How To Create Synth Sounds For A Living – Interview with Rob Jevons

Warren Huart:

Hi, everybody. Hope you’re doing marvelously well. I am sitting here… well, not literally, sort of transatlantically, with Rob Jevons. How are you?

Rob Jevons:

Not bad, thank you. How are you?

Warren Huart:

I’m good. I’m good. I’m enjoying actually quite a gloomy day in Los Angeles. I’ve been hearing over back home, actually, you’ve been having some record high hot days. What’s it like there?

Rob Jevons:

Not so bad today, but lately it’s been hot. It’s been too warm for me. I like it warm, but not too warm.

Warren Huart:

Marvelous. You have an interesting description, but then also an interesting career path, meaning, for instance, your opening gambit on your bio is “British Sound Designer Rob Jevons’ credits include The Prodigy’s number one ‘No Tourists.'” What I like about your career, listening to the stuff you’ve been working on, is now people are starting to recognize how important that is a part of modern music, how sound design, which when I was a kid, of course, sound design meant explosions and…

Rob Jevons:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

… and Foley and stuff like that, but now increasingly music that we’re listening to is just… people… we’re finding new and more exciting ways of making the sonic landscape seem really exciting. So how did you get into sound design? Did you come in through music? Tell us a little bit about your journey.

Rob Jevons:

Well, I suppose what it was really that got me interested in that side of things… because I come from a musical family. My mom’s a piano teacher and my dad’s a bass player. He was in a band in the ’70s. It was signed to Polydor and all that. And so I had that, like a traditional music upbringing, I suppose, but then one Christmas my sister had Roland D-10 synthesizer. I stuck the headphones on, started messing around. I was thinking, “Wow, this is blowing my mind.”

Rob Jevons:

On a daily basis, all I was listening to was piano scales for about eight hours a day when I was a kid.

Warren Huart:

Oh, because your mom’s teaching piano.

Rob Jevons:

Yeah, yeah. But we only had one CD in the house at the time, and that was a Little Richard CD, a live CD. Listened to it over and over again and thinking, “Wow, that dude can play piano.” So I started to get obsessed with Little Richard a bit, but then I was listening to the drums and I thought, “Oh, I want to be a drummer now. Forget the piano.”

Warren Huart:

Did you join bands? Did you start producing stuff? What was the sort of next trajectory as you started to become a musician?

Rob Jevons:

It was just one random day in the house, and we had my cousin over and he said, “Why don’t we start a music club?” Which I thought we’d just sit around listening to records or whatever, but he had other ideas. So he started playing on the guitar and he went, “Play on the synth, play on the synth.” And then my brother was just hanging around going, “Well, what do I do?” For some reason, there was a load of drums in the shed. And then I was in a band with them. Not like that right? We weren’t like that for ages. That was only for like six months, whatever, until I really got a drum kit, and then my cousin got an actual guitar.

Rob Jevons:

I really wanted to record something so we could listen back. My dad gave us this old reel-to-reel. What we had was just a dynamic mic. We plugged that in, stuck the mic out in the room, hooked up the reel-to-reel and just went for it. But then that wasn’t enough for me. In the kitchen at home, there was this old radio that had a telly and a cassette deck. I thought, “Wow, that cassette, when you press record on that, it sounds really good.” And so what I did was I took that upstairs to where all the gear was set out, and then we had this PA desk. And I thought, “Ah, hang on. I could stick all the mics in there and then put it into this thing.” So I did that, and then we… It was like, “Ready? Let’s record. Go.” And then halfway through the song looked at… I was like, “What’s that smell?” And I looked at this thing, and this thing was just smoke coming out of it and everything, and I’d ruined it. But it was a great experience, but I was so disappointed that I couldn’t do any more recording.

Warren Huart:

But now you’re in the ultimate world, which is, frankly, about as far away from it. You’re now in sound design, so now you’re in the manipulation of digital information and the insanity that we can do with it. What a DAW do you work in?

Rob Jevons:

You’re ready for this?

Warren Huart:

I want to take a guess, but…

Rob Jevons:

F…Go on. Probably…

Warren Huart:

Well, I heard you say the first letter. That doesn’t surprise me. Mick Gordon also works in FL Studio. So when did you discover FL Studio? Were you a really early adopter when it first came out, when it was still FruityLoops?

