Ryan’s studio features the best in software and a few choice pieces of hardware. Let’s take a closer look at his setup…

of the list.”

Cm: What do you find most challenging when composing and producing?

RH: “I’m not musically trained and a lot of what I make is done by ear, so sometimes finding interesting chord progressions can be a struggle. I can put together chords on my MIDI keyboard and edit them in the piano roll but I find I sometimes end up going to the same chord progressions.

“There are some great plugins for this sort of stuff which I find really helpful, like Cthulhu by Xfer and Captain Chords by Mixed In Key. Often I’ll start with one or two chords from one of the plugins and then I’ll get an idea on where I want the progression to go, so I draw the rest in on the piano roll.

“Another challenge I’d say I experience is when trying to use MIDI to recreate a livesounding instrument. It can be hard to get MIDI to sound like it has a human feel to it. There are some great plugins like the Native Instrument Komplete libraries or sometimes I’ll find a sample that has a similar feel to what I want and then mess with the timing/pitch to fit my track.”

Cm: Tell us a little about the track we’re going through on the video?

RH: “This track [The Fire] is a collaboration with Armand Van Helden who lives halfway across the world from me, so the track was made remotely. We’d send stems to each other and then have to wait for feedback from the other person as we’re on different time zones. I ended up moving into Ableton Live to finish the project because that DAW is what Armand uses, so it made it a lot quicker to finish if we were both in the same one.