Music saved Wolfgang Gartner’s life (Sick ass electro house Producer)

* Written by: Terry Church

If you saw a teenager wasted on drugs, and if you’d be told that he’d done jail time, couldn’t pay his rent, and was in debt, if you heard he was in rehab trying to come clean, you wouldn’t believe that years later he’d become one of the most respected producers in dance music.

But Joey Youngman, the California kid who was once lost to drugs, landed his first record deal whilst he was still in rehab. It showed that music was all he needed, so he sobered up, produced records, and eventually became Wolfgang Gartner [a], the electro house sensation. Music saved Joey Youngman’s life.

“From about the age of 14 to 20, I did lots of drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. I finally just hit a bottom, had no money, couldn’t pay my rent, was in debt and totally fried on ecstasy and every other snortable substance,” says Joey Youngman, who celebrated his seventh year of sobriety last Sunday. “I checked into rehab at 20. I got clean.”

Youngman met a kid whilst he was in rehab who was learning how to produce hip hop in a studio near the rehab facility. “I taught him how to use the gear in return for him letting me use the studio on the weekends to make house music. That’s when my first record got signed,” he says.

How many years could you bang your head against a brick wall, in the hope that one day you might break through? Youngman never gave up. “I sent demos to record labels for seven years prior to that first record, and within a year of getting clean I finally signed something. Because I spent years of my life being a douchebag, loser, criminal, drug addict, and general piece of shit, I learned what not to do. I really owe all my success to that. Sometimes it is very inconvenient to be sober in this business, but for my personality, there’s just no way I can do it. This is the only way I can keep my shit straight.”

Wolfgang Gartner during his anonymous days. He revealed his true identity in June 2008

There is no poison, only persistence and nicotine, running through Youngman’s veins now (he tried to quit smoking but found he couldn’t make music without it).

The producer, now based in Austin, Texas, attributes his current success as Wolfgang Gartner to “16 years in the studio”. That past includes deep house releases on labels like Tango, Om Records, Naked Music, Doubledown and his own imprints Fetish Recordings and Jackin’ Tracks, as well as a number of successful aliases like Mario Fabriani, Frequent Fliers, and White Collar Criminals.

Joey Youngman transformed into Wolfgang Gartner in 2007. Wisely, he chose to hide his identity behind a mask and let the music speak for itself. Gartner’s mainroom-slaying electro house sold by the bucketloads and within a year he had three Top 10 hits on Beatport, a Pete Tong-backed Essential New Tune, two video game licenses, and a whole load of hype (Wolfgang Gartner revealed his true identity in June 2008).

“It was just time for something new,” says Youngman, looking back. “A bunch of different things happened at once, and it was sort of like a ‘stars aligning’ type situation where I just knew it was the right thing to do at the time. And it was.”

That is the sort of thing that comes more from your gut and your heart, than your mind. It’s something you just feel, and you either feel it or you don’t.

Yet whilst Wolfgang Gartner’s productions happened to resonate with global DJs, Youngman’s huge bass-heavy house sound came down to experience. “I know guys who have loads more tech knowledge than me that can’t write a good track to save their lives. It’s about knowing what works and what doesn’t,” says Youngman. “It’s about knowing what kind of sounds do it for people and what sounds don’t. Even though my previous style was a night-and-day difference, it’s still the same set of principles. It is the same with all music actually. And that is the sort of thing that comes more from your gut and your heart, than your mind. It’s something you just feel, and you either feel it or you don’t. I don’t know if that part can be learned or not.”

Youngman may be modest about his tech knowledge, but his accomplished sound, gear list (see below), and the way he speaks, suggests otherwise.

“In my studio I have a loads of hardware. Synths wise, I have a Moog Little Phatty, Dave Smith Poly Evolver, Roland Juno-106, Roland V-Synth, Korg N264. For samplers, I have an E-mu ESI-32 and the E-mu Emax 12 bit sampler,” he says.

“For compressors, I have two Empirical Labs Distressors with British Mode, and one Cranesong STC-8. For EQ I have an SPL Tube Vitalizer. And I have a bunch of random old effects processors that I don’t use anymore.