Rob Jevons:

Yeah. I think there was no piano roll or whatever it is, mixer in the… It was just a little sequencer. I just used it to make beats, and then I used to export that into a… Do you remember ACID?

Warren Huart:

Of course. Yeah. ACID was amazing. Yeah.

Rob Jevons:

Yeah. So I just used to create collages of audio in there, of stuff that I’d made in FL, like the beats and all that. I used to mess around with Sound Forge and do most of the interesting, more like sound design type of things in there, like adding affects and manipulating the audio in mad ways.

Warren Huart:

It’s old. I mean, was it late ’90s?

Rob Jevons:

Yeah, something like that.

Warren Huart:

I remember in Pro Tools, it was… you’d open it up as a separate software. I can’t remember now specifically, but what I do remember is you could drag and drop loops in there and re-time them immediately, years before any… years before Ableton could do it, years before even Elastic Audio was in Pro Tools. And it would just come in and go… Time it to the new tempo.

Rob Jevons:

Band. When I used to record bands and stuff, I was using Cubase, but as an electronic musician or whatever, it works, for some people, but it didn’t really work for me. The workflow, it was too slow to do things. And then in FL, you can do things in like 20 seconds where in other things it will take you like five minutes. And I thought, “Well, you know, what’s the point? I might as well save myself some time, use it,” despite the negative things that FL had at the time. It’s not like that anymore. Everyone’s different. It’s just a tool to make music with. It doesn’t matter what it is. And as you say, man, if it sounds good, it is good. It doesn’t matter what you use.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, definitely. In your bio here, they talk about doing a whole bunch of synth programming for Ashun Sound Machines, AXiS native instruments, Steinberg, Nord, Electron. Are you doing stuff also with FL Studio?

Rob Jevons:

I have done some stuff. It’s more licensing, really. So I go to them with a pack and they go, “Okay, we’ll have it.”

Warren Huart:

Do you find, then, for you part of the creative spark, because this is what I’m sensing is, the creation from scratch, as opposed to going to a preset and then manipulating it? There’s an excitement, a… I don’t know what the right word is. An adrenaline rush when you’re actually doing it from scratch yourself.

Rob Jevons:

There’s nothing better when you get given a synth or something and you have to program it and then turn it on, press the button, and it’s just a sine wave, the initialized sound. And you’re thinking, “Okay, where can we go from here?” And then you start messing around with it. And then you think you’ve taken it… pushing it really hard, trying to make it sound bad on purpose. That’s what I kind of do to begin with. When you reach that point of you think, “Okay, I’m happy with that,” and it’s like, “Okay, next sound.”

Warren Huart:

Yep.

Rob Jevons:

It’s just that throughout the day…

Warren Huart:

Do you visualize stuff in your head and try to figure out how you’re going to get that sound?

Rob Jevons:

Yeah. It’s going to sound a bit weird, but I can see it, and it’s there, and it’s just like from creating, you have to get to a point where it matches what you’re seeing.

Warren Huart:

Did you do sound design for music, or did you do sound design for film and TV and morphed into music, or? Nobody’s actually ever explained to me the sort of career path.

Rob Jevons:

I suppose it was in about 2007. I was messing around with a Reason. I love the whole modular thing about Reason, and you can patch things if into this little combinator patch thing, I spent hours recreating a TR-808, completely synthesized in Reason. And I thought, “I spent so much time doing that, I might as well sell that.” And so I still got an eBay for like a fiver, but loads of people bought it, and I thought, “Oh, hang on, there’s something going on here.” I thought I’ll do famous synth bass sounds over the last 30 years, and then put that out as a little pack for a fiver. Loads of people bought that. Do you remember something called Synth Maker?

Warren Huart:

I do. Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Jevons:

Yeah, right. This is back in the day when you could get absolute bargains on eBay, and I bought a Jupiter-4 for like 70 quid. I know, right? And I bought it, an 808. I bought an 808 for 400 quid.

Warren Huart:

I’ll give you 80 quid for it.

