FabFilter

The Tractile story began in a schoolyard, when two rebels, Adam Young and Joel Boychuk, met and became friends. It would seem that these trouble makers, often being kicked out of school for a few days at a time, were a bad influence on each other because this only increased as they became better friends.

Adam had written electronic and techno material since he was about twelve years of age.

"We both grew up and lived in a small city where anything other than rock and pop were pretty much alien to everyone. But eventually Joel became interested after hearing some music I was playing at a new year's party and I started showing how much fun there was to be had in producing this stuff." It wasn't long before Joel jumped right in and started in on it too.

Everything they did was almost exclusively computer based. "I had always written my music using computer software. We tried some hardware too, but we always found ourselves returning to the keyboard and mouse. It just felt right." Eventually, Adam and Joel started doing improvisational live performances, using a laptop, fx processor and a sampler. As the results sounded very good, they wanted to start taking it a bit more seriously and be more directed. And so, Tractile was born. From then on, they spent a lot of time working in the studio, trying any and every idea that came to mind. "Over the course of a couple years of abusing our ears, depriving ourselves of sleep and eating too much pizza and instant noodles, we recorded multiple hundreds of tracks, along with a lot more remaining unfinished."

By this time Adam and Joel started to explore the intense music scene of Detroit. "We would go to the infamous 'Shelter' every saturday for a weekly party, sometimes waiting for 40 minutes in the freezing cold to get in and see people like Matthew Dear and Derek Plaslaiko play records". They started meeting a lot of people involved with various labels and decided to get some of their music to them. "Eventually we got in touch with the folks at Minus - whom are now our label and kind of like our new family. Most of the minus artists are people that we were fans of before becoming colleagues and friends with them, and that's been a very nice thing for us."

Tractile and FabFilter

Adam and Joel use a lot of software synthesis and fx processing. When playing live, they each have a laptop, a midi controller and a dj mixer that they feed into. "I had seen FabFilter when browsing the web, and it looked good, but it wasn't until an old friend of my informed me of the new Timeless plugin that I really paid much attention. I had been looking for something like this for a long time, especially something that would run as a Universal plugin on my Macbook Pro."

"When we're on stage, it's very important that we're not lifeless drones just playing some songs we've written.. a crowd shows up with a certain energy about them, and expectations. We have to really show them a good time, blow their minds and bring about the unexpected. While in principal we do this all the time and usually quite well, Using FabFilter Timeless and Simplon, we're able to really tap into an improvisational side of things, putting new and unique twists on familiar hits and finding new ways to create those really weird and crazy moments that elevate the excitement in the club to new heights. Simplon is a very clean and simple tool that does it's job very well, and Timeless is a weapon of many uses. I can't wait until the next time we play just so I can try new things with it. It's exactly what i've been looking for, for a long time... and much more. Some of the sounds we were able to come up with amidst mere jam sessions with these are just too freaky and good to ignore!"