A pivotal player in French electronic music, Canblaster’s insight was solicited by plugin company BLEASS during the development of the extraordinary Arpeggiator. We spoke to the man behind the Can, Cédric Steffens, to learn about his evolution from arcade dance game enthusiast to one-fourth of the acclaimed Club Cheval
It’s becoming increasingly common to find electronic artists and creatives having a hand in the development of the types of creative tools they themselves want to use. It’s often the case that those questing, ideafilled creatives are used as the originators of concepts that product development teams would never hit upon themselves. In the case of BLEASS Software, working with respected French DJ and producer Canblaster when building the ingenious BLEASS Arpeggiator led them to create a plugin far beyond their initial concept, and one that snapped into Canblaster – aka Cédric Steffens – chancebased workflow perfectly.
We spoke to Cédric to learn more about this collaboration, his upcoming three-part record and how using his regular livestreams helps keep him creatively productive.
1 Firstly, can you give us a bit of an overview of BLEASS Arpeggiator and what it brings to the table for creative producers and artists?
Cédric: “I think the main idea was to change what arpeggiators are. For me, it was a process of going back and forth with the BLEASS team and put every idea we could put into this. There are so many different ways of playing the arpeggiators that we tried to find by either analysing ways that the players play on the keyboard, or how classic sequencers were used. Then there’s a whole part about the rhythm of the arp which was one of the main focuses for me. One of the main problems I think with most arps is that the rhythm is unchanged. The idea was to implement silencers in the arp to create some holes and new rhythms using a mix of polyrhythms. The Trigger Mode is something I’m really happy with, it’s the idea that you’re able to control the rate at which the plugin steps through the pattern of notes.”
2 When did you start working with BLEASS?
Cédric: “So they are from the north of France, just like me. One of the guys from the team is a good friend of mine, he was actually the guitarist for my very first band from maybe 20 years ago. I only learned that after starting to work with them. We had several ideas for products we could work on together. One of them was the arpeggiator, but it was very basic at that time. They had a few implementations that were interesting. I had some that I really wanted to do, so we just started going back and forth on the development. We got in contact initially through my label, they knew them from a long time ago
