RS: Talking about being in the studio, what's it like working in the studio with Dave Aude?
Christopher Lawrence: It's really fun actually. He's one of my best friends and working in the studio with him is really good because Dave's another one of those people that's got a lot of experience working with a variety of styles. He's done remixes for Sting, Coldplay, and just about anybody that's in contemporary music as well as working with heaps of other people like DJ Dan, Charles Feelgood and Micro, so he's really flexible in the studio. We have a lot of fun working together.
RS: In the studio, are you Mac or PC-based?
Christopher Lawrence: Mac.
RS: Are you using Cubase or Logic or ProTools?
Christopher Lawrence: It depends who I work with. I work in both Logic and ProTools and got both systems at home. BK and John "OO" Fleming both work with Logic, but Dave Aude is all ProTools. So you kind of have to know everything, but I'll tell you the new thing that's really good is Ableton Live.
RS: I am starting to hear more and more about Ableton from producers out there.
Christopher Lawrence: Yes, it's been around a couple of years and is really easy to use and incredibly user-intuitive. It's got this warping feature where you take your sample or track and you can set it to any BPM you want. Even within that, when you have a record that kind of drifts and the is not perfect in time, Ableton has a feature called pinning where you can pin the beats so that they're exactly right in time. It does a time stretch algorithm between the beats so it doesn't sound really distorted but sounds really good. You can then burn that to a CD, so if you have like a really weird track, this will pin it right down exactly in time. Ableton has some neat features and it's really cheap and easy to use.
RS: What's you favorite piece of outboard gear?
Christopher Lawrence: The Novation Base Station is quite good, and I like my Apogee Mini-Me for analog-to-digital conversion.
RS: DJ Dan was in town here in Nashville a few weeks ago and he was quite a trip. I hear you guys are about to go out on tour.
Christopher Lawrence: Yes, I'm looking forward to this tour. We had a really good time when we toured together on the PlayStation 2 tour a couple of years ago, and that's what motivated us to do this tour. We were looking for a way to play together more and where we were presented with the America's Favorite DJ tour, we jumped on it. It's a great excuse to hang out with your friend and play parties.
