Whether you hate him or love him, between his social media presence, his music, and his insane touring schedule, it's pretty common to hear the name Getter. We sat down with him for a detailed interview about his view on life, the music scene, and much more. Take a look below and explore his words with an open mind and open ears.
Tell us how it feels to be at Miami Music Week.
It feels good, it feels like I’m important. It feels like people actually still care to come out.
Tell us a little more about your new project with Shred Collective.
Shred Collective is basically everything put into one. It’s a Clothing brand, a record label, it’s a comedy group, we’re working on Youtube videos and movies. As for the clothing, it’s not just t-shirts, it’s going to be pants, shorts, socks, real clothes. Music wise were doing metal stuff, EDM stuff, comedy albums, rap albums. It’s a whole bunch of stuff centered at a certain kind of person who would really mess with everything involved.
How important is it to brand yourself as a DJ/Producer in modern day electronic music?
Well for the longest time I was branding myself in the wrong way because I followed the mantra that everyone says: Let the music speak for itself. In a way, it was really good for a time because it allowed me to practice and to get really good at the central aspect of what it meant to be someone in the dance music scene. However now you see that people’s attention spans have cut down to such a minimal level and their A.D.D. get’s so bad that they need more than one thing happening at all times. I’ve met a lot of people who don’t have the ability to brand themselves and sort of have boring personalities, not saying that I don’t either at all, and the music seems to matter less nowadays for someone like that. They can be forced to play a character they wouldn’t normally act like so that they can stay relevant enough to make the tunes they want to make.
What is your creative process like now in a super saturated scene compared to how it was more open ended when you first began producing music?
Writing music for me is a lot easier now because I don’t have anything to copy or imitate. I’ll definitely take someone else’s track and try to remake it to get a look inside how other people develop sounds, but I’ll never release those remakes because it just helps me to take influences and inspirations from others and push them into my own creativity. I’m not Cymatics here and I don’t copy anyone else’s work for profit, but it can be really useful especially if I am stuck in my own head with a track to look for inspiration outside of my own brain. Back in the day, I would write my music TO be those other people. I’d hear a Datsik song and be like man I need to make something like that. Now, I use that as practice more than production. My new track Inhalant Abuse was interesting because I came home from the studio after a really long day, and by the way I wasn’t on whippets when I made the track although a lot of people think I was. I don’t know if you’ve ever done whippets but the last thing you want to do is touch a computer. I just came home and was sitting with some friends playing call of duty while I was working on it. I learned a bunch of new tricks in Ableton that day and was screwing around making new sounds and developed the main synth line. My friends heard it coming from my computer and were like dude you need to turn that into something. My process could come from anywhere though, sometimes I’ll be watching a movie, like last week I was watching a Jeffery Dahmer Documentary and there was this wild quote from a news caster who was talking about one of Dahmer’s crimes in gruesome detail. I was like wait a sec, this could totally work. I took the clip and put it into a super heavy dark song I’ve been working on and it totally worked and brought the piece to a whole new place. It could come from anything. It could come from this cornbread right here.
How important was your relationship with Datsik and Firepower Records early on in your career and how does it influence your career to this day?
Datsik to this day is still one of my best friends. He basically did what I am trying to do with new artists. He approached me when I was very young and as a legend and I was obsessed with him. I saw him on my 17th birthday and he absolutely blew my mind, I was a huge fan. He put me on directly and asked me for music without any prior contact and then was asked me to come on tour with him. This was right around when I turned 18. He taught me so much about the scene and the industry and to this day those lessons still stand tall as my foundation as an artist. When I was making a ton of very experimental music while still with Firepower, instead of holding me back and asking me to stay in the reigns of Firepower, he told me to go check out OWSLA and see if I could fit in there. He was really the first dude who told me I could make different music and not have to worry about ruining relationships, because he told me that the people who are your real friends won’t hate you for trying to expand yourself as an artist. I want to take what he taught me and bring it to my mentor role at Shred Collective and really instill in my new artists what he did for me.
So you do see yourself evolving into that mentor role for other up and coming producers?
I definitely want to. Here’s my thing, everyone calls me very bad things because I talk crap on the internet. It’s not that I’m trying to be that way necessarily, I’m just using Twitter in the way that it is meant to be used, to be unfiltered and to let go of whatever is bothering me. I’m really trying to show kids or adults or anyone who follows me online is that nothing really matters. The minute you stop worrying about what other people think of you, everything else starts to click into place and you find yourself. I do it in a way that might be considered controversial, but the message is the same either way. As music producers, we really need to stop worrying about what people think of our music. I recently watched an interview with Lido and he talks about how he makes music for himself and he knows how dope it is and screw what everyone else thinks of it because this is his artistic creation and his process. That’s how we all should be, you should be making it for you. I definitely spin it in a different way because I might tweet a chode joke, and people will laugh and then can simultaneously tell people to follow their dreams, and if people just relaxed and didn’t get so wrapped up in it all, that could be possible and it would help our scene thrive off of the originality it brings.
If you were stuck on a deserted island and could only listen to one record for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
Either Mobb Deep’s Infamous which has the best hip-hop beats and bars of all time, or Eminem’s Infamous for the same reason.
