Bass Kleph: Fireside Rewind
Last week we were joined by producer & DJ, Bass Kleph for an exclusive fireside chat in our Discord. Speaking with emanate founder Jimi Frew, Bass Kleph detailed his journey from humble beginnings to international success to renowned educator and trainer. His journey started when he was a teenager, sitting behind the drum kit for a rock band before shifting into the world of electronic music. In just a few short years, a simple hobby would take the self-taught producer across the world and send his music to the top of the Beatport charts.
Taking time for dominating the globe, Bass Kleph used his downtime to help other producers struggling to overcome the same production issues he experienced firsthand as a young producer.
Inspiring, insightful and incredibly educational, we rewound the tape to bring you the best of Bass Kleph’s fireside chat.
Humble Beginnings
Playing drums in a band with his friends, the budding musician found some great success early on, but when the group disbanded and Bass Kleph found interest in dance music, things took a different turn.
“I actually started out in rock n roll. We got picked up by a major label and recorded an album; we had music videos and all that. We were about seventeen when we started. At the same time, I began falling in love with dance and electronic stuff. It was just a hobby, but I learned how to write music on the side… At about 21 the band broke up and I thought that I just wasn’t going to find a combination like that again.”
Trading all of his touring gear for studio equipment, Bass Kleph got more serious and began honing his craft for months before eventually getting a residency at a club in Sydney in 2004.
“When I first started out I was playing everything live with Ableton and a combination of synths. I started phasing it out because I got a little disheartened by people's reactions. I’m doing everything live while people are requesting top 20 chart songs; they didn’t understand what was going on. I shouldn’t have stopped what I was doing, but I also loved DJing.”
It was around this stage that Bass Kleph began doing remixes for other artists, which would lead to his first signing as a solo artist. Initially, that signing was a great opportunity, but as time went on the match was stifling more than anything.
“I was doing remixes for other labels like Warner and Ministry of Sound, but eventually signed with Floating Point, which seemed like a great opportunity at the time. I had access to a million-dollar studio and I learned so much. That definitely built the foundation for my skill set today, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out. It didn’t fulfill its job. They dropped the ball on a lot of things and I didn’t feel like it was working. When I tried to move on they wouldn’t let me move; stalling my whole career.”
Fortunately for Bass Kleph, he was eventually released from his contract — but not until some huge sums of money were spent on lawyers.
Making The Label
Using the experience from the short-lived signing and seeing the faults in their design, Bass Kleph decided to make his own label.
“Often great things are born out of a struggle.
I learned so much about how a label works, so I got to see the process behind it. Then when everything started to go bad, I wanted to start my own label; I wanted to do it better. We could all get together and start our own thing. As soon as I got out [of contract] I launched Vacation Records. We kind of just built our own world. We could make this thing happen ourselves — we loved writing and performing so we just did our own thing.”
Reflecting on those early years as a record label owner, Bass Kleph acknowledged that with his newfound freedom came a lot of new lessons.
“I think there’s definitely a huge benefit. For starters, you can release whatever you want, which is good and bad because there’s no filter. I might release something that another label wouldn’t. Fortunately, it all went really well but there is that potential when you have that ability that maybe some songs aren’t ready. With a label, you have another set of ears to bounce off, which we no longer had. I would help out artists and would talk about the songs that they submitted, share notes, etc. Looking back I feel like I’m lucky that it all worked. Not every song was a huge success, some were definitely bigger than others but we didn’t care, we just consistently put out stuff.”
Bass Kleph says that their level of consistency in releasing work was crucial to the success of the label, and that level of output attracted other creators as well.
“That’s a great way to be with music — just do what you love and eventually you’ll connect with the right people.
And they’ll see you working and think ‘I like that too’, and they’ll want to get involved as well. Committing to it and being relentless, just not caring what anyone else thinks.”
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Going to Number 1
After a string of wins with his newfound label, Bass Kleph found that it was offering other people something in return that was key to his success. When he reached number one on Beatport, things went to a whole new level.
“The label definitely helped with my own artist career. You’re rallying a group together and helping other people. That’s so important, to have something to offer. Not just saying ‘Hey buy my track’. Instead, you’re saying ‘Hey maybe I can release this for you.”
Some of the fans of our artists might become fans of me. And you can do this in other ways. Maybe you invite someone to come play for you.
It’s always good to look how you can help other people in the industry and they’ll be more inclined to help you in return.
That first number one was on Fresco Records and it was actually a remix. We were just speaking online. I was thinking I really want to play abroad and I got an opportunity doing a remix swap. Because it was a swap, I’m not getting paid anything for it, and my remixes were earning a good amount of money then. But because it was a swap I thought I’m definitely not going to feel obliged to do anything in particular. I tried to imagine what would be cool if it were playing in Ibiza, and I’d never been at that stage. This was around 2008. I just tried to picture what that would feel and sound like, and it ended up going Number 1 on Beatport. It was the highest selling track on Beatport in the world that year. That chart success and validation basically poured rocket fuel on the whole thing and opened up so many more doors.”
The Student Becomes The Master
“I was always helping artists on my label to get that last ten percent out of their tracks before we pressed them to vinyl. But around 2016 I was getting burnt out with all the shows and the music I was making. I kind of got guided into a certain space and direction that was never my intention. That came from management and agents.
They would say things like “If you did a track like this we could get you a gig here” or “We can get you paid more”. Little by little you think it isn’t a big change but then you stop and look back and think where the fuck am I? So I took some time off and wondered what should I do.
