Crankdat’s aptitude for music production didn’t happen overnight

Growing up around music, Christian Smith, or Crankdat, was destined to become a household name in the electronic music industry. There was a time when a career in athletics was in the cards, but his passion for producing led to opportunities that he couldn’t pass up. Underlying his production is a structured and disciplined approach to progressing as a producer; this involves regularly investing time to learn and apply techniques, as well as actively capturing every fleeting idea before it’s lost. His meticulously crafted material reflects not only his tremendous talent as a musician, but all of the time and effort he has dedicated to his development as an artist.

Joining the Monstercat family in 2018 following his first release, “Kneel Before Me” with SLANDER and Asking Alexandria, Crankdat has superseded all of our expectations. Notably, late last year, Crankdat dropped “Falling,” which showcased a harmonious and melodic sound that caught us off-guard. It was a breath of fresh air and a gold check in the box marked “versatility.” Today, we’re going in-depth with Christian to learn more about his creative process, his latest music, and who Crankdat really is!

 

Let’s start off with a few fun facts!

What is your favourite food you’ve had on tour?

As a generalization, burgers. I eat burgers like every other week and on tour. I’m a big burger guy, so the biggest blessing with my job is that I get to go to all these places and try all these different burgers. They are different wherever you are!

Do you have a favourite place for burgers?

L.A. has the best burgers, hands-down. You can’t beat ‘em. I’d say Vancouver, though! Vancouver probably has the second best.

Pursuing music instead of athletics was a major decision for you! Do you have a favourite pro sports team (that you perhaps followed growing up)?

Not really. I never really followed sports. I did sports, I did track… but track isn’t exactly a watching sport. I never fell into football or basketball to the point where I would routinely watch it.

Who is one person you’ve never met that you would like to meet?

Robert Downey Jr. for sure. I’m a really big Marvel guy, a really big Iron Man guy. Iron Man has been my favourite movie since it came out in 2008. He’s been my favourite actor for like 12 years. I tell people all the time, I don’t really feel like I would get starstruck if I met anybody, especially because being a DJ and stuff I meet a lot of the DJs that I grew up listening to… but it’s never really shocked me that much. But I think, with him, if I met him, I would be very starstruck.

Your exciting brand of music has electrified crowds worldwide!

You’ve participated in plenty of collaborative projects as a producer. What is the most unique or interesting collaboration you’ve been a part of?

Fittingly enough, with Monstercat, I’d say it’s gotta be “Kneel Before Me” with the SLANDER guys and Asking Alexandria. That process was very different from how I would’ve ever expected it to go. Nothing about it was crazy interesting, at least in my opinion, but it took us about a year and a half to make that song… and the way that it started and the way that it ended are pretty much two totally different songs. There’s only one place I can think of where the original made an appearance, but if you know what that is, you recognize that the song that came out was not at all like the song that we initially started.

For that process—that would’ve been [...] either 2017 or 2018 in January that we started that collab—we worked on the song, let it sit for a long time, and then my lawyer actually works with Asking Alexandria. He was chatting with them and he showed them the demo, and the A.A. guys were like ‘We want to work on something with them’ and then me and SLANDER were like ‘Yo, how about this? Let’s work on this!’ So we flew in Danny Worsnop, the lead singer of Asking—in from, I think he was in London—and we flew him into L.A. and we got him in the booth. He was probably there for 35 minutes and just laid down the more fire vocal tracking of all time. You could hear him in the booth, he was stomping. He was absolutely crazy, he’s a madman! We reworked the production a little bit because his vocal is very hard rock and, at the time, the current production we had was not.

Was that your first time meeting and/or working with them?

SLANDER guys? No. When I had referenced starting that track in January of whatever year it was—it must’ve been 2017, it had to be 2017—I had actually met them the month before in New York. A buddy and I went out to one of their shows and we met the guys, and then Scott invited me to go to their place when I was in L.A. the following month, and that’s when we started working on the song. As far as the Asking guys, Danny in particular, yeah that was the first time I met him, which was really cool.

Is there anything you can take from your time as an athlete (be it mindset, approach to training, work ethic, etc.) and apply to your career as a musician?

Oh, for sure! As far as all the fundamentals go, I pretty much apply everything. I wasn’t an athlete for very long, so I don’t really swear by that lifestyle. I didn’t have much of a college experience with it either, but in my high school experience, it was pretty rigorous. It taught me how to “grind.” It pretty much taught me how to “grind” and really (x4) spend a lot of time doing it, which is exactly, in my opinion, what you need to do on music. Not necessarily in the same fashion. You have to be a little bit smarter—but that’s the same thing with athletics as well. You have to work smart. You kind of just have to set it as the center focus of your everyday habits and make sure that everything that you’re doing is working towards that one goal. That’s the same as athletics, and it really teaches you how to focus and “grind” towards an objective.

It also teaches you—in my experience, I had a lot of really down times in my athletic career where I pretty much sucked… that’s kind of the same in music. Nothing ever just goes straight up. It goes up, it goes down, it’s all over the place, and that’s just how it is. That’s how life is. But you definitely come to terms with that very early on in athletics.

