"It's feast or famine!" Danny Byrd on Selecta, motivation and his studio setup

Drum and bass icon, DJ, record producer and musician Danny Byrd may have just signed a shiny new record deal with Ministry of Sound, but he explains why he keeps it old school when it comes to testing out new tracks.

When Headliner catches up with Byrd, he’s just returned home to his small village just outside of Bath after filming the music video for his hit new track, Selecta with D Double E – and he’s exhausted.

“I’ve just had a couple of days in London filming a music video and I’m a little bit tired,” he says, immediately laughing at how that sounds. 

“That sounds really arrogant doesn't it? Selecta’s numbers are picking up and doing really well, so they wanted to do a music video for it. We wanted to do one for a while, but it was all: it wasn't going to happen, then it was going to happen… It was all very last minute, hence the stress involved there. But it’s all good fun. I've got that ‘driven to London’ feeling today that you just can't shake.”

The ‘they’ in question are Ministry of Sound, who Byrd recently signed a new record deal with, although he’s worked with the iconic dance label on numerous drum and bass remixes over the years.

“I finally sent them some original tracks, and they seemed to be into them,” he says. 

“They are probably one of the biggest dance labels in the world, so if you are making any kind of dance music, you probably have got some ambition to want to be associated with them. That logo is iconic, isn't it? The Ministry of Sound logo was the best thing when we 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 realise, ‘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 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 self-motivated. 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.

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.

“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.

“Nothing is more honest than a club set up,” he furthers. “If your mix isn't right, a club will show it up. Even if the bass is one dB too quiet, it will sound really quiet on a club system, so the mix has to be perfect – almost. 

"No mix is perfect from version one, but the Genelecs are so much quicker at getting me to that point where it's finished.”

Byrd’s still a big fan of the ‘car test’.

“I love the car test! Now, I take the mix out to the car, and there's hardly any surprises. It reveals things in the mix that maybe you could change, so the translation is very important. The car test is not so much about the mix and how it sounds though, it's about giving it a market research test,” he adds. 

“I'll drive down to Bath town centre, wind down the windows and blast it really loud through the bus station and just see how many looks I get. You think I'm joking. I'm not,” he laughs.

“If you feel like you're confident enough to play something really loud with the windows down driving along, then you've got something. If you feel a little bit like, ‘I don't know about this’, then maybe the track’s not quite right or needs more work.”

Byrd shares that he’s got a few releases planned for 2022, including a soon-to-be released track with Dynamite MC. If you want a sneak peek, try your chances at Bath’s bus station.