You've recently finished your debut album for Hospital Records. How long have you been working on this album?

If you want to ask Tony Colman [Hospital Records head honcho] he'll probably tell you 10 years! But that's not the truth. Officially I started work on it about eight or nine months ago. It was an intensive writing time.

"Shock Out" was the first big single, were you surprised that this track took off?

I was. I had a strict deadline for the album, and to get it finished I was literally getting up at eight in the morning and working, getting my girlfriend to take away the keys and the internet so there were no distractions. I was working on sketches every day, just writing whatever came to me. When you first start writing an album you might think, "I want a vocal tune, I want this, I want that," but it never happens that way. When you force music it never works.

"Shock Out" was just one of those sketches that came out of a morning. I thought it was ok, it was just sort of a little old school roller. I sent it off to Hospital and they came back raving about it. Also, I had phoned my friend Gerard, who is Roni Size's manager and runs D Style Records, and I must have left my phone on when he didn't pick up. When the call went through to his voice mail, the tune was playing in the background. He called me back and asked me, "What's that old school tune, it sounds amazing?!" It was just a 32-bar sketch at that point. So then I started to think, maybe there's something to it even if I don't think it's that great. It's weird but the biggest tunes you do are never the ones you think will blow up.

What are some of the influences that play into the sound of your music?

A lot of hip hop and dance music in general, anything with soul really. On the album, each tune features a different influence. "Shock Out" is inspired by the roots of drum & bass and hardcore music. I grew up listening to Roni Size and DJ Krust on their radio show every week before you could hear jungle on national stations, and I remember recording the shows and walking around the school yard with my walkman on, so that was what brought that one out. "Gold Rush" with The Brookes Brothers is definitely inspired by garage house with choppy vocals and a sort of euphoric vibe. "Weird Science" is sort of Daft Punk & Justice inspired—it's so cliché to say that because everyone's saying that right now, but it's true. "Red Mist" has an intro that tries to emulate a Just Blaze beat, with big horns and a hip hop feel.

One of the things that set apart your music when you first started releasing tracks was your vocal chopping techniques, you drew a lot of comparisons to people like legendary garage house producer Todd Edwards. What do you think defines your sound now that you've matured as a musician and producer?

There's a certain feel I go for in my music. On certain tracks I like things that are both uplifting and melancholic at the same time. I know I have a distinctive style, I'm not sure I could tell you exactly what that is.

One thing I'm doing is trying to incorporate more old breaks. I'm getting tired of doing the same kind of drum & bass beats. "Shock Out" and a few other things has given me confidence that those kinds of old jungle breakbeats, if they're updated and match the production values of today, will go off in a rave. People do pick up on it. I think it's time to switch up the patterns a little bit. So that's where I am now and I'm sort of adding things as I go along.

How has becoming a DJ informed your production? Has it made you a different kind of producer?

It makes you realize the importance of the mixdown. You realize a tune can be great, it can have great parts, a great melody and a great bassline. But if the mix isn't there it just won't cut it. That's the thing you realize when you start to DJ and play your own stuff out. You think "right, that doesn't sound quite right." Then you realize why other DJs didn't play your music.

It hasn't affected my arrangements I don't think. I try to keep things interesting.

The vocals on Shock Out sound like they're straight out of 1994 before the advent of modern time stretching like iZotope Radius. Tell us about how you got that effect.

I was trying to go for an old school vocal sample feel. I actually had a melody or hook in my head but I couldn't find a sample to fit that, and obviously using vocal samples can be kind of dodgy anyways. So I decided to get my vocalist in.

Shock Out is like an old jungle track—they all had pitched up vocals because producers didn't really have time stretching in those days. So all of the vocals were from R&B tunes that had been pitched up five semitones or so, and that would give that helium, chipmunk sort of effect. So what I did was I brought my vocalist I-Kay in and I slowed down the backing track five semitones and had him sing the vocals at normal speed. And then I pitched the vocals up again to match the speed of the track at 178 bpm.

You also did some things with iZotope Vinyl to make the track a little more lo-fi, right?

