Jonas Rathsman

My favourite thing in my studio right now is my Handsonic HPD-20. It’s a digital percussion hand drum with over 100 presets of the classic drums such as conga, bongos, etc. The sounds are very natural sounding and it’s really easy to use. It’s perfect to get a simple beat going in the early stage of your music production. All the percussion you hear in my track ´To Infinity And Beyond’ (which was just released on Mobilee) was made on the Handsonic and the track was actually made in just one day.

Classic analogue monosynth from the 80s, perfect when making some techno or acid. It doesn’t get more basic than this, which suits me perfect. I love using it together with some of the really good UAD plugins, such as delay, distortion and/or reverb. I can play around with the arpeggiator together with some nice portamento for hours. The sound coming out from this tiny machine is hard to beat.

Wonderful synth for those lush chords and pads. I used it all the time until a few weeks ago when it started behaving weird on me. My old 106 is not feeling very well and hopefully the synth doctor can save it. I need it to make those hits!

I’ve used this on probably every track I’ve made in the last two years. It’s a powerful analogue paraphonic synth which is really easy and fun to use. I like to use the Sub 37 together with the Touché pedal (which comes with pre-made presets). It’s like they’re made for each other, and it takes it to a whole new level.

I am loving the new Touché pedal or hand controller from Expressive. I connect it to my hardware synths and then assign different parameters to it like LFO, filter, etc. It really gives you so much more expression and feeling out of your synths with just the slightest touch of your fingertips. I used it a lot when I made my track ‘Draumzer’ (also on Mobilee). I can’t recommend it enough!

The vibe was recreated in part with the use of the popular acoustic treatment measurement and reference plug-in, Sonarworks Reference, which takes measurements of your room with a series of recordings and calibrates an EQ curve to counteract any nasty dips or bumps in your room’s acoustic response.

“Even if your studio sounds amazing, Sonarworks helps a lot because you trust yourself a little bit more,” says Jonas. “You know what’s coming through your monitors is actually correct. You stop putting effort and energy into EQing things for hours and just let it be and move on to the next part of the production. When I first did it there was a big dip around 200Hz and another at 300Hz, so obviously we needed to work more on the treatment but it works for now.”

Seen used in Fact - Against the Clock challenge.