“I don’t use the ESI-32 sampler at all anymore, but occasionally use the Emax to process individual drum hits in batches and get them nice and crunchy, like once a year or something. The compressors I went nuts on last year and decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of mixing down out-of-the-box since I had to mixdown on an analog Mackie board and patch the compressors as inserts, so I’m not really using them anymore.

“Although we did process the master of ‘Yin & Yang’ through my Cranesong’s analog harmonics circuit to warm it up. That was the last time I’ve used it.”
Studio techniques

There are few producers in electro house that generate such fervent discussion about sound techniques as Wolfgang Gartner (Deadmau5 is another). Whilst Youngman is quick to point out that “there may be some production questions I’m unwilling to answer if they pertain to secret tricks”, he is able to share a few.

The giant gut wrenching bassline in his track ‘Flashback’ for instance, was created by “my trusty Dave Smith Poly Evolver”, he says. “The oscillators are hard-panned left and right, which is why it is super-ultra-uber-stereo. I narrowed the stereo field of it a bit so it wasn’t too stereo, but still nice and wide. I spent a long time on that track, and it took me ages to get the balance of bass, kick and low end right. All in all, it was probably a good week of tweaking.”

Gartner doesn’t do step recording, preferring to play synths as midi tracks, which he then quantizes. “I then send the midi to the hardware synth, and when I’ve got the sound and pattern right, I record it as audio.”

Ableton Live is another trick. Youngman uses it for all his instrumental dance tracks now. “It’s just geared for dance music in every way,” he says. “It’s so fluid, you can drag and drop things from here to there and everywhere, and the way the workflow goes with scenes and arrangement is a totally new and different approach to what I’m used to, but it’s so perfect for loop-based production. I start my tracks by building it out in loop-form. Phase two is laying it out as a full track.”

For vocals though, Cubase is still Youngman’s tool of choice, “Ableton still has a long way to go before it can be on the same level as Cubase in that respect.”

Constant change

Wolfgang Gartner’s music is so much more than just sonic supremacy though. Beyond the perfectly compressed drums, earth shattering bass, and rocket propelled build ups, there is constant change, something which Youngman attributes to the way his brain works.

“My music has always been like that, since the very first dance tracks I made. It’s just something about my brain I guess, or the way I hear and feel music in my head,” he says. “I think one possible reason for it is when I’m making a track, I come up with the main loop, and after I’ve heard it so many times, I start to think ‘this sucks, it needs something else, I can do better than that’.

“And then I make some more sounds and parts, and then I have this sort of biological desire to make use of every single little thing I created and not throw anything away, so I feel like I didn’t waste any of my time.

“I end up using all of the different parts and sounds I made during the course of writing a track, so that I feel good knowing none of my hard work went to waste. That’s a pretty fucked up thought process but I actually think that’s the main reason why my tracks have so many different parts and changes.”

Youngman’s desire for constant change also extends to the music that he sources for his DJ sets. He admits he’s a complete perfectionist and will very rarely leave a track be.

“Basically I re-edit like 90% of the music I buy. And I re-edit and mash the shit out of them too,” he says. “Some of them I’m make into whole new tracks, and I’ll spend a whole week in the studio doing re-edits and mash-ups.

“I like to find tracks that have cool grooves or parts, and turn them into monsters by adding dynamics, throwing more on top of them. I’ve also started to take parts from my own tracks, and throw them over other peoples’ tracks as re-edits to play live, because the crowds always seem to want to hear my stuff, but I get tired of playing it all the time.”

Youngman’s quest for perfection in his DJ box, harks back to the days when, “The really good DJs were the guys that found all the dope white labels that nobody else had. That mentality seems to have changed in the industry over recent years, but I have really hung onto it,” he says.

I like to try and blend as much as possible whenever possible, so because I spend more time in the indie dance section than anywhere else these days, I find stuff that has some really great ideas and still works with my sounds, and then I re-edit and mash them up

So rather than try to find white labels in the era of digital pervasiveness, Youngman makes his own kind of white labels - exclusive re-edits of tracks that only he has.

“It’s damn near impossible for me to find music that I find absolutely perfect. I can find tracks that have cool ideas and parts, but most of the time they just aren’t quite ‘there’, so I improve them.

“I’m also sort of against playing stuff that does really well in the charts because everybody else is playing it, so I spend days and days digging to find hidden gems that didn’t make it into the sales charts.

