I’ve worked with Conrad for several years now and seen him grow as a producer and arranger. As well as setting the bar high in his varied and eclectic DJ sets, he has become an accomplished jazz pianist.
From initially jamming on just a few chords, his progress has been nothing short of inspiring. Both fluent and musical, he now incorporates innovative piano and basslines, Hammond organ & Fender Rhodes parts into genuinely authentic arrangements which really do set his music apart. Here are some examples on his Soundcloud page.
Sometimes our sessions are more like extended piano jams. He can seamlessly translate his new skills into innovative arrangements which also show off his extensive appreciation of soul, disco and funk.
The last 10 years have seen him play at London’s best clubs including Oval Space, Corsica studio & The Cause as well as the Jazz Cafe and
Conrad is also the resident for Eco-Disco, the world’s first plastic-free party. All of this, alongside with working for Jimpster’s renowned U.K deep house label Freerange Records, make him an even more well-rounded musician and authentic influencer.
Elliot (right) with Appetite co-founder Liam Palmer (left)
I’ve been working with Elliot Schooling for over a year now, helping to develop his understanding of music theory, chord sequences and piano technique. It’s all part of a lifelong ambition to help my talented piano students prove to the world how musically creative dance music’s possibilities could be. Elliot is a case study – and his success proves it.
Appetite, the dance music collective and brand that he co-founded with compadre Liam Palmer, has already transformed the dance music scene with wildly successful events across the world.
Appetite’s global success is well earned growing from their early underground following around Essex
Their promotion and branding is eye-catching, as is their social media presence, eg Instagram here.
Elliot has a prodigiously strong work ethic – and he’s applied it to both his playing skills as well as his own music. So proud of his progress; both his playing and his tracks have been transformed. Elliot’s natural musicality is really starting to shine through in his releases.You can hear some of his original work here on his Soundcloud page.
Elliot and co-founder Liam Palmer’s hugely successful Summer event Appetite On The Farm
The day when Elliot plays live keyboards during his popular sets won’t be long. Maybe adding synth pads, basslines or melodies over the top of his own as well as others’ tracks? He’s doing it in the studio, so why not do it live?
Just because DJ/producers rarely play instruments live doesn’t mean it shouldn’t become something to reach for. It would make House music – and more broadly the EDM genre, an even more of a live and spontaneous experience than it is already.
Danny’s tried to build this into all his student teaching and music mentoring – helping dance music superstars The Shapeshifters, Glasgow Underground‘s Kevin McKay and Jamie Jones amongst many others along their musical paths.
Appetite performing at 93 Feet East, London. Elliot gigs at venues from Milan to Barcelona to Ibiza.
Piano lessons aren’t just about learning scales and reading the dots.
They can transform any musician’s creativity, whether professional or complete beginner. Ultimately it’s a pathway to true self expression.
After all, what is the common denominator of every recording studio other than just a mixer, speakers and computer?
Keyboards and synths. And lots of them!
Whether triggering drums, bass, synth, choirs, samples or even a complete orchestra for that matter, becoming a good keys player is a fundamental for any serious modern dance music producer.
Keyboard skills are front and centre of dance music production techniques: students can also learn at Danny’s studio in Camden, North London
Most musicians can program half decent beats on an Akai MPC or sequence a standard EDM track on Logic, Ableton or Pro Tools. But how many can play their parts into the software with passion and soul?
I’m convinced that it will be those like Elliot Schooling, who can express themselves on keyboards both in the studio and at live events – in addition to programming and working the decks – who will be the most sought after dance music talents of all.
Oliver Som, a talented mixing engineer and sometime producer who has worked with such international names as Robbie Williams and James Blunt sought Danny’s help with piano and keyboard playing techniques in order to aid his work. He works closely with celebrated producer Guy Chambers. This has fed into all of their musical ambition and creativity.
Wonderful privilege to participate in this authentic album project with these two ‘80s legends. I collaborated with them on the English Eccentrics album, providing the keyboards and some of the arrangement, but here’s the clincher. I didn’t even know I was! Suddenly I found lots of publicity with my name on it. ‘Keyboard wiz Danny Kuperberg contributes to the album featuring Suggs and Toyah. A pleasant surprise, for sure, but baffling! Then it hit me: the young guy who was dubbed a techno-wiz was actually a student in North London and I’d given him about ten lessons. Unbeknownst to me, I’d been collaborating with one of my heroes! Such is the music biz and it’s unexpected publicity jolts.
