Contributing WriterHey All Vices! Thanks for joining us today. How’s your summer been so far?
It’s our pleasure, thanks for including us. we’ve spent a lot of time in the studio working on ideas & planning our strategy to really push things forward this fall. Both of us are big into football too, so there has been a lot of Harry Kane chat, as one of us is a Spurs supporter and the other Bayern!
Congrats on the release of your new track «Just A Dance» on Believe The Hype. What was your inspiration behind this record?
To be honest the track came out of a jam session. Playing around in the studio we came across the vocals and pretty quickly we knew which direction we were going.
What is the story behind All Vices? How did you meet, and whose idea was it to work on music together?
We actually met while working on another project last year, but quickly found that our musical past is connected by a kind of red line. So we are very aligned on how we view a great record, which makes it really easy to communicate & work together. From this collaboration, the idea of working on ideas together as a Duo came up pretty quickly.
We thought the name was appropriate since we’ve played many different genres in the past – you will definitely be able to hear that in our future releases. the name “all vices” was still in the back of my mind when a friend of mine said it & so we thought it was a good fit for the direction we were going in.
Based in Ibiza, how do you think the local scene informed your taste in music?
Oh yeah, it brought me back to my roots. I started DJing in the late 90s with a lot of house music. and i found the love back to it in Ibiza. Away from the big clubs, there are so many more intimate parties going on around the island, so you really get the opportunity to step out of the mainstream.
What does your studio setup look like?
We tend to use Ableton for getting down quick ideas, and then bounce that out into Cubase for further production, arrangement, mixing, and mastering. HS8s for monitoring, with an audiofuse Studio interface as the hub. In terms of hardware synths, we’ve got an argon8 which is great for those evolving textures & plucks. It has a really great piano preset on it too which is not what it’s known for. We recently brought a Supernova 2 Pro, which is a bit of a bucket list synth and they are so hard to find in good condition as they were only actually in production for 1 year from 2000-2001, but we found one! It’s got a great internal Fx section on it. It’s really good for deep, warm basses & killer on pads and arps. Inside the box, we then use a lot of soft synths. The Roland recreations of the Juno & System 100 are stunning and as we work quickly, give us a lot of flexibility over the hardware. We recently picked up the Arturia emulation of the MS-20 which is a new favourite of ours. It sounds filthy & they have really taken a classic to a new level with this one! We do like to keep it quite simple in the studio though, so it’s important we can work fast and don’t get stuck in the loop.
Can you mention some of the instruments and plugins that make up your trademark sound?
Our sound is really at an early evolutionary stage and we have quite a diverse set of experiences that are influencing where we go with this. The Arturia EMT reverb emulation gets used a lot on instruments and is quite key to the way they sit in our tracks. It’s got a great tone to it and the drive gives really nice harmonics to the instruments. The Zen Delay feedback loop is one that we use a lot on builds. Right now we are really enjoying fusing the old and the new, so being able to dip into a JV1080 for some hits and then process them through a Pro-R, Zen Delay & then saturate with the Arturia Culture Vulture recreation gives you endless possibilities. We record a lot of our own samples too, so some of the crowd, percussion, and siren samples we use have actually been recorded ourselves and then tidied up in Cubase. The iPhone sound recorder is really useful, and it’s actually got a really nice compression built into it. It helps keep our sound quite organic in some places. As our schedules are all over the place, it forces us to commit synths to audio early on, as we are always sharing stems back and forth, so I think this can also be quite key to our sound, as we tend to stick with ideas rather than continually tweaking the midi.
How do you define success? Is it about the numbers or is there more to it?
That’s a very good question. At the moment we would say it would be a first step toward success if we create a Track that got played by Marco Carola and his crowd prefers to keep their smartphone in the pocket and just dance. 😉
Thanks for joining us today. Is there anything else you would like to mention before we go?
We have to thank you for having us and wish you all loads of fun dancing and partying. Stay safe and Sound. Keep your ears open for more All Vices releases in the fall! We also have some exciting guest mixes coming up as well as the club’s first AV club shows.