What does your creative process look like when you’re coming up with an idea for a song?

I start pretty much most of my songs, nowadays, in voice memos. I wait until I get a song idea or something and, usually, it’ll come to me at a random time either when I’m at the gym or in the shower or some like stupid time where I am nowhere near my laptop. I’ll get a song idea, so I’ll crack open voice memos and I’ll just like hum the idea. Voice memos are the most private part of my existence. Nobody is ever allowed in my voice memos because it’s just embarrassing sound bites of me humming random dubstep drops. But yeah, I’ll do that and then, when I get home, I relisten to it and see if I could still remember what I had in my head at that time. If so, I throw it into Ableton real quick and see if I can make something out of it.

Has it always been like that?

No. There’ve been periods of times where I sit down and make something, but I found that those always feel a little bit more forced, rather than when I have an idea that comes to me. As a producer or any sort of creator, you can always force something out but it always tends to be the natural ideas, in my opinion—not just with me, with anybody else that I’m close with as well. Their natural ideas are the ones that always stand out. So I try to keep track of as many of those as I can.

You’ll be playing at Monstercat Uncaged: Origins here in Vancouver in February! Talk a bit about how you, as an artist, prepare for events like this!

Well, I’ll try to put together as many new songs as I possibly can and get those in the set. I try to flesh out as many demos as I can before a big show or a big set—or even just a regular set, it doesn’t even have to be big—so that I can hear what it’s going to do live. Having done this for a couple of years, now, and there’s a lot of other people that are far better at it than I am, you develop a judgement for how a song is going to do live… but you never really know until you try it. So, I always try to get everything together and, that way, I can test it out live. [...] I’ll download some new music that I find on Soundcloud and stuff and throw that into the set. Usually, I’ll try to do a couple new visuals or so. Seeing as [Monstercat Uncaged: Origins] is in February and I don’t have very many touring dates in January, I should be able to get quite a handful of new stuff ready to go for it.

Do you ever find that when you get to a venue and play your set out, it doesn''t sound the way you’d imagined it?

Yeah, absolutely. I have recently, within the past year-ish, put a new emphasis on my working style as a producer into doing mixing in mono. To whoever doesn’t know what that means, mono is just when the sound is coming through both speakers, both channels, identically rather than separately – which is stereo. You get the signal in the left ear and the right ear totally different, but when it’s in mono, it’s the same. And a lot of the time, if you mix sounds really good in mono, it’s going to SLAP in the club, or the venue, or wherever. The festival. It’s going to sound really good. If it doesn’t sound good in mono, it’s going to sound like trash. And I actually had a couple instances of that this past year, where I like ignored that and it sounded really good in stereo, didn’t sound good in mono, and I’m like ‘whatever, I’m sure it’ll be fine.’ And then I played it and it’s like ‘this sounds horrible.’ I actually had to totally rework a couple of tracks because of that. But, yeah, you never really know. Festival systems, and club systems, venue systems are always totally different than whatever you’re working on at home. For me it’s headphones, most other people use monitors, but it is totally different. It’s about developing the ability to judge how that’s going to be.

Is the tech available at each venue relatively the same?

No, not always! Some places have totally slappin’ sound systems, other places have weak ones and the high end sounds very like… not crisp. Sounds kind of distorted—a little bit painful, I have sensitive ears. Sometimes I have to turn down the volume on the booths and stuff because it actually hurts. And some of them have really weak subs, so the bass doesn’t hit the way that it should. Those ones can be tricky because, sometimes, I have songs that I play—for example, songs that are super bass heavy but very minimal or very psychological—and if there isn’t a good bass system in the venue, then those songs just don’t work because the bass is the premise of the song, as is most of bass music… so, yeah, those can be interesting for sure.

With “Who I Am” now airborne, let’s delve into the development of your latest Monstercat releases!

With “Falling,” you embrace the softer and more melodic side of electronic music. While it’s different from anything found in Gearworld and Fearworld, it’s one of our favourite tracks! What led you to pursue a softer tone for this song?

I like to do both. I like to make the bangers, but I also like to have the songs that kind of stick with you. I think that melodic songs kind of have a tendency of making more of an impact—at least with me, personally. Like I love the bangers as much as the next guy, but if I think of the records that have had the most impact on me and are the most memorable to me, it’s more the ones that are more melodically driven and actually have an emotional punch. But I enjoy both, thoroughly. For this one, that’s just what I wanted to do with it. I thought that the vocal on it was really moving and I wanted the production to reflect that and be very powerful. So, that’s what I tried for!

 

 

 

What inspired the artwork for “Falling”?

The artwork is a dude falling. It’s pretty abstract. I didn’t really necessarily have a goal in mind for it. I kind of just wanted to come up with the craziest thing that I could think of or make up. I actually had a limited timeframe to do that one, so I kind of rushed it and had to fore it together. But I wanted to add a guy falling, but it not really be just a guy falling… I wanted it to be a little bit more abstract. It looks like the guy is falling, but also getting sucked up in some sort of laser.

