Wallis on embracing sound-mangling plugins, thriving as a producer and how to survive the music industryInspired by a desire to take the techno she would DJ to new levels, Wallis moved seamlessly into producing her own music, finding a home on Kangding Ray’s ARA label. Based out of Lisbon, she performs around the world, incorporating a hugely diverse range of software and hardware into her live set as well as in her studio, with an esoteric approach to designing sounds.

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With a healthy disregard for industry norms – she believes rules are there to be broken – our chat dives deep into the weird and wonderful plugins, synths and modules that form the backbone of her setup, as well as venturing into discussing how she builds sounds and tracks and how embracing hardware has transformed the way she approaches mixing. Plus she reveals her dream of owning one particular classic piece of gear…
Hi Wallis – great to talk to you! Can you tell us a bit about your career to date as a producer and performer? How did you get started on this path?
It started pretty organically, I was obsessed with techno records and parties and started to organise small events with some friends, which led to DJing at them, which led to producing. Back then, access to techno tracks was different from today and techno was more “rare”. You would dig for tracks in record stores instead of online. While DJing those tracks, you would always wish this track did “this” or “that”, so it made sense to eventually write your own tracks to perfectly fit your DJ sets. That’s my experience at least.
Today, being a producer is a pretty necessary step to sustain a DJ career but back when I first started learning, it was more of a choice driven by passion. Many DJs were not producers at all and producing was not seen as a “tool” to have a career in techno. Only people with a passion for producing would get into it. Things changed a lot.
Image: Rui Palma
Your new LP Everything Is Not Yet Lost is your most expansive body of work to date. What was the thinking behind its creation?
I have been a fan of Kangding Ray forever, and was very honoured when he asked me to submit music for his label. We worked on the tracklist together and it was a very smooth process. His ARA label is all about creating expansive LPs telling a story, and I was very happy he picked some of my most adventurous tracks.
The way I view his label, it’s about everyone honing into music as an art form and pushing the limit to create something new, deeply creative and personal rather than choosing tracks that are more basic and catering to the masses. It’s a risky project in a world where everyone is trying to make music that the algorithms are going to like, and I respect him a lot for still fighting for true creativity in today’s streaming-platform-enslaved music industry.
Image: Rui Palma
Tell us a bit about your studio.
My studio is located in central Lisbon, in an empty building that was turned into all kinds of art studios. It’s a very cool and communal place, with so many artists from different crafts. It’s very inspiring, I feel very at home there. I love Lisbon for this, this city feels filled with creative energy because there is this need to create the cultural space that people wish they had – as opposed to cities like Berlin where things are pretty established already, here everyone is always down to do things. I have my crew of creatives for every possible art form I could need around music and they are all extremely talented and have great taste. I love it here.
What’s your latest gear or plugin purchase?
I just ordered a guitar pedal called “Parting” by Old Blood Noise Endeavors. Effects are a huge part of my sound design and I am always searching for new weird effects, be it plugins or hardware. This pedal is supposed to be a little crazy, so perhaps it will be too wild to take to live sets, but maybe not! Either way, it will be great in the studio for sound design exploration. The description is: “Parting is a glitch pedal. It combines chance-based delay or reverb, modulations, degradation effects and randomized clock changes to give pleasant surprises at each turn of a knob”. When I read something like this it’s an instant buy (and the design also looks really cool and weird).
MISHBY by Freakshow Industries. Image: Rui Palma
What’s the best free plugin you own? Why?
MISHBY by Freakshow Industries. You can technically pay for it or get it for free, and I love all of their plugins because they are absolutely bonkers. There is no other word to describe them. They do things to your sound that are impossible to explain, and it’s great to resample drums through them, or anything really, and cherry pick good moments that come out. They create a really fun and playful sound design exploration and they have the coolest UI of any VST I’ve ever seen.
What’s been the biggest investment in your career/studio? Was it worth it? Why?
It’s hard to pinpoint one “biggest” thing as I have been accumulating what I can at my own pace for well over the last decade, and I have a few things that are quite pricey at this point. One notable change from the last couple of years was adding 19” units to my setup and totally switching up my mixdown process, and I am so happy about the improvement it brought to my sound.
Everything sounds so much better through units, I don’t sum my mixes in Ableton any more, I go through a Neve summing mixer and it added so much depth to my music. I have a ton of 19” units on my to-buy lis and cannot wait to be able to buy them and try them all out. I want to move the majority of my mixing setup to 19” units and 500 series, but this will take me a few years to achieve.
Image: Rui Palma
You write, produce, mix and record your own vocals, building tracks through hardware, resampling and unconventional sound design. Was it a conscious decision to take on every part of the process or did it happen organically or out of necessity?
Everything I do usually happens organically because I have a really hard time forcing myself to do something I don’t find interesting. The hardware sound sources are the most fun ways to produce music, and using a combination of plugins and hardware is necessary to get the best of both worlds. There are things only digital can do that I couldn’t live without (granulation for example), but mixing on analog hardware is a necessity for me, sound-quality wise.
Doing my own vocals is by convenience. It’s very easy to imagine a vocal while producing, and record it right away, exactly how I envisioned it, rather than plan ahead for someone to come and contribute. But a lot of people could do a much better job than me at vocals and come up with cool ideas too, and I love making music with people, so I am very open to this idea. I just haven’t actualised this type of collaboration just yet. I’m a hermit and being by myself feels very natural to me, but I want to work on that and be more social.
