A bit of history
The workshop idea arose for the first time in July 2005 in Wallis(Switzerland).
Couple of friends sharing the same pleasure to produce psytrance and some other kinds of electronic music decided to take one week holiday together to meet in a place dedicated for music production. This has been realized in a small house in the mountains where two studios were installed. Of course, spend time to produce together and exchange knowledge was the main idea of this action, but it was also about being with good friends having a good time. This first place was in a house called "Le Primitif", it is why this name stayed for the workshop session. After this first edition, two tracks produced have been released. Then, the next year we made it a bit bigger, with one more studio and couple of more people joining us. Arriving to the third edition, we contacted people from other countries to come, as well as publishing the concept on internet. So, any producer with any level could come to this meeting to learn and to teach.

More about the project
The workshop head team is composed of several professional producers, DJs, label managers, party organizers, plug-in developers or also electronic and computer technicians. Since the first edition, we noticed that it was impressive how much benefit and motivation this meeting generated for everyone. The success with the 3rd edition prompted us to create an official association to make things more serious and to attract the attention of some institutions to get financial support to cover some of the associated expenses. We wish to take this project further and increase its potential.

About the Association
Primitif Association, created in 2007 is a non-profit organization with the purpose to offer a pleasant gathering related to music production. None of the organizers make any profit with this project. All the funds raised are used to benefit the project itself.

Wide International Network
Being very active in the scene, we developed over the years a large network all around the globe with not less than 20 labels, many party promoters and artists. This might be a good opportunity for upcoming artists who show great potential to be promoted further.

Main Musical Directions
We would like you to know that the main musical interests of the people who participate in this workshop are: psytrance/goa and all their subgenres, chill out, ambient and electronic with some extensions to break beat, general techno styles and so on. We respect all production directions and it is possible for people who are more interested in producing a specific kind of music to come and join the workshop. It is not only about a music genre, it is very much about the technical aspects like learning to use electronic gears and computer based tools. We also are interested in new electronic music genres. So if you come with new ideas, you are more than welcome. Maybe something more to say is that we do not really do acoustic recordings. We are more specialized in synthetic music.

Tools
We use our own equipment to setup the workshop studios. Setups and their locations are very flexible and each studio may vary from each other. We use diverse pro-audio hardware/software combinations. To see an example of a studio setup, please visit the past editions section of the website. Please be aware that we are not Apple users. We work only with PC/Windows stations and the main audio applications are: Steinberg Cubase, Ableton Live, ImageLine FruityLoops, Sonic Foundry SoundForge and Wavosaur. At our 2007 workshop, we had two Apple/Logic based producers who learned very much about how we work with our applications.

Work flow
We form small teams to work together in a studio. While producing tracks, we show each other producing ways and share tricks and information that comes along while working. The studios can be used 24 hours a day.

Presentations / classes
Once a day, for couple of hours, meetings are organized about a specific production topic. It is open for everyone to participate in these meetings. Whoever does not wish to participate can continue working in another studio.
The main subjects we usually discuss are: synthesizer signal flow, audio editing, compressors, mastering, plug-ins creation, and live-set. More specific courses can be organized according to interests and wishes of participants.

Everybody a Teacher, Everybody a Student
Our spirit of teaching and learning is that everyone has his/her part of knowledge that he/she can share with other participants. The main idea of creating this workshop was to share what we know and put it together while working. This is still our main focus.

Not like in a School
We organize the workshops in very peaceful locations, with nice landscapes, forests and nature surrounding us. It is certainly a workshop to focus on producing music, but it is as well a meeting of friends sharing time together. It has always been a family spirit more than a school atmosphere.