Rob Jevons:

It had to be repaired a bit, so I had to learn how to do all that kind of thing. And the 808, that needed like… that was an easy fix. But so I had all this stuff, and then I thought, “Okay, I’ll use synth maker to recreate these things, because I’ve got them right here.”

Warren Huart:

Yep.

Rob Jevons:

And so started selling them for like a tenner or something.

Warren Huart:

Just for anybody watching, currently on eBay, there is one where the highest bid so far is $4,598.

Rob Jevons:

Wow, Jupiter-4.

Warren Huart:

Jupiter-4, yeah, and there’s one on Reverb for $5,232.

Rob Jevons:

I sold mine, and it wasn’t that much. Yeah. And so after that dubstep, the D-word, that was starting to kick off, only in London and all that. But I only found out about it because I went down to London and my cousin was there, and she gave me this… Well, she put this CD on and said, “Listen to this.” And I was like, “What the hell is this? I’ve never had anything like this before.” When I went home, I opened Massive, because that was what everyone was using at the time, and started making these dubstep sounds. And then I started selling that through my website, which is ASLSoundLab.com. I haven’t put anything for about five years, but I’m working on that since lockdown and all that kind of thing.

Rob Jevons:

I started getting some interesting customers, and then one day I had an order, and I looked at it, and it said Liam Howlett. And I was like, “Nah.” Liam Howlett. At the time, I really didn’t give a flip about anything. And I thought, “I’m going to email this dude and say, ‘Are you Liam Howlett?'” And so I emailed him. He was like, “Yeah, I’m Liam Howlett. Why?” And I was like, “Well, you’re part of the reason why I’m doing all this. You’ve got me into synths and all that.” And then we started talking, and then started emailing. And before you know it, we’re pretty good mates and he’s asking me to work on some of his tunes.

Warren Huart:

So he’s doing. He’s going to your sound. You go into your website, ASLSoundLabs…

Rob Jevons:

SoundLab.

Warren Huart:

SoundLab, sorry. ASLSoundLab. I don’t know why I said it plural. Dot com. So he goes there, and you know what? It’s not actually an unfamiliar story. I mean, I work with a lot of producers who say they spend their lives on SoundCloud trying to find stuff that excites them, to get them to come up with new sounds. And it’s always created by somebody you’ve never heard of, because you’re coming along and going, “What is that?” Even to this day, you’ll hear somebody may be established and then you go, “Hey, I’ve heard that before that wasn’t as successful.” So he’s smart. He’s obviously scouring the internet. He finds some stuff he loves. And that’s interesting though, that you reached out to him.

Rob Jevons:

I just thought I had to at the time, because life is too short, isn’t it? And what an opportunity. And luckily enough for me, he’s a lovely dude, and he was nice enough to get in touch with me and be my mate.

Warren Huart:

So you do know people in my age group, then, because you work with them.

Rob Jevons:

Oh yeah. Most of my friends are your age. Age is just the number, man.

Warren Huart:

For me, one of the golden periods, at least in the UK, was that kind of early, mid to mid-’90 when it was Prodigy and Tricky and Portishead and Massive Attack. It just was such a good time for music. You’re blessed growing up surrounded by that, because just the way it blended everything.

Rob Jevons:

The great times, man they were. On the flip side, you had all the guitar bands as well during that time.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, it was insane. When I was your age, I’d go to a festival and The Prodigy would be on the same… It would be like Nirvana, Prodigy, Massive Attack, Beastie Boys, Pearl Jam, whatever. Everything was… It was just fricking awesome. Now it’s like, “This is the rock festival. This is the EDM festival.” It’s like, “No, I just want to go…”

Rob Jevons:

Yeah. Yeah. Where’s the different flavors, you know?

Warren Huart:

So what was the first Prodigy stuff that you worked on?

Rob Jevons:

The Day is My Enemy.

Warren Huart:

Oh, Day is My Enemy.

Rob Jevons:

It was that one.

Warren Huart:

Okay.