“It’s actually hard to find good stuff that doesn’t sell, because oddly enough the general DJ public seems to have pretty good taste! So I find the hidden gems, and usually they’ve got a great foundation or a couple of really cool segments and I make a new track out of them.

“Sometimes I’ll take their intro beats and add a completely new bassline, effects, and an accappella and basically, just make a new track. I’ll spend four or five hours on some of the more in-depth ones. It all stems from my desire to play music that nobody has heard before.”

Youngman finds himself often gravitating towards the more obscure genres on Beatport, and away from the crowds. He may be, more often than not, classified as an electro house artist but he rarely sources his music from there. “For whatever reason, in that particular genre, the stuff that most other people are buying and playing doesn’t really do it for me,” he says.

“I buy a decent amount of techno. I buy a lot of indie dance stuff, but most of it is really not formatted properly for DJs, at least not for my style of mixing, as most of those tracks are designed for slamming in and out of a mix really abruptly, which isn’t my DJing style.

“I like to try and blend as much as possible whenever possible, so because I spend more time in the indie dance section than anywhere else these days, I find stuff that has some really great ideas and still works with my sounds, and then I re-edit and mash them up.

“Personally I would still classify most of it as electro house, but for whatever reason it has just gotten filed away in the indie dance section. And when I play it, nobody ever knows what it is, which is exactly what I want.”
Influences

From the bleepy urban electro house of ‘Clap’, to the disco-fueled late night progressive on ‘Sesso Buono’, from the jump-up electro tech of ‘Montezuma’, to a Beethoven re-interpretation on ‘Woolfgang’s 5th Symphony’, Youngman’s desire to keep moving forwards is ever-present in his productions.

His influences are a little bit murkier. Despite making his first dance moves to DJs like Mark Farina and Derrick Carter - “DJs known for playing more groove-oriented sets with less change and dynamics” - he’s not influenced by their DJ style. By contrast, Youngman is a complete fiddler on the decks.

“I fiddle like a motherfucker. I’ve heard some really great sets this year, but for the particular sound that I am playing, there’s nobody that I’ve heard doing quite what I’m doing. Everybody who gets classified as ‘electro house’ seems to be playing this more generic run-of-the-mill shit that I really can’t get into,” he comments.

“I go through the electro top 100 on beatport and there are usually maybe a couple of tracks in there that I like. That’s not to say that it’s all garbage, but none of it really hits the spot for me. There are a lot of good DJs out there but I don’t have any ‘heros’ right now like I used to when I was growing up. By far my biggest inspiration is playing really good gigs.

“I come home and try and hold on to those snapshots from the club, the way people reacted when I played certain things, the lights, the way the compression kicks in when the beat drops, and use that as my inspiration and influence.”

Remixes and Kindergarten

Wolfgang Gartner hasn’t done a remix in eight months, because Youngman usually prefers to have complete control of his music on his own label Kindergarten. However, he does on occasion accept a remix project if he feels it’s something truly special and worthwhile.

“I just did a MSTRKRFT and John Legend remix because I wanted to be a part of it, because I like the original artists, and because I think John Legend is the best thing since sliced bread. I also think it will help get my name out there to an audience I may have not been exposed to yet. So that is my criteria now. Projects like that, where I love the original and have respect for the artists and label, I will remix.”

“If there’s an artist out there that I have huge respect and admiration for, I’d want to work with them, rather than remix something they’ve already come up with. That would be the ultimate goal. Not to say remixing can’t be fun with certain projects, but it can be a bit ‘boxy’ sometimes. It feels like you’re working in a box.”

Youngman has no plans to extend the scope of his Kindergarten label beyond being a home for Wolfgang’s tracks.

“My plan is to continue doing exactly what I’ve been doing - it’s basically just an outlet for my own music,” he says. “I have decided not to have any more remixes done of my music. I get a lot of offers from friends and other producers to do remixes, but I’ve decided I think it’s best and simplest if I just keep it to my own originals, at least for now. I don’t have time to run a real record label. I barely have time to run my own little wannabe record label so I am just keeping it as simple as possible.”

And who can blame Joey Youngman for wishing for simplicity? As his life tumbled down all around him, he kept plugging away. For seven years his music was rejected, but in the end, his break through came, as he faced the brink. Music is all he ever needed, and he realises that now.