Kidneythieves Cut Deep with SONAR

This story is about a new urban legend in the making. LA-based Kidneythieves combines Rock, Trip Hop, Electronica, and Industrial with melodic vocals. Bruce M. Somers (producer/chief instrumentalist) and Free Dominguez (vocals), both SONAR users, have just released their album Zerospace on Extacy records, and recently had their music featured on the Queen of the Damned soundtrack. We recently talked to Bruce Somers about the album, and how SONAR integrated into the production.

Cakewalk: So Bruce, what is your background?

Bruce M. Somers: I started my career working in recording studios in Cleveland and New York. While attending college at Ohio University I met Sean Beavan. Our great friendship turned out to be a defining influence in my life. Sean quickly became a mentor figure to me, and taught me not only everything about being a recording engineer, but also about being a musician. Sean went on to work with Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. I then came out to California to continue to build my studio doing odd gigs here and there and a lot of Film & Television music.

CW: How long have you and Free been working together, and how did you meet?

BS: I met Free at The Newsroom Café in Los Angeles in 1996. We met through a mutual friend who thought we would work well together. Honestly, I thought she was a freak when I first met her. We've been working together for almost six years. I can now confirm she is definitely a total freak and also one of my best friends.

CW: Does Free use SONAR too?

BS: She sure does. Free has a pretty cool studio that I helped her set up last year. Just a single PC with a couple of sound cards. She first got exposed to SONAR when we started using it on our first tour last December. At the time she had been using ACID a lot, so she was totally psyched when she saw how easy it was to use SONAR's Loop Construction tool with the Loop Explorer, and how SONAR integrated so many more features.

CW: Any anecdotes you'd like to share about your experiences doing the album?

BS: With Zerospace, Free and I have really found our groove and gelled creatively, so this time things worked like clockwork. It wasn't always this easy. Free got really mad at me during the mixes of our first CD Trickster. She came down, we argued, and she through a cup of coffee at me. It hit my knee, sprayed all over a wall in my house and gashed my leg.

I leave the coffee stain up there on the wall to remind me to be nicer and to move faster. Just for the record, we do get along really well.

CW: What was the first Cakewalk product you worked with?

BS: Believe it or not, I have been using Cakewalk software since the beginning. I went from using a Yamaha hardware sequencer (which I thought was amazing in 1986) to a PC with Cakewalk in the early 90's before the advent of Windows! Cakewalk just blew my mind. I remember how cool it was when Cakewalk Professional for Windows came out and I could actually use a mouse to highlight a track. Ever since then, I have always stayed current on the latest versions. The program has come a long way since then and let me tell you, SONAR really took the program to another level.

CW: How did SONAR factor into the recording of Zerospace?

BS: We have a pretty extensive studio setup and use a lot of computers in our rigs. My favorite thing about using SONAR is how musical the program is in terms of actually creating our songs. Over the years, I've worked with a lot of music software programmers who write amazing code, but don't always get enough input from creative musicians to go the extra mile to make their programs musical. That is not a problem with SONAR. An example of this is being able to chop up loops so you can make them your own. As a drummer, I like to make my own drum loops but I quickly may want to change tempo or cut them up to manipulate the groove. SONAR is by far the easiest audio program to use in terms of working with loops because you simply drag in the audio file and it's automatically chopped up. I can then change the tempo till I feel the song is kicking. That's musical software.

CW: What are your favorite things about working with SONAR? BS: As I mentioned before, Loop Construction has made life much easier for me. SONAR is amazingly stable, and one of the first to run on Windows XP and 2000 I might add, which is the only PC OS that is really stable. SONAR also boots up faster than any program I've worked with. I think the mixing is extremely flexible and easy to work with. I love being able to mix from the Track Arrange view. And the DXi synths are definitely more stable than the VSTi's. I will admit that I do use FXpansion's VST DXI wrapper to run VST synths under SONAR too though. CW: What are you working on now? BS: We are currently in rehearsals every day getting ready to tour. Our live show is always a work in progress. We are looking forward to being able to play everywhere. We have a lot of fans who we would like to get out and play for. We are also writing all the time. Free just did an amazing vocal on a simple track in SONAR called Whisper.

CW: Do you have any tips or advice you would like to share with musicians who want to make music on the PC?

BS: Absolutely. Get into soft synths.

When I started getting my studio together, almost everything in it used to make music was expensive hardware. It was always totally frustrating not to be able to get the latest Roland synth or Korg "whatever." When I finally could afford some decent hardware, I would usually get sick of the sounds after a month or two.

Today, almost everything in my studio is software. We're still in the early stages of the music software revolution, and I feel that Cakewalk is at the forefront with SONAR. There's lots of possibilities out there and you really can do amazing things with it. Soft synths are affordable, flexible, and sound like nothing else happening in hardware. It's only going to get better.

I push myself to use every new software synth I can and I urge you to do the same. I actively use the Live Synth Pro (SoundFont player), and Native Instruments' DXi synths like the Pro 52, Battery, and B4. I just started trying a demo of RGC Audio's Pentagon and Triangle synths. Great sounds.

I haven't touched some of my hardware-based synths for over a year. Use the software, it's amazing.

CW: Pick up Kidneythieves' new release Zerospace at Amazon.com or other major retailers and hear what they do with SONAR. You will not be disappointed.

Visit the Kidneythieves website.

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