@crytek
How do you manage your time in the studio?
I’m not really trying to manage it , altough it’s more and more necessary with the number of project growing recently, I found out that I work best early in the morning or late at night, It all really depends on where your inspiration hits you, then everything else is secondary and I try to write the ideas down as quick as possible.
Have you ever had a track rejected from a lable? If so, what were the reaction from you because of it (disapointed, shrugged it off, etc)?
Yes of course, we all know the feeling when you send something out and labels don’t even bother to respond. I think it’s understandable with the amount of tracks they receive daily. I do my best when I make music, but it doesn’t mean that every tune I make is a solid gold, then you have to decide wheter you want to flood the market with quantity or you focus on some quality control. Most of my tracks floating about are unsigned, if I have to choose I prefer a solid and well known label to some “just started” digital label that seem to be popping up everywhere nowadays. I mean no offense to any of these but as in everything else today, you have to dig quite deep to find something good in the ocean of avaragness. Back to your question, honestly, there is always some feeling of disappointment when your work is not received well, making some kind of expression is always attached to our egos, so often the criticism could be taken personally. As a profesional you need to try to avoid that, take the positives out of it and find a way how to include it in your work to grow. It can be frustrating at times, but in the end it’s worth it.
Do you prefer working solo or collaborating with a person on a track? If it’s the latter, how do you go about it - especially with people who doesn’t use renoise - ?.
Mostly I work solo, but collaboration has definitely lots of advantages, most real collabs I did were with vocalists or instrumentalists. Had some collab projects started earlier but I didn’t find someone with whom it would work so well on a longer basis (production wise). It’s ofcourse connected with the enviroment as well, renoise is not so widespread yet, but I’d be definitely happy if it changed. Collaboration is great for having perspective, teammate can pull you forward or tell you when to stop. Technically with rewire I don’t think there should be any problem working on projects now even if someone uses different system.
Any tips on simple tricks (in the fx coulomb) that you’ve found useful?
Do you mean tracker commands ? If so, I tend to use 1xx 2xx 5xx and naturally 9xx a lot, nothing surprising I guess. What I would love to have in renoise though would be some “automation” metadevice to which you could add parameters and control them via fx column. Something like hydra, but not with preset number of “outs” but it would start with only one and you could add more if needed - I often feel that automation chain gets too crowded with parameters i will never use, if I had one device to which i could set every parameter I wish to control in the chain then I would only automate this device and everything would be much easier to see… thinking of it, I think it would be great if you could have more automation curves in one window different in colors, that way you could see filter frequency and resonance curves together for example and switch them on or off if needed… just brainstorming here but i think it would be cool - also maybe it would be cool if every channel had hidden automation fx which you could show if needed and change parameters from tracker instead of automation window - but the change would be represented in the visual as well … maybe renoise 3 ? 
Ever considered promoting, and selling your music yourself? Ever considering starting a label?
Yes of course, You always need to do some kind self promotion anyway. I would like to start a label when I’ll feel I grow enough to it. I would definitely want to go beyond simple digital label.
Do you work more on impulse, or is most of the writing process a bit calculated?
Best things I did were made on impulse, but it doesn’t struck you daily, often it’s combination of both, you get an idea work on it impulsively and when it wears off more rational approach comes to it and you
need to filter out what is good and what isn’t. Beautiful lies for example were written completely on impulse I made it in a day basically. Sometimes you’ve got tracks on which you work for weeks or months but you can
never get it to sound right… often it just means that the idea is just not strong enough and best you can do is to try something fresh
)
out of the vsti