The beauty of "Shock Out" is all the vocals are original but they all sound like old samples. People never ask "who's the vocalist?" because they just assume it's a sample. To me that's a compliment! I've been doing that a lot on other tracks on the album, like "Feet Back on the Ground." When I sent that off to Tom at Hospital he said, "Where did you get that wicked vocal sample? Please don't tell me we have to clear it. Please don't tell me we're going to get sued!" When I told him it was an original vocal he was over the moon. That's the new thing, creating your own vocal samples.

Making dance floors and a&r happy.

Exactly. But when I recorded the "Shock Out" vocals it was all in the digital domain, all going through digital interfaces. The mic sounded quite bright and everything was very clean and pristine. Obviously I didn't want that effect for the sample, so I used Vinyl. I use it on a lot of samples to dirty them up and take away the top end over 10kHz. With digital audio you have all of that extra airyness that I didn't want, and Vinyl grunges it up and gives it a more record-like appeal.

You also actually did some of your own vocals on this album.

On "Weird Science" I had a stab at recording my own vocals through a Heil talk box. But I actually kind of blew that while I was using it, it started smoking! You have to have the right kind of amp.

I actually came up with better effects by recording my vocals into the computer, auto-tuning them, pitching them down, dirtying them up with some distortion plug ins, pitching them back up again-I went through this chain of processing. It went through all of these degrees of processing and each time it got a bit more grainy. It was really time intensive, but well worth it. Especially when I play that track out in a club now I think "that's my vocals!" No one knows ... well they do now!

It's hard to pinpoint what it is when you hear it. You can't tell if it's a vocoder or a talk box or something else.

The hardest thing with those kinds of effects is just getting what the words are saying across. There are certain people like Teddy Riley or Roger Troutman who are the masters of the talk box, you can hear exactly what they're saying. It's actually like an instrument in its own right.

I understand you're using Ozone quite a bit. What do you like about it?

Before I got Ozone, my usual limiter of choice was the Ad Limiter in Logic. I still use it for certain things. It adds a lot of brightness and does something with the harmonics, which sometimes is cool. But the great thing about Ozone is its transparency. It doesn't add any artifacts to the master output, it just does its job and keeps the levels in check.

What do you like about the Intelligent limiter mode in Ozone?

The speed of it. Drum & bass is such fast music. You need the limiter to be constantly looking forward and to react right away. When the bass comes in the limiter needs to react straight away. If the limiter isn't looking ahead it will create a kind of pumping feel and damage the sound in a way you don't want. Ozone's limiter keeps things transparent and it reacts at the right times.

You use Ozone a bit before you send things out to be mastered. How is that?

The rule of thumb was a few years ago was to do a mastered version yourself where you're sort of over-limiting stuff and making things fat so you can play the tune out. When you cut a dubplate [one-off vinyl record DJs use to play new unreleased tunes] they're not doing any mastering there, they're just whacking the tune on and cutting it. And now with the CD generation, you want things to be as loud as they can be when you're playing out tracks on CD, so you sometimes need to do your own quick master. And then, for the full release, you would send an unmastered version to the cutting house where they'd master it properly and get it louder.

But now as the techniques and the sound of drum & bass has moved on in the past few years, you need that limiting on the output. It creates part of the energy. Now I actually send my mastered versions that I've done at home, the ones I've been playing out, to be cut. I would have never done that a few years ago. When you take the limiter off, you've got more dynamics but you loose some of that energy. I'm afraid if I don't have it on there, the mastering engineer won't replace that energy that I've added.

Is there a point where it's too much?

Of course. Sometimes I'll do a version that's heavily limited and ease back off of it a little bit before sending it out. The loudness is like a drug, you always want one more hit. It's a fine line. If the track cuts well and it doesn't sound overly limited, then I'll send that one out for mastering. I always think I've over done it at the time, because your ears are sensitive to your own productions. But later I'll listen and realize it's fine.

Visit Danny Byrd at myspace.com/dannybyrduk or www.hospitalrecords.com
Check for more tips and tricks from Danny at his site beatclinic.co.uk