AZURA Interview
We recently sat down with Ethan Azura, aka AZURA, to discuss his journey around creating music and what inspired him in the making of his new sample pack.
What inspired you to start creating music and how long have you been making music?
I’ve been creating music for about nine years or so. It started with my frustration of not knowing how electronic music is made and realizing that anyone could do it with the right tools. I was always interested in music but never took much to instruments, mainly because I couldn't stick with them. I was in some bands during middle school, but people weren't committed, which frustrated me. I spent two or three years just dabbling with music, not taking it too seriously. Once I realized I could have something that I could do completely on my own piqued my interest, and I just slowly started getting into it. Then, after improving and finding music that deeply inspired me, I decided to pursue it seriously.
What samples do you normally like using when creating your own beats?
I use a lot of harmonic loops and chop them up, as well as drum loops and pull all the one-shots from them to create my own beats. I'd say that's my biggest piece of advice with it, and it's how I personally use it because sometimes, I'll hear three or four sounds in a loop that I really like, but I don't like the loop itself, or it doesn't work the way I want it to. So being able to chop it up and use it differently helps.
Where do you find your loops when making your own EDM beats?
It comes from everywhere, whether it's a purchased sample pack I got a few years ago or from some royalty-free website with Creative Commons and others. I also use a lot of my own original samples - if I've recorded some loops and have nothing to do with them, I'll drag them in and chop them up, I also have a lot of my songs stemming out. If I'm building a new song and need something in F Major or something, I'll pull some stems from that and start chopping them up. Primarily, it's almost a convenience initially until I’ve gotten into a good creative flow.
What vibe were you trying to achieve with this sound pack?
It's all about utility and not having any waste in the sample pack. I want every single sample to be usable, and that can be in a bunch of different ways. I cannot stand sample packs where the majority of it is just interesting sounds on their own, and you cannot figure out what to do with them. Either they have six instruments stacked on top of each other, making it almost a full song, or it's just some crazy sound that stands out too much in a mix or a beat. I put a focus on building the sample pack to be used in various ways while keeping the integrity of the initial sound I made.
How do you see other creators using this pack?
The way I chop stuff up is how I think it's really made for. The drum loops are somewhat minimal, so you can even chop those up. You can dig in there and pull out whatever you can from the pack and you don’t have to drag and drop and use it exactly the way it's supposed to be used. If you want to completely destroy the loop and change it up, that's what it's for. If you're deconstructing it or running it through a filter later, you can do that too.
What tips do you have for creators using the pack?
I would reverse some of the harmonic loops. Kind of like being like a lot of drill bits, for example, that kind of eerie chord sound. Just for me, I would just reverse some of the, like, the Rhodes piano loops, add some reverb, and maybe just bounce it and chop it up stuff like that. So I think you can post-process it a lot and that's kind of where you'll get some really interesting stuff from.
What piece of advice would you give to upcoming creators?
I think its quantity initially over quality, which kind of sounds, I think, counterintuitive to a lot of basic advice. I mean, I would make it as much stuff as I could - when I was starting out, I spent way too much time trying to perfect one song and I think the amount of growth you like you can experience from one song is limited I wish instead of spending three months on one track, I would have made 20 tracks in that time. I think I would have improved exponentially and nowadays, I make way more stuff than like ever before. Because I realized that trying to come up with as many new ideas and just keep working and finishing stuff is just the best way to improve. To have finished stuff rather than have constant working progress that, you know, is gonna be your magnum opus that never will be, just because it doesn't work like that.
Top 3 producers of all time?
John Hopkins, Rick Rubin, Skrillex.
Interview by Sean P. Jones.
You can check out AZURA's pack here.