Derrick Vincent Smith	- Download MP3-

In the intricate electronic productions crafted by Derek Vincent Smith for his performing duo Pretty Lights, listeners are as likely to hear rave-friendly digital sound effects as a sample of a classic funky hornline.

That blending of modern and vintage sounds into a complexly layered yet danceable mix is the end result of Smith's commitment to fusing the old and the new.

The production process begins, as often as not, in the castoff bins of used record stores, Smith said.

"A big part of the music is ... digging through old, obscure vinyl and traveling through with my battery-powered record player and finding little snippets of intros and breakdowns and drum fills and things like that," he said.

"Another big part of my music is what I like to call 'collage sampling,' which is taking snippets from different vinyls (from) ... different decades and eras and genres and cultures and pulling them together to create something new."

The Fort Collins, Colo.-native formed Pretty Lights two years ago after he and drummer Cory Eberhard left a previous band. Creating electronic productions had long been an interest of Smith's, but the need to find a creative outlet after leaving the band suddenly let it become a priority, he said.

Smith is gearing up for his first major national tour, which begins later this month with the release of his third album, "Passing by Behind Your Eyes." That tour will bring him to Rhythm & Brews on Wednesday.

In a live environment, Smith said, his production becomes more fluid and organic, particularly with Eberhard's input to play off of.

"I feel like we're both comfortable," he said. "In a live setting, we can take this music ... and treat it like it's more of an improvisational, live kind of thing, even though I'm using a computer and software.

"Technology really allows us to take it to different places every night."

RELATED LINKS FOR WEB

http://www.prettylightsmusic.com

IF YOU GO

* What: Pretty Lights concert.

* When: 10 p.m. Wednesday.

* Where: Rhythm & Brews, 221 Market St.

* Admission: $15.

* Phone: 267-4644.

* Venue Web site: www.rhythm-brews.com.

* Related links at fyi.timesfreepress.com.

DISCOGRAPHY

2006: "Taking Up Your Precious Time"

2008: "Filling Up the City Skies"

2009: "Passing by Behind Your Eyes"

DID YOU KNOW?

* To help them communicate more effectively onstage, electronic producer Derek Vincent Smith and drummer Cory Eberhard developed a system of hand signals.

* The two pieces of equipment Smith said he couldn't live without are his Virus synthesizer and his Fender Rhodes electric piano.

* All of Pretty Lights' music is available for download free at www.prettylightsmusic.com.

PULL QUOTE

"I was just frustrated trying to convince to give me money for my music. I just wanted people to hear it." -- Pretty Lights producer Derek Vincent Smith on offering his music to fans for free on his Web site.

Chattanooga Times Free Press music reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Derek Vincent Smith, producer of the electronica duo Pretty Lights, about offering his music for free, what inspires him and his most essential piece of equipment.

CP: Glancing at your touring schedule, you and Cory have a really busy couple of months ahead of you. It looks like you're fully booked up through November. What's the tour been like for you so far?

DVS: So far, it has not been as crazy and full-time as it's going to be. We sort of put it together so we could transition into it. Last spring and all the touring before the summer was all weekends. We'd fly out and do something here and fly back and do three or four days in a row. All the summer was all festivals. I had a month off, and now, in September, I'm doing a couple of festivals but also two week-long runs and getting used to the crew and everything to get prepared for the actual big tour, which is really exciting but kind of intimidating as well. It's the first time we'll be in a tour bus out on the road for six or seven weeks straight. I feel like we're ready for it. We've got a really good team put together, and we all work together really well. The clubs are all solid. It's been busy, but nothing like it's going to be.

CP: At the end of November, you've got another break for about a month before you start playing again in January. What do you plan to do then? Crash on a couch? Are you going to work in the studio again?

DVS: (Laughs.) You know, I'll try to find some “collapse on the couch” time whenever I can, but the way I have to look at it is that any time I'm not on shows is studio time, whether that's Monday through Thursday between two weekend runs or December between the November tour and the January tour. To keep it fresh for the fans and me, I have to spend every minute I can in the studio making new tracks and working on new projects. That's exciting to me. I don't really look at that as work.

CP: When you're on stage with Cory, how does the dynamic change compared to being in the studio producing?

DVS: In a couple of ways. One, just having two people on stage and having the live drummer there kind of changes the dynamic for me because I have someone to play off of and work with by feeling out the energy of the crowd. As far as how the live set changes from the record, it's all about how I have it setup within my laptop and all my equipment to manipulate the songs and reinterpret them in a live setting.

The way I do that is that I set it up so the different tracks on the album and different layers are separated within the software, and I use different devices to manipulate it, rearrange it and add effects to it and combine things that weren't combined on the record and add other elements that haven't been heard before, whether that's other samples or instrument layers or a cappella.

