With his foot tapping and hands flying across his mixing board Tyler Ettinger does what he loves while sitting at his kitchen table in Fergus – he produces music.
Specifically, Ettinger, 18, produces and mixes electronic dance music (EDM), a genre that has only recently begun gaining popularity in Canada and can be recognized through the type of music artists like Calvin Harris and David Guetta produce.
Ettinger has dabbled both in mixing music so that transitions are seamless and smooth as well as in producing brand new original songs.
“I love both at the same time,” he said.
However, he said it’s the producing that’s most difficult.
“When you’re producing you have to brainstorm a melody,” he explained. “Something catchy that will stay in people’s heads … a secret among most DJs is you’ve got to get something that’s going to get stuck.”
He said that he often thinks of new melodies in the shower.
“I hum them to myself and since I have a bad memory I have to come out of the shower … humming this melody and then basically I just record it and I save it for another date when I want to make a song,” he said. Sometimes they’re as good as he originally thinks and sometimes they don’t work when he’s listening back.
Ettinger said that although he has produced a number of songs only three have been of good enough quality to upload to the internet.
With EDM the producer uses software to mix various instruments and sounds to make an original mix.
“Sometimes you can record instruments like piano, guitars, drums and you can chop them in this program and layer them on top of each other to make a song on its own,” Ettinger explained. “So it’s almost like a one-man band.”
One of the songs Ettinger uploaded to YouTube is called Chalkboard, a song and video that was the result of a school project.
“I layered different sounds I found throughout the school using a microphone, so I recorded a pop can, I recorded some scissors and what I did is I chopped all those sounds and put (them) together so each sound could be sampled in a way that they would act as drums,” he explained.
“And I could throw the piano in there, I could throw baselines in there from the music class and then I had some teachers who were quoting in the song as well.”
Ettinger has been producing music for five years, since Grade 8, when a friend told him about a computer sound mixing program and he decided to make the music for an elementary school dance project.
“He would do it every day,” Ettinger’s mother, Christine Gagné, said.
“He’d sit down at the computer and he’d play with it for hours and then sometimes I would hear him … and I’d be like ‘wow, yep that should be on the radio.’”
Ettinger explained that once he got the hang of it, mixing wasn’t too complicated.
“Most DJs will do it with headphones to see how it mixes with the song before they show it to the speakers,” he said. “I just go by visuals so if I see that this big peak lines up with another big peak I know that it’s going to work perfectly.”
On his computer screen he can see the music’s sound waves and has learned over the five years he’s been mixing music how to read the waves and match them up. He’s now at the point that he doesn’t need to look at the waves or the sound board to seamlessly move from one song to the next, he can quite literally do it with his eyes closed.
Ettinger recently finished classes at Centre Wellington District High School and will be graduating at the fall commencement ceremony.
For now he’s focusing on producing music and finding a manager and/or booking agency to help him move to the next step of his career.
“I’m trying to get some recognition, do a record label or something, that’d be cool,” he said.
Ettinger has mostly done shows in Kitchener and has done some parties. This summer he will be working with a DJ named Angel K from Toronto who also does EDM, though not the same as what Ettinger does.
“We’re going to collaborate at the time and it’s going to be totally from scratch but I know it’s going to be of one of those trap genres,” he said. “It’s essentially like a heavy bass old school rap type beat.
“It’s the new form of EDM that just came out and it’s being played a lot at all these festivals that are coming to Canada.”
Ettinger said he plans to continue producing and mixing music for the foreseeable future.
