Who the hell is William Light?

As essential to art as the artist who wields the brush is the craftsman who binds the hair fibers and affixes them to the handle. Similarly, behind each sports superstar is a coach, utilizing the latest information available to keep their athlete's minds and bodies in good health and optimal condition. Within the domain of music, one could argue there could be no Led Zeppelin without a Gibson guitar in the hands of Jimmy Page, who wielded the instrument in a way that exceeded previous conceptions of the sounds one could achieve from an electric guitar hitherto. In doing so one could say that he ushered in a whole new era of raw electric guitar sound that still echoes through time and is emulated by guitarists even today. I’m a firm believer that the quality and taken care in the creation of instruments, and the utilization of the greatest technological assets available at any particular time in history goes a long way and plays a crucial role in forging the development of any artistic domain.

Today we sit down to chat with LHI Audio founder and plugin software designer William Light, who in my mind - plays as important a role in Drum & Bass music as Gibson guitars do in rock and roll. Raised in Dayton, Ohio, USA, William Light has always enjoyed music and technology; playing piano from a young age, learning the fundamentals of music and harmonic relationships, and turning to software development as his occupation after college. His early years were spent doing software development in Los Angeles and San Francisco California. It wasn't until he moved to Berlin, Germany in his early 20s that his passions were able to be synergized as he began developing audio software for major companies like Soundcloud and Native Instruments. Berlin has been a haven for the audio tech industry given its rich musical cultural history and social support system, as William said to me 'You don’t get into this line of work for the money, it’s about the passion and love of music and tech'.

These days his unreleased plugins have been utilized by some of the drum and bass scene’s most pioneering talents; including IMANU, The Caracal Project, Phace, gyrofield, Maysev, Matens, and a select few more. The genre and style of these musicians are so progressive, innovative, and multi-faceted that William and I concluded that no genre title really captures it all, so we settled on (Experimental) Drum & Bass as an overarching banner. It gets the point across I guess. Not only that, but William has been making music for decades, with a few selective works including his time-tested ‘Indigo’ EP in 2014 and more recently he appeared on the ‘Together with Ukraine LP’ with his tremendous remix of IMANU’s ‘Fuji’. After discovering this incredible track I knew I had to know more about this mysterious figure, who I only caught in passing on various discord servers giving advice and feedback to many different producers. Speaking with authority and kindness that one only attains after dedicating decades of time and love devoted to mastering their craft.

His latest creation 'Lift you Up' was released on Inspected, a label known for its keen and attentive eye for talent. This track demonstrates a beautiful blend of emotionality and technical production precision. Surely this is only the beginning of William Light’s music career, as he turns his focus ever increasingly to releasing productions of his own - the experimental offspring of many software developments that he himself created.

Hey William, thank you for taking some time out of your schedule to chat. How are you?

I’m doing good man! Thanks for having me. I’ve been keeping busy working on some projects and finishing up this transient shaper plugin I’ve been developing.

Ah yes, I’ve heard rumblings about this one, anything you can tell me about it?

At this time there’s not much I’d like to reveal until it’s complete. But I will say that it’s nearing the final stages of completion and will be available for purchase from LHI Audio in mid to late August. It’s definitely in an interesting place at the moment. As I’m sure any software designer can relate; The first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time *laughs*. I'm on that last stage, everything works great except for a bunch of tiny bugs I'm still working out.

Very cool man. I look forward to learning more about it once it’s finished and prepared for release.

So I wanted to congratulate you on your Inspected single release ‘Lift You Up’, big ups on that. I know it’s been in the works for some time now. Can you tell me a bit about that track and how it came to be? Your inspiration and some of the production techniques you were exploring?

William: Yeah, sure! So I wrote it during lockdown last year. I definitely didn't feel like I was in a great place mentally during the pandemic, but I would joke with friends that 'I'm in such a sad place that all I can write is happy music.'

The track came together as an experiment. One of my favorite sounds or things to do is chopping up breaks that have really long ride cymbals on top. If you look at how a drummer will hit the ride at the beginning of the break, then let it ring out as they're playing the rest of their stuff. It’s that ringing out that I love chopping up into bits and rearranging the slices of the ride if that makes sense. Instead of having it all be the decay, I take it and chop it into a “ch ch ch ch”. I love that sound, and in ‘Lift You Up’ I tried to do that with the synthesizer instead. So the start of the track was kind of the main lead with a huge reverb on it, and then I bounced that to audio, and I chopped it up so I was catching different bits and pieces of the reverb tail. And then I wove those bits in rhythmically.

