Name: TTRRUUCES
Members: Jules Apollinaire, Natalie Findlay
Interviewee: Jules Apollinaire
Nationality: British
Current release: TTRRUUCES's sophomore album JJUUIICES is out via Antifragile.
Recommendations: TTRRUUCES album 1; TTRRUUCES album 2

If this TTRRUUCES interview piqued your interest, visit the band's official website. The duo are also on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.   



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in production and technology?

For sure, With my first band, we used to go to studios to record our songs and usually have the in-house sound engineer record us, and the result was always impersonal and far from what I had in my head. This is what motivated me to learn production.

From the age of 15 I started to put demos together and developed a massive passion for music production and Logic Pro. This really helped me develop my sound and TTRRUUCES is the project where all my love for recording goes towards

What were your very first active steps with music technology and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist/producer?

Being a producer can only come out of true passion. It isn’t something your learn. I always say: I have no idea what I’m doing and if I did I would be a bad producer. Production has to be spontaneous, if you apply rules and preconceived ideas, then you become bad at it.

My first active step was for my first band on Garageband, and then followed countless collaborations with Artists over the years.

Were/are you interested in the history of production and recording? If so, which events, albums, artists, or insights stand out for you?

I have always loved to hear the stories behind records, but when it comes to technology, I’ve never really researched it and kind of crafted my way of doing things over the years.

The Beatles for me is the best music production of all time, because it mixes the spontaneous genius of the Beatles and the tasteful genius of George Martin. You can really feel them having fun and experimenting, but they have the solid foundation of their producer to organise the chaos into something beautiful and timeless.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness as things become more professionalised and how do you still draw surprises from equipment you may be very familiar with?

Making music should always be playful and spontaneous. No matter how much experience we get, studio time never gets more “professionalised.”

But of course buying new toys and instruments is always a source of inspiration, sometimes you have to accept that you can have months without much inspiration and some weeks where you write multiple songs a day, we are not in control of this.

But having a studio at home ready to use when the inspiration comes is definitely helpful

For your own creativity, what is the balance and relative importance between what you learned from teachers, tutorials and other producers on the one hand – and what you discovered, understood, and achieved yourself? What are examples for both of these?

I don’t learn from teachers or tutorials, I personally learnt everything myself and never took a scholar approach to production. I’d only ever use a YouTube tutorial for a specific thing if I don’t know it yet. So it’s useful as a tool, but you can’t learn how to produce a song through teachers as the end goal is to do it your way.

Production is different to sound engineering, it’s creative and obeys no rules

How and for what reasons has your music set-up evolved over the years and what are currently some of the most important pieces of gear and software for you?

The reason my set-up evolves majorly depends on what money I have. I love buying gear and have accumulated lots of great instruments and studio equipment over the years

When I first signed with my publishers I used most of the advance on new gear: A prophet 6, a Space Echo, a Apollo Twin Interface and a 60s Vox Guitar. They are all still today central to my production

Have there been technologies which have profoundly influenced, changed or questioned the way you make music?

DAWs (I use Logic Pro) are a great tool for inspiration and developing songs, apart from that most of our music is instrumental based so pretty old school.

That said drum machines and synths are pretty clever machines nowadays and we do have some amazing go-to plugins which are super creative, so indeed technology is part of the process.

But I think we pretty much would sound the same way if we were doing it all on tape without a laptop.

Yann Tiersen, in a surprising statement, told me: "I feel more sincere with electronic instruments [than acoustic ones]." Is that something you can relate to?

Can’t really relate to that, because he mentions sincerity and we find acoustic instruments as sincere as electronic ones

Late producer SOPHIE said: “You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, and any sound. So why would any musician want to limit themselves?” What's your take on that and the relevance of limitations in your set-up and process?

Limitations are actually sometimes nice, especially in our setup which includes electronic instruments. Producers with infinite loop libraries and sound presets are not making better music than musicians with less gear that they mastered.

At the end of the day we see it song per song and while we love geeking and electronic elements, we also love acoustic instruments which still make the major part of our sounds.

Also having an acoustic sound but using as a source to modify and sound futuristic is sometimes more interesting than starting off with big modern sounds that are already made.

From the earliest sketches to the finished piece, what does your current production workflow/process look like?

Sometimes a song produces itself in a few hours and the “demo” elements stay forever - sometimes it takes weeks to crack a prod. The process is very different for every song

The Longest and most boring part is printing stems when we get someone else to mix a song. It sometimes take longer than actually producing the song.

Rhythm, sound design, melody/harmony, something else – when do the different elements of a piece come into play for you?

It varies song per song, it’s different every time.

In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. How does your own way of working with sound look like? Do you find using presets lazy?

I tend not to use presets even though I’m open to them and some are pretty awesome. I do have my own presets I made over time but even those I usually don’t use and kind of go from scratch every time.

I love working with sound, finding the right identity for a take. It’s crazy how a sound that sounds super small on a dry take can take a whole new life when you start playing with it and running it through effects.

What, to you, are the respective benefits of solo work and collaborations and do you often feel lonely in the studio? Can machines act as collaborators to you?

Collaborations are amazing. But you usually spend less time crafting the sound when many people are in the studio as it can be quite long and boring and requires concentration. So collabs are great for creation and alone time is great to spend time on the sound.

That said, me and Nat are so used to each other that she’s the only person I feel I can stay 10 hours in the studio with working on sound and enjoy it together.

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?

AI has already been part of music for a while if you think about it (autotune - arpegiators, pattern generators etc). But the day you can say “make a drum beat that sounds like daft punk but with a brushy jazz snare” and it actually does it, then it would be pretty interesting to use here and there. Even though it will never replace the personal nature needed for a production to be interesting.

So completely curious and open to the idea but I don’t see it as a threat. If anything it will help get rid of the bad producers who try and emulate other sounds, but it will never replace music producers as human nature is actually what is interesting.

For the same reason it already exists for visual arts, It doesn’t compete with a great visual artist who, beyond technique, bring his own vision when creating a piece.

If you could make a wish for the future directly to a product developer at a Hard- or Software company – what are developments in tools/instruments you would like to see and hear?

A software which allows you to PROPERLY print stems when you finish a prod, respecting mono/stereo, sends/no sends, wet/dry etc as right now the only proper way to do it is to manually do it and double check which is so annoying.

I think there was a company called Bounce Butler who tried to develop that but their product never launched in the end from what I know.