Rob Jevons:

But the thing is, is that I spent like two years working with him. He didn’t use anything in the end, but it was a great education. Every day I’d wake up, and there’d be a new thing in my email inbox, that mail big file thing or You Send It, wherever it is. It’s in a WAV file, and he’d say, “What can you do with this?” or, “Put some beats to this,” or, “Make this sound dirty,” or whatever. I just did that for like two years at that point. And in having access to someone like him and ask… being able to ask him questions like, “How did you make that baseline in Poison?” I don’t know if you know Poison, but it’s got a wicked bass end.

Warren Huart:

Of course.

Rob Jevons:

It’s like… It’s dead good. As time went on, he’d start telling me things, because I’ll overthink things and start being overly technical, and he be like, “Nah, nah, nah, nah.” He was like, “Just do it.” And here we go. If it sounds good, it is good. And he was saying, “If it goes into the red but it still sounds good, it’s good.” Because at that point I was thinking everything’s got to sound perfect, spending too much time on all the details when really what that’s doing some of the time… Well, especially in the creative process, you’ve got to leave some of the details for later. You just got to concentrate on what’s going on now and what you’re doing, and all the bells and whistles that comes later… His point was always finding something that… I don’t know how he does it, but he does it, and it’s like, “Wow, that’s magical.” And it’s like that hooks everybody in. And sometimes it comes from somewhere weird or… but it works, and finding something, not your normal thing… He’s not afraid to be too different, and that’s what you got to be, isn’t it? Not afraid. Fearless.

Warren Huart:

You’re talking about classic mentoring.

Rob Jevons:

Oh yeah.

Warren Huart:

I mean, he’s taking you on the journey. He’s bringing you into everything, even if he doesn’t end up using your ideas on the songs. You’re working with him, and you’re learning. You’re being mentored. And then of course, that goes… you carry on doing that so much so you’re working on the next record, which is what? No Tourists, and you do end up working on a track and being credited and it’s… that’s pretty special. I mean, to be honest, he’s a pretty awesome guy that he’s keeping you around. He’s working with you, he’s helping you develop. You’re getting to work on really high-level tracks with an amazingly talented artist. I mean, he’s insanely talented.

Rob Jevons:

Oh, I didn’t even know that I was credited on that album, and then I got a text from someone saying, “You know you’re credited on the last Prodigy album.” So I texted Lee, and I was like, “What did you credit me for?” I hadn’t done anything for like six months. He was like, “Oh, it was some sound that you sent me ages ago.” But at this point, because we’ve been doing stuff for ages, and it was like, “What do you want for this sound?” and all that, or, “What can I give you in return?” So he started sending me a massive box of Cohiba cigars and expensive champagne. And I’m sitting there thinking, “Wow, yeah, this is cool.” But unfortunately he’s got me a new habit of expensive cigars, and I can’t afford it,

Warren Huart:

But it’s interesting, because the sense I get from you, from us talking, is you’re obsessive about sound. I mean, you really sort of started your career, if you don’t mind me characterizing it, replicating sounds that you wanted to hear. You talked about the 808, the Jupiter, and all these kinds of things, getting these synth sounds. So you’re creating these sounds, you decide to sell them for some extra cash, and before you know it, it’s an actual business, and you’ve got a business. And now you’ve got guys like Liam, who’s one of the great, I don’t know, maybe this is the wrong way of describing, electronic artists ever. And you’re…

Rob Jevons:

That’s perfect.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, I mean, I just… I don’t know about you. I can’t stand the term EDM. I feel like that’s…

Rob Jevons:

No. Yeah. Yeah, I… Yeah.

Warren Huart:

It just sounds like an older A&R guy who just doesn’t understand anything about the subtleties, not that there’s much subtlety between say trip-hop and dubstep. There couldn’t be two more opposing genres, but in that ADM suddenly you got trip-hop. You know what I mean? And dubsep is now EDM.

Rob Jevons:

Yeah. Yeah. Just one big umbrella term.

Warren Huart:

It’s like saying reggae and funk.

Rob Jevons:

There you go. Two completely different things.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. Completely, couldn’t be more different. But yeah. And especially I think for one of the unique things about Prodigy is it’s kind of punk rock as well. You know what I mean?

Rob Jevons:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Warren Huart:

When I think of them, they’re a punk band with synths, you know what I mean? It’s a dumb way of explaining it, but there’s no kind of… There’s an attitude and… behind them, which just resonates more with the Sex Pistols than it does with anything else. So they’ve got just an edge that any rock band would be happy to have, let alone an EDM band.

