SCALER on remixing their music for stage, the Novation Peak, and 200 channels of basement re-ampingAd feature with Novation
Hailing proudly from Bristol, England, four-piece experimental band SCALER have spent the past decade fusing metal, techno and trip-hop, both onstage and in the studio. Their latest album, 2025’s Endlessly, is an intricate collage of metallic synths, thumping percussion and, crucially, rich vocal parts from five different local collaborators. The band’s shared and intimate studio space in the city is where these ideas begin and transform.
The quartet of lads in their 30s stress that the live show is where SCALER REALLY comes to life. “The concept behind the band was always to create the best live show that we possibly can,” says SCALER’s guitarist and self-confessed tech-head, Nick Berthoud. “We’re writing songs to facilitate the live show; the reason we’re writing music is to play it live in some capacity, basically.” Beyond laptops, they rely on several choice instruments and essentials — Novation’s Summit and Focusrite’s Clarett chief among them — to bring their vision to the stage.
A SCALER show is an organised chaos of an audiovisual experience. Having supported Squarepusher and performed with Daniel Avery in recent years, the band attract a distinct type of fan with their collision of acid basslines, crunching guitar riffs, and permutating drums.
We sit down with bandmates Berthoud and James Rushforth to learn more about their live-first approach to music production, the reverb-rich environment they used to re-amp the elements of Endlessly, and the gear that’s crucial to SCALER’s sound.

Endlessly is now eight months old. How is it evolving SCALER as a band, both in the live shows and in your approach to making new music?
Nick: “We took quite a long time to make Endlessly as a record. And from a songwriting standpoint, it’s quite different from our live shows; we placed a bigger focus on vocal features, and we just wanted to explore a different side to the band. We almost always remix the songs to play live.
“Some tracks from the record have been completely reworked, because what works within our live show versus what they are on the album are two different things, so we do have to work that out. I think that’s a process we quite enjoy, though, and it keeps things quite interesting [for fans]. If we just played all of the songs exactly as they are on the record, then…I don’t know, it’s just a bit naff.”
James: “Endlessly has been really difficult — the conversion into the live show. When we perform it, it definitely feels like we’re doing an album show. It’s much cleaner, which is fine, but we’re kind of in the process of enacting a response to that chaos.”

Why do you place such a strong focus on the live show?
James: “In the age of playback, I think there should be a bit more responsibility to try harder with the arrangement. People just don’t do that enough, and it’s very lazy.”
Nick: “Our back catalogue has never streamed well. It’s just not that type of music. But it’s not a worry for us that we’re not getting millions of streams because the reason we make a record is to come and get people down to the live show to experience the full thing.
“We don’t want to just play exactly what we’ve heard for a year whilst making an album. It’s much more interesting for us to take elements from that and make it exciting again. We’ll even sometimes rewrite a song for specific shows. Like, if we’re playing a techno event or playing a more metal event, we’ll think, ‘Okay, how can we like dance-ify that song even more for this show?’, and it keeps evolving.”
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SCALER tracks are complex and layered, almost like tapestries. How do you actually start a song together?
James: “Conventionally, a song will start from a simple but strong idea, which then gets pitched to the group. However, when working across an album, we end up being responsive as we’re writing. It’s a lot easier, with this band, to conceptualise the track first [and] be like, ‘What actually are the limitations of it? What are the things that it’s borrowing from?’ Being able to put the building blocks of an album [together] is much more satisfying to me, because you have this longer form to play with, so you can be reactive as you’re making it.”
“The much bigger picture, about us making music…Like, when we were making a lot of these songs [on Endlessly], I was saying, ‘Let’s just make something that when we get older, we’re going to look back and be happy with those decisions.’”
You’re speaking to us from the studio right now — can you tell us more about the gear there that inspires you?
Nick: “We’ve got most things piped into a Focusrite Clarett audio interface, so everything is good to go. There’s a wall of synths that changes — because we all have some synths at home as well, and we bring them back and forth. That’s all parked into a Soundcraft mixer that then goes into the Clarett.
“We also use the Novation SL MIDI controller, which controls the wall of synths. It’s really nice how you can set up each individual synth and have the MIDI CCs control [each synth].
“But the biggest thing for us was the Novation Peak synth. [It] was used at various points on the record — probably not as much as the Arturia MiniFreak or the Roland JP-8080 — but for live, we’ve taken a lot of the synth lines onto the Peak. So Alex [Hill], who performs the electronic instruments, can control it live. It’s this idea of consistency… Being able to take a lot of those sounds and put them all into the Peak for live means that we have that consistency across the live show, where a single, versatile synth can play all the sounds that — some of which it created, some of which it doesn’t create in the studio. That’s been a game-changer for the live show.”
Image: Press
What do you think it is about the Peak that makes it such a valuable centrepiece for you?
James: “It’s got analogue oscillators with digital control. That’s the whole setup, really. And then, within that, the effects sound great; multiple different filter modes. You’ve got these Animate buttons that you can assign stuff to, which seems kind of gimmicky, but you can actually use them really well. It’s also got a wavetable thing going on as well, so you’re kind of somewhere in between analogue and wavetables. So you can have a nice low end and then a really bright high end.”
Nick: “For a professional or semi-professional, it’s one of, if not the best synth you could use, because it’s built like a tank and it can just kind of do everything you would want it to do.”
Beyond synths and straight-up gear, you also used some interesting recording techniques for Endlessly, right?
James: “Yeah, the whole record was basically an exercise in feedback and resonances. Conceptually, that’s across the album, in the loops and you can kind of see it in the artwork. But at the end of the album process, we went to a manor house, and we took the stems from the record and re-amped them in the basement of this empty manor. So across the whole record, there are lines and lines of re-amps mixed in with absolutely everything: different mic positions, two Fender Twins and a bass amp, and then a shit amp in the other room, multiple mic positions on the stairs…There’s like, 200 channels on one of the songs [laughs].”
“I basically made this spreadsheet, going through section by section — ‘We need this one, we need this one…’ Then, yeah, we just spent three days in this cold basement and spent two and a half grand to do it.”
“You go back and listen to Cold Storage, in the middle eight it goes right down into this bleepy arp, and then you can hear you’re fully in the underground basement…It’s crazy. But once you do that stuff, you never look back.”
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There are a few collaborators on the album, too, who are all local to Bristol. As a quartet, what’s the collaboration process like for you, and how did you end up working with these artists — Art School Girlfriend, Akiko Haruna, Tyla X An…
James: “Well, when we were making this album, we were unsigned, so we funded the creation of the album ourselves — it’s not like we were going in with a budget. I was basically going cap in hand to some people I didn’t even know, and cold-calling people. So my olive branch was always, ‘We’ve made you a track. We want you to do this. Here it is.’”
“This project specifically was about collaboration, and to also be a real illustration of the landscape and the people that we’re surrounded by. We want it to be an authentic representation of a moment in time in Bristol, really. We love to do it. We’re always going to be doing it. It’s always gonna be part of what we do.”
With Endlessly now out there, what’s your focus from here on out?
Nick: “We’ve got some festivals over the summer — we’re going to Sonar in Barcelona for the first time. But we’re also focusing on writing some new music at the moment as well, which should keep things rolling.”
James: “Also, just within our lives, we’re trying to make the band financially stable, and make sure we’re consistently putting out stuff in a way that is comfortable and actually enjoyable. We want to make sure that, A) we can sustain all our fixed costs in a reasonable way, and B) consistently put out music that we all enjoy and not kill ourselves doing it. That’s crucial, because Endlessly killed us — not in a bad way, but that’s what it takes to make a record like that.”
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