Stalking Your DAW: Junkie XL Shares Intense Sounds with “Desert Dystopian”

Paranoia. Bone crushing pressure. Nasty hallucinations. Brutal buzzsaw attacks.

These symptoms stem from listening sessions of Desert Dystopian, the new Sounds Originals sample pack by Tom Holkenborg. Also known by the name Junkie XL, his new collection is set to open up exciting options for composers and music producers alike – especially those who want to inject some musical mayhem into the mix.

Holkenborg transformed from simply being an electronic music and remixing megatalent in the 1990s and oughts to an indispensable film composer. His original film, TV and video game scores went on to include Deadpool, Black Mass, Alita: Battle Angel, Divergent, the forthcoming Terminator: Dark Fate, and Mad Max: Fury Road – the aggressive apocalypses of the latter having an undeniable influence on Desert Dystopian.

Tom Holkenborg, a.k.a. Junkie XL onsite in his LA studio.

Inspired by his past experiences, Holkenborg assembled the components of a big soundscape in this 85-piece pack. Elements within include driving drum ensemble rhythms, gritty synth basses, guitar feedback loops, and metallic textures supercollided with orchestral soundscapes and intense sound design. The result is a unique toolkit of samples and loops geared to grab the ears.

Holkenborg also has some other good news to share. He recently launched Score Academy, an annual year-long program, created in collaboration with ASCAP, providing emerging composers with the chance to receive hands-on instruction with him. Topics covered include scoring, sound design programming, music production, music technology and film music business.

Holkenborg expects to profit handsomely off of the new venture – just not in the monetary sense. That’s because the course is being offered annually to students for free, further extending what has been his long-running commitment to accessible education. Score Academy follows Holkenborg’s free online tutorial series Studio Time, which now has over 100,000 YouTube subscribers. And the man has legit education chops, following an Associate Professor position at ArtEZ Academy of Music in his native Netherlands, where he birthed a four-year bachelor program called Media Music.

Speaking with a pleasing Dutch accent from his jaw-dropping studio in Los Angeles’ Tarzana neighborhood, Holkenborg gave SonicScoop a welcome earful about these new initiatives. From best practices for incorporating sample packs into productions, to when it makes business sense for composers and producers to get into sample pack creation themselves, and his drive to give back through learning, this Q&A is utter utopia.

Tom, why should musicians and producers use sample packs? What hole do they fill in the creative process?

The thing that’s really cool with sample packs is that they offer a genuine approach to a certain music style, and that’s why the sample packs are so widely ranged. You might be working on a commercial and you feel like, ” I need this really authentic sounding blues lick.” And you can go to sounds.com and you will find the real deal blues guitar player that will give you 50 blues licks, right? For $9.99 or something like that.

Then the next week, a TV composer might be working on something and they need 20 seconds of authentic Chinese percussion. They go to sounds.com and they’ll find authentic percussion like that.

It’s a format that’s really built for the demands of modern composers in 2019, whether it’s film, TV, commercials, trailers, it doesn’t matter. Or for people that work on artist’s records, because nowadays, everything goes into a pop production as long as it all makes sense, right? If we just pick one example that’s old, but it was one of the first ones, was one of the Brittany Spears’ records of the early 2000’s, where she combined Indian orchestral strings with a sitar and a Turkish kind of percussion, with a typical American R&B beat underneath.

But in those days, producers really had to jump through hoops to get that all sorted, to get the materials, and to clear the rights. Now, it’s all made so easy for you, so if you want to combine an Irish whistle with like a Moroccan percussion group, an Indian string lick, some vocal performances from Iran, and then you want to mix it up with percussion from South America and some taikos from Japan, with an R&B beat on the underneath with some cool vocals within 10 minutes you have these samples that you can start combining these things together. That’s the beautiful thing of a platform like sounds.com.

I’ve produced plenty of electronic music myself, and I’ve certainly used plenty of sample packs too. The one thing I always wondered about, though, is “How do I ensure that, in the process of using this, I make it mine?” That can be in the back of people’s heads when they’re combining lots of samples or using samples. Maybe they feel like they’re cheating creatively. What’s your viewpoint on that?

“Desert Dystopian” offers an abundance of sinister inspiration.

That’s always around the corner. I would say — for beginning producers and people that get their feet wet into scoring, or electronic music, or doing commercials — it’s always there that people buy a sample pack and basically, they just combine the samples that come with the sample pack that are supposed to play together, and you create a piece of music that technically 1000 people can create at the same time, right? Because they buy one sample pack.

