In The Studio With… Porter Robinson’s Spitfire

By Jim Tremayne | December 1, 2011

Already, 2011 has been a big year for Porter Robinson.

The Chapel Hill, N.C.-based DJ/producer has played some of America’s largest
festivals; he’s supported Skrillex and Tiësto on separate tours; and he was
commissioned to offer up a gnarly, underground remix of Lady Gaga’s otherwise
anthemic “The Edge of Glory.”

His fresh, youthful take on EDM borrows from a slew of disparate styles—dubstep
drops, trancey fills, Moombahton beats—and now he’s released Spitfire, a debut
EP on Skrillex’s OWSLA imprint. It has already topped the online retail
charts—and, oh, he’s only 19 years-old.


We recently caught up with the youthful Robinson for some studio talk.

DJ Times: Where’s your studio? How do you work?

Robinson: [Laughs] My “studio” is a single PC in my bedroom at my parents’
house. Remember that I’m 19—this year would be my first year in college if I
wasn’t playing a show every single day—and so, my stuff is still there. It’d
make no sense for me to be paying rent on a place I’m never at. I can’t work on
the road at all. I can only make music at home, so I don’t write while I’m
touring.

DJ Times: So how do you create music?

Robinson: I started with Sony’s ACID, and then progressed to FL Studio, which
is now is my only sequencer/DAW. As far as VSTs go, I use the standard ones:
[FL Studio] Sytrus, [Native Instruments] Massive, [LennarDigital] Sylenth1. I
don’t use any hardware at all, although I own a [Roland] JP-8000.

DJ Times: What was the process for the Spitfire EP?

Robinson: I started working on it nine months before it came out. I was in high
school until June. That means I had five or six months where I was home Monday
through Friday going to high school and I was only playing gigs on the
weekends. During that time, every day I got home from school and immediately
went to work on the EP, and then I flew out and played gigs on the weekends.
Since the summer, I’ve been touring full time, and it’s been way harder to make
music since then. I think the only song I’ve made since summer started
was “Vandalism.”

DJ Times: Give me an idea of how you created one of the tunes from the EP.
Let’s take the title track as an example.

Robinson: I stumbled across those chords while toying around on the piano and
they stuck with me for months. Whenever I’m playing piano, I almost
automatically tap out those chords. “Spitfire” started as my typical
approach—it’d be a somewhat trancey, epic breakdown that would build into hard
electro. But somehow it became dubstep. That song happened miraculously
quickly.

DJ Times: As for remixes, what do you try to do with them? Using the Lady Gaga
track as an example, what kind of spin did you want to put on that?

Robinson: I want each remix to be unique, but my approach to the Gaga one was
probably the most consciously chosen. I knew that, by remixing perhaps the
biggest pop act in the world, I was going to risk looking—and more
importantly—sounding cheesy. So I changed the key to minor and I gave the song
perhaps the weirdest, creepiest, most brooding drop I’ve ever made.

DJ Times: What’s your musical background?

Robinson: I didn’t have a musical background at all, but that’s not so rare
amongst EDM producers. I started unintentionally teaching myself to play piano
right about the time that I started producing. I had a MIDI keyboard—I didn’t
know how to connect it to my computer—and I’d tap out little melodies on it.
Over the course of seven years of producing, I became pretty competent at
piano.