Grittiness is just like imperfection.
Nothing is actually perfect, it gets like--
There's more life in things being imperfect.
You think about some of the greatest music ever made.
It's not perfect.
It wasn't meant to be perfect.
And like, that's what makes it perfect.
I forgot what it is.
I know for Denz, you started producing when you were like 13,
and I started DJing when I was 13.
And when we met at NYU, we became best friends.
There was a moment we're just like, "This feels right,"
to like do a project with my best friend.
And for us, we've named ourselves Take A Daytrip
to like really live for experiences and see the world.
We want to bring so much of that to other people.
Right after that,
we just started making as much music together as possible.
Sound really dictates a lot about how we just like interface with the world.
The way that we even think about sound is with feelings.
The whole frequency spectrum, who's playing with frequencies
that will make people think a certain thing.
These very visceral feelings.
It's really just about being perceptive about what sounds make you think and feel.
Sometimes we envision what it might sound like as it's completed…
Now, how do we do that from starting at zero?
We'd pick out references, pick things into a specific tempo,
reference things from a specific genre, from different kind of tempos,
see things we liked, patterns we like,
and then reverse engineer that all the way back to zero
and then build it back up our way.
And then sometimes you're like, "Oh, s***,
-that sounds fire." -Yeah.
Like, "Keep going on that."
We just gravitate towards grit.
Our first song ever that hit the Billboard charts
was one of our greatest songs ever.
At the core of everything that we make
we just love things to feel gritty and like sound gritty.
Even when we're making clean pop.
I feel like the natural texture from recording on voice notes,
we forego some of the most expensive mics in the world
and just record on an iPhone because that's what sounds the best to us.
We just love gritty sounding stuff.
It fits in the type of music that we create
and it fits in our sound.
And with analog keyboards,
that's the first time we discovered this is the way
that we could work together as a producer duo
instead of like trying to share a laptop or like,
"Oh, I have an idea. Okay, I have an idea."
It was like, "Oh."
It changed everything.
The analog keyboards literally changed everything.
Let's see if it works.
Analog is like a scene that you're looking at.
Like you're looking at a mountain and then digital
is like taking a picture of that mountain.
Once something is digital, the picture has been taken.
And there's not really anything
you can do to go back to that actual moment
and change how it was solidified in time.
Analog is infinite, infinite values between values.
There's not a, you know,
a specific range of bits and bytes in the beauty of analog
where it's like imperfect in so many ways
that you can really become a different things in ways
that it can't be in digital.
So doing everything through voice notes
allows us to really capture the analog sound of the drums.
We'll airdrop it to the computer
and then shape it within the digital space
to the vibe of the track.
And then you left this one out, but it's kind of cool, I don't know.
It's kind of cool. What if it went down even more?
I'm going to try something new
based on the bass chords around it to start…
By introducing analog keyboards
into our process is what made us understand
that ego just shouldn't exist.
Once you remove the fear and ego,
then the possibilities of things that can happen grow,
so the best idea really comes to the top.
Early on, we set our mission statement was to make the world feel smaller than music.
Take this person, mix them with this genre.
And now the people who like that genre and like that person
now are a community and get to share ideas they may have not come together before.
Being a producer and really a creator in general
it's manifesting an idea from a dream into reality,
seeing that process over and over again.
I think it's my favorite part about it.
-Yeah, that was pretty good. -Thanks.
I got nothing else to say to that. I agree.