I use this sign language kind of system that's very simple. We have a number of different hand gestures we've developed so we stay on the same page. When I'm controlling and coordinating the music and deciding to take it up or down, we have a system where I can communicate that to the drummer without everyone seeing it. It's working really well. It's taken a little more than a year for us to develop it and evolve it. I feel like we're both comfortable, and in a live setting, we can take this music in a live setting and treat it like it's more of an improvisational, live instrumentation kind of thing, event though I'm using a computer and software. Technology really allows us to take it to different places every night.

CP: How did you and Cory team up to begin with?

DVS: We've been friends for quite a while, way before Pretty Lights. We were in a band together before that. I feel like we paid our dues touring with our old band. When that all disintegrated and people moved on, I needed an outlet for my musical expression, so I went from being in a band and writings songs for a band to the production thing. I'd always messed around with hip-hop beats, but I made it the forefront.

Basically, the first Pretty Lights record was produced in the studio - well, in my living room, I guess - and I started playing solo regionally doing my production. Then, I guess I wanted to expand that whole performance dynamic, so I came to Cory and asked him if he hand an interest in playing drums live on this project I'd been working on. We started touring around with it doing live shows. We both liked it, and I thought it added something new as far as the performance goes. It's always been that I'm the producer, and I compose and produce and do everything with the music and the record, and he comes to the live table to make the live show more exciting. It's been a lot of fun for both of us.

CP: How long ago was that band you two were in? When did Pretty Lights first start performing out?

DVS: The first Pretty Lights record was produced in 2006 and came out in October of 2006. Cory and I started playing together about a year after that, so around autumn of 2007. During that time I was working on “Filling Up the City Skies,” which came out in late October 2008.

CP: Let's talk about “Filling Up the City Skies.” The first thing people visiting your Web site see when they come to your Web site is that you've got that album and “Taking Up Your Precious Time” available to download for free with an option to donate. What motivated you to explore digital distribution that way?

DVS: Well, at first, my thinking was that I had just been in this band where we had a record out and we had been trying to sell it and use it as a source of revenue while we were touring. That was really difficult, to convince people to buy an album for a group they'd never heard or just heard one song by. I was just frustrated trying to convince to give me money for my music.

My thinking was that I think my music is good and that a lot of people out there would like it, and I just wanted to be in as many people's stereos as possible. That was my thinking.

At the time, this was a pretty new idea. This was before Radiohead “In Rainbows” and before Trent Reznor's free download experiment. With a friend of mine, we put up this Web site and came up with a system to make it available, which was basically a zip file with the art and music in it, and started letting people know about it. We passed out flyers around town that “Oh, we've got an album out for free online, download it” and sent messages to people on Myspace. I put a lot of effort into soliciting it and letting people know it was free. I just wanted people to hear it.

What happened is that downloads started picking up a year and a half later. We were ata couple hundred downloads a month, word was slowly spreading, and when I started playing live and people started knowing about it, it started picking up a little bit more.

When I put ou the second record is when something really surprising happened. Basically, It went from a couple hundred downloads a month to 10,000 downloads a month in the span of one month. It blew my mind. What had happened is that the word of mouth and the phenomenon of the way information spreads on the Internet had taken hold and people started finding out about it and downloading it.

My live shows immediately picked up. No matter where I went, people were there, whether it was the first show I'd played in Richmond or wherever. Promoters were starting to call that I'd never heard of from places I'd never been to.

It started as wanting as many people to hear it, and it continues because I feel like it is really having an effect on the way the music industry is changing. I want to be a part of that, and I know people are going to download the music anyway, even if I try to control it and sell it. This is me trying to have quality control over that and do something for my fans and, at the same time, help my career expand and evolve along the way.

CP: At this point, it's been downloaded 150,000 times. Are people actually donating money to you or are most people just getting it for free?

DVS: Yeah, a good amount of people are throwing me a few bucks here and there, and every once and a while, someone will actually download all three discs and give me $30, which is cool. I definitely get a handful of donations a week. It's nowhere near as many as the people that are downloading it, but that's fine with me. I also offer it in a higher quality format on iTunes if people want that experience. I'm still selling some records on that medium as well. It's nowhere near as many as are happening for free on my Web site, but I'm still getting some revenue. What's interesting is that giving it away for free has accelerated the sales of it as well. If I wasn't giving it away for free, I would be selling as many as I am now anyway. That model and decision is really surprisingly paying off in every facet of my career.

CP: What is your production/arranging process and what inspires you?

DVS: I grew up a lot on hip-hop. One of my favorite artists was DJ Shadow growing up. That whole style of production of electronic music was really inspiring to me. I got into record digging a long time ago, so I love any kind of record stores and flea markets and pawn shops, going through and seeing what they have. A big part of the music is that, digging through old, obscure vinyl and traveling through with my battery-powered record player and finding little snippets of intros and breakdowns and drum fills and things like that.

