John Tejada

Directly in focus, on top of the rack.

Picture taken during an interview with the artist in his home studio.

Photo taken during an XLR8R interview with the artist in his studio.

"Is your current live set-up still all Elektron pieces? Yeah, it is. When I travel, they just have this great bag where you can fit three of them in it. I don’t know if it’s because I’m doing something wrong, but I usually have to squeeze into really tight spaces at gigs."

"I used to have everything quite tied to songs, but now that’s what I'm trying to get away from…the way something starts, or the drum sounds. So now the drum sounds aren’t tied to any of the pieces, so it's quite loose. And like I said, sometimes I’ll bring the Roland and not the Elektron Rytm, so it'll be totally different drums."

"The Elektron machines are really special. They take old ideas from the heritage pieces, but they are more forward-thinking. One of my favorite pieces, and it’s actually not in the studio at the moment, is still my Machinedrum. The Elektron pieces are really unique because they are multi-purpose pieces. Like the Analog Four, or Keys—they can do a lot of CV and audio processing, which is quite awesome, but I think the Machindrum still has a huge bit of magic, especially with the live re-sampling."

"For poly, the CODE is a great because it's a true poly, where everything is per voice and really massive sounding."

"Is your current live set-up still all Elektron pieces? Yeah, it is. When I travel, they just have this great bag where you can fit three of them in it. I don’t know if it’s because I’m doing something wrong, but I usually have to squeeze into really tight spaces at gigs."

"I’ve had different iterations over the years, but what I do now is use the Octatrack as my Ableton-esqe workstation. So starting here in the studio, I send sync to everything and use my Elektron toys to get paint-splatter writing going. It's not thinking too much, just jamming. The Octatrack is quite good at capturing things, so I don’t use my computer at all. So I capture things into the record buffers, and I assign them to tracks—just things that work together. I’ll do that for eight channels and will set it up so not everything plays at once at first—because on the Octatrack, it's not like the typical Roland, 16 patterns with banks. What you have is 16 banks and, within each of those banks, you have 16 patterns—so, each bank is essentially a song. So within a bank I can have 16 variations, and the great thing about the Elektron gear is that they do these things called parameter locks. So per line, you can copy in parameters and info, and it makes it quite easy to change parameters just for that one step."

In the artists list.

At the background, you can see this studio monitor, by Focal.

In this video, the Tiptop Audio Trigger Riot can be seen in the lower left side of John Tejada's rack.

In this video, John Tejada uses the Z8000 to modulate the chord filter sound by advancing to a new filter setting with each note all in sync with the Tiptop Audio drum modules.

The Make Noise Phonogene can be seen in John Tejada's rack next to the Tiptop Audio Trigger Riot.

In this video, the Schippmann CS-8 Series VCF-02 can be seen to the right of the Z8000 and above the Phonogene.

"I’ve had fantasies about doing really simple things, and I think if I moved to a different room, I would just start from scratch and just do something really stripped down. Like with the Intellijel Metropolis and the Atlantis, putting those into a case and just going somewhere with headphones and just really getting lost in the gear."

"I’ve had fantasies about doing really simple things, and I think if I moved to a different room, I would just start from scratch and just do something really stripped down. Like with the Intellijel Metropolis and the Atlantis, putting those into a case and just going somewhere with headphones and just really getting lost in the gear."

In an interview with Future Music, John Tejada says, "While I find DAWs interesting, I don’t find them very interesting for creating music. I loved those days of just getting lost inside the EPS [sampler] or an Akai MPC, so for that reason I’ve become a huge Renoise fan."

"The SH7 is the all encompassing, classic Roland mono synth. Along the lines of a System-100, with a little bit of the later 101. For me, that can quite spacey, and Moogy, and big."

Right below the elektron.

"The Elektron machines are really special. They take old ideas from the heritage pieces, but they are more forward-thinking. One of my favorite pieces, and it’s actually not in the studio at the moment, is still my Machinedrum. The Elektron pieces are really unique because they are multi-purpose pieces. Like the Analog Four, or Keys—they can do a lot of CV and audio processing, which is quite awesome, but I think the Machindrum still has a huge bit of magic, especially with the live re-sampling."

"Is your current live set-up still all Elektron pieces? Yeah, it is. When I travel, they just have this great bag where you can fit three of them in it. I don’t know if it’s because I’m doing something wrong, but I usually have to squeeze into really tight spaces at gigs."

"The Elektron machines are really special. They take old ideas from the heritage pieces, but they are more forward-thinking. One of my favorite pieces, and it’s actually not in the studio at the moment, is still my Machinedrum. The Elektron pieces are really unique because they are multi-purpose pieces. Like the Analog Four, or Keys—they can do a lot of CV and audio processing, which is quite awesome, but I think the Machindrum still has a huge bit of magic, especially with the live re-sampling."