Image: Rui Palma
Can you share some of the production and processing techniques you use to achieve the very dense, intense sound you get on your productions?
The intensity of my music happens through the mixing. I pay great attention to have something in all frequency ranges, and that nothing clashes for space either. I think about the stereo field a lot and I play with that a great deal, to create what I would call a “sound blanket”. I want people to feel wrapped up in the music. Placing everything in the stereo field where it belongs is a necessity and my 8816 by Neve is a big part of that process. Right now I am focusing on having as few elements as possible and pushing each element, so I think the next EPs are not going to be “dense” at all. But intense, always!
Your drum sounds are really hard-edged. How do you design your kick and snare sounds in particular?
For kicks I layer a lot. Usually about three kicks, paying attention to phases to avoid cancellation. I have some eurorack modules that are great for the top end of kicks, for example the Asteroid BD v4 is a great option on the cheaper side, and there are many other amazing options as you increase your budget. I do a lot of work in the kicks in Ableton, compressing, clipping etc, and if they need more low end I will add it digitally afterwards with plugins like ToTape7 for light needs or Dropkick for bigger alterations.
I am constantly creating sample banks with drums and various other types of sounds that I record in my studio so that they are quickly available when I need them and feel like arranging a track. Having separate “recording days” or “arranging days” depending on your mood is very helpful, because those are two different processes and you need to be in a different mood to do either. It helps with productivity a lot. When I don’t feel inspired enough to write a track, I can just twiddle on my modular with zero expectation and cherry-pick whatever good bits come out of it, and save it for a later day.
For percussion like snares or hi hats I often use a module called “Trigger Riot” in the studio and it helps me create mad patterns and play with timings in unexpected ways. I am always searching for something I have never heard before.
Image: Rui Palma
Can you give us a breakdown of how your complex live rig is put together?
Currently I use an Octatrack as my main clock. I have a T1 by Torso to sequence my modular – I love the T1, I highly recommend it – although I wish they would add more jack outputs because currently it’s not catered to modular use to the best of its potential.
The sound from my modular goes directly into my Boss RC505 so I can easily loop everything coming out of the modular. And then both the RC505 and the Octatrack audio outs go into a v10 by Pioneer. The v10 is such a good mixer, I was a hater of Pioneer mixers, but this one really changed the game. And it’s perfect for live use due to how many effects it has and individual channel compression.
I am still searching for another sampler on the down low, because I do not like the sound of the Octatrack at all, but in terms of playability it’s still the best sampler catered to live sets for my needs, unfortunately. And I add a few effect pedals depending on my mood, and switch up what is inside my modular to keep it fun for me as well.
How do you see your sound and studio evolving in the next two years?
The next step for my studio will be acoustic treatment. I recently swapped rooms with someone and my room is very small now, with a weak ceiling, so we will need to find a clever, lightweight way to treat it, and one that allows me to still be able to walk everywhere.
Then, eventually, I want to upgrade my speakers and get PMCs or ATCs. This will be a massive financial investment but I am so looking forward to being able to do that, I dream of hearing everything. It’s been years and will probably take a few more years until I can buy them, and I cannot wait for that day!

Do you have a dream piece of gear? What is it? Why?
My absolute dream piece of gear, that is in my dreams every night, and that I cry myself to sleep thinking about is the mighty H3000 by Eventide. It’s the most ridiculously good-sounding piece of equipment that makes everything sound better, and I must own one. This is going to be my next big purchase for sure. I tried one in Blawan’s studio and the way it slightly alters the sound felt so elegant.
Every time I am having issue with a synth, I keep thinking “man if I had a H3000, I could fix this synth”. Which is a lie, because you can’t save bad sounds. But it’s something I keep telling myself nonetheless. And I need an H3000 in my life to find out if it can indeed make everything sound magical or not.
What’s a music production myth you think needs debunking?
I think every single music production rule should be debunked. Breaking the rules is a must. Also, people saying plugins now sound as good as expensive hardware equipment. It does not, and never will.
Image: Rui Palma
Who gave you the biggest lesson in your career? Can you tell us about how it impacted you?
The biggest lesson I learned is to be always guided by my intuition and not by “what works”. Your intuition towards what sounds “right” or not is the most valuable thing you have as a musician, and it is what makes you unique. Trusting your intuition in the studio but also while performing is so important. And it sounds so obvious, but I actually had to have an epiphany moment on a dancefloor to be reminded of that. This was 2022, we were all so excited to be post-covid, and I hadn’t even realised I much I had lost my connection to the dancefloor, in many ways.
I think it must have been three or four years ago, I was at my friend Lolsnake’s party in Berlin, and I was really enjoying dancing along to the set from an artist. And the next day it made me realise that I didn’t DJ the tracks that I would prefer dancing along to. It dawned on me that I had slowly turned to playing crowd pleasers, without realising I had lost my way. Spending time on the dancefloor helped me realise a recalibrate was in order, and worrying about playing tracks that would get crowd reactions on the dancefloor was not for me. I need to be focussing on the feelings that good techno played at a really loud level gives me. And be guided by that.
I always try to serve the dancefloor and guide the vibe towards what I feel is needed in the moment, and I have also made a rule that the tracks I produce must all fit into my sets, so this gives me a limit to how weird they can be, and helps guide me. “Would I love hearing this on a dancefloor?” is a question I ask myself a lot when producing today.
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