Rob Jevons:

They’re the ultimate crossover band, really, at the time, because they had all the rave heads, and then they attracted all the people who were into metal and stuff, and this new community just merged of Prodigy fans. What a great thing to do, especially around that time.

Warren Huart:

You’re hitting on a great point, because I often say that modern metal and modern dance music shares so much in common.

Rob Jevons:

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Warren Huart:

The crossover, the audiences, that actually makes perfect sense, especially for production. Where do you go from there? I mean, that’s relatively recent. No Tourists came out in what? 2018, so we’re only going back a couple of years.

Rob Jevons:

There was a couple of things going on. I was doing a bit ghost producing for this dude in Florida. I’m not going to say anything else more about that.

Warren Huart:

I was talking about that with Matt Lang. I don’t know if you know Matt.

Rob Jevons:

I watched the interview.

Warren Huart:

Did you hear his discussion about ghost production?

Rob Jevons:

I did. Yeah. It was bang on.

Warren Huart:

I won’t say who it is, but we had an artist come over here who’s from the Netherlands. Not super famous but super talented, got a ton of… several million streams on Spotify with different stuff, so definitely a player. But then most of their income is coming from ghost production of some really famous people. It’s definitely an interesting world, but now you’ve got these younger guys and girls that are wearing it as a badge of honor, like, “Hey, I’m ghost producing.”

Rob Jevons:

Yeah. That’s really weird for me, because when I was doing it at the time, all I could think was I’m selling my soul here, and someone else is getting all the glory. It’s more detrimental to your mental health to do something like that than just to not do it and go your own way.

Warren Huart:

I think so many talented artists battle that all the time, because you have to put… spend so many hours of your life doing something to get something that you’re remotely happy with. And it does affect so many other avenues. I didn’t get married until a good 10 or 15 years after all of my friends got married. I didn’t own a house a good 10 years, 15 years after all my other friends. All my friends in England, when I tell them I moved over here, they got grown kids. My kids are super young and little, because I was “making it” for whatever the reason, whatever word I want to use. But so I… Yeah, that’s a tough… it’s a tough life. If we want this, the hours are horrific, the deadlines can be horrible, and working with artists or producers with massive expectations can be really stressful.

Rob Jevons:

The other thing about ghost production is that you do all this stuff and then okay, gets out there, but your name’s still not getting out there, is it? Nobody knows who you are. I mean, in a way it’s still, okay, you might be getting paid for it and all that kind of thing, but you’re still a nobody. Do you know what I mean?

Warren Huart:

Right. I totally understand and relate to the idea of ghost production being really frustrating from the perspective that you might get paid okay, fairly well, but the back end of it for somebody else could be millions and millions of dollars. But do you feel like you learned from that? Were you getting any kind of experience from the guy or the person, a guy or girl that you were producing, creating the tracks for? Were you’re getting feedback that actually made you grow, or were they purely just taking your ideas?

Rob Jevons:

There was good and bad in it, I suppose. It was a learning experience. Some of the things I was working on were completely not my genre. So I was doing a lot pop stuff and stuff like that. And I’m thinking, “Why am I doing this? Where’s all my credibility gone?” But it’s okay, because nobody knows who I am. I’m a ghost producer.

Warren Huart:

You did a remix album, Red, Gold, Green, and Blue, which is pretty insane, because you’ve got you Toots and the Maytals, you got a Michael Rose on it, Freddie McGregor and Big Youth, all of which are my age group, Liam’s age group grew up with two tone and just like what that ballooned… I remember when I was a kid, Black Uhuru were Top 10 albums. All of Bob Marley’s stuff, Uprising, Exodus, these were huge. So these artist resonate with me insanely. How did you get to do that?

Rob Jevons:

Back to Liam Howlett, then. He had a mate who was a rapper, and Liam asked me to beef up his tunes a bit and make them sound good, whatever, because they were just demos at the time. We were working together for like two or three years, this rapper. Same Old Sean is his name. He’s mates with Zach Starkey, who runs a Trojan Jamaica. He didn’t run it at the time, then. Sean showed him these remakes of these songs that I did. Sean said to me one day, he said, “You’re going to get a call from Zach Starkey.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty cool.” And then for a month I never heard anything, and then all of a sudden I got this text saying, “All right, Rob, it’s Zach. D you want to mix this song for me, or make it sound good or whatever?”

