Me in my studio: Icarus

Continuing the relatively long tradition of electronic music-making siblings - see Disclosure, Orbital and Krewella - Icarus are a Bristol-based house duo comprising brothers Tom and Ian Griffiths.

Perennial recipients of Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac’s weekly Hottest Record In The World award, are now signed to Pete Tong’s FFRR label, and have just released their new EP This Must Be The Place. We asked them to show us their most essential studio gear, which includes some famous synths and a plugin-powering audio interface...

“A recreation of a classic. We used the MS-20 for pretty much all of the synth sounds in our single, Echoes. We’ve not delved too deep into the different patching options on it yet, but it’s great for really thick saw and square wave sounds and you can do some crazy things with the filters.”  

“We have a kind of love/hate relationship with the JV-1080. You can go very deep with it, but it’s not the most intuitive piece of gear. We’ve definitely spent a lot of time fiddling with sounds and not really got anywhere, but sometimes it has the perfect sound for what you’re looking for. ‘90s piano house all day long!”

“Another classic. As with the MS-20, it’s perfect for fat bass sounds and thick leads, but with totally different characteristics. It can be way more warm and cuddly than the MS-20 and has a rich, analogue sound.”

“We don’t use a lot of guitar in our tracks, but when we do we always record using the Lonestar. We tried a lot of amps before getting this one quite a few years ago. It has a lovely clean tone and two really nice reverbs.”

“We upgraded our interface to the Apollo a couple of years ago for better A/D D/A conversion and to improve our workflow in the studio by having all of our hardware synths wired up ready to go. Since getting it we’ve bought a few of the UAD plug-ins and really love them. Great for the studio; bad for the bank balance!”