|
 This episode of Sho’ Ya Love is about The Reluctant Legend himself. I think he’s got the best stage name around. Multi talented, intelligent, versatile, loves our humble craft, and masterfully runs our tight little ship of a home we lovingly call TastyFresh. But how did he get his music thang going? Where did he begin, and BESIDES ALL OF THAT, what does his earliest music sound like? Enquiring minds wanna know, man! Will he let us check it out? Read on…
Coco: When did you fall in love with EDM? Redsavior: I probably fell in love with it differently than most. My family, my father specifically, listened to almost nothing but classical music. So from practically day one, I was listening to music that progressed across ten minutes or more. It was pretty cool. The concept of actually listening to shorter pieces of music is actually rather new to me. In a way, this is where my foundation really is musically; not that I can hold a candle to Bach or Mozart.
About the time Chariots of Fire hit the theaters I noticed synthesizers. The theme for this movie just really inspired me and captured my heart. My father bought his first CD player about that time as well. One of the first CDs he purchased outside of the Chariots of Fire soundtrack was a compilation of Sci-Fi movie themes. There were several on that CD that relied heavily on synths at that time. Those were my favorite pieces. What intrigued me about them was how alien they sounded compared to the strings and horns I normally listened to. Nothing I had heard prior to this had the same qualities.
Later, I think I was on a field trip, I saw a group called Future Bach. It was a quartet of keyboardists who were performing selected classical pieces (mainly by Bach) using only synths. The sound was so amazing I convinced my mom to by a tape to give to my father. I think I listened to that tape only a few times though. The sad thing is that despite being exposed to classical music all my life, it just did not truly excite me. Classical music was my dad's choice, not mine. As a result, until high school, I really had no interest in music outside of playing my alt sax in band class.
That's the background information. Here's the EDM tie in.
The first time I recognized any use of synths outside of classical music and soundtracks was when a neighborhood friend (one that i wasn't too fond of, but that's another story) played Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus when I was over at his house. I didn't pay any attention to the lyrics, but I was amazed that synths could be used to do THAT. So... like my experience with classical music, that got filed in the back of my head.
 It really was not until I was a senior in high school that I truly fell in love with and pursued electronica. The year was 1992. I was on a ski trip with my church and on the way home, one of my friends slipped a copy of Jyradelix into the bus' tape player. WOW... that struck a nerve with me. I loved it. The next techno I heard was the Prodigal Sons and after that Scott Blackwell and then I was hooked. Of course prior to this I had heard other dance songs that are still guilty pleasures for me, but they NEVER hooked me like this music did. Gonna Make You Sweat by C & C Music Factory will always be number one on my top 10 guilty pleasures list and James Brown is Dead by LA Style is another... but it is LOW on that list. Coco: Believe it or not, we follow similar paths. I started out listening to classical music as well...I adore Mozart, and the movie Chariots of Fire moved me beyond words. The theme stuck in my mind for a long time afterward. So, now, 1. When did you start to create your own music? 2. For all the gear heads out there, what did you first use? Mine was an old Casio that had those preprogrammed songs on it like "Loreli" and stuff. 3. What was your first creation, and do you still have a copy of it (heh heh)? Redsavior: I think I was making my own music the day I got my sax. I wouldn't exactly call it music though. I was pretty bad like everyone else is when they first get an instrument they don't know how to play. Eventually though, I would just noodle around with it. I would never write a real tune or anything, but it would be more like impromptu solos... in the privacy of my bedroom. I'm sure my parents loved that. I did learn to play music that I liked by ear though. In some ways, I'm like a drummer… I hate sheet music.
What's funnier is that at one point, two of my best friends and I decided to form a rock band in high school. We were all Christians and well... we wanted to have a really cool band that would knock the socks of Petra. Side note: Petra is now over 30 years old and is FINALLY retiring. I'll be seeing them in concert later this year to say goodbye. I'm shocked though that despite Bob Hartman's age, he's not performing in a wheelchair or cryogenically frozen.
Anyway, we basically had a huge problem with the rock band idea... I knew how to play sax and my friends knew how to play squat. I think one of them did have some guitar lessons and sometime after the other got married he learned how to play bass by ear. Well, all that meant one thing; the band lasted about a weekend.
Outside of pulling out my sax every few months or so, my music performing days actually ended my sophomore year in high school. I had to choose between my two passions: art and music. I choose art because I felt I could be more creative there than with music and might be able to make a living of it as a graphic designer. Turns out, I made the right choice at the time. Still, I hated to give up music. The funny thing about that was I had just then really started to listen to pop and rock music. My knowledge of music was just starting to expand when I had to give it up.
 All of this led up to about my first year of marriage when after studying art on a college level for a few years I realized that I had never truly explored how music was made. Something clicked and I realized that each second of a track or frame of music on a CD was like a photograph or painting. I saw music much in the way you would view a crudely animated flipbook. What really grabbed me was the realization that I had no clue how to develop things artistically over time. I understood composition on a 2-dimensional or even 3-dimentional plane, but I did not understand it when the 4th dimension was added. This is what really got me interested in writing music. It was a desire to learn and answer a question.
Never was it to become famous or even write something halfway decent that someone might play on the radio or even want to spend money on. At that point, music became an artist exploration of the 4th dimension for me.
So here I was, married, in college, working full-time as a part-time employee with a $12 an hour salary, and a Pentium 133 PC with a SoundBlaster Live! card. I had no clue where to start with gear. I just knew two things: I didn't have much money and I didn't want to invest much in something I might not be good at or enjoy. This is where Jamey Wright entered my life, but I doubt he remembers this too well.
