Whoever coined the phrase “slow and steady wins the race” must have had someone like Detroit born-and-based DJ/producer Mike Huckaby in mind. Except with Huckaby, it’s less about winning a contest and more about achieving his personal best.

Spinning since 1983, Huckaby is one of the Motor City sons responsible for bridging house and techno — on the dancefloor, in his minimal but emotive releases and through a 14-year stint at the massively influential Record Time shop.

In the 12 years since Huckaby dropped his first EP Deep Transportation, he has released only a handful of records; he’s been selective about the remixes he would create (his latest, a reworking of Pole’s “Düsseldorf,” is genius); and he’s collaborated with similarly minded city-mates including Moodymann, Theo Parrish and Rick Wilhite.

More than anything, what Huckaby has done to set himself apart is embrace new technologies.
“I was always curious about how things really worked,” says Huckaby over the phone from his home. “I knew that if you were equipped with some bit of skill regarding the theory or science behind something that it would enable you to be much better as a DJ, producer or musician.”

Although Huckaby has always appreciated and adored the classic hardware behind much electronic music — including MIDI gear, Roland 808 and 909 drum machines and vintage synthesizers such as his über-rare Waldorf Wave, on which he created last year’s lauded My Life With the Wave EP — he has become heavily immersed in production software over the last four years. Not surprisingly, Huckaby chose to work with Native Instruments’ Reaktor, perhaps the most powerful but intricate production program there is.

“A person should always do what his peers cannot do and will not do,” Huckaby declares.
“There are two things in this music that people cannot do and will not do. One thing that most people cannot do is play the piano. The other thing that people will not do is use, study and devote themselves to Reaktor. It’s very difficult to learn. I got into this in 2003; the program was new, the potential was enormous, and there was an incredibly low number of resources to learn it from. I shelled out thousands of dollars to seek training in Czechoslovakia and from the top Reaktor guys in Berlin, and that demystified it quite a bit.”

I probe further, curious as to why Huckaby would go to such lengths when there are so many good software options. Why Reaktor?

“Let’s go through the history of Detroit techno to answer this,” he chuckles. “In the beginning, there were three individuals — Juan [Atkins], Kevin [Saunderson] and Derrick [May] — who pretty much could command a machine to speak for their souls even without knowing much about the methods of the machine. That was over 20 years ago and that was luck; the whole Detroit techno movement was luck.

“You have to be quite skilful to produce a track with today’s technologies. What’s behind that skill is the knowledge of the science of synthesis — how things work. [Reaktor] will teach you everything about all aspects of electronic music production. I consider it more effective than anything else out there because Reaktor is all programs — so much that you could actually emulate most programs in it. Reaktor can whip any program.”

Huckaby is now such a Reaktor devotee that he dedicates as much time to teaching it as he does learning, doing workshops as well as teaching kids through the YouthVille Detroit development centre.

“It’s really interesting that all these people making electronic music don’t want to learn synthesis. That’s just silly. It’s like if you’re an Olympic runner and you don’t want to do aerobics or something.”