Studio Essentials: Stefan Goldmann

Stefan Goldmann has spent years developing a catalogue of music that exists between the boundaries of club music and more experimental electronic composition.

Through releases on labels including Perlon and Innervisions, alongside his own Macro imprint, he has built a reputation for productions that balance rhythmic precision with a deeper focus on sound design and sonic detail.

A long-time Berghain collaborator, Goldmann has remained closely connected to one of electronic music’s most influential spaces while also continuing to explore different projects involving Berlin’s Philharmonie, and Istanbul’s Tarabya Cultural Academy.

Stefan takes us inside his production environment to highlight the equipment that plays a key role in his creative workflow. From wavetable synthesisers and outboard reverb units, to Oberheim oscillators, he shares insight into the hardware choices that help shape the distinctive sound running throughout his productions.

Check out the full list below, along with insights from Stefan himself.

Polyend Perc

“Lately I’ve quite enjoyed producing with microphones and electroacoustic instruments, bridges between the acoustic world and the processing/programming world. However, I’ve never been really good at playing any instrument in real time. Mechanical instruments solve this issue pretty well. Polyend Perc is a ‘drumming machine’. It’s a system of electronically controlled physical ‘beaters’ which you can apply to any surface. It’s a bit like a robotic drumstick, with the actual movements programmed in MIDI or with a hardware sequencer.

Many producers have been playing around with such systems recently. What I noticed is that I only ever see such mechanical triggers being mounted in fixed positions, which also means one is foregoing about 90% of the possible nuance and expression that comes from moving these things around so that they hit different points on the drum skin or whatever you are using. I mean, no drummer hits the exact same spot twice with the exact same velocity. So why would you?

Hence I did a lot of recording with these, with me ‘playing’ the position and moving them around all over the place. There’s a microphone technique called ‘Blumlein’ – two figure-8 mics at a 90-degree angle. The stereo image you get with this is absolutely stunning. Moving the Perc all around the mics sounds as if the drums are flying around your head. So that’s something I’m enjoying a lot, and it should yield an album sooner or later.”

Waldorf Quantum

“The very first synth I owned, and it was the only synth I owned for quite a few years, was Waldorf’s Microwave II, a digital wavetable synth. Wavetable is a little bit like FM in that, in principle, it can do anything – bass, pads, percussion, lead sounds, weird stuff… you name it. There’s no obvious limit. However, it is a bit tricky to make any of these sound as good as the usual go-to processes do more effortlessly. Just by trying to emulate what other types of synthesizers do, I ended up with quite a sound bank of highly individual patches which I use to this day.

The Quantum is a newer take on wavetable synthesis, with a lot of interesting additional features. It also has a few other sound-generating options, like granular synthesis and a very versatile waveshaper, making it an extremely flexible synth that one could use on anything. I quite enjoy getting sounds that do not come with a whole lot of history behind them, and this individuality or independence of sound somehow always comes with what I manage to do with this one. I mean, I rarely get those “this sounds like a nice FM patch” deja-vus.

If I had to pick one complex polyphonic synth, it would be hard to decide between this one and the Dave Smith Prophet 12. The latter is a more classic subtractive-synthesis analog machine. What is really unique about that one is that it has a sort of effects section between the oscillators and the filters, i.e. you can bend the wave at the source in ways unavailable if you start adding effects after the complete filtering and envelope shaping has already taken place. These two machines pretty much cover anything I could possibly ever need.“

Lexicon 300

“I’m a sucker for reverb, to the degree that I actually made two albums in which all sounds were made with nothing but reverb. I remember when I got the 300, maybe twenty years ago, and instantly everything I was doing sounded about 30% better. Only over time did I realise how reverb, and mostly very short ‘ambience’-type programs, are responsible for a lot of the feel of other producers’ tracks that I really love. Reverb and distortion, really.

The 300 is interesting because it came out between the era of gritty 1980s reverbs such as the Space Station, the AMS RMX16 or the Lexicon 200, and the high-gloss stuff like the Bricasti M7 or TC System 6000. It sounds full and lush and 3D, but at the same time it’s clearly artificial. Which I like. I’m not trying to emulate the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall here. I like artificial, and the 300 can be bent into all sorts of absolutely improbable spaces. So this one has been really important in extending my inputs into space and gluing things together in most of my mixes.

