TSOS drifted into deep orbit with Australian artist DavZ to talk nostalgia, chillsynth, game audio, warped textures, and the dangerous beauty of too much warble.

DavZ creates dreamy, atmospheric electronic music that feels like fake memories from a place you have never been, but somehow miss anyway. Naturally, we had to find out what makes the signal shimmer.

Signal

TSOS: Let’s assume we have some readers who aren’t familiar with you (GASP!). How would you describe your project DavZ and the music you create?

I like to see how to push genre envelopes and combine various sound palettes from different styles to make modern takes on nostalgic tones. Outer space has a huge influence on my music.

Dream State

TSOS: Your sound has a really relaxed, atmospheric quality to it. It feels like you are pulled into a dream. What emotions or moods are you usually trying to capture when writing a track?

It depends on what I’m working on at any given moment and the end goal of the project.

A majority of my tracks are strongly underpinned with feelings of nostalgia, both from legitimate longing of past experiences growing up as well as the indescribable “fake nostalgia” that you often hear in lots of great atmospheric music under the chillsynth and vaporwave umbrellas, think HOME Resonance and similar.

On a day to day basis, sometimes it’s hard to say what emotions I’m trying to capture at any given time because my creative process can be so spontaneous. Usually it’s more important that the music feels well-formed, and whether I can stay in flow state on the same tune while producing for long periods of time.

A nice emergent property is that any particular music I release reflects my headspace at a certain time period, and it’s almost like a time capsule I can always go back to. Music releases kind of feel like collecting scraps and sorting through them. Sometimes I’m even nostalgic over my old music that was initially designed to sound “fake” nostalgic, and that is a very strange feeling.

Australia

TSOS: Being based in Australia, has the environment or culture there influenced your music in any way? How is the scene over there? Do you, Killstar, Gryff, and September 87 ever go out to grab a cuppa? Yeah nah yeah?

Bloody oath yeah nah yeah mate.

Might be a strange take, I don’t think Australia’s music culture has influenced me as strongly as I thought it would. Like, I listen to various artists from around Australia such as Flume, Mick Gordon, Tame Impala, but I wouldn’t say I’ve been involved in any Australian underground music cultures that have influenced me personally, since I only got into live music very recently.

I’ve been to a few shows both in Melbourne and in Sydney but mostly for acts from overseas that I already knew about online. My personal influences stem more from the wide variety of things I’ve seen on the internet.

What seems to have influenced me the most though outside of music is definitely the game development and game audio scene in Melbourne, and I’ve met so many cool people through events during Melbourne International Games Week. I met a legendary game dev mate of mine through High Score 2024, which is basically a set of cool game audio industry talks from professionals in the field. I do a bit of game development on the side so it’s always cool to meet up with local folks and see what people are working on.

I haven’t hung out with local synthwave folks yet but I’d be so keen to get myself a cup of Joe with them, or maybe even head over to Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio to go record some old 90s synths and make some music hehe. I met up with Z from Nightride FM once in Melbourne which was dope! Currently staying in Sydney for work though, keen to hang regardless!

Process

TSOS: What does your creative process usually look like from the first idea, do you quickly pull over to the side of the road to record yourself humming, to a finished song?

I’ve definitely recorded myself humming a few times hehe, although I find it hard looking back at old recordings to understand what was in my head at the time. I usually start by thinking about what kind of broad genre group I want to make music for on a particular day, either chillsynth, bass music, synthwave or similar. As a result I can then sort of ‘hear’ what it will sound like before starting, without putting any expectations on myself for it to sound the way it does in my head.

I usually write melodies and chords first since that can impact mood dramatically, or I spend some time on sound design and figure out a new way to use, or abuse, the plugins and tools I own and end up with something unique.

At a very high level, it’s easy to think about the meat and potatoes of the creative process in a certain way. It’s as if I’m starting on the same blank slate every time, and every single action I take puts me closer to an end state, a finished track. To readers who know anything about programming data structures, it’s like a depth first search through a massive connected graph of options and opportunities where every action, such as tweaking knobs, moving arrangements around, replacing drum samples, adding chord variations, etc., means you jump to a new end state.

I like thinking about it this way because it makes every action feel extremely small which makes it easier for me to overcome writer’s block and various other production hurdles. Basically telling yourself when you’re stuck, “what is the next thing you could do to make your existing project 1% better” and taking the next step is usually quite easy.

