really got to do a warm-up thing and you’ve got to keep it fairly chilled and not go crazy. But if I’m playing at 2am, 2 till 4 or something, or midnight till 2, I know that’s peak time, so most DJs I know will go through their collection and know there are certain tracks that work on the dance floor.

26:37 And we’ll feed off a crowd. If we play a big tune and everyone goes crazy, you kind of know that’s a vibe that gets people going. So you have to kind of play a big one and then back it off a little bit and kind of… Yeah, maybe. I don’t really think about it too much you kind of know I mean I’ve another thing I’ve always said to my students when I was when I was DJing teaching DJing is that the records tend to jump out at you if you’re flicking through your music collection you come across a track it’s it tends to jump out you just know that’s the tune that you got to play next that’s cool but that’s something it’s like as you’re feeling it or the crowd’s feeling it yeah I mean they don’t know obviously but it’s just the natural flow of your DJ set unconscious competence right yeah but you can’t I don’t think you can teach that and I mean one of the things you know I’ve been DJing for over 20 years it took me years and years and years to get that programming thing down of actually knowing kind of what to play next I think and you know you can learn how to mix pretty quickly I mean as when I told you I was getting it yeah in a couple of days you can maybe you can pick up the basics but then it takes years of, you know, experience to go to a club and play the right thing at the right time.

27:49 And I don’t think you can really teach that or read it out of a book, but you just got to do it. Because you might be thinking, I’m going to play, you know, track one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And then you find by track three, you know, one’s feeling, you know, one’s feeling that genre. You don’t, you don’t really plan it that much sequentially like that. Okay.

28:07 I mean, I know there’s sort of when I play, there might be two or three tunes, I know, go well together. And if I play one, I’m likely to play the other two. But it’s never, you might know maybe what you’re gonna start with. I did see an experiment where they would take like, maybe a set from 12 to two when everyone’s nice and getting a little bit inebriated or high or whatever and have a DJ stand at his booth and pretend to be mixing but just have a set like just running off a computer.

28:37 To be honest, I don’t think the choir would know the difference in many cases. Not always, but in many cases, I think people would still be like, woo-hoo, party. It’s a bit of a dance music myth that’s really. Yeah, there’s, in fact, I saw on YouTube, there’s this guy, David Guetta, who’s huge at the moment. Yeah, we know.

28:52 He’s huge. And there’s this YouTube video going around of him playing out somewhere. And some sad person somewhere has kind of put an arrow on the screen saying, look, the CDJ light isn’t on. And it’s kind of like, this guy’s so fake. And it’s like, well, actually the CDJ, the lights on the older models were much dimmer.

29:11 They weren’t bright. So you just couldn’t see that they’re on. And it’s just, it’s one of these things. I mean, I just, I don’t really buy this idea that a big name DJ is gonna go to a gig and press play on a sequence mix and just punch the air. They just don’t really need to, you know.

29:28 It’s just fun. Probably wouldn’t be here to have fun, yeah. It’s kind of fun, and so. So even if they’re using a laptop, they will be making just decisions as far as what tracks. It’s just that the laptop is the new record bag, all your music is on your laptop, but you still play it on the turntables.

29:42 And the auto mixes as well. The laptop will auto mix. No. Oh, you still have to mix it. No.

29:47 I mean, you can set up, to a degree, you can set up a certain amount of synchronisation in terms of tempo with software now, but you’ve still got to decide which tune you’re going to play and play it. You still got to be a good DJ, to be a good DJ, you know, you can’t fake it, I don’t think. They had Deadmau5 on the Rogan show and he was playing the MTV VMAs the next day or something and they’re like, do you have to get there and get ready and they asked him out like five times and he’s like, I just have to hit the space bar, really.

30:17 But you know, that’s Deadmau5. You said that. Yeah, he did. He was kind of making a joke about the whole thing, but obviously he was playing his own tracks. He was probably only going to play a few and he’s like, come on, what do I really have to do?

