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DANNY BYRD
Return Of The Rave Digger
were doing the artwork for the first single! It’s a real stamp of approval.” Long before dropping his debut album Supersized in 2008, a young Byrd was obsessed with the idea of creating a computer game. “When I look back, I wasn’t very good at it,” he reflects, “but I was good enough to make a very basic game in the basic programming language, and that transferred into music. If you think about the two, they’re both programming, and at some point, music took over. I was really interested in all the rave music in the early ‘90s. When you listen to those early rave records, they’re really raw and kind of…I’m not gonna say, ‘basic’, but you listen to it and in my naivety I thought, ‘I could do that’, and then two years later you realize, ‘no, I can’t do that easily’. It takes years to do that and learn that, but the DIY nature of it appealed to me.” Byrd was one of the very first to sign to Hospital Records at the turn of the millennium. With his unique take
on the genre with strong hip hop and R&B influences ever present in his music, his signature mixing style and production flair render him one of the scene’s greats to this day. Supersized really put Byrd on the map, including club bangers Shock Out and Red Mist – the former of which he admits he only ever saw as an album track. “This is the interesting thing about that track,” he discloses, “I never saw that track as a single. I just saw that as an album cut. At the time, I was like, ‘No way, that’s not coming out as my first single, that’s just a little experimental piece’. And they were like, ‘No, no, no, that’s coming out as the first single’. And they were right, you know? That track was the start of that album in terms of kicking off that campaign. It’s so hard to be objective with your own music.” Despite the long drive to London, Byrd still takes his inspiration from the urban scene where he soaks up the energy from the hustle and bustle.
“I don’t find myself so much inspired by nature – a lot of people get inspired by the trees and the grass, and I’m the sort of opposite – the urban environment gets me going, although you have to be quite selfmotivated. I have these periods of great laziness and then great motivation. It’s feast or famine!” He’s currently in the process of building a home studio after working in what he refers to as “a little shoebox room” throughout the majority of the pandemic. “For me, personally, having a home studio has always been essential because all the best ideas always come when you’re just messing around,” he shares.
Photographer: Sam Neill
It transpires that Byrd was the first person in the UK to install Genelec’s original 8351A studio monitors, which, among many things, he used to perfect Selecta from home.
HEADLINER USA
“I’ve got my trusty Genelecs set up and they’ve done a great job with the room correction using the GLM software,” he nods. “Once I set them up, it was life changing because I was working in the little box room in my house, which was great for writing, but you would have to mix elsewhere. When you take the mix to another studio, you probably spend about four hours just trying to get it to sound like it did at home! During the pandemic I was mixing stuff fully at home, and the Genelecs changed everything for me: the accuracy, the way they translate. It’s just incredible.