When We Dip catches up with rising UK duo Truth Be Told, getting an insight into their recent shenanigans, their upcoming trip to Dublin and lots more as well as sharing a full premiere of ‘Brass Minkey’ – forthcoming on Kerri Chandler’s Madtech imprint.
WWD: How’s things lads! What have you been getting unto as of late?
Oi oi! We’re spot on mate! Just the usual, chugging along in the studio in-between gigs and getting
our music ready for the winter and 2017
WWD: If you were stuck on a remote island and you had stay with 3 other DJs. Who would you choose and why?
Very good question! For food and for his culinary skills it’s got to be Seth Troxler. His Smokey Tails pop up restaurant looks superb, I’d trust him chucking something together for sure! (Laughs.) The Martinez Brothers could easily raise the moral on the island with their funky attitudes. For someone to look over things and have a wise, father-like view on situations then it has to be Poppa Sven (Sven Vath.) I’m sure he’d be able to stay calm and collected when staring danger in the face!
WWD: Where did ‘Truth be told’ come from?
In terms of how we met, we both met through mutual friends and our love of music and DJ’ing at the tender age of 15/16. The name stemmed from a time which was frustrating for us as we where producing other genres of music and not feeling comfortable or happy with what we where making.
We’d been attending ‘Tech-House’ nights for about a year or two with friends but never in a million years thought we’d be able to make the music to. We both sat down in the studio and for months we came up with ideas and demos. After about a year we had our first release ready, our Too Much Time EP along with our freshly named alias, Truth Be Told. We felt the name reflected our feelings and mood towards our new music and where we wanted to go with it.
WWD: What is it about Djing, compared to producing that makes it interesting for you?
We think Djing and producing can go hand in hand. We produce music to DJ and we DJ so we can refine our productions. Saying that though it’s also good to detach them and have the mindset of thinking that the track you’re working on can be listened to in any situation, adding melodies and little hooks you’d only ever hear in headphones or at home listening. There’s nothing better than human interaction though, and Djing you experience it first hand! Such a rush!
WWD: On the topic of production. You have a new 5 track EP coming out on Kerri Chandlers label ‘Madtech’ late July. How did you approach this release?
We where approached earlier on in the year to release on their ‘Ibiza VA’ and got such a good reaction to the track we released. So after this we rummaged through our old and new demos to find something that’d suit MadTech and sent them the Brass Minkey EP, they snatched it up straight away. I think this is one of the first times a release has been pretty straight forward for us.
WWD: A quick question for all of the tech nerds out there. What hardware/vsts would be a go to for you?
We don’t really have any hardware but other than a nice pair of studio monitors we do recommend a very good pair of studio headphones! Anything around the £100/£200 price mark from the likes of Beyerdynamics, Audio Technica, Sennheiser & AKG especially for home studios with less than perfect acoustics. Something to cross reference on.
We are keen users of Izotopes Ozone series and Fabfilter’s compressors and EQs. We praise Ableton’s built in synthesisers and processors too. Most of our funky sounds we use Ableton’s Operator solely down to the ease of use. Get to know one or two synths inside out instead of having a large array which you haven’t got a clue about. It makes workflow so much quicker.
WWD: When preparing for a set. What way works best for you? Would venue, set time etc come into play or is it always the same process regardless.
Yes for sure, the venue and set time plays a part of our track selection. A warm up set in Ibiza would be different to a headline in the UK, and vice versa. It’s all about working your style into each set for us. We’d do a bit of quick research of each event based on location, the event before, time of year and make a selection of about 20/30 tracks we’d like to play, each. We also have our full library split into set times (warm up, headline, closing) still incase we have a change of mind which we can easily switch back to. We say never pre plan a set but its always good to have 20/30 tracks to swing through instead of a USB full.
WWD: You are making your Dublin debut at the end of this month. Are you excited for that?
Yes! mega excited for it! We’ve heard amazing things about Dublin and The Hangar. To be playing with Flashmob, who we’ve looked up to for years makes it even better! We can tell it’ll be a big one already!
WWD: Just before we sign off lads, what’s the big goal for you by the end of 2016?
Another good question! We’d really like to release on more labels and work with the ones we’ve previously released on. We will also have a plan in place for our own imprint.
Truth Be Told – Brass Minkey EP is out July 22nd on Madtech Records.