30:27 Because he, you know, then again, he was just Deadmau5. But that’s not DJing. That’s a distinction that I think a lot of people don’t make these days, is that they look at Deadmau5 playing all of his songs and think that he’s DJing, he’s got all his tracks sequenced in probably Ableton Live, which is the software I teach now, sequenced ready to go. That is a case of pressing the space by pressing play, and then you tend to have artists who like Deadmau5 who will have controllers, they’ll have little boxes with pots and faders and buttons and all they’re really doing is adding extra effects or adding sounds on top of a sequenced… Doesn’t sound like that would be very difficult. It’s not but it’s difficult to make the music. Yeah you’ve got to come up with a music and you know you’ve got to come up with an interesting live show and it’s really hard. Speaking of making music it’s something we talked about pretty few on the phone a few weeks ago and I think it’s part of the questions we got and I’m gonna ask these questions from Sergio Batista Appreciate those by the way, but um the first thing that comes to mind is how do you make money in this business because everyone’s gonna Say I like DJ and I want to get into it. I want to create EDM You know you’ve seen it you’ve seen probably artists you’ve seen the heyday where you could make money by selling music And now is it difficult well the 90s was very different because especially the 90s

31:44 That’s when it kind of first blew up some DJs became rock stars basically yeah And just the floodgates were opened and the money got really stupid and during the noughties it kind of, a little bit more sense came into it and the DJ fees started to drop. Was it just the DJing fees or was it the music they could sell by creating an army? Well that changed with the downloads. As soon as we got broadband, especially in the UK, that changed everything. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish. But yeah, in terms of making money for music now, if you want to make money in the music business now, you’re in the wrong business. Because you can’t, you know, unless there’s that bit bit of magic there, as I was talking about earlier, there’s like sometimes there’s just a bit of magic where somebody gets in, starts making tunes and their tunes just hit a chord with people and they become successful very quickly and if you take guys, I mean in dance music at the moment, who can use an example, well guys that I would play people like James Blake who seem to just appear from nowhere, you know, to become a Mercury music nominated artist. A couple of years ago he was at school. These things happen very quickly for a very tiny percentage and that’s not normal. Everyone else really struggles and making music from dance music you really need to do a lot of different things. You need to become a brand essentially and you need to make music, run your own club nights, do your own merchandising,

33:17 Really clued up with sponsorship as well so when you’re doing events you’ve got a budget things like that and and you know some people do that really well I mean there’s there’s you know crews that do lots of events the kind of labels that do as many events as they put out records or like releases I mean if you take well in recent years we’ve had labels like numbers and night slugs you They’re sort of, I guess, dubstep labels or post-dubstep or whatever you want to call it. And they do a lot of club nights around the country. And you’ve got, who else? I saw it recently, there’s like Tempa and Rinse FM.

34:00 Rinse FM is a pirate dubstep station. But they have a label called Tempa Records. And you might have heard of Scream and Benga. Magnetic man, they’re sort of quite big dubstep artists who have crossed over into pop But yeah, they’re sort of part of the temper family and there’s the radio. There’s the they do fabric They do it’s branding basically. It’s branding Yeah If so to answer your your your question if you want to make music out of if you’re sorry If you want to make money rather out of dance music you need to become a brand as a DJ You need to become a brand First when and explain the whole DJ crossover into making your own music because not not all DJs do that Or is it a natural progression that you have it’s definitely a natural progression It used to be that a DJ would hire the services of an engineer to go in the studio with the moment guys like Karl Cox you know he was he kind of used Releasing music to help build his name as a DJ and Sasha as well to a degree But then it sort of crossed over to the point where the DJ started getting technical and became engineers And now with laptop music, I mean, you know, I can sit on a bus with my iPhone and make a beat on a virtual drum machine, you know, it’s like, it’s so easy to actually do now.

35:16 You know, everybody’s doing it and it doesn’t, you know, take much to make music because everybody can. So everybody is. Are you happy about the technology? I think it’s wicked. Yeah.

