Cause4Concern have been tearing up dancefloors with their brand of techy, futuristic drum'n'bass since the 90s. Usually consisting of 4 members, Edd Holmes (aka Optiv) takes time ahead of the bands upcoming release of their new album "Pandemic" to answer a few questions.

In terms of synths, our main work horse is Massive. We don’t often run it live but it’s a good starting point for generating good tonal basses for further processing.

It really depends on the context of the sound. We like to think there is a sci-fi element to our music and we spend quite a lot of time trying to express that. The emphasis with our music is more on unusual sound FX or atmospheres than on melody. When we work on basses we try to make it sound as interesting as possible, we think that the movement and tone of the bass is just as important as the riff it plays.

We normally break our studio sessions into two parts, sound design and arrangement. Our favourite method of sound design is by triggering Massive with a relatively simple riff, applying a fair amount of plug-ins, such as distortion, phaser, reverb, etc. and randomly automating as many parameters as we can over a given time. We end up rendering huge wav-files, of which 99% gets trashed but occasionally you end up with great sounding hooks or FX. You never really know what you might end up with but that’s half the fun.

It has changed greatly! Up until 5 years ago we were very much hardware based but now we are using the computer to do just about everything. Occasionally we get our old hardware synths out but that is more for nostalgia than anything else. When we first started using soft synths we were overwhelmed with the choice and ended up using many without really understanding how they worked. Nowadays we just stick to a few and we feel we have nailed them pretty well.

When we started we used hardware synths, hardware samplers, and a mixing desk. Nowadays we are quite happy just to use a computer, so the development of the DAW has easily had the greatest impact on our work in terms of speed and creativity.

When we made the move to making music in the computer we asked a lot of other drum & bass producers what they were using as a soft sampler and the answer was almost always Kontakt.

We use Massive, Kontakt 3, Battery 3 and Kore 2 on nearly all of our tracks; they’re the backbone of our VSTi’s. We also use Audio Kontrol 1 as our main soundcard to our DAW.

Our music is mainly instrumental and it is promoted through DJ-sets in clubs. Eventually we may end up making more vocal-based Drum & Bass and take it on the road. Until then we will stick to DJ-ing.