Neon Vines is an Austin-based electronic musician with an acoustic background in classical piano, drum line, and marimba. She attributes many of the techniques she developed as a marimba player to the skills she uses to produce music today.
A lifelong music hobbyist, she spent several years performing as a vocalist in a wedding band and playing at retirement homes. Not long afterwards she found herself working as an emergency services operator in the Washington, D.C. area, without realizing how much she needed music in her life.
Neon Vines relocated to Austin, Texas where her love for music production was reinvigorated. She recalls hearing an acoustic violin paired with electronic drums and being totally intrigued by the sound, which was paramount to the way she approaches making music now!
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ROLI’s Seaboard is just one of the tools she uses to produce organic electronic music. Please enjoy the conversation we shared at NAMM 2020 below!
A complete transcription of the interview can be found below:
Warren Huart:
Hi everybody, we’re sitting with the rather lovely, Neon Vines. How are you?
Neon Vines:
I’m great. Thank you for having me here. This is awesome.
Warren Huart:
Thank you. I have the flu, which is why I’ve been apologizing. So I’m going to give you the elbow, rather than the handshake. How have you been enjoying NAMM, because we’re in-
Neon Vines:
It’s been crazy. Yeah, really crazy but really good. Especially for the networking. But next year I’m going to have to do some thinking as far as performances because it was pretty hectic.
Warren Huart:
How many performances did you do?
Neon Vines:
I think it was like eight or nine. But 30 minutes sets and running between booths to do that is kind of demanding.
Warren Huart:
And you’re doing it entirely on your own, no help?
Neon Vines:
Yep, all on my own. Yeah.
Warren Huart:
It has been a pretty crazy NAMM.
Neon Vines:
Yeah, definitely.
Warren Huart:
Have you been to any before?
Neon Vines:
I went last year. Yeah. But last year was way different for me because I was with AKAI and they have a private suite and it’s very calm and chill and quiet and nice. So I didn’t really get the full on NAMM experience. But yeah, this year has been crazy.
Warren Huart:
So I presume you use AKAI products?
Neon Vines:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. So last year I did the AKAI Force launch, so that’s why I was there. But yup, that’s the main one.
Warren Huart:
How did you stumble into doing this? What was your trajectory?
Neon Vines:
I guess the interesting thing is that electronic music and any kind of electronic instruments are pretty recent for me because I come from an acoustic background. So I studied classical piano from the age of six through high school. Drum line through high school. Marimba randomly here and there. I was competing in a world class drum line on marimba actually. And I think that the skills I developed on marimba actually were very essential for the seaboard technique. Because the seaboard is my main thing I guess that people associate me with now. And you have to be very accurate with placement because you can play between pitches on the keys. So your body placement is very critical to playing technique. So I find that with marimba it’s the same kind of thing because a marimba is a 10 foot long instrument. So you have to be very aware of where your body is and it has to be in the middle of your playing and everything like that. So I feel like that technique really helped me.
Warren Huart:
There’s a lot of really cool EDM and dance music out there, which I like, but a lot of it is very sound design. But you have sound design, but you also have a musicality. So I think relying on sound design is, doesn’t thrill me at all, I want to hear a melody, I want to hear a tune.
Neon Vines:
Exactly. But I don’t know, I’ve always been trying to find where I wanted to be in music because I knew I wanted music to be in my life obviously. I didn’t know for a long time though, if it would be a hobby or if it would be a full on career. And even if it was a career, I didn’t know what that would look like for me because I just experimented with a lot of different things musically. I sang in a wedding band. I performed at retirement homes and nursing homes and things like that. I sampled a bunch of different-
Warren Huart:
I did all those same kind of things.
Neon Vines:
Did you really? That’s awesome.
Warren Huart:
Yeah. I did working men’s clubs in the North of England when I was like 16 or 17 years old. And I feel like that was a fast track because when you’re doing covers, people look down on doing covers, it’s like no, you’re hearing called sequences and melodies and harmonies, written by some of the greatest songwriters of all time. As much as I love writing on my own, I learn more by playing other people’s songs.
Neon Vines:
Yeah, for sure. Definitely. But I will say that playing the same songs every night is, gets to be a lot.
Warren Huart:
Kind of soul destroying.
Neon Vines:
Yeah, I feel like my interests were just deviating and I was trying to sort of find my place and then I ended up being like, after college I was like, well, I got to make money. I got to figure this out for myself because music, I didn’t know what I was doing. So I got a full time job, working in a cubicle in DC, answering emergency service calls over the phone.
Warren Huart:
Wow. Very admirable.
Neon Vines:
Very intense job.
Warren Huart:
I can only imagine.
Neon Vines:
Very intense. And it was so demanding that after work, the last thing I wanted to do was create and be creative. I just wanted to escape. So after a year of doing that, I just kind of went crazy. I was like, I never realized how much I needed music in my life until I actually couldn’t do it. I could I guess, but you have to be mentally present in order to write a song. It’s not just about having time allocated for it, it’s about having that creative energy. So yeah, I just was zapped of that and it was kind of killing me, so I was like, I got to get out of here. I’m going to go to Austin, Texas. Never been there before.
Warren Huart:
Oh, so you’re not from Austin?
Neon Vines:
Well, I was in DC.
Warren Huart:
I see.
Neon Vines:
Childhood in Houston. Teenage years in DC.
Warren Huart:
Right. DC has a rich kind of a punk and hardcore scene.
Neon Vines:
Yeah they do.