35:29 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, as long as your expectations are level, you know, as long as you keep a level head and you don’t think that just because you’ve got music maker on your iPhone or whatever it is, it’s called or you’ve got GarageBand on your iPad that you’re a producer, you’re not, you’ve got to learn and you’ve got to make a lot of tunes and learn from your productions and soak up a lot of music and, you know, it takes a long time to, you know, for most people to get to the stage where they’re actually good producers. And I want to talk about your tuition in a bit.

36:05 I just want to knock these questions out from Sergio. He had about four questions, and you can answer some of them. But one was, how does one get out there as a DJ successfully? I think you kind of answered that to a certain extent. Yeah, also networking as well.

36:20 You can’t do it from your bedroom. You’ve got to go out to the clubs and meet people, and all the people that I’ve worked with over the years, especially all the tracks that I’ve had out on record, my earlier releases, were the result of me going to a club and going up to the DJ at the end of the night who ran a label, giving in my CD and saying, hi, I’m Jonny Millard, I make tunes, I think you might like this stuff. And actually meeting people and looking into the whites of their eyes and getting to know them and networking and that’s kind of, I guess you’ve got iChat and stuff like that And it’s my label, the guy who owns the label that I work for, he lives in Basel, in France.

37:03 So we video conference, but I still go over and I still see him and we still meet up. I think that’s really important if you’re a DJ and you wanna, or if you’re a producer and you wanna get yourself out there, you gotta go meet your peers. Can’t live life on Facebook. You can’t, you can’t. It helps, but you’ve got to couple that with actually going out and doing it.

37:24 It’s good advice, man. It’s good advice for anything, whether you’re in comedy or any kind of show, probably any kind of business, let alone show business. Let me just, oh, here’s a good question. Is it important to be signed by a record label or can one simply start their own label in order to get the music onto online music stores? That’s a good question. Yeah. Well, that’s what I’ve done.

37:42 That’s exactly what I did. I used to have a label called Just Listen Recordings, which was my tunes that I tried to, you know, I sent to other labels and they were like, well, it’s cool but it’s not quite right for us we’ve got our own thing going on so I said okay I’m just gonna start my own label and set it up with you know a digital aggregator a digital distributor who can put it on iTunes and you can do that and I you know I’ve I did that quite early on where there weren’t thousands and thousands of people doing it but it’s still quite new but now it’s like you know if you go on Juno or Beatport every week there are thousands of new releases. So it’s easy to do. The hard thing now is actually getting people to notice what you’re doing. It’s like a, you’re just, yeah, a blade of grass on a football pitch.

38:29 It must be a bit disconcerting, you know, when you go out there and you see there’s thousands of people like every week putting out all these tunes, they can all, everyone has Garage Band now with their max and, and it must, I mean, I don’t know if that’s the same with you look at, it’s not the same with independent film because with independent film, I think there’s just more to making a movie. It takes more people, more budget. It’s harder, How do you get yourself the wheat and the chaff with all that music out there?

38:53 Well, the result is that the quality has definitely gone down. So it’s harder now. You have to search through a lot of rubbish to find. Well, I do anyway. I search through a lot of music every week and 90% of it is rubbish to me.

39:08 And the 10% that the little nuggets, you have to dig harder for them. It takes more time, whereas before, if I think back to the 90s and the noughties, you go to record shop, you might have like, if you’re into drum and bass, there might be ten, five or ten hot releases a week. So you had less choice, now there’s a thousand. So you’ve got to pick out the ones that, you’ve got to spend more time looking, or you go for the trusted names. So it’s kind of like, a lot of artists say to me, how can I get my track signed to temper how can I get my track signed to hyper double numbers or night slugs you know the cool labels yeah and it’s like well you’ve got to make really good music you know and again let’s go get into the hands of the person who makes it exactly yeah exactly but even then you know even then like you know I see a lot of label managers on Twitter saying oh god another another inbox full of rubbish demos so even then it’s you just you swamped you know we get stuff for Sonar Pilot Audio, we get a lot of people hitting us up on Soundcloud saying hey listen to my tune, listen to my tune and yeah I do my best to listen to as much as I possibly can and we’ve actually you know put tracks out by guys who’ve never had any tunes out before whose music I’ve come across on Soundcloud and liked and we’ve kind of signed them up so to speak.

