British producer Danielle Gooding, aka Flava D, has had quite an impact on UK electronic music over the past decade and a half.
Growing up in Bournemouth on the British south coast, Gooding got her start as Flava D via MySpace. At the time she was creating grime instrumentals – teaching herself to recreate the sounds she heard via Channel U in an early copy of Ableton.
After sending messages to scene originator Wiley via the social media platform, she began creating beats for MCs including him, Ghetts and Merky Ace. Eventually she linked up with Butterz, the influential label helmed by Elijah and Skilliam that spanned the realms of instrumental grime and underground dance music.
By her own admission, some of those early ideas were fairly rudimentary in how they were made.
“I didn't really know what anything was in terms of, like, compression, echo, reverb,” she explains when we visit her in her studio. “I didn't even know how to use a delay. I would literally copy and paste my hat to create a delay, when I could have just put a delay plugin on there to do it for me.
“I was doing all this really OTT manual stuff that would just take me forever,” she continues. “I wouldn't use, like, loops of shakers, because I just didn't have the samples back then. You couldn't go on a website and buy these massive catalogues of samples. It was just MSN and you had the odd group. So I was trying for hours to make my own shaker loop.
“It was a lot of manual, DIY and very time consuming stuff. At the same time it was a really cool learning experience. I think you always take those skill sets with you.”
Flava D’s productions have come a long way since then, both in terms of style and technical ability. Following her start in grime, Gooding began to DJ and started moving more into the realms of UK garage and bassline. Her latest stylistic shift has seen her embracing drum & bass, landing on the influential Hospital Records for her newly released album, Here & Now.
As she tells it, each genre move also required a step up in her production skills.
“I think when I transitioned into garage from grime, that was my first step into really thinking about structures and mixing down,” she tells us. “I was starting to DJ in 2011 and had my first gig, I played some of my grime stuff out, and I was just thinking it sounded awful compared to the tunes I was playing before and after, which were properly mastered and mixed.
“My structures too,” she continues. “I didn't have hi-hats in some of my intros. It wasn't DJ friendly. The bass just wasn't standing up – it wasn't moving the venue. That was a big eye opening point of, like, 'Okay, I need to go home and really go back to the drawing board and think about not just being a bedroom producer'.”
As Gooding explains in our video interview, as she began making more explicitly dancefloor-focused music and playing more DJ gigs as a result, it required an increasing focus on the technical aspects of structuring and mixing tracks.
“It's been this constant journey of trying to get better,” she says, “because the more you get into your career and begin playing more shows you just constantly want to get your music sounding better.”
For Flava D, drum & bass is the apex of that production journey and the most significant challenge so far.
“I felt like each genre that I've gone into is a step up,” she says. “It's like, garage has to be better than grime, now DnB, for me, is the ultimate learning curve.
“It's one of the most advanced genres in terms of sound design,” she explains. “I might have thought I was amazing at making garage, then I tried to make DnB – it's such a big sound. And people are serious nerds with mixdowns. It's insane. I'll never stop learning how to make something sound good through trial and error.”
The move into drum & bass not only necessitated learning new skills, but also upending some of the techniques she would rely on in other genres.
“When I first went into DnB, I was used to making garage where you have a very big, solid kick and snappy drums,” she explains. “With DnB, it’s all about having a small, poppy kick and a massive sub. It’s the opposite way around.
“That was quite interesting, because a lot of my DnB stuff in the beginning was quite low-end heavy compared to other productions. It probably took me a good year to rewire my brain in that sense. You just have to go into each genre as a different entity.”
Despite the steep learning curve, the journey into drum & bass has led to the creation of a full length album that shows off the depth of Flava D’s skills as a producer.
“It's quite a versatile record,” she says. “It's quite a broad project, which I'm really happy about. I feel like it's something that I would listen to in the car or on the train, but also in the dance. I feel like it ticks a lot of the different boxes of what makes me, me. It's got liquid on there, it's got a bit of harder stuff, it's got some really cool collaborations as well.
“It's got the sweet and sour elements, which is how I wanted it to be. It's quite an emotional project.”
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.