Carl Cox is bored of DJing: “Instruments don’t play themselves; you have to create the sounds”Oh yes, Carl Cox loves playing to crowds just as much as when he started four decades ago:

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“The idea of my performance is always excitement. What’s going to happen? The creativity of that — what can I achieve? How do I connect with people?” Cox says.
But these days, his excitement, creativity, and connection come from his live electronic set, not DJing. Cox has completed the DJ game. In this phase of his career, the 62-year-old steps on stage, and, with the help of a Pioneer V10, a bevy of machines, and his inimitable ability to respond to crowds, he creates music that will never be heard again.
“It’s only me, from my point of view, coming down from the DJ pedestal to go into realms of creativity. The machines don’t play themselves. You have to create the sounds. You have to find the rhythm. You have to find its soul. When it all comes together, it comes through the speakers, and everyone’s got their hands in the air — there’s your moment,” Cox says. “That’s where I’m happiest because I’m being challenged.”
Image: Dan Reid
Cox is currently preparing to debut his brand new live set, Evolution, at Ultra Music Festival on 29 March. But he’s been seeking challenges onstage long before he developed this show.
“I’ve always had aspirations of being a live electronic artist,” Cox says. He recalls watching Liam Howlett perform for The Prodigy with an Ensoniq SQ-80 in the early 90s, when Cox was opening for him as a DJ.
Inspired, Cox decided to start the Carl Cox Concept, a trio that included Cox on keys, MC Magika on the mic engaging with the crowd, and Neil McLellan, a producer who worked on The Fat of the Land and other albums from The Prodigy, also using an SQ-80.
But Cox stopped the trio — he was too in-demand as a DJ and hungry for growth.. “I hadn’t reached the highest heights as a DJ to be able to say to myself, ‘I’m going as a live act.’ So I dropped the live,” Cox says.
Cox didn’t perform a live electronic set from 1992 until 2010, when he finally assembled a couple of shows in Melbourne for his album All Roads Lead To The Dancefloor. The album got a lukewarm reception, despite his diligent work with vocalists and instrumentalists, so he quickly reverted to DJing and swore he was never going to make another album. 10 years later, two things happened in quick succession in 2020: the pandemic eliminated live events and he received a beta version of the Pioneer DJ V10.
Image: Pres
“I said to the world, ‘That mixer is a game changer’. People were like, ‘How much is he getting paid to say that?’ But every DJ now wants to use a V10 mixer,” Cox says. “I never was a massive Pioneer fan. I always felt that the sound of Pioneer would be cheapened based on the components they used to use back in the day, but now it’s as good as any [premium] mixer out there.”
The most groundbreaking aspect of the V10, for Cox, is its ability to separately record each channel into Ableton Live, while many other mixers can only output a stereo feed. “When I told people you can record each channel like they’re stems in Ableton, people thought I was mad. I was using Richie Hawtin’s Model One mixer before I changed over to the Pioneer. It doesn’t do that.”
With this new tech available while he was on a forced break from touring in 2020, Cox spent his time off the road jamming on hardware. He would plug his Moog Labyrinth, Moog DFAM, Roland TR-8S, and various other machines into the V10, link them with Ableton, hit record, and start making music.
Image: Press
After one particularly fruitful jam session, he realized he had a whole album’s worth of material recorded into Ableton — after just 90 minutes. Just as new tracks unfold before him during his live set, new tracks were revealing themselves to him in the studio. That material became his 2022 album, Electronic Generations.
“I found as I was doing all these different ideas while I was jamming that I was actually making a live album. I wasn’t expecting to do an album. But everything that was coming about, I could tell — ‘That’s another track. That’s another track. That’s another track.’ I found myself doing about 25 tracks,” Cox says. This process birthed the new live setup he’s been touring since events resumed.
“I didn’t want to come out of COVID and just continue to DJ. I [like to] dive into the machines, swim around in all their components, and find out all these wonderful things that can come out of them that turn a corner on people’s expectations,” Cox says.
