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Texas-based producer and musician Chad Cisneros began his career in the heady world of electronic music and, after a successful run on some of the world’s biggest stages, decided to expand his sonic palette beyond the beats of nightlife.
These days, Chad can be found making music at his studio in Austin, running a record label based in London, and building a deep spiritual practice with his gurus in North India. The common thread among all these ventures is his belief in the power of sound.
We sat down with Chad recently to find out about his musical evolution, how UA’s Apollo Gen 2 interfaces integrate with his creative workflow, his thoughts on the eternal ‘analog vs digital’ debate, and what he is looking forward to as he expands his musical horizons.
Take us through your journey in music and how your sound developed.
I really fell in love with electronic dance music at the age of 15. When I was in college at The University of Texas at Austin, all my electives were dedicated to audio engineering, but I also studied remix theory and sound design, and was doing weird stuff with synthesizers.
So, although I was at school learning things the old way, like how to mic up a drum kit, work a compressor, and work on a console, all the things I was actually using to make music were digital. That allowed me to get comfortable with breaking the rules early on. Traditionally, you’re supposed to keep the master bus clean, but we were doing these crazy master chains with insane dynamic settings and mixing to get a specific result because we knew the mix was going to end up in a live environment, and we wanted it to be really powerful. With electronic dance music specifically, because the stages are so big and some of the audio systems are so hi-fi, you can really dial in the sound.
Dave [Reed] and I started making records together as Tritonal around 2008, and we had a really amazing, successful run. We've got platinum and gold records in North America, toured the world many times over, and we have over a billion streams. In 2019, we did more than 120 shows, and then COVID hit. We’d had a good run for 12 to 13 years, and when that shut down, it became a time of introspective contemplation for us as artists.
My children were very young then, so I was really asking myself some deep questions about what we were doing with our sound and our brand, like, “Are these shows actually helping to awaken consciousness or not?” That was when we launched a deeper, more authentic project called PRAANA, which is progressive melodic dance music, centered around a philosophy and the metaphysics of sound.
And now, I'm a co-owner of a London-based record label called Enhanced Music; we also have the Colorize label and a publishing company. I also work with other artists in fields of music like ambient, sound medicine, solfeggio frequencies, and even ragas and mantra. So for me, since COVID, there's been a much deeper introspection. I've been to India six or seven times and studied with a master in the Yoga Vedantic tradition in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Those practices are so powerful, and when you begin to step beyond thought and transcend the mind through meditative practices and techniques, you are able to go to greater depths in the unboundedness of the self. One’s message begins to change, and one's desires begin to alchemize and transform as well. I'm just not as interested in nightlife culture as I once was. I think some of that is age, some of that is being a yogi and a dad, and some of that is understanding what's important and what's not.
What is your take on the benefits of analog vs digital gear, since you use both extensively?
The hard thing about analog, when you're young, is that it's so expensive! [Laughs] When you're in college, you don't have any money, but if you have a little Groovebox, you can work with it. Back in the day, when I was in college, there were computers, although computation, CPU power, and RAM were nowhere near what they are now, so Digital Performer, Pro Tools, and Logic could only do so much, and it wasn't a whole hell of a lot, to be quite honest. People were still using samplers, MPCs, Korgs, and Roland Grooveboxes and 303s, and I loved that.
Now, I've earned the freedom to work in this great sonic space, and I have a real appreciation for the sound itself. With analog, there's this alive quality to the process. There's a tonality with tubes and diodes and real transistors; there’s real electricity, and real components that do something to sound. There's an unpredictability about it that I love. Like, I have this Dangerous Music BAX EQ that I love, which only has a few settings for bass and treble, so there are no choices, really. With analog, you end up printing audio a lot, and because you do that, there's a choicelessness about it. You're going to use that stem, that bus print, or whatever it is, because it's printed, so then you move forward.
With projects that are all in the box, there are almost infinite choices, so you can go back forever and get attached to these weird little loops, get involved with the automation, or with some little thing you're doing, and it can bog the psyche down sometimes. I find freedom in moving forward, just printing it and moving on. That's a different style of working.
Now, a plug-in is exacting in what it does, and that is also beautiful because it's instantaneous. When you're channeling and writing music, there's a crystallization of an idea into an actual piece of music, and I love that about plug-ins because sometimes creativity lives right on the very split second of now. I'm such a fan of digital. Take a plug-in like Serum 2, for example, you can't do that out here in analog. Serum is an instrument, and it should live where it lives and how it lives.
The point I'm trying to make is that it’s a mix of digital and analog. You see this onslaught of so many AI tools, and I think music's going to be more and more driven in that direction. To me, what's interesting is taking things that are digital and processing them with electricity out in the real world and resampling and working with them in ways that are a little more random and unpredictable. I think that's so fun!
What drew you to the Universal Audio Apollo x8p Gen 2 interface?
I have the x8p and the x16 and I love both of them. Also, Console, with its virtual capabilities, is incredible and the preamps on the x8p are amazing.
I've got a Dangerous Music LIASON on a TT analog patch and certain gear half-normalled to the Dangerous, so I can use LA-2As, 6176s, Black Boxes, and Shadow Hills Compressors as insert effects and switch their order in an instant without repatching.