Rob Jevons:

Gave it a little bit of a mix and sent it back. He digged it, and then they put that out as a single. I wasn’t really fully into remixing at this point. I’ve done a couple, but only for a laugh. You know what I mean? It was just something from my own personal thing, stick it on YouTube and people will go, “Yeah, that’s cool.” There’s was nothing ever released, not official. Didn’t get the go-ahead by the bands or whatever. He said to me, “I’m doing a tribute album to…” I think it was the 50th anniversary of Mark Boland’s death or something like that.

Warren Huart:

Oh, wow.

Rob Jevons:

Or his birthday. I can’t remember. But I said, “Just send me the vocals, and I’ll see what I can put to it.” The way I approached remixing… I suppose like 15 years ago, whenever, it was always like a four-to-the-floor beat with a vocal sample on, and that was a remix. And I thought, “Now, I’m going to do something different with this. I’m going to turn them into their own songs in their own right.” So he started sending me these vocals, and then I got one, it was like Chrissy Hind, Johnny Mar. He said, “Can you just mix this? Can you just mix it? Don’t remix it, just mix it.” And I said, “Yeah, man, that sounds…” So Johnny Mars on vocals, McCartney’s on bass, and Ringo’s on the drums. So I get all these multitracks, and I’m thinking what… I’m listening to McCartney in isolation and Ringo. And then I thought, “I’m going to solo the overheads.” And so at the end of the track, Ringo goes, “Surely that’s enough,” and I’m thinking, “Wow, nobody’s heard that.” And there’s me thinking, “Yeah, flipping Ringo in my ears.”

Warren Huart:

Wow, was that the last one or two years? That was pretty recent.

Rob Jevons:

I think that was about three years ago, I think. But nobody’s heard it. He hasn’t released it for some reason. I keep saying to him, “You’ve got to release that,” because that Ringo and McCartney one, I’m so proud of it because it’s a T.Rex Song, but Zach said to me… he said, “Can you make it sound like it was on Revolver?” I’ll get my George Martin hat on it. It sounds pretty cool, man. I like it, and nobody’s heard it.

Warren Huart:

I’m sure the time will come on that. So I’m looking at the artists who worked on this. Pretty, pretty amazing. Robbie Shakespeare bringing on home.

Rob Jevons:

Legend.

Warren Huart:

Three Michael Rose tracks on this, so that’s pretty, pretty incredible. I didn’t know that. Andrew Tosh, Toots and the Maytals. Yeah, this is pretty fantastic. And then of course, a couple of Big Youth tracks as well.

Rob Jevons:

Yeah. So with that, he just sent me the vocals.

Warren Huart:

Do you build the tracks from scratch?

Rob Jevons:

Yeah. Somewhere of them took a while because I was either playing around on the piano or on the guitar trying to find the vibe, because it’s interesting when you just get the vocals and you don’t have the music. I knew it was… behind it it was like blue songs that were reggae, do you know what I mean? Blue songs done in a reggae version. But without hearing that, I thought, “Okay, I’ll see what I can eke out of this. Surely there’s another groove in there somewhere.” I spent days just playing and coming up with stuff. You knew when it hit, because it was like, “Yeah, that works.”

Rob Jevons:

There was one song on there that I think it was at like 68 BPM or something, and it just didn’t work. I don’t know what the BPM is now, but I mean, I totally changed the timing of it all, turned it into some hip hop song, trippy hiphop song, and it did the trick. But knowing that that was in there from the original song. I don’t know where half of it came from, really, but I suppose just perseverance and just trying to find something that wasn’t there.

Warren Huart:

So this guitar sounds and stuff on here. Are you sampling in…

Rob Jevons:

No, that’s me, that is.

Warren Huart:

Oh, so you’re playing the guitars on it as well?

