Here’s to the sound of acid over the sound of bombs. “The future will survive / future will stay alive.” Yeah, acid might be needed now more than ever.
Roland dedicated this year’s 303 Day to acid originator DJ Pierre, aka Phuture member Nathaniel Pierre Jones. It could be just the thing if you’re looking for some inspiration. (Full disclosure: I contributed a little to this one for Roland.)
They’re dedicated enough that someone edited the video to 3:03 exactly.
Journalist Gino Sorcinelli, who has a fascinating newsletter “dissecting” production, beats, and beatmaking, wrote the interview with DJ Pierre. I have to confess I didn’t know “We are Phuture” was written as a comeback to the notion acid house was dead many years ago. I’ll put that in the “very much alive” category now. Even better is the nugget that DJ Ron Hardy emptied the floor with the cassette of “Acid Tracks” and played it three more times in the same set until people liked it. There’s a deeper lesson about… a great many things, probably.
Check the story:
Lifetime Achievement: DJ Pierre and Phuture
But since you know those by heart, absolutely do not miss the 2017 full-length from DJ Pierre, because it grooves hard as hell. There is beautiful warmth and soul mixed with absolutely dirty, raw beats and blistering bass. While other people copy-paste a lot of that acid formula – some even with reasonable success – this is acid house that doesn’t sound like anyone else’s acid house, even from Phuture.
If you have Roland Cloud, you’ve got the TB-303, TR-707, and TR-727 ready to go, among others. As of today, you can take advantage of a library of patches and patterns from DJ Pierre they’ve dubbed The Phuture Collection.
It’s honestly a master class in sound design and nuance; I wrote up why that is and how to use it for Roland:
This is Acid: Exploring DJ Pierre’s Phuture Collection
Listening again to “Wild Pitch – The Story” makes connections beyond just those machines, to some deeper feelings. Hope you can enjoy.
For the record, that sound is just literally this bank, the Roland Cloud plug-ins, and the Logic Compressor and ChromaVerb. It’s like a generative Phuture album you can load up and tweak that never ends.