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Features >
From Keith Urban fan to...
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Features |
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From Keith Urban fan to avid duck hunter - introducing Toontrack's Andreas Sundgren
Monday, June 2, 2008
Want to know more about the people behind our brands? What they get up to when they´re not working on new products or who their favourite bands are? Every other month we bring you an exclusive interview with one of the many talented people behind our products...
 Our second exclusive supplier interview features Andreas Sundgren – the CEO of Sweden-based drum sampler specialists Toontrack Music. Here he reveals his penchant for lonely white men with acoustic guitars and duck hunting...
For those of our first-time web visitors that are not so familiar with Toontrack, please introduce yourself and your company background.
Toontrack Music was formed in collaboration between a few old friends in the local music scene in Umeå (small town in the north part of Sweden) and was originally meant to be a production company for record labels and for composing music for computer games. We did a few game titles in the beginning and we also produced, wrote and mixed music for national and international artists but as a result of our production work we started creating sound libraries of our own for that production which in turn led to us selling those libraries, which in turn made us into a sample and software developer.
Which is your favourite Toontrack product and why?
EZdrummer is sort of my baby and a concept that we designed and devised as the conclusion from our experience in the business so far and what we thought it would take for a product to be successful. It has taken Toontrack to a whole new level and it’s our most important product for that reason. Right now though my favourite is EZplayer pro. First of all because it turns somebody like me into a fairly able bodied drum programmer although in reality drum programming scares the living daylights out of me. Second because, in all its smallness, it points out so many new and interesting directions for future development.
Of the many well-known names who use your products in the entertainment industry, which ones give you the greatest pleasure to be associated with?
That’s hard. Anyone that uses our stuff professionally or non-professionally that is creatively enabled by our product makes me proud to be associated with. We have people like Futureman and Tom Roady involved in our products and we’ve had the pleasure of working with legendary musicians like Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks from James Brown’s band lately. Nir Z who recorded EZdrummer and Superior Drummer 2.0 for us is just an amazing musician as Neil Dorfsman is an old hero of mine having worked on the Springsteen albums of my teenage musical awakening like The River. Harry Stinson who recorded the drums for the Nashville expansion for us is also someone that probably plays on half the albums in my record collection. It’s always cool to turn on the radio and be able to identify your sounds in a recording.
You have probably seen significant changes within the MI industry over the last 2 or 3 years, what significant developments do you predict over the next 2 or 3 years?
The principal of The Long Tail is about to break seriously with the web being accepted as a standard method of consuming products, ie the future of business is to sell less of more.
Technically what will effect us the most is the increasing mobility of powerful hardware and the switch to new standards of hard drive memories and their performance. More people will make music in their homes and the MI industry will be, and is being, very affected by the decline of the traditional model of business in the record industry. Here, the expansion potential for music software is just tapped at the surface.
The technical renewal cycle is speeding up too. With the sales channel being equally open to anyone these days, that will probably be to the advantage of small and mid sized companies with shorter turn around times.
What type of music do you most enjoy and do you have any favourite composers/artists/bands?
At Toontrack everyone is a musician and songwriter to some extent and most popular musical tastes and genres are represented. Personally I’m a sucker for lonely white men with acoustic guitars feeling sorry for themselves which is why I am currently on a Jackson Browne bender. The latest really great album I bought though was "What is love for?" by Justin Currie (former singer of Scottish band Del Amitri) from Ryko Disc. Buy it now. I also have a sick fascination for really commercial Nashville country. Keith Urban’s Greatest Hits is in the car right now. Great great music for driving apart from the very sympathetic fact that he’s covered Steve Forbert’s (another one of the lonely white guys with an acoustic) Romeos Tune.
Are there any surprising or amusing incidents that have happened to you whilst on Toontrack-related business and if so, what are they?
As Tom Petty sang; ‘The stories we could tell... but won’t to protect the names of the innocent’. Suffice to say that this is a business full of dysfunctional boys (me being one of them) and that that can lead to things getting out of hand pretty often. Time+Space personnel have known to be involved. But, my lips are sealed. I did bump into Jackson Browne at NAMM a few years ago.
If you hadn´t become a member of the MI industry what would you have done for a living?
I would’ve been an arty post-modern depressed and most likely poor (in both senses of the word) novelist. Still plan to become one. At some point.
What would you most like Time+Space customers to know about Toontrack?
That we aim at being a company to whom you can turn to whatever need you might have in relation to percussive elements in modern music making and that we have our ears very much to the ground in terms of what you as a musician/creator of music actually need to be creative since we are still part of a music making community. As writers, for example, we had a cut on an album that went Platinum in Sweden just after xmas. Brag, brag.
What are your other interests and hobbies outside your musical activities?
Personally I’m an avid duck hunter and enjoy upland bird hunting with Spaniels and pointing dogs. I’ve trained, and to some small extent, bred gundogs for the past 15 years and am about to get my first Spaniel in years this summer (plan to call him Stinky). My kids are also a source of endless fun, personal insight and entertainment. If you don’t have one, (a kid that is), get one now.
Superior Drummer 2.0 is due for release in June. What particular features of this product please you most?
The new beautiful user interface, the great filters supplied by Sonalksis, the fact that it is built in a modular fashion so that the user can decide to what extent he or she wants to use the product – from a small custom install for your laptop encompassing only a few gigabytes to the full monster install of 20GB of sounds (equivalent of 60 GB of sounds recorded) to the very versatile MIDI engine Ezplayer pro included in the package.
The MIDI grooves by Nir Z allows the user to get one of the most accomplished studio drummers in the world at this very moment playing in their PC. The sound libraries are fantastic and two of the studios in the package can no longer be accessed other than through Superior Drummer 2.0.
I could go on but ok, in short, everything pleases me. We aim to deliver something that should be the standard choice of digital drum production tools for years to come.
Toontrack will be joining us on the Time+Space stand at the London International Music Show. Click here for details.
Click here for more information on Toontrack products
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