Words matter. These are the best Tycho Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I just tend toward more lush, full sounds in my productions. I don’t have any preference when it comes to analogue versus digital; I use what’s best for the application. Analogue synthesis is nice, but it’s just one tool among many, and it has its place.
I appreciate the intimacy of a 300-to-500-person venue; it’s the sweet spot for me.
I feel like, with drum programming, the way I used to do it, I’d think of how somebody would play these drum patterns and then try to replicate that through programming. It’s not that it’s better or worse, it’s just a different style.
I think of the Tycho sound as something separate from the band. I think the methodology and approach to production I use on the Tycho records can be applied to a lot of things. But from a performance and songwriting perspective, yes, Tycho is a live band.
Conceptually, I’ve always gravitated towards arrangements that weren’t just presenting one idea. I like to look at my songs as having a main part, an interlude, and almost like another song at the end.
The big thing on the horizon for me is video. I feel like it’s the closest thing to a perfect mix between music and design, because it has the motion and it has the dynamics of music, while at the same time having the aesthetic components of design. It’s a nice mix.
I think there are some things I am unable to fully express with my visual work, and the music is what fills that void. At the same time, I don’t think you can fully appreciate the music without the anchor of the visual work.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just memorializing my youth when I spent all this time outdoors. I always envisioned my adult life like I’m going to run every day and live in the woods in a cabin if I can – and here I am living in San Francisco and working in a studio.
Moving to San Francisco affected me in a pretty profound way, in a lot of respects. I think it helped me evolve my sound and think outside of the space I’d been in in Sacramento. The scene there is so insular and kind of feeds on itself: you just end up playing the same shows with the same people for the same people.
I just felt something was missing from my vision of what Tycho should eventually be. It took several years of learning new recording and production techniques to get to a point where I felt I could make a record like ‘Awake.’
I’ve been a visual artist my entire life, so translating music to imagery has always come naturally to me. Tycho is an audio-visual project in a lot of ways, so I don’t see a real separation between the visual and musical aspects; they are both just components of a larger vision.
I had big problems with stage fright in the past. I think, slowly, as I’ve gotten better at it, I’ve started to enjoy it. It’s made me a more confident person in my normal life. I can open up and be myself in situations that used to be abject terror.
In the beginning, I was truly trying to take what I felt when I was in a field or in an outdoor space and directly translate it into the music.
I like tweaking the studio and wiring things up almost as much as making music, so that’s kind of a hobby of mine, in and of itself. I don’t like to collect gear that I know I’m not going to use, though.
I feel like music and design complete the idea of each other for me. So, it’s like whatever I’m trying to express in one really can’t be fully expressed without the other. I’ve always seen them as the flipside of a coin and bounced back and forth.
I studied computer science and graphic design, yeah, so music was self-taught and a backburner thing, an obsessive hobby.
I was always a visual artist my whole life, and I came to music really late – when I was 21 or 22 was the first time I ever touched a musical instrument. For me, it was always this fun side hobby.