I do have wonderful memories of both ’It’s A Mystery’ (Toyah) and ’It Must Be Love’ (Madness), who I adore anyway. One of the main reasons I so wanted to play Camden’s The Dublin Castle, solo, just voice and keyboard, was because it was where they made their name. And of course, I’d hung out a lot in Camden Market weekends as a teenager. Still, the nostalgia feels great. The creative possibilities when you hear music like this, aged 11 on your Walkman (no vision), are limitless.
Danny K with Trevor Horn; St John’s Church, Hampstead, London NW3
Trevor Horn; absolute studio and musical hero of mine. It was a real pleasure to meet him and discover that I have a near neighbour (and great sound engineer) friend in common who he had worked with.
Trevor’s recording studio Sarm West is where some of the greatest music, certainly of the eighties and nineties was produced. For example, it is where the stars gathered for Band Aid to record Do They Know Its Christmas. He produced ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Art Of Noise, Seal and many many more. His own Buggles classic Video Killed The Radio Star was the first video to be played on MTV.
The Buzzcocks’ Steve Diggle far left. Pete Shelley, second from right.
The year was 1996. It was in a Gospel Oak terrace, not far from Hampstead Heath in North London. Britpop was in full force, where me and a flatmate would be mastering, mixing or generally tweaking our ’kit’ or cool studio gear that we’d covet. Vaguely, these days we’d be known as Gear Sluts (www.gearslutz.com) on account of us doing anything to get, swap, buy or barter for synths, drum machines, samplers, mixing desks, not to mention microphones. Even our floppy disk sample library (orchestral sounds, bass and vocal samples etc) were in demand and advertised in Sound On Sound. (See my Bernard Butler / Suede post #3 Danny’s Brush With…). The samples would be loaded onto my Akai S900. These days, the equivalent are just plugins installed into one’s DAW.
It was here that I met Steve Diggle, The Buzzcocks’ (www.buzzcocks.com) lead guitarist who wanted to remaster their Live In Paris album with my flatmate. Pete Shelley, who sadly passed away, was the lead singer and main songwriter and their hit was ’Ever Fallen In Love With Someone You Shouldn’t Have Fallen In Love With’.
Anyway, we hit it off immediately with our similar music tastes. They were really a seminal punk band. They helped define the punk ethos too, plus they put Birmingham on the musical map.
Steve Diggle: what a talented guy and guitarist, not to mention great musical taste. We smoked and drank a lot well into the night. I was mildly surprised to learn that he didn’t have the passion for punk style music that I’d anticipated. He was heavily into classical electronic music. This is complex music with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varese (musique concrete) and Pierre Boulez amongst those brilliant mid 20th century composers. The Buzzcocks experienced some pretty cool and funny escapades which Diggle enjoyed telling me about.
Suede, circa 1994: Bernard Butler, left. Lead singer Brett Anderson, right.
This is the tale of an unexpected visitor, my Akai S900 sampler (see post) – and two floppy disks. It happened in 1994 during my days living in Gospel Oak, a part of North London just bordering on Hampstead Heath. Britpop hadn’t really arrived yet and it was about two years before the world got to know Oasis and The Spice Girls. Anyway, the guy I was sharing with had his own recording studio on the top floor. It had state of the art ProTools audio mastering facilities so occasionally bands, mainly dance music acts but occasionally name bands, would turn up (see my Buzzcocks post)
I also had some ‘kit’ (the term for audio and studio equipment), but my audio software couldn’t match that of my flatmate. Yet I DID own an Akai S-900 sampler. The Akai had a certain credibility because one could use 8-bit crunched up early digital sounds (think the early Super Mario Bros gaming soundtracks). This could easily be switched to 16-bit for a sleeker and more accurate digital sound. It was simple to use and also looked very very cool. The slightly younger musicians certainly wanted a piece of it.
So the Akai S-900 was cool, but my unique selling point turned out to be my sample library, a set of real recorded (not synthesised) sounds that could be loaded into the sampler. The analog equivalent of the early samplers would be the Mellotron consisting of many strips of tape of musicians actually playing. It was famously used by The Beatles and George Martin in Abbey Road studios, also in North London and fairly near Gospel Oak. You can hear the Mellotron in the famous haunting intro to The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever. Paul McCartney (or George Martin?) are effectively playing ten flautists simultaneously. It is not synthetic and neither were the early samplers, except that they were digital and not analog.
