Name: Dam Swindle
Members: Lars Dales, Maarten Smeets
Interviewee: Maarten Smeets
Nationality: Dutch
Occupation: Producers, performers
Current release: Dam Swindle's Minor Fools EP is out via Heist.
Gear and equipment recommendations: I’d focus on some of the plugins that are an integral part of our workflow. The Fabfilter Pro Q is a must for precise EQ’ing. It’s doesn’t just have a great workflow, there’s also an opportunity to match EQs and make your EQ points dynamic, which is something we use a lot, especially on ‘dirty’ samples or recordings that require some additional love.
Another essential piece of gear for us is our modded Korg Mono/Poly. It’s a lovely piece of vintage gear that makes the most beautiful arpeggios, even more so thanks to our tubbutec midi mod. This one has been with us for a long time and will probably stay with us till the bitter end!

If you enjoyed this Dam Swindle interview and would like to stay up to date with the band and their music, visit them on Instagram,  Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.

Over the course of their career, Dam Swindle (or Detroit Swindle, as they used to be called earlier) have collaborated with, remixed or been remixed by a wide range of artists, including Seven Davis Jr., Jitwam, Emma-Jean Thackray, and Fabrice Lig.

[Read our Seven Davis Jr. interview]
[Read our Jitwam interview]
[Read our Emma-Jean Thackray interview]
[Read our Fabrice Lig interview]

For the thoughts of artists featured on Dam Swindle's very own Heist imprint, read our Cinthie interview, Prins Thomas interview, and our Orlando Voorn interview.



The views of society towards technology are subject to constant change. How would you describe yours?

Technology has brought us so much, but at the same time as a society, we’re at risk of letting it take over our lives. And not in a Matrix kind of way, but in a way where we have created something that can numb us to the bone. The very essence of social media is to make us screenwatching idiots, cause that’s when the most money is made.

At the same time, tech brings us so many beautiful opportunities.  We’re both very aware of the fact that technology made music production accessible for us. Like many others, we started as bedroom producers with just a laptop and a DAW. This would have been way more challenging if we would have been doing this 20 years ago.

And now, with the introduction of AI, the possibilities of letting your creatitvity flow are insane. If used in the right way, technology is an amazing asset for anyone who’s exploring their creativity.

What are currently your creative goals and how are technologies helping you reach them?

We’re currently working on a new album and tech is making our life so much easier.

From simple things like remote sessions with musicians over video to extracting elements from samples with AI tools, to creating countless ideas using effect plugins on our DAW, technology is helping us be the most creative version of ourselves.

How and for what reasons has your music set-up evolved over the years and what are currently some of the most important pieces of gear and software for you?

Our setup has evolved massively over the past ten years.

We started with just a laptop and some controllers at home. When we got our studio, we expanded with a lot of different pieces of gear over the years, such as the Fender Rhodes, a Moog Voyager, a Dave Smith / Sequential Prophet 6 and lots of drum machines all routed through a Midas Venice mixing desk. When we ran out of channels, we switched to a digital mixing desk with our RME sound card and that’s what we’re using now, although we’ve ran out of space again to be honest.

The nice thing about our current setup is that we can record everything simultaneously and straight into Ableton, so it’s a really direct workflow. This works really well if we’re jamming in the studio and quickly want to record ideas and tweak them in the box, while moving on to a different idea on the same synth for instance. We might change this again at some point, but right now, this feels like the best setup for us.

Most of our processing and FX are in the box, so we mostly record the dry output from the synths and do our processing in Ableton. Our 2022 track “All I Want“ is a good example of a track that came together in a short session, simply by having one of us working the DAW and the other recording several ideas on the Korg Mono/Poly, the Rhodes and drum machines.



It’s a track where we found a nice balance between sampling, live instruments and electronic instruments.

Have there been technologies which have profoundly influenced, changed or questioned the way you make music?

We’re both producers but never played keys or any other melodic instrument, so we do everything by ear. When there’s complex samples or melodic parts that we’re working with, this can become time consuming and at times, it would take the energy out of our creative process.

Ideas would sometimes lose their initial spark, so when Ableton introduced their update where you could extract harmonies and melodies from samples, it really saved us a lot of time and that little piece of tech helped us in getting our ideas written and recorded a lot faster when working on more complex pieces of music.

From my point of view, the three key factors which have driven music technology over the past decades are mobility, affordability, and (easy) usability. How important are these for your own work – and did I miss any?

Mobility has been a big deal for us. We’ve done so much touring in the first 10 years of our career, that without a laptop, probably more than half of the music we’ve made wouldn’t have existed. So many ideas started somewhere on the road and were later finished in the studio …

Affordability is definitely a thing, although I still believe that you can make music with anything. You just have to make it your own. I would even say that affordability and usability have made it easy to create someting that sounds really well produced, but they aren’t neccessarily drivers of creativity or in itself tools to create your own sound.