I see, it certainly creates a nice intermingling layering effect with all the different inflections and nuances you add to each 'ch ch' as you describe it.

Yeah definitely. So that was how the track started. With the percussive elements, everything is very layered but the layers are programmed in manually. The snare in particular is five or six layers that are varying in their position relative to one another and in their volume throughout the track. So the snare changes in sound quite a bit throughout the track. It goes from being really clappy at some points to being even smaller in some places and then, y’know becomes a bigger snare in some places as well.

I'm not much of a drummer myself but I have taken drum lessons and I try to be better at it. I love how expressive acoustic drum kits are and how much real-life drummers have at their fingertips in terms of dynamics. Even on the exact same drum set, they'll have it sound completely different in the verse and the chorus, they can really let it open up. Snares are a super dynamic instrument and I feel like I'm always exploring ways of bringing some of those kinds of dynamics into my own tracks. Having bits of variation between hits and having it respond to dynamics of the track and stuff like that. I feel like ‘Lift You Up’ is probably the most involved that I've gone so far. But then in some of the unreleased tracks I'm working on, I'm trying to push that further.

The attention to detail certainly elevates the track. There’s so much to dig into. Can you touch on the chord switch-up that occurs halfway through the song?

Yeah, some of that came from a sample from a movie soundtrack that I found. I had a lot of the track structured the way that I wanted it to but I was kind of stuck at a point. For me, I often begin tracks by experimenting with certain production techniques, but I find it difficult to progress it into a finished track until I ascribe it some sort of emotional resonance - a melody or something that gives me a theme or vibe to work with.

So I was puzzling over this and then I came across this scene from a movie that had a chord progression and harmonic structure that kind of fit what I was going for. I made the snap decision of 'what if the track does this; what if halfway through the drop it becomes a different song' and I kind of just wove that in. It's not 1:1 with the original sample and a lot of the melody work on the top was written specifically for the track but that was kind of what led to it. Finding this movie scene which kind of shared the sentiment that I was trying to express, inspired me for sure.

I also had a friend who had said a couple of weeks before that she didn't think Drum & Bass had enough chord progression changes so I had that on my mind and thought it could be cool to play with. Everything kind of clicked into place after that.

Don't you love how encountering a new problem makes you create a new solution?

A lot of it is serendipity and that's part of what I love about finding samples or looking for samples in general. Sometimes I'll just find the perfect fit for something I'm working on.

Yeah, it's lovely how the human mind works in this unconscious way. You are stuck on a problem in your rational mind but you put it down and before you know it the solution presents itself in your environment in a serendipitous way. Seems like that sample inspired this for you.

Yeah, 100%. Everything really clicked into place with this track, and I’m so happy to get it out. Inspected has long been a favorite label of mine, too, and I’m humbled to have my debut single released with them. The response to it has really exceeded my expectations– the support has been coming from everywhere in the electronic scene, both inside and outside of the drum & bass community.

That’s wonderful man, it’s a great tune. What is something that you love to see in the music scene today?

I feel like Drum & Bass is in an interesting place right now because people are unafraid to not just draw inspiration and cross-pollination from other genres, but people are also courageous enough to then make those genres themselves. And to contextualize them within Drum & Bass. There was that moment where a lot of people were making techno at 172, there were a lot of tracks pushing the kick drum and it created this fast techno and it was really cool!

There's an American Hip Hop DJ Z-Trip, he’s known for playing these crazy multi-genre sets – House, Techno, a lotta Hip Hop, Breaks, Drum & Bass. He was a very talented scratch DJ as well, but he did it all in the framework of Hip Hop. He was adamant that, whatever genre the individual songs in the set were, it was still a Hip Hop set in the end. I feel like Drum & Bass is kind of in that spot right now. I was lucky enough to see Curated By: IMANU which happened in Amsterdam in April.

Yes, I heard that was a crazy night!

Yes, it was! And one of the reasons why it was an incredible show is because the majority of the show was a back to back to back with IMANU, The Caracal Project, Posij, and then Buunshin also jumping on and off the decks as well. They would play three-four-five songs at 172bpm then they would mix off of a breakdown and then be down at 130 and play some House music. Then they'd jump up a bit and play a little bit of halftime, some mid-tempo stuff, and then they'd speed it back up to 172. They must have done that at least five or six or seven times throughout their set.

