Mr.bill Tunes

[Wesley Godinez]

MrBill is exactly the kind of "no BS uber-tech-savvy genius" you want teaching you the heavy hitter production stuff. I'm a huge proponent of looking at the RESULTS of whoever you're learning from and only investing your precious time with people who are where you want to be, and making tunes you respect. His music speaks for itself...brilliant. It's rare to find someone who walks the talk and is also willing to teach all they know without reservation. Bill is one of those rare few. Mad respect and big ups brother! I have personally learned a lot from you and I know thousands of others have done the same. Keep doing what you do! Much love.

My name is Bill Day. I produce music under the name Mr. Bill & Electrocado (w/ Ryanosaurus). I create educational content on YouTube & mrbillstunes.com that revolves around electronic music production, and travel the world playing electronic music to people in clubs, live venues & festivals as well as doing masterclasses at schools.

I use a Razer DeathAdder mouse & a Goliathus mousepad whilst travelling & whatever MSI mouse my laptop came with & a SteelSeries mousepad in the studio. My studio is full of GIK Acoustics panels. I use a DJM-900NXS or 2 live & just USB straight into that bad boy, then set 4 audio-tracks in live to send straight to that. I use 2 x CDJ-2000's & a DJM-750 in my studio for practice (mainly cos they were cheaper). I have an Argosy Halo desk in my studio & some 43 inch Acer monitor (if that counts?).

Guitar-wise I use a Schecter Demon-7 & an Axe-FX II, as well as some Guild acoustic guitar. If I'm running DSP in my studio I'll use a miniDSP 2x4 + a Metric Halo ULN-2 (for the D/A conversion) - however, at the time of writing this I'm not. I also use a modular Eurorack system in the studio. I have an Absinthe Green Pearl Masters in my studio which I use sometimes for recording breaks (usually with a single overhead SM57). I mostly use SM57's for everything)

Dream setup would likely just be a fairly flat room with really nice speakers that's comfortable to sit & work at and doesn't feel too sterile (like some studios can) with a really fast computer that is nicely file managed and has lots of nice software on it. I actually don't really like the classic sterile studio vibe - I prefer working in bedrooms in houses for some reason, so it'd have to be some hybrid between a bedroom and studio vibe.

The omnipotence of this collection comes from Mr. Bill's disregard for conventional techniques, and inventive use of seemingly everyday tools to create sounds in ways you may never have heard before. We'd be very surprised if you're not surprised by what you find!

Mr. Bill is an electronic music producer, and DJ from Sydney, Australia (currently residing in the USA) best known for his willingness to share tips in studio techniques & massive library of technical know-how with other aspiring producers.

With a huge catalog of released original music (including many collaborations and remixes), Mr. Bill has worked with established artists such as deadmau5, Ganja White Night, Subtronics, Dirt Monkey, Virtual Riot, Infected Mushroom, and more. Having released music on a wide array of well-known labels such as mau5trap, Monstercat, Subcarbon, Deadbeats, Cyclops, & WAKAAN has led to Bill touring the globe extensively & playing many major music festivals & world-renowned venues such as Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and Hampton Coliseum.

Brian Taylor (director of Crank: High Voltage - starring Jason Stathom, and SyFy TV hit "Happy!") reached out to Bill to score the motion picture, horror-comedy Mom & Dad, featuring Nicolas Cage & Selma Blair. Bill has also been commissioned to compose, and create sound effects for multiple music libraries, applications, and to-be-released games.

Being heavily active in the music production community has led Bill to create his own record label, Billegal Beats, which primarily releases left-field downtempo, and glitch music, and Billegal Sounds - a sample pack company. As well as has developed a VST plug-in "SLAP" in collaboration with Yum Audio.

Mr. Bill runs the educational website mrbillstunes.com which houses 1,000+ hours of educational video content teaching the music production software Ableton Live, and he hosts "The Mr. Bill Podcast" which has had speaking guests such as, Duncan Trussell, deadmau5, Steve Duda, Kill The Noise, Feed Me, Peekaboo, edIT, Mick Gordon, Herobust, Richard Devine, Beardyman, The Flashbulb, Haywyre, Daedelus, Subtronics, Virtual Riot, Misha Mansoor, Jordan Rudess, and YouTube sensations Adamy Neely, and Andrew Huang.

One of my absolute favorite producers on the planet actually happens to be halfway around the planet. Bill Day returned to Australia after a massive summer tour in the US, and I got to pick his brain a bit about his plans now that he's back on solid ground.