Nowadays I layer different reverbs, sometimes panning them hard left and right so as to get an even more bizarre space for the music to bounce off. But this one will probably remain central forever. Again, there’s a really good plugin version by UAD of the 300’s bigger brother, the 480L. The great thing with plugins is that you can deploy ten of each and fine-tune it to each sound individually. I sometimes catch myself thinking ‘why bother running this through the hardware at all?’, but what keeps me going back to it is often the capacity to ride a fader and use the board’s panning rather than any difference in quality of the effect itself.

The reverb will come back on a stereo pair of faders and I’ll move them when recording the mix in some sort of handmade sidechain compression. When you move the reverb down every time something salient is happening, and I mean responding to two to four events per bar, the mix gains a lot of clarity while also becoming much more ‘organic’. Of course you could automate all of this with envelope followers and compressors, but it would just take too long to reproduce the ear-to-hand interaction that comes with doing it manually.“

Oberheim SEM

“With synths it can be like cooking. Some recipes call for twenty ingredients to come together, and then it takes a lot of experience to get the proportions and sequence right. Other dishes have just four ingredients, and if those ingredients are great on their own, that’s often all it needs. Typically, such a mix is also less sensitive, much more forgiving in respect of timing or proportions. Adding a fifth or a sixth component might actually make matters worse.

The SEM is something like this. Oberheim oscillators just sound like nothing else out there. They seem to have a little resonance somewhere in the harmonics that makes them cut through anything. It’s a very specific ‘shine’ that makes the SEM’s waveform sparkle in the sunlight of a mix. This quality doesn’t get lost when filtered either. So just a basic waveform, possibly with one oscillator synced to the other, a bit of filter, two envelopes… That’s it. Just the best bass right away. I mean, this doesn’t require any ‘sound design’ to speak of. It’s as simple and ready to go as a can of San Marzano tomatoes. Oberheim’s polyphonic synths like the Xpander or OB-X8 have the same quality, by the way, if rich analog polyphonic sounds are your thing. They just cut through anything.

Think about it: The kind of actual notes typically played on a distorted electric guitar are only interesting because distortion adds specific harmonic complexity to them. On the other hand, if you tried the same with five instead of two notes, distortion would just turn everything into mud. The same is true for harmonically rich synth sounds: If you want to use very simple material at the notation level, tones, chords, the kind of ‘sparkle’ one can find in such an analog synth is the ingredient that will lift it to the level of interesting. By contrast, a dull sound will call for more complex tonal content or additional effects to be applied on top.

It’s almost as if there is a certain degree of complexity that is necessary for music to be convincing. If the sound already carries 70% of this, there’s only so much more information you can add before the pot boils over. Take a 303. It’s a similar situation: How many tracks do you know where a 303 has been sent through another five instances of effects? I can’t think of one. It’s such a rich sound already on its own that anything you add becomes a subtraction.”

Ursa Major Space Station

“In the early days I used to always put a little delay on my samples. There was an internal effects card on the Akai S5000, and it allowed you to set different delay times for the left and right channels. It didn’t have note values such as 3/8 or so – you had to set milliseconds. Since I was too lazy to calculate numbers that would match tempo, I’d go by ear and put something like 130ms on the left and 172ms on the right. With very little feedback, this would create something similar to early reflections in a reverb and that really helped glue the independent samples together into one coherent stream.

Since they were all getting the same ‘reflections’, they’d feel like they were in the same room, just without a reverb tail to muddy anything. The Space Station does something similar. It has four ‘taps’, that is, little delays whose levels can be set individually, and then it has a couple of presets that are basically different temporal patterns of those taps. Also, the position in time of those taps is continuously modulated, which makes it way more interesting than if the pattern was static. At the same time, it is an early digital effect, so the 8-bit resolution gives it a slightly rough, metallic edge which I like a lot.

For years I’ve had this on every mix, and I’m basically running all parts through it. On my mixer, it’s not even on an aux send, but a bus. So I just punch tracks in and out of it. It’s just extremely satisfying once you cut off the low end, you don’t want things to bounce around down there. Actually, there’s a plugin by Audiority which gets this one quite right too.“

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