SCALER on remixing their music for stage, the Novation Peak, and 200 channels of basement re-amping

Ad 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.” Image: Press 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 sy