Solomun's Seven Deadly Studio Sins

Here's a brutal truth: headphones and studio monitors lie to you. They make everything sound like it lives in a perfect, controlled world. They cannot tell you whether a track builds tension the right way, hits hard enough at the drop, or collapses emotionally during the breakdown. Only a dancefloor can tell you that.

Solomun spent years DJing before he ever made a record, and he's always been clear that his DJ perspective is inseparable from his production instincts. He knows exactly what 300 people feel like at 2am when a track loses the plot. He knows what a room sounds like when something is too busy, too clinical, or arrives too early. Most bedroom producers have never felt any of that — and it shows in their arrangements.

This sin produces a very specific and recognisable symptom: tracks that sound great in solo but feel emotionally flat or confusing in a mix. The drop comes without enough build. The break resolves too fast. The elements are all technically correct but the emotional arc is wrong.

Most producers treat vocal selection like a grocery run — grab something off the shelf, check it sounds roughly correct, and move on. The result is tracks where the vocal feels like a fixture rather than a force. You can always hear it: the voice is technically present but it isn't driving the emotion. It's just sitting there, doing a job.

Solomun's approach to vocals is almost the opposite. He won't commit to remixing a track until he's spent two or three days just living with the original vocal — listening without producing, letting it settle into him. "I need to take some time to feel the vocals," he's explained. "If I don't feel them, I can't do a remix." What he's describing isn't perfectionism. It's the process of letting a vocal become emotionally true to you before you build a world around it. That process cannot be skipped without consequences.

This is exactly why having a large, well-curated library of quality stems at your disposal matters so much. Platforms like Vocals.fun — co-founded by David Guetta, Dom Dolla, and Maddix — give you over 1,600 royalty-free packs across every key, BPM, and vocal character, so you can actually take the time to find the voice that genuinely moves you rather than defaulting to the one that's merely convenient.

This might be the most common sin in electronic music production. You build a loop. It sounds great. It feels good on repeat. And so you post it to SoundCloud or your group chat and call it a sketch, because secretly you don't know what to do next. The hard part — arrangement — hasn't started yet, and most producers never get there.

When Solomun was asked about his greatest strength as a producer, his answer was pointed: "I think that regarding arrangements I often have my moments and have quite a good instinct for this." That's the quiet acknowledgement of something most producers never wrestle with seriously. Arrangement is the emotional journey of a track in time — when elements enter and when they leave, how tension is built across two minutes and released across four, where the listener's attention goes and why. A perfect loop with no arrangement is a meal that never arrives at the table. It exists. It smells great. Nobody eats.

GAS — Gear Acquisition Syndrome — is not a joke diagnosis. It is a genuine creative disorder that convinces producers that the right plugin, the right hardware, the right sample pack, is the thing standing between them and a great track. It is almost never true. What GAS actually produces is decision paralysis: you open a session, you have forty-seven reverb plugins, and you spend twenty minutes auditioning them instead of writing anything.

Solomun's setup is almost defiantly simple for someone at his level: Logic Pro as his DAW, Barefoot MicroMain 27 monitors, an RME interface, UAD plugins for processing, Native Instruments Komplete, Output plugins, and a small handful of hardware including a Roland Juno-60 and a Prophet 5. That's the whole story. "Even many of my geekier tech friends who have collected much more gear over time," he's said, "are going back to smaller set-ups — which is much more effective." The constraint isn't a limitation. It's the source of the sound.

You're waiting for the weekend. You're waiting until you have a proper studio. You're waiting until you have better monitors, better acoustics, a free evening with no interruptions, the right emotional state. Meanwhile, nothing gets made. This sin kills more music than any technical limitation ever has — because perfect conditions are a myth that creative cowardice invented to feel respectable.

Solomun tours almost constantly. He has studios in Hamburg, Ibiza, and Luxembourg — but he's rarely in any of them for long. So he does what any serious producer does: he starts ideas on a laptop on a plane, in a hotel room, in a soundcheck window. "Since I am traveling more or less all the time, I am working on ideas with my laptop on the plane or in the hotel," he's said. "For finishing tracks I need a studio set up around me — but this can be everywhere." The capturing and the finishing are two different phases. The capturing can happen anywhere. Anywhere.

The instant you open a DAW session, your brain shifts into a specific mode: technical, reactive, decision-driven. Every click is a choice. Every drag is a commitment. This mode is excellent for executing ideas. It is terrible for discovering them. The problem is that most producers live in execution mode almost exclusively — they open the DAW to find the idea, instead of finding the idea first and then opening the DAW to build it.

Solomun will sit with a remix vocal for two or three days before he touches a fader. He calls it getting to know the track. What it actually does is allow his subconscious to run sessions he's not aware of — so that by the time he does open the session, he already knows roughly where the track wants to go. The arrangement is half-finished before a single note is placed. This is why his remixes tend to feel so coherent and inevitable rather than assembled. He was already inside the music before the music started.

This is the deadliest sin of all, because it wears the disguise of ambition. Trend-chasing feels like strategy. It looks like market awareness. It sounds like career planning. What it actually is, in every case, is the abandonment of the one thing that makes any producer irreplaceable: a genuine point of view.

Solomun grew up on funk, soul, hip-hop, and disco. He came to house music through love, not career math. He produces exclusively under his own name, refuses pseudonyms, and has always made the music he wanted to hear — even when that meant taking risks that didn't pay off. "I try to evolve as much as possible, taking risks, which I am not afraid of," he's said. "Sometimes this works, sometimes not. You always have to try it to find out." The artists who last two decades are never the ones who best predicted what was popular. They're the ones who were so specifically, stubbornly themselves that the world eventually caught up.

Solomun at Pacha doesn't sound like anyone else. Diynamic Music doesn't sound like any other label. That is a creative achievement — one that required resisting the siren call of whatever was working for everyone else, constantly, for twenty years.