40:33 We’ve put out, they’ve got them to do a remix for us or something but I’d imagine the big labels it’s really difficult because they just want day-to-day with thousands of tracks you know and it’s it tends to be like a peer thing as well if a label if a big label if the label manager gets told by one of their mates or a DJ that they respect about a certain track they’ll pick up on it so again it’s out there pressing a flash. I guess to answer the question how can I get noticed get your music to DJs and to taste makers who might play something to the label manager of X label or Y label and say, hey, I’ve picked up this really good tune. I met this guy in a club. He gave me this CD and it’s dope. That’s how to do it.

41:18 Not just kind of cold calling. It tends to work by a third party coming in and giving a track to somebody. That’s the way everything works. The last question was, is it important to have an agent or a manager? Not at all.

41:31 Okay. We don’t think so. Back in the day, the music labels, like in Elvis Presley’s times, like Sun Records, When they signed you, they would make an investment and they would distribute. These days, obviously, the investment isn’t as important and the distribution isn’t as important, right? Yeah, I think in terms of what a manager does, they manage you, they take your music and they shop it and they arrange things for you.

41:54 You can pretty much do all that yourself now. I think it comes to a point though where if you’re successful, you have to have a manager. But a manager is not going to magically make you well known and famous, it’s just not going to happen. There’s no reason how they can do that, there’s no way that they can really do that unless obviously they’ve got a lot of money or if you’ve got a lot of money to buy your way into it. With money you can buy advertising space and you get the DJ magazine, they do a poll every year of the top 100 DJs and it’s staggering you know you can if you’ve got money you can buy an advert in DJ with a picture of yourself you know and saying what you do and vote for me for the top 100 DJs and it for some people that’s something they try to do is try to work their way into high-profile by way of spending money but it I just don’t really think it stands up you know it’s tricky at the end of the day you’ve got to be good you’ve got to deliver I see so many parallels with this and what we’re doing with the podcast, you know, is there’s so much media out there trying to get someone’s attention from a music perspective or even from a media perspective is hard because there’s so much information. And like you said, it’s one way that we’ve had a bunch of things presented to us is like spend this amount of money and advertise. But then we’ve also had people telling us, you know, you need to find people that

43:16 Really like your stuff and your content are going to watch you the way not because you have an advertisement because they might watch it once and then move on. I mean, Brian and I, we’ve had our issues over this because, I mean, Brian’s got such an amazing work ethic and he’s like, yeah, we’re going to push and get this going. And I just, Percy, I don’t know if, I’m wondering like how well the brute force techniques or tactics work. We fight all the time.

43:42 So it’s like… We’re like a bad married couple. So I can see like in music, I mean, if you took an average guy and gave some PR person a million pound budget and said I want this to be the next Paul Oakenfold or the next David Guerta or whoever, do you think it could be done regardless of if they had a base level of talent or do you think? I don’t know. It’s like the million dollar question, can you make a star?

44:06 I think if it was that easy, then we’d see it. But if you look at kind of who is well known, especially in the world of electronic music, the people that are at the top of the tree are pretty good I mean if you take guys like Richie Horton yeah he’s really good actually what he does is amazing and you know any any of the sort of big names and any of the subgenres when you actually listen to what they’re doing they’re there because they’re there on merit they’re there because they are what creamer always rise to the top right yeah and I mean there’s that phrase and shit sinks it’s like shit sink man I haven’t heard that one stuff shit sinks and the good stuff will float to the top I think always and if what you’re doing is really is really good you know naturally if you’ve got that certain something whatever you’re doing in in in in life I think I get into too deep okay that’s pretty deep you know we’ve only got about about 10 minutes left and we haven’t talked about your your teaching could you just talk about how you got into that okay what it is you actually do when people come in and yeah is that really important to you Yeah, I love it. I don’t do as much of it as I used to.

