My Toolbox: Subjoi

Adelaide producer Subjoi released his new EP In Absentia via 13 Hour Records. The 4-track project comes with three originals and a remix from Loure. In Absentia toes the line between at-home listening and smooth club selections to kick off a night. He finds that middle ground with tunes like the deep, side room house “Without You” and its playful piano line or the anthemic vocal samples with strings on “I Say.”

After EPs on Lobster Theremin sub-label Distant Hawaii and Shall Not Fade, this is another great release from Subjoi in 2020.

To get a better idea of how he makes his music, he takes us under the hood to his studio for a My Toolbox feature. Explore his limited, yet effective studio gear in the feature below.

"My toolbox is quite limited, I try to keep it simple and use stuff that I know quite well. I’m not really keen on having heaps of hardware or plugins if I don’t know how to use them properly! Below are 5 tools that I rely on quite often.

1. Valhalla Vintage Verb

Probably one of my go to reverb plugins, everything just sounds mint. It lacks any sort of user manual but the whole GUI is easy to use so you can make some real cool effects in no time. It’s cheap, powerful, simple, sounds great and definitely worth it.

2. AMP

This one is included with Ableton as stock but it’s a very useful when you need it. I use it whenever I need some distortion or to add bit of a mono signal to a wide audio track. I bet I can do that differently but it works for me. It’s use definitely depends on the situation and it’s not something that I use all the time.

3. Oberheim Matrix 1000

One of my go to hardware synths. It’s a great sounding synth, especially the pads which I use quite a lot. You can’t really adjust any of the sounds without an external MIDI editor but with 1000 presets I can overlook that limitation. I feel like these were underrated for quite some time but it seems like the interest has grown in these lately.

4. Virtual Tape Machines

Probably my most used plug-in, I put this on a group of tracks to get that warm tape sound. Play around with the settings, tape speed, tape type to get whatever sound you’re after. If you want to slam your track then set that input right up.

5. SM Magic Racks

Last one is not really a plug-in I guess but more of a preset racks that can be imported into Ableton. You can obviously design these yourself with whatever you need but this was a good quality of life addition to my setup. The audio effect racks really changed everything for me as it’s a one stop shop for whatever I need, be it delay, drum effects, vocal effects and more.