You always get sent a bunch of messages when you’re DJing at this level and a lot of them were “hey can you check out my track”, and usually I never had time to reply but now I was just chilling living off of royalties, so I started answering.
People were just so stoked that I’d listened to their music. I just started talking back and at some point I asked a group of them “what do you guys really want?” Someone said we love your music and shows but more than anything we want to be you.
So I thought “What about for one month I’ll take on a small handful of students. I’ll work with you one on one. And it sold out; it totally blew up. It was crazy. So we did it and the results were incredible; seeing peoples lives change. I felt their pain and I had struggled like that too, but fortunately I got past those struggles, but I could help these guys. So we did that and I helped and I saw them fall in love with music again; get signed and I felt like I was winning with them. I got super hooked to it and that’s how the school started.”
With the success of his first group of students and the increasing demand for his tuition, Bass Kleph decided to pre-record his lessons to save time for himself.
“Now we sell pre-recoreded classes which is better for everyone. We have some very popular courses that have been super successful. Especially the Road to Mainstage. This just started as mentoring for about two years and I learnt so much about what people needed. I already knew how I make music but I didn’t know what the average producer was struggling with. It was a lot of similar things. I felt like I was repeating myself, so I just recorded myself giving the lessons.
You’re not going to get the gigs without the music but it all comes back to the music. But some of them just said more than anything I just want to be proud of it. The cool thing is we’d go way beyond making them proud and get them signed. Everyone was struggling finishing songs. You write a bunch of stuff and you don’t end up finishing it. Lots of people get stuck on arrangement or feel like something is missing and the reason is you don’t know what you don’t know, you need someone with experience stepping in and giving that guidance. The other thing is sound quality and hooks.”
By hearing from a growing group of producers, the producer turned teacher found that a lot of people were struggling with the same things.
“It’s the ultimate when you have someone one on one not wasting the time you already know. Fortunately it works out well. It’s really mostly based around those big problems that people have. Bad habits. It’s not their fault, it’s just been spread all over YouTube. But then I mix that with my personal system that I use to make high quality music fast enough to compete at an international level.”
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Time Isn’t On Your Side
“You have way less time to write music than you think. You might be in a day job doing music on the weekends or evenings. People think when they go pro they’ll have so much time — you won’t really. Between shows and touring, social media stuff, the impact of touring, there isn’t much time left to make music. Not many people I know can do a full eight hours of music. The first four are productive but the last four are pretty meh. You don’t have that much time so you have to be effective.
Around 2006 or so I had a song I was so proud of — and after three months I realised that if it would take that long to make every song, it wouldn’t be viable. I had to be doing at least one a month. That’s when I figured out how to make music quickly and that changed everything. That consistent output that was crucial.”
Analogue Soul
Returning to live performance and manipulation of sound, Bass Kleph started his new project, Analogue Soul — an amalgamation of his fondest influences.
“I’m super excited about it, it’s so much fun. After a year or so of taking time off and doing mentoring, which helped me figure out what I wanted to do, I got more perspective and listened to a lot of different things. Going out more and remembering how much I loved the underground stuff. That was the big part of it but also just other music and nostalgia. I always loved and had these super fond memories of watching old eighties movies. These soundtracks with melancholy vibes. There was something about that and I wanted to put in all the things I really love and stick them altogether. My favourite festivals and stuff were the sunset parties, the outdoor ones. Well if I was playing those festivals what music would I be playing? I got this vision of deep 80s techno with a nostalgic feel. I loved that tone of analogue synths.
Serum is incredibly popular but it takes a lot of work to get it sounding analogue. I just appreciate and have so much fondness for warmer, slightly imperfect sounds. What if I mixed that all together with this sunset vibe — and I wanted to do it live. I want to bring that back. How fun would that be? To write on hardware. I wanted the same thing I write music on to be the same thing I perform with — also becasue DJing became super easy. I wanted a challenge. It’s almost a little bit stressful when you’re doing it all but once you memorise it its easier. I wanted to get back to playing with hardware and manipulating sounds. Reading crowds, instead of picking songs I was picking a sound.
I wanted it to feel as fun as DJing but with the potential to manipulate it further. Each song is just one pattern — one loop with many different parts. It’s the adjustments on filters and effects that make it move. But then I can mix and match parts from other songs; use leads or bass parts from other songs, a whole heap of patterns. It’s like DJing with stems but you have so much more power to change those stems.”
For other artists looking to bring more live performance to their stage show, Bass Kleph advises not to overdo it when it comes to hardware.
“There’s a few ways you can do it. One is don’t have too many boxes or too many instruments. The maximum amount of boxes you should have is three. Even two is a lot. Cause theres a lot of things you can and a lot of ways you can adjust the sound. If you need five boxes to make one sound happen… you only have two hands. It might seem ok in the studio but when you’re on stage and it’s going crazy, things need to be doable with two hands. You can do my format where you have some pre-written patterns and manipulate those, or you can go completely live, which I don’t know if I’d recommend. Anyone can do it but to make it actually interesting for the dance floor is not always easy. You could also do stuff where you have most things in stems and you just add a few parts on top — synths, bongos. You gotta play on your strengths. It shouldn’t be so difficult you’re breaking a sweat. And be visual! Any chance you get, try do something that shows this is live. Remind them so that they appreciate it.”