45:19 I used to do it, you know, five days a week, six days a week as a job. You do some online teaching as well, right? Yeah, it’s now online. I do private tuition where people just come to my apartment and I’ve got decks and computer there and I do that as well. What do you teach them?

45:34 I use a program called Ableton Live, which is, it’s called a DAW, Digital Audio Workstation, which is similar to GarageBand and to Cubase and Logic There’s a lot more buttons on it. It’s basically, the difference between Ableton, the one I use and a lot of the other ones, is that Ableton is aimed at being creative, it’s a creative platform, you can take it on stage with you. In fact, we were talking about Deadmau5 earlier, I’m 99% sure he uses Ableton Live, and all the big artists who take a computer on stage with him and play their own music, they’re likely to be using Ableton Live, it’s designed to be used by performers on stage and be intuitive and work well while you’re doing stuff live.

46:18 I’m just wondering what kind of person, like, I mean, besides Brian, is always trying new stuff and pushing the boundaries, but what kind of person says, hey, I want to take a DJ lesson? Yeah. That’s a good question. Or learn how to make music. Yeah, learn how to make music.

46:31 I don’t know. I think partly it’s because it’s become a lifestyle choice. It’s become so easy to do. You don’t need to book a studio anymore. If you want to make a tune.

46:41 And set up a home studio for like a thousand quid. You don’t need to. A thousand pounds is nothing. Ten times that if you want a decent home studio with hardware, with a desk and synthesizers and stuff. You just don’t need to do that anymore. You can open up an iPhone and make a beat. You’ve actually got sequences now for the iPhone that you can make a tune on. It’s crazy. So it’s become a lifestyle thing where people, it’s become cool and fun to DJ. I think Pioneer, who do the probably most well-known CD turntables for DJs. Their latest product is aimed at a house party environment.

47:20 So you look at the adverts and it’s like some kid in the kitchen with the decks on their worktop with their friends all around, drinking cocktails. It’s a lifestyle thing. DJing is not about the clubs anymore. It’s about being able to DJ wherever you like. And again, if you look at the, you should definitely check the new pioneer adverts. It’s like a guy just taking the decks out onto the street and plugging in and mixing, you know, on the steps of a building.

47:46 Man, you know, someone just came to me, we’ve got to get this cat to DJ at the London Real Party, right? Right. Is that something you would do? Absolutely. Love this networking shit.

47:55 All right. That sounds like the right kind of music too. Do you find, I mean, there’s an old proverb that says the best way to learn something is to teach it. Do you find that’s true? What you do?

48:05 Yeah. I mean, when I think back to when I first started teaching DJing, I sat with a pen and paper for six months and I wrote down everything that I was doing as a DJ and came up with a theory and a formula of what to do and what steps and then I was with a few friends in Manchester. This is when I was living up north. My friends opened a studio and we just kind of agreed that we were going to do some lessons to help pay the rent in the studio that they had. So I was helping them out and it gave me some work and stuff and it just kind of grew from there. They set up a school and I ended up doing my DJ tuition at their school. So I kind of you know fell into it really I never really thought you know I was gonna become a teacher I hated school to be honest I hated it. Yeah me too. So it’s like it’s you know last thing I thought I was gonna end up doing was teaching but more recently it’s been the music production and I worked for a school called Point Blank in London which is one of the big schools in London they’re really cool and they’ve got an online school so there’s like I make tutorial videos and I write courses for them so I’ve written a a couple of courses for Ableton and we have students from all over the world who submit their work and I look at their work in Ableton Live and I advise them on maybe how they could use the software better. Do you ever see something like some real potential or something like wow?

49:23 Yeah I mean like last year we you know with Sonopilot Audio the label that I managed, we actually took one of my ex-students who I’d spotted on the course and I just thought I’ve I’ve got to keep an eye on this guy because he’s really good. We gave him a remix and put him on his headline on one of the releases. So just out of interest, how much money would he make out of that remix? Not a huge amount. It varies label to label.