Cox will always be a legendary DJ but many of his world-class contemporaries are yet to follow him on this creative path. David Guetta put it similarly in 2024 — “In our profession, there are now…Entertainers and DJs.” These ‘entertainers’, says Guetta, stand behind decks of CDJs playing their own songs in their entirety, with little improvisation and a focus on props and stage production. “I don’t think that’s DJing,” adds Guetta.
DJs, on the other hand, read the crowd, play the music that fits the moment and introduce audiences to new music. Such entertainers, Cox says, are squandering their skills as a DJ.
Image: Press
“It’s the reason why a lot of DJs are bored. They’re playing the same tune, week in, week out,” Cox says. His remedy to that boredom is the machines, but in his experience, very few DJs have any interest in playing a live set.
“If you stick most DJs in front of [a live setup], they’ll just walk away. I feel there’s laziness to that, because when you go in the studio to record, you use these machines. You use a drum machine. You use synths. You use keyboards. So why don’t you do what we’re doing in the studio, and then create that live?” Cox says.
Cox is creating tracks in the studio and on stage with 13 different pieces of gear including his MacBook Pro running Ableton Live, an Ableton Push, Novation Launch Control XL, Abstrakt Instruments’ Avalon (to emulate the sound of the Roland TB-303), and a MOTU Ultralite mk5. All this runs into the six channels on the V10, and he puts a DOCTron IMC on the master chain.
Channel 1 is a palette of kick drums in Ableton. His music is based heavily on four-to-the-floor beats, which allows him to manipulate the sound of his set drastically. He can infuse any track with a different energy, from round and funky house kicks to deep and throbbing techno kicks.
Image: Press
“If I’m using a track, I normally take the kick out of that, and then put a new kick on top, so the track sounds different. But sometimes, that track has a good kick. I don’t even use any of mine. So I exchange, or I use the kick in a track and then use my kick to really get that bottom slamming,” Cox says.
Channel 2 is reserved for the TR-8S for the classic Roland drum machine sounds. Channels 3 and 4 include the full tracks he wants to play during his set that he can then manipulate with the machines and the mixer. Channel 5 controls the Abstrakt for the 303 bass, and then channel 6 is a submix of the rest of his Moog synths, percussion clips, and samples from Ableton for any further sonic decoration.
“I hear a track, find a good loop area, and I basically make a track from that loop. Then I work that, and take the channel from the Ableton out, and already have another new track being created. So I use that as my paint board,” Cox says.
For past live shows, he’s used mixing desks with 64 channels to give him all the room he needs for all of his desired functions. However, the tactility of the V10 allows him to perform like he does when he’s DJing. Still, Cox remarks that routing all of this into the V10 is still limiting him a bit because it only has six channels: “I could actually use two more extra channels on this mixer, but [Pioneer DJ]’s not listening to me,” Cox says with a laugh.
“I create the energy of my music through the mixer. Cuts, fades, and effects. I use it as an instrument. Where all the other mixers you put the fader up and fader down, you go to a channel on an insert and find an effect that you want to use. That slows me down,” Cox says. “Having a V10 as my only DJ tool within my live set keeps me on my toes.”
Image: Press
Keeping his eyes off his computer screen is crucial to remaining on his toes. He wants to give his attention to the machines and the crowd, absorbing their energy and transmuting into the music as directly as possible.
“I don’t want to be seen scrolling the menu. It makes me a very dull looking performer,” says Cox.
Though he’s concerned with how he looks, he is more concerned with sound quality. That’s why he has the DOCTron IMC. Given that Cox is combining numerous live elements rather than outputting tracks that have already been properly mastered, the extra bit of compression and limiting from the DOCTron (made by fellow techno gearhead, Stimming) helps him glue everything together.
“The difference is unbelievable. It takes what you’ve got and makes it into the most beautiful butterfly. The sound guys love me for it because they cannot believe the signal that they get,” Cox says. “You just feel the sub level tones you never thought existed. It brings it all out. I want this to sound live.”
Over the past 40 years, millions of people have heard Carl Cox say “Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes!” on the mic at his shows. He says this to fire up crowds into uproaring cheers, and as he challenges himself with new machines, new methods of performance, and new ways to deliver top tier musical experiences, he is just as excited as they are.
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