I was asking questions about how to start on the old N*Soul Records boards. Tastyfresh didn't have forums yet and the Tastyfresh community really was the N*Soul community at the time. Things have changed haven't they? Anyway, Jamey responded that FruityLoops was a great low cost program to start out with. He and Joey had used it to lay out some of the drums for the first Faith Massive album. It wasn't a tool that he was still using, but he thought it would be a good one to start out with. I trusted his advice and bought it. It was a pretty minimal program back then, but today it's robust enough to take on Reason as a studio while still being versatile to be a plug-in within any of the major audio suites. What I loved about it was how simple it made the percussion and how easy it was to sculpt sounds to be used as fx. The big selling point though are their free upgrades.
So, that was my studio back then. Just a SoundBlaster Live! and FruityLoops. Today, my studio is still pretty barebones. I still use FruityLoops. It's name has changed to FL Studio for various reasons though. In addition to that, I'm sequencing all of my midi, arranging audio clips, mixing and so on now in Cakewalk's Sonar 5.0 Producer edition and using Native Instruments Reaktor 4.0 as my main group of synths. FL Studio is the cornerstone of my drums and "sound sculpting" as I sometimes call it. By working this way, I can focus solely on the rhythm of the percussion and then later focus solely on the synths.
It's been a good system now for five years. Ironically, the one part that has yet to be upgraded in my studio is my soundcard. It's still a SoundBlaster Live! I really should upgrade that at some point, but since I do very little work with actual hardware or vocals, it's fine. Coco: You said that your performing days ended when you had to choose between art and music (wow, what a beastly choice to have to make!!) so you're saying you have never performed ever since? I don't know about everybody else, but I'd LOVE to see a redsavior Live PA!! Redsavior: Well, yeah... from 1991 until today, I have not done a liver performance. The sad thing is that I don't even have the right setup to do a live PA right now. For the record though, I was never a great sax player... even if I did have six years of experience.
I actually do get requests for live PA's from time to time. I have to turn them down. Of course, I could always do what many in the industry do and fake a live PA. All I'd need to do is grab my Yammie CS-2X and a CD deck with my music on it. It wouldn't fool any producer, but the crowd would never know. The number of artists who have done this before would shock people. Coco: Going back to the 4th dimension of music exploration, have you answered that question? And I still wanna know what your first EDM creation was, and if you still have a copy of it! If you have it, let's hear it!  Redsavior: Yeah, I think I've answered that. I'm not sure how to put it into words though. It's more of just something you do. Music or film for that matter is similar to the ACT of painting. While a painting tells a story, if you were to film the painting of a painting you would see a story about the painting's creation. In a way, the creation of music is a hybrid. It tells a story, but within that story is the story of how the music was produced.
As far as my first work goes, yeah... I'd like to hear some of that now too. Unfortunately, despite the fact I have most of the FL Studio files, FL Studio has changed so much and I missing some plug-ins that the files I have sound nothing like what they did when I originally did them. I did find a 20 second loop that I wrote about three months before I started Redsavior for a flash intro at work. It's not too shabby for 1999. It's pretty different from what I can do now though.
Coco: It is obvious that you love this craft, but what's in it for you? I mean, what does this music add to your life? Redsavior: Heh... what's in it for me? Hopefully at least enough cash to pay for an music software upgrade each year. Seriously, it's not really money or fame. For me it really comes down to being creative. Do I like getting recognition? Heck yeah... who doesn't. It's not the focus though.
I look at it like this, my ability to write music is a gift from God and gifts from Him need to be put to use. I don't believe everything you do with that gift has to be buried in the church, but I do believe it should bring glory to God in some fashion either directly or indirectly. For example, I would not call my music Christian. I am a Christian musician and my music is a reflection of my beliefs. There are times when I set out to do an overtly spiritual track, but then there are times when I write music that simply reflects how I feel at the time or just as an exploration of tools and ideas. In the end, if I write something halfway decent, it's because of the talent God has given me. Regardless, I want my music as a whole to help support Christians who want to use dance music to aid their ministry.  Coco: I really want to thank you for taking the time to let me get all up in your musical business. I do have one last question, tho'...where/how did you get the name Redsavior??
Redsavior: Heh... my name actually dates back to my senior year in high school almost 8 years before I posted my first track on mp3.com. The short version is that I was curious about how the hype about bands get started. I wanted to see if I could create a name for a band that did not exist and then plaster the world with marketing material about the band. I was thinking that it would be possible to create a huge market demand for a band that does not exist just like some companies will do that with products. After the need is there, they develop the product.
At the time, I was looking at some secular bands to model the name after. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were making a pretty huge splash back then so that was part of the inspiration. The second was that this would have to be a Christian band since I'm a Christian. The original name of the band was "The Blood Red Savior" and was going to be a weird mix of metal and alt rock in the vein of King's X and maybe Undercover. Well... that effort lasted about a week before I lost interest.
Fast forward to December 31, 1999. I was about to upload my first track to mp3.com called "TheTruth." I needed an artist name. I didn't have one at that point in time. I needed one RIGHT then or I couldn't post the song. I just simply remembered that fake band name and quickly choose to clean the name up. I dropped "the blood" and pushed "Red Savior" together. Then, in a stroke of annoying genius... I decided to follow the Bauhaus' idea that capital letters should not exist. So I dropped the caps and had redsavior. You can ask Carey Jarvis about how anal I was about the spelling. I really was. That's the story in all of its glory. I love this guy…he totally inspires me! Keep on Lovin’ It, Reds! |