My treasured Akai S-900 sampler, one of the first imported into the UK. They year was 1983 and I was thirteen. It was bought for me by my father from Turnkey, when it was still based in Hendon
Anyway I had studiously assembled my sample library and was very proud of it. I had several orchestras, horn sections, drum kits, bass sounds etc etc. Yet each floppy disk would only contain several samples, maybe only four or five sounds because each disk could only store about 5Mb – inconceivable now in the age of terabytes. To put it into context, a simple piece of music software now contains hundreds of thousands of samples (not four or five). Yes, music technology really HAS moved along that quickly. In magazines like Loot, musicians would exchange disks, copy them and then use them on their recordings. Like jazz scores, there was common agreement that money shouldn’t exchange hands as this was creative and consensual sharing. There were exceptions, but this was the accepted wisdom.
So back to the anecdote. One day, a very thin, very pale, long-haired twenty something knocks on the door and ambles up to my room hardly making any eye contact with me. He appeared to be dead set on a serious mission – and as far as I was concerned, it was a sound mission (excuse the pun) for authentic orchestral samples according to his reply to me via Loot. I ask him if wants a drink (although a very large Big Mac and fries would probably have done him more good). He doesn’t want a drink. He then proceeds to approach my Akai S-900 and starts to flick reverently through my floppy disks as if they were the lost holy grail of audio. I ask him:
‘So you’re a musician then? Keeping the wolf from the door?
‘I need strings. You got anything like that?’
Well at least there were two sentences there, albeit short ones.
‘Are you a musician?’ I ask.
He replies: ‘Well actually I’m in a band.’ And I reply: ‘Cool, done any local gigs?’
‘A few’, he mutters, still staring down at his shoes. But I did notice him glimpsing furtively at the two floppies marked ‘Orchestral Stabs’ and ‘String Sections’. I was amused.
‘So what’s the name of your band?’ I ask.
‘Sueeaaaaayyyyyyyyyde’ he says, staring at me, possibly stoned out of his gourd, who can tell? The word lasted a long time. Then he looked at me as if I’d arrived from outer-space and I was his first human encounter. Now I was not so much puzzled as impressed, or a combination thereof. If I’m honest, my heart had stopped for a split second… Suede were a very big and very influential band at the time; many (including me) say a major influence on the likes of Blur, Pulp; Britpop in general. In fact Suede had already enjoyed mainstream success, critical acclaim in fact – and they were on to their second album. Of course I didn’t let on I knew much about them. Plus there was also the fact that I felt just a little bit sorry for this bedraggled urban waistrel. So I thought for a moment:
‘Oh yeh, I think I’ve heard of them.’ I said.
No response. I looked at him again, and realised that the tables had been turned. Now it was I who regarded him as the alien. He looked vaguely surprised that I hadn’t reacted to him with more reverence, but it was barely a flicker. This man was clearly on a mission. His eyes were deadset on his second album, and he clearly wanted to throw a few orchestras into the mix.
I now saw him for who he was – and I was puzzled no more. Bernard Butler was a bedraggled guitar wielding young rockstar – the real deal, yet seemingly unhappy and tortured-looking. I may have been wrong but that was certainly my impression.
I looked back at him and said goodbye. Again, zero eye contact. Finally, without much more ado, he shuffled back downstairs armed with his two floppies: ‘Orchestral Stabs’ and ‘String Section’ and stumbled past the door. Looking back I do believe that he’d forgotten to close it.
Such was the pre-Britpop scene, Gospel Oak/Belsize Park, North London, 1994.
Jamie’s compadres Lee Foss and Richy Ahmed both later contacted me for keyboard/harmony/session help à la Jamie, before being waylaid by a blizzard of international festival and Ibiza club offers. They are all now at the top of the global dance music production tree. And there are connections there with Scarlett Etienne, with whom I’ve now worked on and off for over seven years.
Lee Foss and friend
They are all part of ‘Hot Creations‘, the label that Jamie started, which has set the standard for the modern Superstar DJ brand. The label is an enormous success now. Jamie’s weekly event in Ibiza, ‘Paradise’ is a go-to event in the dance music world.
And Jamie still tops the bill, see below, even a full six years on from his initial breakthrough.
Boy, is it a lucrative business.
Without doubt, the money to be made in the music biz these days is certainly in the dance music production festival and elite club circuit (and not in the pop or rock star realm, which may surprise many).