All of my artwork is very sci-fi inspired. I’m a big sci-fi nut, Star Wars especially, so I have a lot of inspiration from those kind of things. So that’s kind of what drove that one. I wanted him to fall, but it be weird and also be sci-fi.

With “Who I Am,” it’s a return to form in terms of your heavier sound. Talk about what you enjoyed the most working on this song!

A little background on that one, I actually started [“Who I Am”] on a train in Germany like a year and a half ago. I really liked the melody for it. At the time it didn’t really hit hard enough, so I wanted to make it hit harder. That song is actually, now that I think of it, a composite of two different songs. That’s the song that I did in Germany, the one that I just mentioned, and also another one where—earlier we were talking about songs that didn’t sound good in the club—I had one that the drop just did not work in the club. At all. It didn’t sound good at all. I got rid of it, put in a new version of this Germany song as the drop, and just kind of reworked the entire track from there.

I really enjoyed the process of merging the tracks together. I’m starting to do that more and more now and it’s really fun, actually, to take older ideas that might not have worked on their own and put them with newer ideas to make this cool composite thing. That’s definitely where the fun on that one came from for me. In general, I really like to do the bass-heavy stuff.

 

 

 

On either of these two songs, was it kind of the same thing where you recorded yourself humming it or had something in mind, recorded it, and came back to it later?

Yes, “Falling” in particular. I did exactly that with the melody. I had the melody idea, I recall, I was at the gym… so I ran off into the locker room and hummed it out into my phone. And then I came home that night and I put it in. That one was another song where I actually have three or four different versions of it and the one that came out was the one that I wanted to go with… but I was really stuck with it for probably like a month and a half, and I had that melody idea, so I just reworked the drop into being that way. And I’m really happy with how that one turned out!

Let’s wrap up with a few final questions!

What was your first introduction to Monstercat?

Probably, several years ago, Aero Chord or Tut Tut Child. I can’t put a finger on how long ago that would’ve been. It had to have been sometime around 2013, 2014 maybe? It was probably either of those guys. I was really into Tut Tut Child when I first got into dubstep, and I know you guys had some of the earlier Tut Tut Child records. I was a Youtube kid, so I spent a lot of time on Youtube. That’s why I caught onto Skrillex so quickly because that’s kind of where he [...] made his home after, where he got really, really popular.

Would you say Youtube is important to the popularity of electronic music?

I don’t know. For me, personally, yeah. I’m not sure where everybody else heard their music. I know that some people found Skrillex on Myspace and stuff. I never used Myspace, so that wouldn’t have been my experience. Nowadays, we have Apple Music and Spotify and Soundcloud… for a while, there, in like 2015, we just had Soundcloud as the focal point for electronic, which is where I started my whole thing. But it wasn’t until I got started producing that I even looked into Soundcloud. I was listening to all the music on Youtube. I’m not sure if other people had a similar experience, but, for me, it was mostly Youtube that I found electronic music with.

What is one piece of advice you’d give to aspiring artists?

We’ll go back to what I was saying earlier when you had asked about if there was any kind of crossover between sports and music, and what I had mentioned was that I think the most important piece is time—especially (x3) if you’re learning! If you’re trying to learn how to produce and you don’t feel like you’re at a level where you’re comfortable showcasing your music or putting it out there and starting to get your name out there and you’re just learning the fundamentals, nothing is going to beat time.

I think that investing a solid amount of time into watching production tutorials and all that. There are so many out there now, too. When I got started, there weren’t even half of as many, not even a quarter. There are so many Youtube production tutorials that are modern and relevant on how to get started and learn good sound design, learn good processing, all of that stuff. You could do it, in my opinion, relatively quickly. I’ve met guys that have gotten a very good grasp on production in like a year and a half, which is very (x4) fast. But it really takes time. Good time. Daily time. You have to dedicate a certain number of hours that you can to it every day. Different people have different obligations. Some people might have eight hours of work they have to do a day, which means you come home. Let’s say it’s Monday. You get home at like 6 or 7, and you want to just unwind, watch a movie or whatever… but it’s like, if you spend one or two hours, those days, working on music, that’s going to composite. You have five weekdays during the week, that’s ten hours during the week. And then, if you can do another ten hours between the two weekend days combined, that’s twenty hours. If you wouldn’t have put in the two hours a night, it’s just ten. That’s doubling your time and that’s one of the pieces that not enough people put focus on, is just investing raw time into it. You’re not going to get better unless you put in the time.

Catch Crankdat at Monstercat Uncaged: Origins next month!

We’d like to give a huge shoutout to Crankdat and his team for working with us on our interview today. Discussing his creative process and how important it is to use time wisely, it’s clear to us that Crankdat’s devotion to his craft is unparalleled. At the same time, he isn’t all work and no play; he’s a huge Star Wars and Marvel fan, and will probably be caught red-handed with a burger every other week! Adding him to our roster was undoubtedly one of our biggest highlights of the past few years, and we can’t wait to see what’s next!

Make sure to give Crankdat a follow on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook!