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How did you first get into making and producing music?
Well, I was always into keyboards and multitracks as a kid.
I started as most people do by learning piano and moving onto
equipment that has more lights and buttons. I did the degree
course in Popular Music & Recording at Salford Uni where
I met Neil. It was a funny place, full of brass players and
jazz funkers, Neil and I never fitted into that so we would
either bunk off and write stuff on our Ataris or get into the
studio's they had there. It was a good springboard for learning
and meeting other like minded people. We just started writing
and sent out tapes to people and managed to get a deal off the
back of that.
How does a typical Mint Royale track come about? How do you
divide the work?
Well, we don't really divide the work as such, we both try to
come up with ideas for tracks and mix things as we go, so it's
not like one person does one thing, we always both work on tracks,
it's never a solo effort. A track for us will usually start
with finding a sample of some sort of hook which we like the
feel or sentiment of, it could be a vocal or anything really.
Sometimes we'll end up just using it, other times it will serve
as a basis for going and developing it into something else,
then we just keep building it from there.
What bits do you use in your writing process, and what are
you planning to get to use on any upcoming projects?
We've been using lots of the Arturia
synths, they are amazingly true to their old models and sound
VERY good. We also use Native
Instruments Reaktor 4 and Absynth 2 on this record a
lot too, they just don't sound like anything else!
The latest album, 'Dancehall Places' was mixed by Chemical
Brothers' engineer Steve Jones, what did you learn from him?
Steve was a great guy to work with. I think the most interesting
thing about him was that even though he was surrounded by cutting
edge sequencer software and hardware all the time, he would
always run stuff out into the desk and use some vintage piece
of analogue kit on it, maybe a valve compressor or mu-tron phaser
or something just to give it that warm fat sound.
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I think that the technology now is fantastic, you can make
records totally within the digital domain, however, there's
still so much to be said for classic analogue gear being in
the loop somewhere.
You've worked with a few other big names, who have you worked
with and what was it like?
We've worked with and remixed quite a few I suppose, Prince
Buster, Pos from De La Soul, Harmar Superstar, Junior Senior,
Stone Roses, Doves, they are more but obviously I can't remember
at the moment. This sounds like a cheesey line (cos it is),
but they were all great! I don't think that either of us would
really want to be in a position where we were working with people
that were really difficult; it just kills the creative process
if you want to strangle the person. So far we've been lucky
I suppose......
What do you have lined up for the next few months?
Well, we're 80% there with our third album which we're really
chuffed with so far, then hopefully if we're not too late we'll
try and squeeze in a few festival appearances and then some
touring will probably be in order. We'd also like to try and
fit in some production work with other artists as well. Oh and
I'd like a holiday please. Somewhere hot. Cheers!
Thanks for the interview!
www.mint-royale.com
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