Not all actions will improve your project but it’s up to your judgement on whether you think a particular decision helps or hinders your vision for the project.

Not everyone’s technical music production advice is right for you to hit your end state so you should pick what works for you, but at the very least take some time to understand all the different technical perspectives before parroting a popular music take you hear online.

It’s a good way to think about genre groups as a set of key particular musical decisions. Personal artist styles feel like this to me as well, certain artists with a distinct style picked up the muscle memory to do certain musical things differently in their workflow and their particular combination of actions ends up with unique results that can only be attributed to them.

Towards the end of a project, the majority of the idea will be in place so I’ll be working on cleaning up any problem areas, adding extra sound design sparkle here and there. Sometimes it takes a different kind of mindset to do this finalisation work because you’ve probably heard your own music a thousand times at this point. It’s kind of similar to how James Lee, the YouTube animator, describes their creative perspective of two different mentalities for different parts of the creative lifespan of a project, the unorganised, creative one, and the logical organised get-stuff-done one.

Tools

TSOS: What DAW and gear do you currently use the most, and are there any plugins or synths you swear by? Our readers are all producers or wanna be producers, and they need to know!

Most of my production up until very recently has been fully digital with nothing more than just a MIDI keyboard and headphones. I’ve done all my production so far on some Beyerdynamic DT990s which I’ve been using forever, but I mixed DAVE album on some Audio Technica M40Xs which I was wearing before those.

I’m currently on Ableton Live 12 Suite but before I switched to Ableton, all my albums were made with FL Studio. That’s DAVE Album, Exotic Spaces, Endless Paracosm and Radio Continental, all made in glorious Fruity Loops.

I’ll swear by Serum and Vital forever haha. I’d highly recommend Vital as a free option. Arturia’s V Collection was immensely helpful when starting off and super fun to play around with. A lot of chillsynth producers tend to use Mini V but you can make similar sounding stuff in free alternatives. I learnt as many ways as I could to get analog sounding stuff out of digital synths like Vital, but you have options such as OB-XD, Surge XT, Synth1, Dexed, even Sforzando with some soundfont players if you’re into that thing. Diva is amazing as well.

My favourite FX has to be the Valhalla suite of plugins. I used to also use a free plugin called Spaceship Delay which was my favourite delay plugin at the time. Nowadays you can have tools like Valhalla Delay and Supermassive outperform it but I really liked the filtering options as well as the fact that there was a tiny bit of incorrect timing offset included in the delayed signal that gave it a very nice unique sound.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing audio programming as well and I’ve developed my own distortion plugin called Hamburger which I’ve been using on my music since 2020.

Recently, as of a month ago, I moved into a new apartment and finally committed to setting up a proper studio so now I’ve got a Prophet Rev2, some Yamaha HS5s with a HS8S, an ARP Odyssey, an old cassette tape recorder and a Strat Squire I borrowed from one of my best friends. I already had a Korg Modwave and Arturia Microfreak which I barely used, but considering that the Rev2 is an actual analog synthesizer, which sounds absolutely beautiful, I’m using it way more often. I’ve still yet to release something that includes sounds from it, but big things are coming soon as always…

Warble

TSOS: We love the grainy, warbly, degraded analog textures you use in your music, especially on the opening track “Ballistic” from your DAVE album. It sounds like the music has been sitting in the back of a pickup truck, weathering in the sun for twenty years. What is your process for creating those effects? How do you know when you’ve added the right amount? And can there ever be too much warble?

I enjoy toying around with making perfect sounds imperfect, and some tools make that easier than others. I used Synth1 on the intro chords for Ballistic, which already made it sound quite gritty, and then added a whole heap of delays, chorus and other effects, which is probably why it sounds the way it does.

A lot of these washed out effects come from various types of modulated effects like ping pong delays, large reverbs, filters, tape and vinyl emulations, as well as chorus and flangers.

One trick I like to use is throwing some chords or filtered saw stabs through a ping pong delay but making the input totally mono, and then multiband compressing it with OTT afterwards so that when the original chords stop playing, the feedback comes back in and completely envelopes the stereo field. It sounds very spacey and atmospheric. Increasing the modulation in your delay also gives a typical wavy hazy effect.

Using distortion in creative ways is also useful, like using a little bit of phase distortion with a noise sample as an external input. Analog tape saturation goes a long way and ChowTape is great for that.