In the ’90s, when these sample CD’s came out, and they were called “Best of House Construction Kit 1-50.” You could build your own house track, but if you combined the elements together that came within one sample pack, you would create something that probably 10,000 people would create as well at the same time. That’s always there, but I think that’s more of a thing for the beginning producers and people who are getting their feet wet.

People that are more experienced, they’ll look into the sample packs and they say, “You know what, I’m going to pick the baseline from Tom’s Desert Dystopian thing. I’m going to combine it with the beats that Diplo did on his sample pack, and then I’m going to combine it with Mongolian singers that come from another sample pack. Then on top of that, I’m going to do a Cajun mandolin kind of thing, or a banjo kind of thing.” There you have it, you have something really unique.

The next level is when you use the samples from the sample pack as a starting point for inspiration. That’s what I tried to do with my sample pack. To not only to give something to the user out there, so they can use it right away if they wanted to, but also to inspire them.

Obviously, the Dystopian sample pack is referring to Mad Max, and so the sound has really that quality of that Mad Max score and some of the other ones that I did. With the sample pack, it’s like, “Here you have the individual layers that would make up a piece of music for Mad Max.” You can examine it and you can use that as a basis of inspiration, or by all means just use the sample itself. Just do something with it! I’m trying to rattle all these potential outcomes from super-beginning producers to very experienced producers.

Making the Most of Sample Packs

What was the inspiration behind Desert Dystopian’s theme and artistic direction. Mad Max touched it off, right?

Primarily Mad Max was the main inspiration. Not necessarily the movie, but it was like the approach to that type of music, which I’ve done for Batman Vs. Superman, or Man of Steel, for 300: Rise of an Empire. There’s a couple of movies that have that same language, if you will. What the language is, it’s really intense on the percussion and it’s really intense in sound design. Everything that’s done with the orchestra is enhanced by 20-fold. Basically, it’s very over the top and very in your face. That’s what this pack is trying to showcase. Basically, how rock & roll can you go into film-scoring, if you will?

It’s interesting to hear you call the Mad Max: Fury Road soundtrack “rock & roll” because, obviously, there’s stuff in there that’s creepy, that’s really high-impact, in a different way than rock. It sounds like some of these sounds definitely sound like you’re trying to scare yourself. Is that right?

Oh, absolutely. Myself and others!

Well, that’s been successful. Next, can you walk me through the creation of one of your favorite samples in this pack?

There’s 85 sounds in the pack. The whole idea behind sounds.com is that they’re bite-sized chunks. It’s not like a library of a million samples. You might find something in sounds.com that immediately fits your needs, and on the other side, it’s something that might really motivate you to do something unique, yourself.

The sample pack is divided into five construction kits and five construction kits with five different layers. You should really see it as drums, bass, the whole orchestra, some special effects and something else. If you line this construction kit up and you loop it, you have a complete piece of music. You can use only one element of it and combine it with something else. There’s five construction kits that are technically complete pieces of music and you can use them as-is, but, you could also use just a few elements of it — that is like 25 sounds.

Then the other sounds are just individual sounds where there are a couple of drum loops that emphasize that really-big-drums quality with brutal rhythms. Then, there’s a couple of one-off hits so you can build your own drum instrument out of that. Then there’s a bunch of low-hits and impact-hits, and then there’s a bunch of bass guitar loops. A bunch of guitar loops, and a bunch of sound-design loops. That all comprises the set of 85.

You certainly hit on something that to me felt problematic using sample packs, was how many options I had. It could get to be overwhelming with some of those. When you set out to do something that’s a pack that has 85 elements, how does that make that easier for you? I’m asking because part of what I want SonicScoop readers to come away with is, is sample creation something they can or should do? By breaking it down, does that make it an easier process, and more fun and creative?

I think so. It also makes it very focused. Obviously, sounds.com is a massive platform with God knows how many samples and loops and individual sounds on there. But, you just have to go through it and look for certain things, and it’s like, “Oh, I’ll take that, I’ll take that, I’ll take this.” Eventually, these are just tools for somebody else to be creative with it.

The least creative form of it, obviously, is to download my sample pack and play it as is, which is fine, too. Like I just said, there’s people, kids as young as 12 years old, that just play around with GarageBand, or they play around with FruityLoops, and they yet have to discover the world of making things yourself. They’re using all these sample packs to make their own tracks. As they progress into the world of making music, then eventually they want to make their own sounds, and sounds.com can be a major inspiration to do that.

Also, there’s all the people that do not have the money or the skills, or the expertise to put together a few loops — that is outside of their comfort zone. They might be comfortable making their own bass sounds, and synth sounds, and drum loops, but now they need this orchestral loop of strings playing something frantic, and they simply don’t know how to make that. Or, you need that authentic blues guitar, or this authentic soul choir lick. You can just go to a samples platform and grab one or two things and combine it with your own stuff. Like I said, it’s really like a playground to gather all these different types of instruments and samples, do with it whatever you feel is creative, and whatever you need at that specific point.

