Gabriel & Dresden:
Setting the Music Free
Plugging In
That creative flow could get interrupted if either musician has to take time to troubleshoot an external MIDI device. That’s why nearly every sound or riff in a Gabriel & Dresden song is imported into Logic Pro and edited as a waveform. “We don’t use external MIDI at all,” says Gabriel. “If we’re using an external synthesizer, we’re playing it, recording the audio, and then editing the waveform. If we do MIDI, it’s internal, for the ES1 and other plug-ins.”
They cram a staggering amount of audio files into a single Logic Pro session, then add plug-ins — lots of them — to augment the recorded sounds. “It’s not uncommon for our songs to have 200 plug-ins going at once,” says Gabriel. “We put the digital audio up, process the hell out of it and then run complex automation on all the audio tracks. We just lay out the audio tracks and never really worry about it. We have a Power Mac G5 and we’ve never had any problems with the amount of audio tracks or plug-ins. Logic just works.”
Simple plug-ins are chained together to create complex effects. “We might run a clean vocal through a phaser, a reverb, a compressor, a delay, another compressor, and then put filter in front of the chain so we can really control this sort of wash. We can open and close it with the intensity of the music,” says Gabriel. “The processing on the vocal track becomes an instrument itself.”
Some standard Logic Pro plug-ins have been very instrumental in Gabriel & Dresden tracks. “Two plug-ins have changed the sound of our music,” says Gabriel. “We use Pitch Correction as an effect — it produces very pleasing artifacts. The other plug-in we really like is Guitar Amp. We use it to dirty things up. Every single track on our album has an instance of that plug-in. We use it for processing vocals and ES1 sounds — everything. It creates a feeling that a sound is going through something physical.”
On Tour
Gabriel & Dresden are currently on tour and the first single from their debut album went Number One on the Billboard Club Play Chart. They are traveling the world, spinning their tracks before live audiences in the United States, Europe, and Asia. “We’ll be DJing three or four days a week,” says Gabriel. Thanks to Internet distribution, the duo has fans across the globe eagerly anticipating their performances. “The Internet is the new radio,” says Gabriel. “When we go and play gigs in places like Turkey, Indonesia, or Singapore, people sing along to our songs. They all have the same understanding of our music.”
“We make music with lyrics and choruses, music that is emotive with melodies and meaning,” says Josh Gabriel. Photo by Tilmann Schaal.
“We have definitely built an organic following of people all around the world,” says Dresden.