49:53 What budget they have. Most labels now have very little budget, especially the label like us, we’re a small digital label. We don’t make records, we just basically make digital content. So we don’t have a huge budget, I don’t know any digital label that does, unless they’re doing a lot of other things. But yeah, financially it varies person to person, there’s no set amount, but I’ve been surprised over the years by two things, one, how much some people I know have been paid to do remixes, and also the other thing, how little big names have been paid to do remixes.

50:35 And it’s, there’s no set thing, you know, like I say, I’ve heard extremes of both sides. I’ve heard guys who aren’t massive names getting paid quite a lot for remixes, and I’ve heard of huge names getting next to nothing for remixes, so depends. You know what interests me about Jonny is like, he’s so zen. Yeah, it’s so understated too, I think. I think we’d probably go to his place and we’d see these huge pictures of him playing these a lot.

51:02 Oh, I did that when I was 16. I was like, oh, I don’t want to talk about that right now. You are obsessed with party posters, right? Fliers. Oh man, don’t get me started.

51:11 How long do we have? We’ve got about five minutes left. Jug his face light up. Yeah. I know.

51:16 That’s your picture on your Facebook. Yeah. I collect rave fliers. What can you describe to what a rave flyer is to people? Yeah.

51:23 It’s my guilty pleasure. It’s my train spotting thing. I basically, I used to go to a lot of raves when I was a kid, when I was like 15, 16. At the end of this, in the 90s, they had these big raves and they were all advertised by these flyers, which were like A4, A3, big posters. It’s on Monday.

51:43 Really decorative artwork, lots of beautiful illustration. It was all about having, if you put on a rave, it was like, you had to do a really nice flyer to get people interested in your rave. And I just started collecting them and never really stopped. And now I’ve got tens of thousands of these things building books, and I buy and sell flyers on eBay. It’s my hobby.

52:05 You buy and sell them? I do, yeah. I bet your girlfriend really loves this, eh? Yeah, there’s some, there’s some. I think all your parents are, as you said, are very of a whole catalog.

52:14 Yeah, we spoke on the phone. Last time I spoke to Brian on the phone, I was going through a bag of flyers that are at my parents’ house, bless them. Thank you, mom and dad. Um, and I was like, I had, I was talking to Brian on the phone. I was covered in flies.

52:27 I had this like lap full of flyers I was going through that had been in a bag for years that I wanted to sort out. Um, it was a quiet day. So, um, so yeah, it’s, it’s could be worse addiction. And I personally, I just, I love it. It’s like, it’s my hobby is my, my hobby.

52:45 Is it like a throwback to those days of like, you know, nothing, it’s not digital anymore. It’s like a physical representation of something that happened. Well, these days when you put a club night on, you know, the most important thing is how many likes you get on Facebook or how many names people say they’re coming or how many maybes you have, you know, it’s like, you know, and sound like old man, very few day. We had posters. It’s true.

53:07 I mean, very few events now by, you know, fabric, they do, they do a beautiful poster every month, um, showing, showing who, you know, what, what’s listings or what’s actually happening there, but you don’t get many clubs that actually make flyers anymore. And I mean, partly because the internet has come so important. It’s, you know, alive so much, but also there’s less record shops. You used to go to record shops and pick up flyers. Okay.

53:31 That was what I did when I was a kid. Anyway, I didn’t have much money to buy records. So I buy one record and then just hit take home 20 flies with me. And, um, I got to ask what’s, um, what’s the craziest rave you went to in London? Well, I used to work at them when I was very young.

53:46 What’s with this like doing over 21 things when you’re really young? Yeah, my first gig was at the London Astoria. When you were 11. When I was 15. You know what?

54:01 Your parents did a horrible job raising you. Bless my mum and dad, they didn’t know half of it. The thing is that, I mean, I started when I was 15, but that’s not a big thing these days. I mean, you have DJs and producers who are like 15, 16, that’s standard. I mean, I’ve taught people on point blank who are like 12, 13.