Simultaneously, there's a parallel mix knob, and say I'm using the Manley SLAM!, which has this really cool overdriven, tubular sound; sometimes all you want is 20% of that. You don't want 100% of that, so having a parallel mix knob with the Dangerous on the patchbay with the x16 and x8p is great. It gives me so much flexibility to send I/Os. Like this pedalboard I have in the studio, which is 16 I/O; those loops come to the patchbay, and those patchbays work with Console to send audio around the room.
On this side wall, I have 16 I/O normalled to the patchbay that I can instantaneously hit with the x16. The x8p and x16 are normalled to an RND 5059 summing mixer, which allows me to also instantaneously insert my UnFairchild compressor, the Elysia Alpha compressor, my H9000 effects unit, for example. So I have a lot of I/O on side-chained things for master bus compression and multi-effects processors where I need I/O.
I could even add another x16, but I've already got so much flexibility with just those two cards. And when you start doing things in the analog realm, like creating pedal boards, and you're doing all this reamping and reconversion, it can get really fun.
But, ultimately, I think it's more fun if you have an organized system in which to do that all from one patchbay, and a lot of people have it all going every which way, but it all comes down to fundamentals. You have to do it from the ground up, and that all comes down to I/O. So, for me, the x8p is amazing.
What features of the Apollo interfaces do you find particularly impactful on your sound?
It's got to be UAD’s Console; I use it all the time. For example, when I had a vocalist here recently to set up a cue, for video recordings, and just for sending audio around, actually. Everything on my CPU is a Virtual Channel on my Console, so I can grab audio from anything at any time, from anywhere.
It's always listening, and it’s sendable. That is amazing, and I can have anything be a sound source, so to me, Virtual is so important. And then, you have the flexibility of the I/O with the patchbay, which I love.
I think the x8p and x16 are amazing. They're exponentially more amazing when they're paired correctly with the patchbay system, where you can really go to work on using your I/O flexibility quickly. So, for me, that's really what it is about.
My ten-year-old daughter has a friend called Colby, who's an actress, and she needed to do a voiceover for this sci-fi project. Now, I'm not going to necessarily create a patch with the 6176 and dial in two LA-2As and send it up to the Shadow Hills… What I did was I pulled up UAD’s LA-2A Gray, an UnFairchild, and a Precision Maximizer plug-in and recorded her in 10 minutes. I feel like there's a beauty in that – knowing when to warm up something and really go in, and when to just use the plug-in.
What do you think of the Apollo x8p’s Auto-Gain feature?
So good! Especially on the fly, when you're working and trying to figure out your signal. There's always things to learn. That's the beauty about this thing: I'm a student first, and I think staying in the seat of the student has always benefited me, as a producer, a composer, and as a devotee in life.
That's great advice. Were there any special considerations while configuring the interface for your space?
I feel like what I have is enough. I was thinking I might get two x16s, but I quite like the x8p's preamps. They're so flexible, and honestly, I'm not doing band stuff; if I was doing a band studio where this was the room and there was another room with a piano and a whole guitar rack and all that, then that's a different situation in which maybe going more into the Dante setup might be needed, and the x16D works with Dante.
For what I do in this room, which is electronic and ambient music, the way I'm running it is with pedal boards, a few synthesizers, and then a bunch of mastering gear. With the x8p and the x16 I have, that's enough channels for me. I think really understanding what you do and how it's best for you to do it is everybody's own little experience and experiment. I also feel like adding limitations forces creativity. It comes down to that choicelessness thing.
If I only give you five colors and tell you to do something, the choicelessness amplifies creativity. It's sometimes about making decisions and going with them, and sometimes it’s about taking the Moog and going to a different room, sitting on the couch, and going into the super deep submenus.
Your state of consciousness is actually the most critical component in what you're creating at any given moment, and when you start to operate in flow, you start to operate in harmony. There's an effortlessness in the way in which you can move through the world, which is a beautiful thing. A lot of times, I'm like, “Wow, I really want to make music that helps people go deeper and deeper into that state, because that state is the ultimate healer”.
How are you liking the LA-2A compressors?
They're amazing! I opened the manual and realized that you can take a shielded cable and link them via the terminals by unracking the units and opening them up, so I'm going to do that so that they're stereo-linked.
I love them. You get this sort of warm blooming of the low mids, and they sound incredible. That's why people love them; it does one thing, and it does one thing really, really well.
It's a classic for a reason! What's it been like working with Alex St Cin and Vintage King?
I have a great relationship with Alex; we do a lot of stuff together. I actually just ordered a Manley Variable Mu compressor; I got the mastering version with the T-bar mod and MS option. I'm excited because I have the SLAM! and the Massive Passive, and with this compressor, it can go on with a 1:5 ratio, slow attack, medium release, where it's not really doing too much, not really creating a ton of density, it’s just gluing it on the top.
And then I got two more Radial Engineering EXTC Reampers so that I can reamp all the pedals before I send them back in.
What are you looking forward to doing with music in the future?
‘How much can you do with sound?’ This is what's really interesting to me, learning how cadences and rhythms work and then using that in a solfeggio, micro-tuned, harmonics-based frequency structure. I really want to lead these experiences where, sure, there's maybe a bit of wisdom, but primarily we're going to bring in a lot of shakti (energy) into the system, and we're going to use that at its peak in order to experience shunya, the place of no thought, and then we’ll begin this sound journey. My focus, for the next few decades, is teaching but also exploring sound in different applications beyond the club. To me, that is such an interesting future. It all comes down to the music and what you're expressing.
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