Chords for In the studio with Nils Frahm

[Fm] _ _ _ _ [Ab] _ [Cm] _ _ _
[Ab] _ _ [Bb] _ _ _ _ _ _
[Fm] _ _ _ I'm Nils Fram.
I'm sitting in the middle of my instruments and this is where I make my music.
We are in _ Funkhaus in Berlin and this is Saal 3, which was made for classical chamber [Cm] music.
What is fascinating about this room, it is from _ 1956.
_ Basically any acoustic environment you can imagine _ was set up here.
We even have reverb chambers, which I was able to reconnect.
So now I can use an actual analog acoustic chamber.
I didn't only _ record here, but most of the music for the record was recorded here.
I have a little other studio space on a beautiful island in the _ Mediterranean Sea.
_ [Em] _ Germans know it, it's Mallorca.
There is a beautiful _ old well [Ab] I have access to, where I can record inside.
That well has an even more _ _ _ crazy sounding reverb than our Funkhaus reverb.
_ So I had to fly there sometimes to record certain sounds _ in that well,
which was a whole [G] lot of fun, because it [Cm] doesn't sound like [Gm] a real reverb.
It sounds very artificial, but [Fm] it has a sense of physicality to it,
[Cm] which for me I [Gm] think is the main inspiration, is purely sound.
[Ab] What I'm really interested in is physical feeling which sound can produce.
_ For me it basically comes from playing acoustic instruments.
When I'm playing _ _ [Dbm] a note, I feel it in my fingers, I feel the vibration.
I can feel [Ebm] the _ physical tension from the strings. _
[Db] It all creates a really beautiful, _ [Bbm] _ inspiring sound to me. _
[Ebm] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ [B] _
_ _ _ _ _ [F] _ [Bbm] _ _
_ _ [Eb] _ _ _ _ [Ebm] _ _
[Eb] _ _ [Abm] Also my piano sound for this record was not a typical piano sound.
It was this little Danish piano, which I found a couple of years ago in Denmark,
which I bought for 50 euros and put it in my car and drove it home.
It's a very small piano.
_ When I miked it in a way I wanted to,
I prepared it with my technique of dampening the sound and so on.
_ I discovered that I even liked it better than the big shiny grand piano.
_ So I played that quite a lot more,
_ _ which is [Ebm] funny because it's _ by all means not the greatest instrument,
but it has a lot of soul and _ _ there's a lot of music inside it.
My whole life I was basically going after real instruments
and trying to get unusual sounds out of them.
Building the studio was basically like building a big instrument,
which I envisioned for over years and years.
It was a workflow which I had in mind, which I could finally _ try out here.
That workflow became also a decor [Gb] inspiration.
[Fm] _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [Ebm] _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [Gb] _ _ _
All my instruments are basically very normal instruments.
You see just a normal piano, a Mellotron, which has been _ _ on earth since the 60s.
I have a real pipe organ, _ [Ab]
which is controlled by a MIDI keyboard here.
So it is basically like an organ pipe organ,
[Gb] which we can bring on tour, which we bring also to the concerts.
_ [Bbm] _ I have some Juno synthesizers, which are very generic [Fm] synthesizers, I have to say,
but they work nice [Gb] for life because they don't break [Ebm] very easily.
The things which really made a difference for the [Bbm] record technically
were [Fm] some unusual instruments.
The harmonium, which I found here [Ebm] in Funkhaus.
_ [Gb] Somebody left it and it [Bbm] was in really bad shape.
A harmonium is basically a pump organ.
[Fm] You pump air with your feet inside.
The instrument, [Ebm] when you press down a key,
it will release [Bbm] air through a piece of metal,
which is [Fm] vibrating and making a sinus tone.
This is all old school [Ebm] stuff, basically.
It's a little bit like the studio, a little bit like [Bbm] people would work decades ago.
But now it feels [Fm] like it's a new thing because we almost forgot how that was.
[Ebm] And I'm rediscovering it here.
_ I can [Bbm] only say it's wonderful.
It's also _ [Fm] a curse. _ _
_ _ _ _ [Gb] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [Bbm] _ _ _
I thought we would build a touring organ,
_ _ _ made three modules to put the pipes in three cases, so they break up a little bit.
It is a little bit of _ a sad situation [Fm] because we cannot put the pipes [Bbm] on stage.
We have to put them off stage because you still mic them with microphones
and bleed into the microphones from the surrounding sounds, from stage and from the venue.
It's so loud that you get really bad sounds.
In the end, they need to be in a separate room and will remain invisible.
People asked me if I couldn't really make a sampler,
sample the version out of it for live tours.
And I said, I thought about it and it would not sound that good.
We have to bring it, even though it will look like I'm playing a sampler.
[C] So this is _ _ quite _ the idiocy [Bbm] about _ this _ tour.
You _ bring all the real things and people in the end cannot really tell what is real and what is not.
And probably they also don't care 100%.
But I think for me it's very important that I care.
And if I'm not inspired, it won't be inspiring for the people. _ _ _ _ _ _ _