While you're reading the interview, the perfect soundtrack for Mr. Bill's words are Mr. Bill's tunes. Here's a recapitulation of his incredible performance at SONIC BLOOM back in June, and you can follow the link to pay what you want to get it into your grubby little hands.

Mr. B.: My background is basically all music related. I've essentially pursued music full-time since I was about 13-14 years old, all through school I played guitar, then got into producing music on computers (Garage Band to begin with, followed by FL Studio, then finally, and still currently, Ableton Live). So, my music interest definitely started with guitar.

PC: I'm especially interested to know how you got into electronic music. Was there a particular record that sparked your interest, or a live concert experience? What are the biggest influences or formative experiences that led you down the path of making electronic music?

Mr. B.: It was a concert experience for sure. I met a friend around my area who went by the name of "Frosty", and he was really into what I would at the time consider experimental music, like he introduced me to Nine Inch Nails, Infected Mushroom, Aphex Twin, and a bunch of other kinda edgy, left-field stuff. At first I didn't really get it, until he suggested we go to a "Doof" (which is Australian terminology for a psytrance party), after going to that, and experiencing it in the context in which it is supposed to be enjoyed, I was a full electronic music convert, which is what spurred me to get into GarageBand on my parents computer to start trying to figure out how to make that kind of stuff.

Mr. B.: My focus prior to 2023 was basically the same as my focus prior to every other year, which has always just been - learn how to make cooler sounds, and do better mixdowns, try to work on my songwriting, get better at creating motifs & hooks, get better at creating cohesive sets for live performances, etc. Essentially just trying always to hone in on the craft more & more.

Mr. B.: The lead up to 2023 was actually not good. Writing music day-in, and day-out certainly does take a mental toll. Through 2021, and 2022 I got heavily addicted to Ketamine which led to me spending a month in rehab in October/November 2022. Ketamine is an extremely prevalent substance in the electronic communities at the moment, and as much as I'm ashamed to admit it got me, it did, and I spoke about it at length on Episode 115 of my podcast (The Mr. Bill Podcast) with Mimi Page if anyone's interested in hearing more of that.

Mr. B.: This year has been really great so far! I started working with a new manager, and we've built a great relationship, and made a lot of really good connections. So, I'm hoping all that music work I've been doing is going to pay off in terms of seeing some of my bigger goals come to life.

I have a remix album coming out this year on April 19th called Phantasmagorical, which has a bunch of remixes on it from my 2021 album Phantasmagoria, and we've got a lot of really cool artists on there that I look up to a lot such as Culprate, The Widdler, Virtual Riot, KiloWatts, Resonant Language, Player Dave, and a ton more!

Mr. B.: The way I see it, is I'm extremely pro-electronic music, and so anything anyone can ever do (no matter how big, or small) to better that space in terms of sound-quality, technical information, building better equipment, building better tools to make music with, figuring out how to spread music more efficiently, creating communities for producers to come together & collaborate, and share ideas & learn together, etc. (whatever it may be) is GOOD.

When I started doing electronic music in Australia in about 2006, it was seen as a literal joke. My friends looked at it as music they'd hear in video games, or slot machines, but they never saw it as a real form of music, they thought it was talentless, soulless garbage. So, to see where it has come in the past 15 years is awesome! And the only reason that all happened was due to sharing information, making better tools, better sound-systems, better visual systems, etc. Without those things, producers wouldn't have gotten better, the full-body, sensory-overload experience you can have at a show would still be mediocre, and it'd likely still be seen as something not worth taking seriously. So, I feel like I just want to help in any way I can to build on the electronic music culture, as I love it very dearly.

Mr. B.: Yeah! I love collaborating with other producers. I think we all have our strong suits. I think I'm good at being creative & I'm OK at sound-design & mixdowns maybe, but there's other people who are just so much better than me at other things, like the song-writing/arrangement side of things, or they might be really good at writing melodies, or really good at making insane bass sounds, or drum sounds, or something else. Or, I might just like their overall style a lot & think we could create something interesting as a blend between both our styles.

It really depends, but in general, I like collaborating because it yields something impossible for either party to have created on their own, and I have all the time in the world to make music on my own, so I like to take the opportunities I have to work on music with others when I can. That usually happens whilst I'm traveling in other parts of the world. I'll get to sit down in a studio with another producer, we'll start something, then finish it over Dropbox over the coming weeks, months, or in some cases, years.

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