They were completely unafraid to play whatever music they wanted to. The crowd was rocking to it the whole time, the promoter had never seen anything like it. I feel like Drum & Bass is getting to that spot where people are getting so much inspiration from other genres, that they'll produce those genres then they'll play it in a Drum & Bass set and people really enjoy it.

Yeah and then like you were getting at with your Z-Trip example, it’s still a Drum & Bass set even though all those genres were played.

I caught my first set from gyrofield not that long ago and Kiana dropped a heavy metal track in the middle of her set. Half the audience pulled out their air guitars and rejoiced and the other half didn't know what to make of it *laughs* it was so cool.

Oh yeah. *laughs* There were two really cool moments from Curated By: IMANU that stood out to me. Kiana had a set there as well, and she played at about 4am for the first 30 minutes of her set just played techno. I remember the promoter was standing there like, 'It's 4am, and there's techno at a drum and bass night. And everyone is fucking with it. I've never seen anything like this.'

And also Felix, The Caracal Project at one point crowd surfed while playing an Underscores song.

Really?? That’s amazing! Underscores is wild, do you know what song they played?

It was 'everybody's dead' and yeah there are pictures of Felix crowd surfing to it.

Badass. When you make your plugins they begin in your own world and you are able to bring them to a certain level. And then you’ve mentioned how you give it to other people, and how this community aspect gives you feedback and is very inspiring for your work. Can you speak about that a bit?

When I'm working on plugins I'll tend to make a lot of sketch projects, where I'm just testing a certain aspect of the plugin. Sometimes weird technical experiments will become songs in their own right. I have a couple tracks, to say the least, that started off as an experiment of 'Oh I wonder how the distortion would sound on this.' Then it grew past that into a demo song, and then it grew even further past that into an actual song. That’s a really fascinating process for me because it's kind of this back-and-forth conversation between two areas of my life. I'm working with the tool, I'm playing with the tool and I think 'Oh wouldn't it be cool if it did this?'. And coincidentally, I know the guy who made the plugin - it's me! *laughs* So even just inside the four walls of my studio, I have a lot of back and forth between using a plugin in a session and then going back and developing the plugin further but then using that itself to push the session forward. It’s the most roundabout way of creative progression in a song *laughs*.

Then when I send the plugin to other people and they start sending me back stuff that they've done with it. That can be really really humbling in such a beautiful way because will take these plugins and push them beyond what I had even considered doing in my own work, past my understanding of what I thought were the capabilities for it. So yeah, people have been using the transient shaper to denoise field recordings for instance. I have a ring modulation plugin that I'm testing right now, and I know a couple people who use it for making bass lines. And when people send me this stuff sometimes I don't believe them, they'll send me stuff and they'll say I did all of this with your plugin. And then I'll go 'Well yeah but then you did this and this and this, didn't you?' And they'll go 'No no, it was all the plugin, it was all the transient shaper' or just the distortion or whatever. And sometimes I'm like 'I need to hop on a stream with you and have you show me how the hell you got to this point because I don't believe you'.

I'm sure you love that.

It’s incredibly inspiring.

Well, thanks a lot for your time, William. Its been a pleasure chatting with you about your track, your plugin work, and your thoughts on the scene as a whole. Before we depart, I always like to ask if there are any artists you'd like to shout out or projects you'd like to mention.

Ahh well, of course, have to shout out the triple threat at the moment, IMANU, Caracal Project, and Buunshin. Everything they put out is incredible. Then of course, gyrofield and Latesleeper are doing some crazy stuff right now. Lastly, a quick shoutout to the NËU crew, folks like Secula, Maysev, and Matens. I love what all these artists are doing right now for the scene, and it’s going to be very exciting to see what comes next. I’m excited to get more of what I’ve been working on released too!

I’m very excited as well, for them as well as your future releases too. Thanks again, Will!

At each point in history, nearly every artist has utilized the latest technologies and instruments available in order to push their art, and their creative domain further as a whole. The development of such technologies is integral to the production of new styles and genres and novel achievements in the arts. With each new development, artists are able to unlock new possibilities and push the envelope of their particular domain.

William Light stands poised between two worlds of a producer and also a designer of instruments for electronic music. As such, he offers a unique and valuable perspective on musicality as a whole and it’s been a tremendous honor and pleasure to speak with this prolifically creative and passionate individual. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out his latest release 'Lift You Up', out now on Inspected and keep your eyes peeled for his new plugin out later this summer.