Nathan Dobson

Nathan Dobson on SellaBand
Nathan was exposed to quality music from a very early age. Listening through his Father's record collection, he was introduced to such artists as Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder plus artists that eventually went on to influence the type of music he plays today such as George Benson and George Clinton.He got his first set of decks aged 15 and started practicing the art of mixing with records he bought using his pocket money and money earned from his Saturday job. Unsure of a particular direction to take, he used to buy vinyl that had crossed over to the commercial record stores like HMV and Virgin. This resulted in records varying from house to trance and even hip hop!
This was until he took heavy influences from listening regularly to Pete Tong's Essential Selection radio show on BBC Radio 1. This reignited the spark from his younger years and he started to focus his record collection and style on house music. It was during this time that he discovered independent record stores selling promos and tracks that hadn't yet or would never cross over to the high streets shops. Nathan began to hone his mixing skills in the bedroom, meanwhile learning valuable lessons in performing, DJ'ing with his Dad at weddings, birthday parties, anniversaries and the like. Lessons such as the importance of reading the crowd and record selection. This combined with competant mixing skills earned him a slot with ResidentClubber Nights , promoters who he met at Global Gathering 2005.
Whether its warming up with soulful funky house music for the pre club bars or rocking the dancefloor with techy electronic tunes in the wee small hours on the dancefloor, Nathan is competent in picking the right tune at the right time and using his technique to make them sound even sweeter.Click the link below and provided you have iTunes, you will be magically transported to the mind of Pete Tong.
I listen to his Radio 1 show every week to get ideas of up and coming tunes, from early set/bar material at the start of the show to some of the tougher tunes that appear in his end-of-show Hot Mix.
Productions
I have used this section to list my current productions and give a brief discription of each. First and foremost I hope you have enjoyed listening to my music. Having used Reason and Cubase at college, I found the intergration wasn't working how I felt comfortable. Since then I have made the switch to Ableton for some basic sound creation tools but mainly for arrangement. I still use some of the Reason modules for more advanced sound creation and loop sequencing.
As mentioned above, I havn't really been serious about production until fairly recently so many of my techniques should continue to improve and hopefully the tunes will follow suit!
Live
This production started out as a university project. I created a full length club track, the version you hear on myspace, but what was submitted was tweaked and adapted to fit the grading criteria.
I began thinking of ideas for my track by listening to inspiration from my record collection as well as previews from digital download record stores when I stumbled across a Chris Lake remix competition on Beatport.
The competition the winner would have their track mastered by Chris Lake and released on beatport.com . My intention was for my project to double up as a competion entry but I didn't complete it in time. However, it was still a good opportunity to produce my first remix using the multitrack from Chris Lake's original.
After downloading and topping and tailing the loops I downloaded I was ready to start producing the track. I began by creating drum loops using Reason's ReDrum module. I created a main loop then several variations around that loop as well as built ups. I then mixed down the loops and saved them in a folder for use in Ableton.
That is when the actual arrangement of the track began. Anyone familiar with Ableton with know the features of the "track window" this is where the user can trigger automatically beatmatched samples independantly while recording the samples into the "arrangement window". This is how a prefer to make most my tunes as you get a basic arrangement for the track in real time. Then I went into the "arrangement window" and fine tuned the sequence. This process carried on several times until I had an arrangement I was happy with.
The mixdown part of the production of my track Live consisted of making sure all the levels were consistent and panning the different tracks across the frequency spectrum, as well as applying effects.