Gareth Emery: The Trance Young Gun
Author: Mark Burton
Monday, July 5, 2004
Not just content to stay in the studio, Gareth's also played at gigs for the likes of Slinky, Godskitchen and The Gallery in the UK whilst also having toured Australia, Canada & Sweden. Having initially trained as a classical pianist, before playing lead-guitar in a band, how did he get into trance production- "I got seriously into trance in the golden years of 1998 or so and it was a natural progression to start making it. The hardest thing was learning how to use a computer to make music, because I was coming at it from a musical background, rather than a sound engineering one."
The follow-up to Mistral, Reason to Believe, is just out, and unsurprisingly doing rather well. "It's had plays from all the right people like Marco V, MIKE etc, made it onto all the dance radio shows, and the record's been selling great and has scored highly in the appropriate charts, so I'm told. What more can you want-!" There's also a collab with fellow "Young Gun", Jon O'Bir, Escapade.
What does that sound like- "Wicked, in fact I'm really excited about this one. The first time Jon came down to work with me we just messed about and didn't really get anything done, but we tried again a few months later and things just came together and we finished with a pretty special track. PvD and Tiesto have already both been on it so we've got high hopes."
In addition to releasing under his own name & the GTR pseud, he's also released as Cupa & co-wrote the CERN anthem 'The Message', which took clubland by storm in 2003, getting caned by the likes of Armin et al. Does having so many different production guises give you more artistic freedom- "Definitely, sometimes a record doesn't feel right under a particular guise so it's great to have others to use. The only problem is if people don't realise who's behind them, but I think most people are now clear that Gareth Emery is behind GTR!"
Gareth would also like to diversify into producing different genres of music. "I'd love to, and I do occasionally experiment with bits of house, chillout, etc, but it's more for a break than attempting to do it seriously. If I was a good enough engineer to pick any genre and produce a track in it to the sort of standards I expert from myself, I'd probably do it more often, but at the moment I'm not, so I'd rather improve my skills in making progressive / trance than to be a jack of all trades but master of none, if that makes sense. That said, I'm sure you'll see records by me in other styles at some stage."
He cites CERN as a new production talent worth watching. "CERN are really good, they're starting to get a lot of recognition now, so I'm not sure how much longer I can plug them as a 'hot new production talent'! There are lots of good people out there though, too many to mention, but I've recently been loving Probspot's work on Lost Language, it's simply amazing from a production point of view, and Astrix has been really impressing me with his accessible psy-trance." Does he think it's harder, with regards to getting a good reputation as a DJ, being an established producer and then having to build a DJ career rather than being a DJ who's branched into production- "It's hard whichever way you do it. Established producers who go into DJing get battered because people think they're not good DJs and are only getting gigs off the back of their name, and established DJs who get into producing get battered because people think they're not really mak Tags