Getting Into the Game

Tom, speaking of playgrounds, I saw the promotional video for Desert Dystopian, in your studio. That certainly looks like a playground most musicians would want to play in. I know I would. How are the tools and all the toys in your studio set up to help you create sample packs? Among other things that you do, which, of course, includes scores and records.

For starters, everything is always on. Everything is connected to a patch bay or a mixer, or a sub-mixer. I mean, literally, you can walk in any room that I have and it’s filled with classic synths, drum computers, real drums, percussion instruments, guitars, all kinds of guitar amps. Hundreds of pedals. I mean, it’s just a sea of instruments around here. It’s always there to use.

My main recording room always has a drum kit miked up all the time. There’s always one bass amp that is miked up all the time. There’s always one or two guitar amps miked up all the times. It’s always ready to go.

Are there some synths or instruments in your collection that you find yourself gravitating to more recently?

It totally depends. I mean, there’s one set of synths that is great for one thing, there’s another set of synths that’s great for another thing. Sometimes you work for a year on a movie, you don’t need any guitars, bass guitars, or drum kits, or whatsoever. Now I’m working on two projects where it’s all about drums, space and guitar. You know what I mean? On Alita: Battle Angel, the movie that I just finished with James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, it’s a very orchestral score. Less on the sound design, and less on the synth. It’s more official writing. So it completely depends.

Circling back to SonicScoop readers who might want to supplement their revenue by creating sample packs themselves. Is this a good business sector for producers, composers, artists, to participate in not just as users, but as creators of them?

I would say it only makes sense if you do something that you’re actually really good at. That’s why these sites are around: They offer a small sample pack from somebody that is really good in doing that, you know what I mean? There’s certain people out there that make amazing, funky drum libraries. You’re talking about a guy who actually is the real-deal drummer, you know what I mean, and actually makes that.

So if you’re a veteran composer and you put together a funky drum library and you compare it to the real deal, people are like, “You know what, I’m not gonna buy that one, because that other one is the real deal.” You have to make something that’s really close to what you are as a producer and as a musician. That’s what you have to release.

There’s certain things that, if I were to release something, it would not be as good as somebody else. I mean, I’m a guitar player, but if I release a simple library with blues guitar licks that I played myself, I’m going to get kicked out of market by the real blues guitar players. You know what I mean? I’m not doing that! I’m releasing stuff that I’m good at, and so that’s a very important thing I would say.

Sharing with Score Academy

You just announced Score Academy. Why did you add this to your already busy portfolio?

This is a long history, but in short, my mom was a music teacher, and she made her money during the day teaching students music theory and a couple of instruments. Then at night, she would teach kids from less fortunate families for free to do the same. She would make deals with the local music stores so these kids could buy instruments a whole lot cheaper or with a subtle payment plan. She was really pushing education amongst really young kids. That’s already how I grew up.

Score Academy takes its students inside Holkenborg’s head.

Then, in 2002 or so, I was asked to join one of the bigger music universities in Holland to set up a four-year course based on a model of Berklee to set up a serious four-year university music study. I was connected with them for 10 years.

When we stopped working together in 2015, then I started Studio Time, the online tutorial series. Then last year, we were like, “Okay, let’s do something else.” That’s when we started the idea of the Academy. This is actually a plan that’s been brewing for a couple of years and we finalized it last year. Last year, we started with the test year. After a trial run, a couple things came back that we incorporated into study.

For me, education is something I’m really passionate about, so I push it as wide as I can with the Studio Time series, with the Academy, which is a study completely for free, like it should be. We’re very passionate about this.

Now, we’re going into our first official year with sponsoring with ASCAP, and let’s see where it takes us. Hopefully, we’re going to grow and we can handle more students, but obviously, this is depending on sponsorships and depending on if I can devote enough time to these students, because that’s very important.

It needs to be extremely hands-on, and it’s important that these kids have constant access to me to ask me questions: “How would you do this or that?” That’s very important for the success.

You refer to Score Academy as a “full contact curriculum.” What does that mean?

I am not a guy that can fit in a part with sheet music and a pencil, and just do whatever. That’s not how I am. I also don’t like the idea of sitting behind a computer all day with a mouse and a keyboard, and just programming everything in.

I need to hold instruments. Whether it’s a guitar, or a drum kit, or a synthesizer, or whatever. I just need to hold an instrument and play it, and from there, the inspiration starts. That’s why I call myself “a full contact composer!”

• David Weiss

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