54:24 So when I was 15, there weren’t many DJs. I was like the only kid in my fifth year at school who had decks and everyone thought I was weird because I didn’t wanna be a rapper. You know what I mean? I wanted to play acid house music on decks and go to race and so they all thought I was mad. But yeah, it was like, you know, my first gig was, I was 15, it was Astoria.

54:47 I’d managed to get some part-time work at this rave called Fantasy, which used to be a pirate radio station, which kind of got me into electronic music. Was that in Camden, the Astoria? It was in Charing Cross Road. Tottenham Court Road, rather. They’ve just, they tore it down, like last year, actually, sadly.

55:03 I know, I was gutted, man. But yeah, that was like New Year’s Eve, just before my 16th birthday. I wasn’t even old enough to be in the club, I was playing so that was I you know I got into it quite early and yeah I used to it’s I mean crazy sort of big open air raves I mean we used to me and my friends we used to go and do flyers we used to work for flyer club flyer companies as well so we get free tickets to the raves and I remember one of them called perception which was like a big open air you know ten thousand people it’s where the prodigy first started playing they used to do these big raves before they picked up guitars where did they do something like it was just mostly in like the Midlands there was in the 80s late 80s there was a lot of raves illegal raves but I was just too young for that I’d never really I was too young for acid house in sort of 88 89 I got into it 1990 by then there was like big events in the Midlands Cambridge and Oxfordshire and and so you used to drive out into the middle of Oxford into the finer field 10,000 people. Yeah. And so pictures from back then. Actually, no, that’s one thing I’m really gutted about. Actually, I never had a camera when I was a kid. I never, you know, a few of my friends have a few pictures. But yeah, it’s I don’t have any pictures, but I’ve got flies. It’s like, but that’s the case when you’re always having the most fun, you forget to take pictures. Sure.

56:26 That’s always like the good sign. Yeah, it’s one of the I noticed that I never take a camera when I go on holiday or anything like that, because it’s the quickest thing to take you out of the moment it’s like you’re thinking what should I be taking a picture of this instead of just having fun you’re thankful later especially 20 years later yeah boys this is pretty much rounded it up I just want to get in any context if you want to get in touch with you I know your your Twitter is at Jonny Miller yeah J-O-N-N-Y-M-I double L-E-R and your label and how do they find you if you want them to find you so far guests don’t want to be found no it’s cool we’re on SP audio sorry SP dash audio.com SP so Sierra Papa dash audio.com SP okay SP dash audio that’s sonar pilot audio that’s the label and the school I work at is called point blank online that’s point blank online dotnet and all my music can mixes DJ mixes and stuff that’s at soundcloud.com slash Jonny Miller okay cool and they can find you on Facebook and Twitter yeah I think I’m I’m johnnymuller.music, I can’t remember man, I can’t embarrasing, but actually all my contacts are on my Soundcloud page, that’s just soundcloud.com slash johnnymuller, that’s the best.

57:35 And if they want private tuition, they can hook you up and meet you up in London and stuff like that? Yeah, definitely. I’ve got a few people that I see regularly, you know, teach regularly, but yeah, always looking for new people. I had a really good time with johnnymuller for two days, I mean it was like eight hours each day, it was pretty hard. It was cool, wasn’t it?

57:48 It was a lot of fun, and you were very patient with me, and no, we had a good time. It was great. It was good. So I recommended, it is kind of a fun thing to kind of do this little different, and be able to DJ your own house party or something. I would not have the confidence to do that, but maybe if I spend a little more time with this.

58:09 Anyways, dude, thanks for coming on. That was really informative, man. We got a nice little slice into it, and I think what it’s like, what you do. Thanks for having me. Well, next time, I’m going to ask about DJ groupies.

58:17 Yeah, another another myth This guy plays it so close to the best So until next time it’s about the journey cool guys. Thanks for coming