Published in the December 2009 Issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 22 - Number 12
By Justin Hampton

Evoking a timeworn showbiz cliché, Barclay Crenshaw has waited most of his life for the overnight success he’s seen on the dancefloor under the nom du dance Claude VonStroke.

He originally made music as a Detroit-area pre-teen and then got schooled on synthesizers at the University Of Rochester. Later, Crenshaw took a small detour into L.A.’s film industry—his IMDB entry places him on the sets of “Batman & Robin” and “The Truman Show,” for example. He eventually moved towards San Francisco and developed the minimal, funky, yet droll production style epitomized by club fives like “Deep Throat” and “Who’s Afraid of Detroit?”

Crenshaw sees his primary strength as an arranger, turning disparate wheezes, noises and palpitations into something memorable on the dance floor. “The sounds are not as important as the way you put them together,” he insists. “You have to be good [at making them], but you can make a cool song out of nothing.”

Before being blessed with a wife and kids, Crenshaw produced music in his bedroom. Now he creates his tracks out of a separate studio/office space he maintains on San Francisco’s Polk Street, also home to his labels dirtybird and Mothership. Here, Crenshaw created his latest LP, Bird Brain (dirty bird), which finds him expanding on his signature sound. Having jettisoned his early gear long ago, Crenshaw relies mainly on software, using outboard gear sparingly.

On down-and-dirty funk track “The Greasy Beat,” for instance, Crenshaw sent funk legend Bootsy Collins’s vocals through a Korg Kaoss Pad and a Diamond Memory Lane guitar pedal with a one-second analog delay, patching the results under Bootsy’s main vocal line. Additionally, Crenshaw says his outboard gear, like his Avalon VT-747 SP EQ/compressor, is mainly used “to really freak stuff out a little bit more than getting fatter sounds.”

For the “fatness” on “The Greasy Beat,” Crenshaw employed Rob Papen’s SubBoomBass, one of many emulators Crenshaw utilized on this album. Others include the G-Force plug-ins, Oddity’s ARP emulator, Spectrasonics’ Stylus RMX, Camel Audio effects, Guru FXpansion, Sugar Bytes, the Waves plug-ins and Synapse Hydra for its bass sounds.

However, Crenshaw stresses that much of his production is built around sounds from modest sound sources. For “Vocal Chords,” Crenshaw hired a singer to sing octave notes of every vowel sound, and then grouped them into chords using his primary sequencing program, Propellerhead’s Reason. Other sounds are often provided by vocals from Crenshaw’s wife, Crenshaw himself—a one-time beatboxer in his youth, apparently—and even the WeBot iPhone app in “Beat That Bird.”

“We were just goofing around when we did it,” he recalls, “and [we thought], ‘Well, there’s no point in changing it now.’”

Bird Brain shows Crenshaw using Reason alongside Ableton Live 8 as his two primary production tools. “Reason has absolutely the fastest arrangement programs for me, and I’m really all about arrangements,” he explains. “But when you get long samples and things that are just gonna be super pain-in-the-ass, then you just have to go into Ableton.”

– Justin Hampton