Warren Huart:
Is that still prevalent?
Neon Vines:
It’s a lot of clubbing stuff too. That’s kind of the main, I guess impression that I got from it. But I didn’t really go downtown that much to be honest.
Warren Huart:
Right, to the 9:30.
Neon Vines:
Yeah. Well, 9:30 club for sure, that’s the best club.
Warren Huart:
Were you involved in the DC in any way?
Neon Vines:
Not really. Any kind of work that I did was sort of on the outskirts, like Alexandria area, which is pretty much DC. But I mean, Northern Virginia area is where I would perform. Yeah.
Warren Huart:
Fantastic. So then you decide to get up and move to Austin, which of course is a wonderful music town.
Neon Vines:
Of course and that’s the only reason I went there because honestly I’d never been there, didn’t know anyone there. Just always heard good things and was like, oh my gosh, I just needed to a change.
Warren Huart:
So you hadn’t been to South By Southwest and-
Neon Vines:
No, I’d never been to any of that. But I just needed a drastic change and I just had all my stuff shipped there, didn’t know where I was going to end up living. Ended up getting what I called banana cabana, which was the yellow-ist house ever, blindingly yellow. This tiny little shack, my brother fell through the floor a couple times. It was barely standing, but I loved that house, it was amazing. And I feel like that was the beginning for me where I really started to figure out what I wanted to do and I think it was inspired by just exploring Austin and seeing a lot of kind of hybrid electronic acts, where they have acoustic elements and there’s people maybe playing a violin and then having a drum machine in front of them. That combination for me was really intriguing.
Warren Huart:
Right. I hope that becomes more mainstream.
Neon Vines:
Yeah, for sure.
Warren Huart:
That’s what I’m sort of looking for. I have had a lot of conversations about it when we did our AES panels here, there’s an AES component. We did four panels in a row, a lot of acoustic panels. And I sort of feel that there’s a sort of, if you go back to the early mid nineties you had Massive Attack and Portishead and all these artists that were able to blend organic instruments with program stuff and with samples and things. And it seems to have disappeared. Now it’s all, they just don’t seem to work together anymore.
Neon Vines:
Yeah, that’s a very good point. Yeah. Because there’s a lot of people that just kind of with the electronic stuff, you can just push a button and your whole set just plays. I mean, there’s a lot of people that really are just kind of like barely, it’s just playback. So for me, I’m just trying to introduce those elements, yes, because they sound so good and the production quality is incredible. But combining it with a little more flexibility in performance. A little improv, things that are more acoustic in nature and spontaneous.
Warren Huart:
Yeah. The random, or I like to say the “wrongification.” When you record a real instrument, it’s not the perfect sample. The other thing as well, I make this joke all the time, the instruments I have, are my instruments that I have. So nobody else has that sound. But now everybody has the flexibility to go, oh, you want the most famous orchestra in the world in the most incredible sounding room. We all have access to that now. When I was a kid that was like the Holy Grail. You had to have a half a million dollar budget and to make an album of even one quarter on, let alone-
Neon Vines:
Yeah, that’s crazy.
Warren Huart:
But what was good about that is you would go somewhere, you’d record something and that was your recording. So I think for a lot of people they’re looking for ways to randomize, to make something their own.
Neon Vines:
It’s because electronic music, love it, but it tends to be very sterile in expression, in emotion and feel overall. Because everything’s quantized, everything’s pitch corrected, everything’s so perfect. But yeah, to introduce some kind of fluidity.
Warren Huart:
What is your DAW of choice?
Neon Vines:
Ableton.
Warren Huart:
I was wondering, you see, because the thing about Ableton that, and I’m a Pro Tools guy, I mean I’ve been doing this for a long time. So Pro Tools at that, when I started using DAWs was just so far ahead at least for audio and audio editing. But my experiences with Ableton are insane. I worked with Salaam Remi a couple of years ago on some One Direction stuff. And he would just record everything and just dump it into Ableton, and then create mini tracks from staff. And so suddenly the baseline was playing the high melody and we were creating harmonies from everything. It was insane what it could do.
Neon Vines:
That’s awesome.
Warren Huart:
I immediately downloaded it and then started using it and my head exploded.
Neon Vines:
Yeah. I feel like it depends what your first DAW experience was, to which ones you’re able to really get. Because for me, I cannot get Logic. That’s the one that I just was, I can’t figure out the work flows.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, I agree. And I think also the reality is I’ve spent so long being good at my DAW. It’s frustrating to get in and be like.
Neon Vines:
Because you know what you want to do. You’re just like, where is the setup a track button? So simple but can’t find it. Yep.
Warren Huart:
I think that’s why some people move to Reason because you can copy short cuts and keys and stuff across. So if you came from Pro Tools or Logic or whatever it was, there’s templates or what are they call them? Skins, I think they call them. Where you can do that. But yes, Ableton is a DAW I hear all the time now. All right, so I have the flu, so I’m not going to give you the handshakes so I’ll give you the elbow.
Neon Vines:
Yes. Elbows, that’s where it’s at.
Warren Huart:
Thank you ever so much.
Neon Vines:
Yes. Thank you very much.
Warren Huart:
I’m glad I found you on Instagram. Yeah.
Neon Vines:
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Warren Huart:
Where you kill it by the way.
Neon Vines:
Oh, thank you.
Warren Huart:
We’ll have links to all of your socials as they like to say and everything. And thank you ever so much. If you have questions, please leave the bunch of questions below and have a marvelous time recording and mixing.
