Camo & Krooked might be figureheads of a genre, but they don’t feel constrained by it. Since first making music together in 2002, Reinhard “Camo” Rietsch and Markus “Krooked” Wagner have constantly explored the limits of drum and bass, taking inspiration from across the musical landscape and repeatedly changing the genre with cutting-edge production techniques. As a result, they’ve remixed everyone from Lana Del Rey to The Prodigy, toured relentlessly across the world, and released five albums – the latest being a collaboration with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra as part of Red Bull Symphonic.

In this interview, the duo discuss the earliest days of their collaboration and explain how the move to Bitwig Studio gave them the musical freedom they were always looking for. They also drop a wealth of production tips, covering sidechaining, layering, stereo width, and more.

When you started making music in the 2000s, what tools were you using?

Camo: Both of us started with eJay Hip Hop, right?

Krooked: Yeah, it was pretty much the easiest way to make music. It was almost like LEGO – you could drop in the included samples and everything was already in key, so all the sounds worked together.

Camo: We properly started making music with FruityLoops. That was how we learned the basics like mixing, compression, and EQing. There wasn't the huge knowledge base there is today, so it was learning by doing, asking friends, or looking over someone's shoulder.

Krooked: Back then we didn't have proper speakers. Our first two albums were written on Sennheiser HD25s and an AC'97 internal sound card that really altered the sound – there was probably some internal EQ and compression going on before it actually hit your headphones. But it worked. We knew those headphones inside out, so we knew how to get the most out of them.

Krooked: The most important thing for us was to have separate, identical studios. We don't actually like the collaborative dynamic of being in the same room. When we made our first tracks together in 2007 we used a plug-in called VS Tunnel, which was a really simple tool for streaming synced audio to one another online. One of us would make some drums, the other would make a bassline or melody, and we would just bounce things back and forth. We worked like that for ages, until suddenly the plug-in stopped working. With Bitwig Studio we discovered a workflow for sharing projects in the cloud.

Do you still work with mirrored setups?

Krooked: Yeah, our setups are exactly the same. The computers have the same hardware, the same sound cards, the same speakers, and the same headphones. That way no one can argue that it sounds better on these speakers or those headphones, because we both use the same things.

Your tracks often have unusual arrangements and draw influences from different genres. How do you create your arrangements, and what do you consider to be the Camo & Krooked trademark?

Krooked: I think a lot of it has to do with using Bitwig and being able to easily drag different ideas between projects. Our attention span is quite short and we like a lot of things to happen throughout a track. We try to envision a musical world for it, because that makes it easier to choose a palette of sounds and possible directions to explore. Interesting arrangements aren’t looked at so much in drum and bass. Everything is always so dense, so dance floor and rave-orientated, that there's a lot of missed opportunities.

Camo: Our trademark is that there is lots of contrast. You never know what will come next, and it's really determined by our current influences. We always take inspiration from other genres, and try not to let our music be too influenced by drum and bass itself. If we did that it would become something that already exists, and that's not very exciting to us.

Krooked: I think that one trademark of Camo & Krooked is that we hardly do something twice. If somebody says, “I miss the old Camo & Krooked,” I'm always like, “which one?” If you look back at our discography, we’ve always tried to evolve and not repeat the artistic statements we already made. And we’re growing older, so our sound is maturing.

We learned a lot of inspiring stuff during the writing process for Red Bull Symphonic, things we'll definitely incorporate back into our own music. We're also digging a lot of the garage-y stuff that's around right now. I think this could be refreshing for drum and bass, because these are evergreen sounds that have been around for many years, but they’re being used in a more modern way.

You started using Bitwig Studio in 2017. How did you go about learning Bitwig, and what were some of your favorite features after making the switch?

Krooked: Customizable shortcuts help a lot. That way you can bring some of the shortcuts that are already in your muscle memory. We were doing some live shows back then too, and Bitwig Studio has some really interesting containers, such as the instrument and FX selectors, that made our live shows much easier.

The thing that really sold us on it was being able to work on multiple projects simultaneously. We might have a drum project, a melody project, and a sound design project all open at the same time, and we'll just drag parts between them to see what works. If it doesn't, we delete it and try the next thing. This changed everything and has made our workflow so much better.

Camo: When we moved to Bitwig Studio, we switched from using drum samples to synthesizing everything ourselves and went very deep into learning sound design – right into the bones of programming and building drum sounds. We make our own finger snaps and claps, and spend a lot of time analyzing sounds with the oscilloscope, trying to figure out the physics behind every sound – why something sounds the way it does and how to replicate it with just sine waves and noise.

Krooked: We often use comb filters and resonator banks to create peaks and resonances that are sometimes missing when you're making synthesized drums. The Segments envelope generator also helps a lot when you need to combine a transient with the body of a snare, for example. And the Blur device is great for creating weird, all-pass filter-esque delays, when you want a room sound without having to actually use reverb.

Camo: Learning all of that frees you from going through thousands of samples. Whatever’s in your mind, you can program it. Presets and samples are fine of course, but for us the mastery is in doing everything from scratch. Maybe you won't hear much of a difference, but the feeling you get as a producer is really special. It's your baby. That's what we're living for.

