Underground trans producer a.k.a. skips, who gained initial fame with his high-energy, multi-genre project Ducky, spent a decade building an impressive resume. Collaborations with artists such as Jauz and MUST DIE!, festival performances at Ultra Music Festival, EDC Las Vegas, Bonnaroo, and Lollapalooza, and releases on labels such as Deadbeats, Astralwerks, Dim Mak, and Spinnin have all contributed to his success.
Photo Credit: a.k.a. skips – Official
After taking a hiatus to begin his transition as a transgender man at the end of 2021, a.k.a. skips is now openly queer, guided by love, and radiating trans joy. His new project aims to create a welcoming and inclusive community for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.
a.k.a. skips has announced his return to the music scene with a new, dreamy house single titled ‘If The DJ Let Me.’ The track is part of a forthcoming EP set to release in November.
‘If The DJ Let Me’ by a.k.a. skips showcases their expanding sonic repertoire with a mix of gritty breakbeats, dreamy synth pads, nostalgic chord progressions, and heart-pumping risers. The track opens with atmospheric production, builds with a central vocal refrain, and ends with a cathartic finish.
To celebrate the release of ‘If The DJ Let Me,’ a.k.a. skips invites EG into the studio for five studio tips to create music with intention.
1. Learn the rules
YouTube University is rad, but if you’re blindly replicating settings from a tutorial without knowing what the tool does you’re going to limit your creative potential long term. Get a book on mixing fundamentals and learn what all of the basic studio gear actually does – compressors, limiters, EQ, gates, etc. You can do a better mix with an expert-level knowledge of volume, EQ, stereo width, and compression than you could ever get with a bunch of plugins that you half understand. I like “Audio Engineering 101” by Tim Dittmar to really lock in the basics.
2. Break the rules
OK, so you’ve got an understanding of how your tools are “supposed” to work. Now you have the ability to push them past that! mess with the sequencing of your effects, daisy chain effects that wouldn’t normally connect, group a few channels, and see what happens when you do some batch effects. Try weird stuff with sends. There are actually no hard rules – only concepts to understand thoroughly so you can work with intention.
3. Remember the sphere
Your song is a sphere, dimensional along three axes: stereo width (mono/stereo or left/right), frequency (low to high), and presence (front to back, which is affected mostly by volume and compression). for a super clear mix, every element should have its own space, which can also help you think about arranging. If two or more elements overlap, it might be worth moving one around. Sometimes all you need to do is shift something up or down an octave to get it out of the way.
4. Resample, resample, resample
I suggest constantly bouncing out interesting snippets of sound design that you make, especially when it comes to bass and lead sounds. Change your export settings to 24bit WAV and start building yourself a sample pack. Sometimes I’ll resample whole sections of a song into a single audio track to do more extreme processing with a sound that doesn’t work in the context of your current project might be the thing that brings a different song together.
5. Bring other people into the mix
I still think that the best way to grow as a producer is to do collabs, but no production process should exist in a vacuum. One of my helpful processes is to take a few days away from a song I think is done and then play it for a friend and sit quietly while they listen. If I need to change something I’ll usually feel super awkward when they listen to that part, and that discomfort points out where the work needs to go.
a.k.a. skip’s ‘If The DJ Let Me.’ is out now. Download your copy here.
