Showcase - Bobby C Sound TV

If that wasn’t enough, Bobby recently got a shout out by the Godfather of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa on a recent remix for Ft. Knox Recordings. Bobby C Sound TV is one Bobby Collins a producer and audio-visual DJ hailing from Denver, Colorado. Bobby has been messing around with electronic music production for about 10 years.

The past few years have seen him busier than ever on the production front with remixes and releases on 11 different labels worldwide and jumping on multiple top 10 lists for Juno Download and Beaport. He recently made the soundcloud weekly top 10 as well making their hottest tracks list for one of his fully original tracks, Neon Night Light.

His Ray Charles remix made it to #4 on The Hype Machine’s most popular list which was the third time he made their top 20 list. Many more releases are on the way and his Soundcloud page has been getting thousands of plays and downloads each week while his youtube channel is fast approaching 400,000 plays.

His tracks have been turning up in DJ sets all around the world as of late to packed dancefloors everywhere.

1) Tell us a bit about your music (genre, inspiration source, goals)

I describe my music as “Laser Funk”. It’s pretty eclectic, but I tend to stick to bass-heavy, mid-tempo tunes with dashes of glitch, electro (old and new) and old school hip-hop elements. Basically I try and create music I’d like to hear if I was going out to a club. Over the years I’ve been very inspired by Coldcut and pretty much anyone off the Ninja Tune roster, but these days I love listening to a lot of Glitch hop artists like Opiuo and Tipper. My greatest love of all and the best party music of all time is still Golden Age Hip-Hop from the late 80’s and early nineties, actually pretty much any hip-hop from the mid 90’s or earlier. A lot of my goals are starting to happen as I’ll be touring in a bunch of different countries this year and really I just wanna make the best music possible and play the biggest shows I can and grow as an artist.

2) How do you use Massive in your productions?

Massive usually is used for creating basslines, but I’ve created some really nice leads and polys that help round out my tunes from textural standpoint, but it’s great for bass as I’m sure a lot of producers will agree.

3) Can you tell us about the creation of a specific sound in one of your tracks?

A little over a year ago I heard “No Sex For Ben” by The Rapture and thought it was a great tune with an almost D.C. Go-Go sound to it that I love. I thought there was room for a little more low end and a bit heavier beat. The main bass in it was a patch I had been messing around with for months to try and get right. I finally got it working the way I wanted and used it to add some rubbery, chunky low-end to the track. The sound itself is pretty straight forward and I’ll attach it so users can have it. Basically it’s just 2 Square-Saw waves with varying intensity, I run em both through a Lowpass 4 and then assign the cutoff to a performer setting on LFO 5. I also assign the same performer to the drive on a Classic Tube to act as an exciter of sorts and add some clarity to the low end so the listener can hear the modulations better. It’s a pretty simple sound, but when used effectively it’s huge and sounds great on a big system and you can always tweak it to get more out it.

4) Tell us a technique in Massive you use not many know about?

Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve discovered any techniques that no one else knows about. I wish I had, but the tutorials from Massivesynth are kicking open doors for me all the time and I think anyone who reads this would do better to read everyone of them thoroughly as they’ll get worlds more out of that than anything I could say. The recent tutorial on randomization would be a great place to start.

5) How has MassiveSynth.com helped you on your production journey?

massivesynth has really shown that automation is not boring or busy-work. It unlocks worlds upon worlds when producing. I used to hate writing lanes of automation and trying them out and thought it was such boring nerdiness, but using Massive and realizing that every last thing thing can be automated in a myriad of ways has show me that automating is a blast and to apply that eagerness to the other programs I use. It has also shown that experimentation in electronic music production is more important than all the tutorials or online classes you can ever take. Get into your program and start tweaking knobs and automating everything you can to see what sounds you’ll get. Don’t be intimidated or overthink it. Just get in there and start messing around. It’s a blast!