It was a bit of an eye-opener working with Bitwig Studio after FruityLoops because it's really tight and everything is so stable. If a plug-in crashes, the rest of the project is safe. It feels so comfortable – like the digital playground we were always looking for.

What music tools are exciting you currently? There’s obviously a lot of discussion of AI.

Krooked: I think the biggest problem with AI is that it relies on something that already exists and you can't always trace its origin. When you create something, how do you know if it's taken from something you shouldn't take from? We sometimes like to make our own samples that sound like old Motown or soul records, upload them onto Suno or Udio, and then see where they take them. Then we'll use that as inspiration by replicating it. We don't use the actual sample, instead we rebuild the whole thing so we have full control over it.

Camo: The new thing that's really exciting us is Bitwig Studio 6, to be honest. It will change our workflows, and give new input and new possibilities.

Krooked: We wish we could have used Bitwig Studio 6 for the Red Bull Symphonic project! With the template we have for orchestral writing, we write every single instrument as individual parts: first violin, second violin, viola, cello, contrabass, brass, woodwind, all the percussion. But when you want to see the bigger picture, you have to scan through all these individual tracks. With the new editors in Bitwig Studio 6 you can select the whole string section and see all the voices in one editor, and just drag around notes. That would have made life so much easier for us! It'll probably make working on orchestral projects twice as fast. I’m also curious where the project key signature can take me, for example in combination with an arpeggiator, if it’s automated. These are things that make you think outside of your own world, and offer up new inspiration.

Camo & Krooked's
Production
Tips

Get Creative With Sidechaining

Krooked: We discovered completely new ways of sidechaining with Bitwig Studio's modulators. We were using a lot of audio-rate modulation to sidechain a signal, way before it was possible with third-party plug-ins. It can be really powerful to use audio or note information from a certain point in the chain as a note-on for triggering a sidechain with a gate. This is really important for us with all the layering we do.

Layer Sounds for Huge Results

Camo: A lot of producers have the craziest, biggest basses, but when they show you how they do it, the original sounds that come out of the synthesizer are so small. Everything comes from stacking different frequencies, distortion, and effects to make it bigger. Almost all the power, particularly in drum and bass, is in the layering, and this is really nice to work with in Bitwig Studio, especially thanks to the container devices.

Krooked: One use case for mid-side containers and stacking FX containers is to keep the original signal as clean as possible while building on top of it, rather than destroying the sound by trying to get the most out of one thing.

We have a lot of weird placebo-like stereo effects that we made ourselves with nested Tool devices. We hard-pan a signal to one side and delay it a little bit, then with a mid-side container solo the sides of that channel. The other side is the dry part, so what you end up with is a Haas effect, but only on the sides. We do the same thing with the Dome Filter, rotating the phase of an incoming sound and panning it to one side to get a super nice stereo effect.

Where containers get really interesting is by using ring-modulated chains. You have a dry signal on one layer, and a convolution reverb or other effect on a second layer, which is then ring-modded against the dry sound. The result is that only the peaks of the dry sound run through the reverb.

Camo: When you combine the built-in container devices like Note FX Layer with VST plug-ins, it opens up a whole new world. Even if you're not using the built-in devices, Bitwig Studio can do so much with VSTs. You can use multiband devices, stack them up, and sidechain them against one another.

Maximize Your Loudness

Krooked: If you want to achieve the loudest, cleanest sound, you can't have anything clashing frequency-wise. We do a lot of internal sidechaining of drum sounds against one another. We use a Tool device with an Audio Sidechain modulator controlling the volume, which triggers sidechaining.

The most important thing for maximum loudness is a stereo signal that folds perfectly. Often people try to make the widest possible sound by using 16-voice unison or a lot of chorus. That can be cool, because sometimes you want some phase smearing going on – but to have a precise, loud sound, you need the cleanest, most phase-coherent mid signal possible.

It's All About Stereo
(But Think Mono, Too)

Camo: We don't really think in terms of left-right anymore, only mid-side. It's much more important for us, because sometimes clubs have limited stereo width, and mono still always wins in the club.

Krooked: All of our tunes have stereo information down to the second harmonic of the fundamental frequency, usually around 100Hz. But what a lot of people get wrong is trying to have their tracks completely stereo from the bottom to the top. If you have no contrast in the stereo field, how can you tell if something is wide? We used to make that mistake quite a lot by trying to widen everything to achieve loudness.

Camo: It's important that some of the elements of your tunes are quite narrow, so you can feel the wider ones more. If the snare is wide, and the mid-range is wide, the mid-range doesn't actually feel that wide. But if you have a mono snare and the mid-range is wide, wow.

Krooked: Having a Tool device mapped to the plus and minus keys on my keyboard is super helpful: If I press minus, the Tool folds the audio to mono. If I press plus, it folds back to stereo. With every decision I make, I press minus. Sometimes it stays on minus for hours, and when you're happy with what you did and press plus again, you're suddenly like, “oh my god, it works!” That really helps us get the perfect mix.

Before you even think about stereo width, always work in mono. If the track sits how it should sit in mono, you’ll have no problem with your stereo image at all, meaning you can think creatively about whether you want to make your mid-range wide, or your drums wider, for example. A terribly-mixed stereo tune always sounds worse than a completely mono tune.