The bar to release music has significantly lowered with the help of tech, which has its pros and cons. Without the right connections, you would have never been able to release music, whereas now, you can simply start your bandcamp page and release whatever you like.

That doesn’t mean that everything that can be released, needs to be released. I still believe that you need to set the bar high for yourself and create something original.

Technology is usually associated with innovation and progress. Are these also important considerations for your music?

I think Lars is more of a tech guy than me, so he really likes to get nerdy when new tech is announced and he’s probobably also more tapped into innovations and how he can use them.

For me it’s always about the function it has within my workflow and how it can help me be a better producer and it’s probably safe to say that I am underusing a lot of the gear we own, but that’s totally fine with me. I might end up discovering something new that really has a function when I’m producing. But for our approach on music, we actually don’t really need a lot.

If you check out our single “That’s right“, there’s nothing technologically innovative about our process. But still this track has played a big role in our progress as producers, as we recorded a lot of different live musicians in our studio (horns, keys, bass, percussion).



It makes me wonder what progress really is. For us, progress is being in the studio every day, working on music and learning new things and using this in our next songs. As deliberate as it sounds when i say it like this, it’s very much a subconscious process and part of any artist’s path when working on something new.  

Late producer SOPHIE said: “You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, and any sound. So why would any musician want to limit themselves?” What’s your take on that and the relevance of limitations in your set-up and process?

SOPHIE was certainly right to say there’s endless possibilities in creating your own music. There’s no need to copy something that’s already out there, or to recreate a specific sound that someone developed. But there are advantages to limiting yourself in favor of focused production. Without limitations, some people might get stuck in searching for the right sound, preset or pattern and never finishing anything.

We’ve always been quite good in deciding what we want to hear in a song, but that doesn’t necessarily make things easier. We’ve never ever made a song with just 1 drum computer for instance, but instead spend countless hours in finding that right combination of claps, background loops and kicks to get that live-electronic crossover feel that we like so much.

A good example here is our track “You”, where we spent so much time in finetuning the percussion to find that perfect groove to match the arpeggio.



The sound sculpting capacities of current music technology are remarkable. So is the abundance of high-quality and ready-to-use samples. Which of these do you prefer and what does your process of working with them look like?

I both like and dislike the way samples have become a business model in itself. It’s nice to get ideas going for sure, but we get so many demos from artists that use the same samples. Then again, this has always been the case with classic soul samples as well, so maybe things didn;t really change that much.

When we work with samples, we always look at finding a unique perspective on that sample. Flip it, detune it, chop it up to create something new, you name it.

In many of our 15 Questions interviews, artists have emphasised the happy accidents as a result of human imperfections and unreliable machines. What's your view on this and how does an element of surprise enter your productions?

Unreliable machines give me nasty flashbacks to the many live shows we did with way too much gear where loopers didn’t loop, synths went out of sync mid-show or stopped working altogether and much much more.

Happy accidents or in our case, simply messing around and triggering ideas through randomization, changing starting points, altering pitch, flipping through patches or creating crazy FX chains all serve the same purpose of letting creativity flow through the inputs you’re getting. So many times did we start a track with a specific idea and went on making something completely different, just because a certain patch worked really well with our chord sequence, or a clap was accidentally placed on the offbeat.

It’s those moments that you should really embrace and accept where the song is taking you. More often then not, it’s when the most exciting things happen.

Production tools can already suggest compositional ideas on their own. How much of your music is based on concepts and ideas you had before entering the studio, how much of it is triggered by equipment, software and apps?

We’ve not used tools like that, although a bit of browsing through chord packs or sample libraries for inspiration is kind of the same thing. You take something external and internalize is with your own creativity. Whether that’s a loop, software, an app or a 60 year old song; the concept is the same.

Inspiration can come in so many ways and I welcome every way there is for people to light that flame of creativity.  

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?

There’s zero fears on our end. Creativity can come in many forms and if AI assists, or functions as a tool to inspire, it’s doing something great. Just like nature, other people’s music, conversations or books can inspire you to write new music. This is just an exciting new form.

Obviously there are issues to be dealt with, like copyright. Using AI to mimic something that already exists and enjoys a degree of popularity such as - let’s say, a famous artists‘ voice -  is not the way to go. There’s gonna be people that do this and they’ll probably make a lot of money, but it’s also a cheap trick and shouldn’t be allowed without consent from the artist who’s being impersonated by the AI.

We welcome the technological advancements and we’re curious to see what the next steps will be.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in tools/instruments you would like to see and hear?  

To be very specific, I’d like to see more sampling options within Ableton clips rather than in the sampler. It would really make working with loops more inspiring than it is now.

I’m also curious to see how DAWs will do more with AI. Anything that can help producers stay in their flow of production or in other words, can help us be the most creative versions of ourselves is very welcome.