Rob Jevons:

I’m playing the guitar and the bass and the piano and stuff like that. The on program drums that… not the hip hop type of tunes, that’s my brother. I used to send him an MP3, and he’d record it in his garage on his electronic kit, and then send me back the MIDI file, and I would put it into Superior Drummer.

Warren Huart:

So you’re playing real instruments as well. You’re doing programming. But did you have any reference? Did you get the original…

Rob Jevons:

I only heard it when he released the original album, not the remix album. So that was the first time I heard him. And it was really weird, because I was used to my own versions, and hearing these other ones, it’s like, “What?” That’s not right.

Warren Huart:

That’s pretty amazing. So I’m going to go back after this interview and listen to both versions. I’m excited to hear just how the variety is between the two. That’s pretty fantastic. Did you do this all remotely? So you’re at home doing it, or did you end up going out to Jamaica?

Rob Jevons:

There was talk about going out to Jamaica, but it never happened. When you’re working with someone with just their voice on their own, you kind of build this emotional connection to them, because you’re hearing every little nuance in what they’re saying. So me, I’m connected to these people emotionally.

Warren Huart:

What are you working on now?

Rob Jevons:

With the ASLSoundLab.com, I’m putting out… I should have a new pack out in a couple of weeks for Serum. You know that synth… I think I’ve got a couple of more remixes lined up Zack. There’s a rapper who wants to work with me. What I want to do is put out some of my own stuff that is just me. But trying to figure out what I want to do, because I spent the last couple of months just writing and jamming stuff out, and I’m thinking that’s not… it’s not right yet. It’s not right. But I’ll know when it’s right. But when that happens, I don’t know. It might be 25 years, but we’ll see.

Warren Huart:

Ooh, this… There’s Cyril Neville track as well.

Rob Jevons:

I don’t think that’s on the original album.

Warren Huart:

It’s not on the original album. I’m looking at the remix one. Yeah. That’s pretty special.

Rob Jevons:

Well, it won’t be when you listen to it, man. You’ll know exactly what I mean. Zach put on that on there because he loved it so much. It’s a bit out there, I suppose, but unfortunately for Cyril Neville it’s his voice going through… There’s a plugin called Bitspeek, and it makes you sound like those Speak-and-Spells. You remember a Speak-and-Spell? When you press it, and it goes like, “A, I, E.” Do you know what I mean? Like a toy from the ’80S.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. Yeah, I do. I do.

Rob Jevons:

Yeah, so unfortunately…

Warren Huart:

Speak-and-Spell.

Rob Jevons:

… that’s the one. So unfortunately for Cyril Neville, I made him sound like that, and I feel incredibly guilty, but Zach enjoyed it.

Warren Huart:

There will be links to all of this below so people can go and check it out. I love the sound of the track. Like I said, after this I’m going to delve deep into the comparisons between the two. It’s really interesting to hear that you did it in isolation without referencing the original, which sort of makes sense. I can’t remember. There’s a famous ’70s Genesis record where they went into a studio or a house, probably a house with the studio…

Rob Jevons:

It was a house, wasn’t it? Yeah? Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Yeah, and they didn’t listen to anybody’s music. They weren’t allowed to listen to anybody’s music. And they had to create music without any way to go out. There was no radio. There was no record players, no tape decks, nothing. It was just like, just create music.

Rob Jevons:

That will drive you mad, I think. You need something else to listen to, even if it’s just completely different from what you’re doing.

Warren Huart:

Rob.

Rob Jevons:

Nice one.

Warren Huart:

Thank you ever so much. Lot of fun.

Rob Jevons:

Thank you very much. Yeah. I’ve actually enjoyed myself. I’ve been dreading this, and I’ve been getting myself in a right state about it. I haven’t eaten properly for about a week.

Warren Huart:

Oh my God. It’s just me, mate. I’m just another wonky English guy that is trying to eke a living out music.

Rob Jevons:

No, man. You’re cool, man. You’re a legend, and thanks again for talking to me. You didn’t have to, but you did.

Warren Huart:

You rock. We do great stuff. There’s tons of links under here. You can go and check out the remix album. Thank you ever so much. Have a marvelous time, everybody. Thanks, Rob.

Rob Jevons:

No worries.

Warren Huart:

And of course, please leave some comments and questions below.