Another fun trick is blending your dry signal with a wet signal coming from a wow and flutter plugin, such as IZVinyl, RC20, or ChowTape, as a transition effect to go in and out of parts of the arrangement. It results in a very simple flanging effect but the wet signal sounds more crunched up and distorted so it’s different to just applying a regular flanger and more interesting in my opinion.

You can also add additional texture in the form of noise samples or various foley background hum elements, like cassette tape noise, to make things sound even more weathered.

There’s heaps of ways to make things sound retro and hazy and honestly feels like it’s a little bit overdone everywhere nowadays. All these effects serve to drive the nostalgic quality of the music so it’s just important to get the balance right as you’ve mentioned. It’s very easy to overdo it.

Every time these effects are applied you’re treading on thin ice and it often feels like you’re walking a fine line between a perfectly clean noise and something unlistenable. I think having a weathered distorted sound doing some kind of tension and release in the track is very satisfying which is probably the cause of the warbly degraded analog textures you point at.

It’s easy to overdo reverbs and delays so you need to learn how to mix them in a way so that they sound massive but don’t bloat and muddy up the mix. A constant note becomes a wavy silly mess with too much tape warble. Balancing that is just finding the sweet spot where you can push these effects to the point where it doesn’t detract too much from the overall track and isn’t too frustrating to listen to, which requires a critical ear. With that being said, that is just my personal standard and you only learn by experimenting so feel free to mess around with these things and find your personal preference.

Influence

TSOS: What artists, genres, or soundtracks had the biggest impact on you growing up?

I can’t go without mentioning Home, the progenitor of chillsynth. Listening to their first three albums back to back as my study music during high school and university must have permanently altered my brain chemistry. C418 was in a similar vein for me, Minecraft Volume Alpha and Beta are truly magical.

I love listening to music from the folks in the chillsynth community and I’d say my long time favourite standouts have got to be Foewi, Eagle Eyed Tiger, Voyage, YOUTH 83, Hotel Pools, A.L.I.S.O.N, Forhill. My friends have had a big inspiration on my style as well, specifically my best friend from Perth who goes by the name of DIYColdFusion and makes incredibly intricate neuro and bass music. People from the communities I used to spend the most time in, such as We Suck at Producing and Chillsynth Discord, with folks like Brinch, Bean, HurleybirdJr, Twanner, Antfactory etc. all have had an influence on my style to this day.

As of recently some very big influences are Oneohtrix Point Never, Boards of Canada, new release soon??, KOAN Sound, JPEGMAFIA, False Noise, LORN, Jake Chudnow, Carpenter Brut, Vorso, Mid-Air Thief and Flying Lotus to name a few. I recently discovered Sweet Trip’s Velocity: Design: Comfort. which has been an incredible find for me. All of these peeps are driving my influences towards a few different interesting directions, either experimental and IDM or grittier darksynth and bass music, that I want to explore.

I also picked up a lot of my music influences from video games I played a lot. Mick Gordon has worked on some absolutely pivotal games that still stuck with me to this day, such as NFS World, Prey and ROUTINE. Ironically I haven’t played much Doom so might need to pick that up.

The Astroneer soundtrack was very important to me since I have very fond memories of playing it with my brother. I also played a lot of N++ which introduced me to some crazy artists such as LORN and Rival Consoles who were inspirations from an early age. I loved listening to the soundtrack in old school games such as Skate 3 and Need for Speed Most Wanted 2005. Hotline Miami 1 and 2 was a massive inspiration for me as well as the rest of the synthwave scene, as it must have been for many.

Various other games with amazing soundtracks I enjoy include Borderlands 2, Risk of Rain 2, Watch Dogs 2, Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic and the creepy ambiences and sound design in GTFO.

Breakfast

TSOS: Most importantly: what was your favorite breakfast growing up, and does it still hold up today? What about Friday Pie Day? Could you secretly ship Dennis and Jules some Aussie meat pies?

Sultana Bran has to be the greatest breakfast of all time. Pies are great when they don’t burn the roof of your mouth but I’m more of a Bunnings snag enjoyer myself hehe. I’d send a meat pie but Aussie shipping prices are so ridiculous it would probably cost three times the price of the pie. Maybe you could consider coming over and visiting!

Huge thanks to DavZ for taking the time to chat with us about his music, process, tools, influences, and the fine art of making pristine sounds beautifully imperfect.

Check out DavZ wherever you stream music, or at his website at davz.com especially if you like your synths dreamy, nostalgic, spacey, and just a little sun-bleached.