A big part of my music is what I like to call “collage sampling,” which is taking snippets from different vinyls, which means different decades and eras and genres and cultures, and pulling them together to create something new.

Some people have this idea of sampling as just stealing music. I definitely agree that there are plenty of people who engage in that process without much creativity. Some artists will take a four-bar loop and add a drum loop and call it a song. My process is much more involved as far as the sampling element. What I try to do is take pieces from many different decades and cultures and eras, little pieces, and work them together to create something new. Part of the process is finding things that inspire me. That might just be the timbre of a guitar line or the way the horn sounded when it was recorded in 1934 or whatever. Then, I have a studio full of instruments, vintage keyboards and bass and lots of synthesizers, so I basically toy around with it and record my own things to go along with it and find other samples to match up and create new feels.

I evolve it until I have a lot to work with, lots of different layers and parts and things to draw from when I turn to the arrangement process. Even during that process I'm still writing new layers and looking for things to add to it. It starts as this musical brainstorm, and then I pull from all the different elements to put it together.

I feel like a big part of the style is having the vintage, past-era timbres and organic elements combine wth the new school, electronic fusion, futuristic synthesis to create a real modern, present sound by combining the old and the new.

CP: Are there any particular artists you gravitate toward? When you say horn players in 1934, the automatic connection is to Louis Armstrong. Do you go for recognizability or do you prefer to stick with the obscure?

DVS: It's not necessarily no-name, but I definitely try and stay away from the artists that have really come to be the face of the era, like Louis Armstrong or something like that. I definitely go for more-obscure horn players or folk artists and funk bands from the '70s. I'm not out there sampling The Bee Gees or The Beatles or Earth, Wind & Fire. I try to steer clear of anything recognizable.

CP: What was your own musical genesis like? Did you play an instrument to begin with before moving on to producing?

DVS: Yeah, I do play a lot of instruments, that's how I started. As far as when I started playing music, it was kind of this thing I discovered as a teenager. I didn't grow up in a musical family like a lot of musicians who have parents who play or encourage them to get into it. It was something I found along the way.

I didn't do anything until around middle school, when I discovered the grunge rock/punk rock scene. Nirvana and Green Day were two of my favorite bands. When I got into that, I, I wanted to find out what it was all about. I ended up getting a bass guitar around 8th or 9th grade because I had some friends with a band who needed a bass player. By the time I saved up enough to get the bass, of course, they didn't want to let me in because I was brand new. I found some people who wanted to play with me and was in a handful of bands through middle school and high school.

I started with bass guitar and taught myself that and got in bands. That just opened up my world to music. It went from grunge and punk to funk and The Beastie Boys kind of hip-hop and 311, which opened me to other hip-hop like Wu-Tang and then I got into underground hip-hop and electronic music in high school. Discovering all these genres of music and finding ways to appreciate all of them, the style I came to is taking elements from all those genres.

When I played in bands, I really wanted to play the flute, so I'm kind of self-taught on the flute and keys. When I really got into producing, that's when I started getting instruments and toying around with them. I have a ton of instruments in my home studio. I'm not exceptional on any of them, but I can hold my own.

CP: Of all the equipment you've got in the studio, what's the one piece you couldn't do without?

DVS: Probably my Virus, which is my synthesizer, or one of them. It's my go-to synth. That, and my Fender Rhodes (electric piano).

CP: What are you working on now? I saw that your next album, “Passing By Behind Your Eyes,” is coming out later this month. What's after that?

DVS: I'm working on finishing up, “Passing By Behind Your Eyes.” I look at it as sort of a fusion between the two styles I was experimenting with on “Filling Up the City Skies” with two different styles on each disc. I wanted to bring those two styles together and bring them quite a bit further. It's still very organic, but electronic at the same time. It's somehow sort of down tempo and jazzy but at the same time with hard, banging beats.

I'm really excited to get this finished up and put out.

It's coming simultaneously with a number of things. One is the tour, which is the biggest for me. The other is the launch of the new Web site. We've put a date on the record, but it might not be exact because we need to be sure the Web site launch is simultaneous.

The new Web site is really fresh and is being built to focus on the model of distributing the music, which is the free downloads. As the library of Pretty Lights music expands, I want to make sure the Web site can handle it.

After this record and this tour, I do have a lot of ideas. As the means becomes available, I'm really looking forward to working with a lot more live musicians in the studio. Rather than going to the record store to find an old, obscure record where I can take pieces of a guitar line or something like that, I'm looking forward to networking and making connections with artists I want to work with and bringing them into the studio.