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An Interview with Ryan Dann (Holland Patent Public Library): Composer on Joe Pera Talks With You and Drifting off with Joe Pera

By Eimear O SullivanMusicngear Editor

I do a lot of interviews, but the below conversation with composer Ryan Dann is one of my favorites. One day last year here in Ireland, I was building a miniature wooden botanical library, and I was looking for something to listen to, when I came across ‘Drifting Off With Joe Pera.’ I was submerged into the warm glow of this gentle, quiet section of the internet, one that I had deeply missed since the show ‘Joe Pera Talks with You’ ended. It felt like the smell of warm soup bubbling on the stove on an autumn evening, it felt like the feeling of being at home under a patchwork blanket - this magic being worked by the sound design and music of composer Ryan Dann (aka Holland Patent Public Library), alongside guest composers.

In the below interview, we discuss the following: his recording setup, how he gets that lovely warm sound, how the environment you create art in influences the music, how making tracks that feel super polished and professional can result in something lacking personality; how you don’t have to know everything about an instrument in order to be able to do something cool with it in Ableton; the fun of using VSTs and plugins to make the weirdest sounds possible; how Ableton is infinitely flexible and more!

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Eimear O Sullivan, Musicngear: I love the warmth of your music - could you maybe talk us through your recording setup? 

My recording setup has evolved quite a bit over the years, and I'm also in different places. A lot of what I've done is in the box, so as long as I have a midi keyboard (Alesis V25 MKII/Alesis V25 MKII, or I've got an M-Audio Hammer 88 now but whatever gets the job done really) and then just a little Focusrite interface and a pair of AKG K701 Open-back Studio Reference Headphones reference headphones and everything else is whatever I can cook up in Ableton. 

I have a minor plugin addiction, I'm sure I'm not alone there, but a lot of tracks come from just pulling weird virtual instruments I like the sound of, messing them up and mashing them together. I really love this one company, Felt; they have a couple of really interesting and well-sampled cello/violin/viola instruments, as well as some other unique keyboards and things. I really love their work and have used them a lot. 

I also use a lot of Altiverb for reverb. I really like to have a clear concept of the space in which a sound is occurring, and Altiverb generally makes that easy to navigate and dial in. But really, Ableton is the instrument; it's infinitely flexible, anything you can think up you can achieve, it's got an incredibly active community, and unlike a lot of other software, they've continued to get better with every update.

All that said, I do love it when I have the time and space to record live instruments. I have a similar approach to live instruments; I grab whatever I can find, even and especially if I don't know how to play it, and try to record something with it. I bought my brother-in-law's flute from high school and figured, well, I just blow here and push some buttons down, let's see what happens. And if I can get off a few good notes or phrases, now I've got some interesting samples to play with. I also bought a gong after taking an experimental music class where the teacher explained how you can take a rubber mallet and drag it across the gong to get some crazy overtones, and then that ended up in the ‘Slow and Steady’ special.

As for warmth, that's probably more to do with some instinctual instrument selections than with anything to do with recording or mixing styles, which frankly I don't know very well. I have a Sennheiser 416 shotgun mic that I had from when I was a sound recordist on film sets, and I just toss that thing on everything and EQ as much as I can to compensate. I remember reading about Ruban Nielson from ‘Unknown Mortal Orchestra’ recording a whole album with an Shure SM57 LC or something, and thought, yeah, I need to just record with what I have rather than chase the perfect mic or set up.

Musicngear: I saw on your Bandcamp that you were living in the Hudson Valley while working on 'Songs To Fall Asleep At The Wheel To' - could you talk about how that environment influenced your music? 

So I had some friends who had a summer house up in the Hudson Valley that they would go to one weekend here and there, but generally it was empty most of the time. 

They were also musicians and artists, and so we all set up a little jam space in the basement. 

Eventually, I asked if I could just live there full-time for a while, and they were cool with it, so I moved in. It's funny because it was kind of tucked in the woods, so at night it would get extremely dark, and something about the house at night was always a little eerie if you were by yourself. Also the coyotes would screech in the woods. But for the first time in my life, I had a place where I could set up all my instruments and things, I could play loud all hours of the day (I'm very much a night owl), I was completely by myself most of the time and I was working remotely freelance so I had a lot of flexibility and time to experiment. 

The first season of ‘Joe Pera Talks With You’ was recorded there, as well as Quiet Or You'll Wake Them, and a bunch of ‘Songs to Fall Asleep At The Wheel To. People like to joke about "going and living in a remote cabin," the way they joke about people always saying they're going to finish that novel they've been working on, but really, for me, it was awesome, and the most productive I've ever been. Just having that time and space to explore was what drove a lot of what came out of that time. 

And for ‘Songs To Fall Asleep At The Wheel To’, I was driving back and forth to the city a lot, enough that the route became this kind of preset meditation, each landmark signified a new section of the journey, and that was kind of the point of the album. It was timed to exactly match the drive into the city. I tried at some point to film it and time it with the album, but by the time the album came out, I was living back in the city again, so I couldn't get it right. 

But anyways, my own personal music has always served as a way to preserve a time and place in my life, where I can quickly access what I was thinking and feeling, and the album was about preserving those drives where I could exist outside of my life a little bit, outside of obligations or pursuits, just getting from A to B and that's it. I appreciate those moments more and more. I also just like driving, even though it's terrible. 

Musicngear: What was the process of making the music for Drifting Off with Joe Pera? 

On the podcast, I was doing dual duties of sound design and music. Often, we would have a guest composer, so that took most of the music duties off my plate, and I could just focus on the sound design. I really loved those collaborations because we could just tell an artist we really liked, who we knew would mesh well with the show, "write us something to fall asleep to," and they would send us their own interpretation of that. It was great, and then I could take that and weave it into the show and add soundscapes and effects and fill it out. 

On the episodes where we didn't have a guest composer, we were pretty loose with the music. On ‘Joe Pera Talks With You’, Joe had a very specific vision that we wanted to achieve, so there was a lot of back and forth and refining, but on the podcast, because the time constraint of putting out one a month, we had to kind of roll with "first thought best thought" mentality. So Joe would record the voice-over, we would discuss a bit the general vibe of each section, where we thought there would be music and sound design, and then I would write stuff I thought fit. 

The general premise of "put the listener to sleep" made it a little easier because you could evaluate each song on a simple rubric - does this song make me sleepy? - and go from there. I'd also made a lot of sleep music with Joe at this point, so the boundaries of the world we inhabited were pretty clear in my mind, and I usually knew what would work and what wouldn't. Similar to the TV show, though, I usually would just dig through sounds until I found something sleepy, write a little bit, search for another sleep instrument to layer on top, weave it in, and repeat until it felt like a full track.

Musicngear: I really enjoyed your performance of 'Fall Drive Theme' on the Slow and Steady special. Could you maybe run us through your live setup for that?

Again, Ableton is just the instrument, pretty much. 

On the live shows we were doing, I would have various instruments and prerecorded pieces cued up on buttons so I could quickly launch things, like a DJ basically, while doing one element live myself, just so it had a little life to it. On "Fall Drive Theme," it was the acoustic guitar, and then I would launch a backing track halfway through. On other parts, I would have a bed track while playing the gong, for example, or guitar or piano. But the setup was not complicated hardware-wise, just a MIDI keyboard with buttons and knobs, a little Focusrite interface, and then maybe a mic or guitar DI into the interface. 

Everything else was Ableton launching. I will say the programming in Ableton was a lot of fun because I tried to make things that had some randomness or expressiveness, so it wasn't exactly the same every show. I programmed a certain piano part, for instance, to harmonize an individual note into a full chord, but to randomize the inversions so it didn't become a monotonous loop. As an audience member, this probably isn't super exciting, but from a nerdy perspective, it's fun to create these little music machines to operate according to your imagination.

Musicngear: Your music has so much life running throughout it - what is your process for mixing your songs?

I don't have any formal training in mixing or mastering, so I have to really rely on critical listening and paying very close attention to what I like or don't like, what's working or not working, comparing to other similar tracks, and trying to understand where the difference lies and then throwing effects on haphazardly to try to get there.

 I usually have a playlist of inspiration tracks that I can refer back to, and if I like the piano on a certain track, for instance, then at least I have a guiding light for how I should EQ or reverb the piano I have on my track. I don't think it's a great approach necessarily. I think it makes me slower, not having the conscious technical skills, and personally, I'm always aware of the gap between what I'm doing and what a professionally trained mixer could probably do. 

The only upside is that I do think that tracks that feel super polished and professional can lack personality. Imperfections and odd choices indicate humanity, so I think there's a sweet spot where you can have just enough "off" qualities to feel personal without it being a total turn off, and I also think going from smart to stupid can be harder than going from stupid to smart, if that makes sense. Ignorance and naivete are really hard to recapture once you've moved past them. 

Musicngear: What art inspires your music? 

I'm always trying to find art that makes me think "oh, huh, I never would have thought to do that". Like you can watch a movie about living in Chicago, and think, well, if I lived in Chicago, it would perhaps occur to me to make a movie like this.

But when you watch a movie and think, I have no idea how I would ever have come across this concept or this style, that's when I'm like, I need to absorb what's going on here. Same with music, or visual art, or writing. This is why a lot of my music is picking up an instrument I have no idea how to play, because I have no frame of reference or previous skills to fall back on. I guess I've done a lot of actively avoiding refining a certain style or skillset, which sometimes

I think it might be to my detriment in some regard, because part of building your brand as an artist is having a distinct, recognizable style that people enjoy, and I'm just continually all over the place, chasing whatever my latest interest was. Which is fun, and makes creating feel fun and fresh, and I think that's what I've seen in other artists, the style they've created becomes confining and makes it feel more like work and less like play.

So, I don't know, pros and cons, I think I'm still navigating it even though I've been working creatively for a good while now. 

Musicngear: What is your favourite way to listen to and enjoy music?

Laying in a hammock on a warm day with good headphones on.

About Eimear O Sullivan

Eimear Ann O Sullivan is a multi-genre music producer, audio engineer and vocalist. After receiving a Masters in Music Technology from the CIT Cork School of Music, she went on to operate as a producer under the name Blakkheart. Her releases have received critical acclaim from Ireland's biggest music publications, such as District Magazine and Nialler9, alongside receiving heavy commercial radio airplay. She currently works in Cork recording studio Flashpoint CC. Previous clients of hers include the likes of Comedy Central’s Dragony Aunt star Candy Warhol, rapper Darce and Outsider YP. (Photo credit @Fabian Boros)

Contact Eimear O Sullivan at eimear.o.sullivan@musicngear.com

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