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VOTE FOR NAPT @ BREAKSPOLL 2009 INTERVIEW EXCLUSIVE 
What’s up mates? Thank you for taking some time off your top-notch music productions to chat with us about the world of NAPT. You guys have put out only quality and chart-topping hits these past few years, so how have your gigs been going and how are you feeling about your accomplishments now?
We’re really happy with the way things are going of course. We have been lucky to have a really strong year with sales and profile going so well. That said we don’t really stop to recount accomplishments we are just always working towards the next thing. Hopefully these coming years will be the most exciting and fruitful as we have a lot of material coming out and the break beat machine seems to be picking up steam! Gig wise we’ve been lucky to play all over the world in 2008 and hope to see that continue in 2009!
What do your parents and family think of your hit tunes? Would they ever come out to dance at your gigs?
Yes they download our music and take a keen interest. My dad came out with me to Spain a few months ago for a big festival and we enjoyed a nice British cup of tea at sunrise. So yeah they are very supportive.
You chaps had so many number 1 hits on all the breakbeat store outlets in 2008 (1 on DJ Download, 1 on Trackitdown, 1 on Break Beat Online, 1 on Beatport for a total of 12 weeks!) with your sick hits like "Gotta Have More Cowbell" and "Frequency", what are you currently working on now and would like to chat about?
We have got a collaboration coming out with suave electro pop band Kish Mauve entitled “Lose Control” coming soon on Funkatech Records at the start of March. There’s a big room 12” club mix and a vocal mix of that too. It’s quite an ambitious project and we’re really happy on presenting two quite different mixes so that is one to look forward to for us. It has been getting quite a lot of attention from outside the scene which is something that needs to happen in the world of break beat, people looking in to us rather than us looking out. Then we have a couple of remixes of high profile acts coming soon as well as N-Funk Parts 3 and 4, which we can’t wait to get out.
You guys remixed and worked with quite a few big names in the industry now, like Slyde, Deekline and Wizard, the Freestylers, Ils, MJ Cole, MC Skibadee... Who has been the coolest and most memorable artist to work with so far and why?
Doing remixes you don’t usually ever meet or work with the artists so we’d probably have to go for Skibadee. A very professional and original personality with great skills. It’s also rewarding to work with vocalists because they see music in a different way to producers and it’s good to try and broach tracks from their angles. Hopefully we’ll have some more collaborations like this coming very shortly.
I love your Deekline and Wizard remix "Angels" track, how did this project come about and how do you feel about it being number 1 on DJ Download, number 1 on Trackitdown, number 1 on Break Beat Online, and number 3 on Beatport? What did Deekline and Wizard think of it?
Yeah it was great fun. I think this one has to be one of our personal faves. We stayed up all night after going to a massive club night (yes we still do that for fun!) and were full of inspiration to do something a little sexy and shiny with that breakbeat intensity so it was nice that this vibe came across to people. Deekline and Wizard are really cool guys and great producers and have always been very supportive so we wanted to make sure we gave them the right product.
So you guys are on the list for "Best Producer" at this years Breakspoll awards (Feb., 26 Fabric 2009) and you guys are gonna also play there...can you please tell us what to expect there for the people that have never been there?
It’s basically the biggest ever break beat line up in one place! The awards are important of course but the party is the thing that stands out for most people. You end up recognizing a lot of the 2000 people who come so it kinda turns it into one big breakbeat reunion!
What time of day do NAPT write your slamming tracks at and have the best outcome for your hit tracks?
Man it really depends… any time is tune time really if your feeling it. Even though we usually stay up very late I tend to find it best to only ever do more to-the-point-production like drum fills or FX at this time as that 4 minute long epic breakdown you do at 5 o’clock in the morning, disappointingly, never sounds that great the next day!
Do drink soda pop or tea over your keyboard? Did you ever spill anything?
We usually take tea breaks in our office to minimise the risk of that. Food and drink and electrical equipment do not make the best mix. We do tend to make it a habit of jumping around and spilling our drinks especially on each other when we play out though.
How long does a NAPT chart-topping track take from conception to the mastering output?
It entirely depends on what is going on at the time. Sometimes we may start projects and they don’t get finished until sometime down the line and sometimes we can polish off something quite quickly. 5 days to a week is a pretty satisfying turn around in terms of writing, production and engineering for us.
How does your creative process work with you lads? Who does what?
I think we differ from some of the other double acts as we are both very keen and confident writers and producers individually. We’re naturally better at some different aspects of the production process, but it’s always quite a team effort. We work in a variety of ways from sitting together and doing it note by note to showing each other ideas we have been working on and taking it from there. There’s a certain NAPT in-house style that comes across in everything each of us does, so I think that is the key thing really. In production two heads are generally better then one and it really helps if you have been working on something for days to have an outside opinion, just saying change that bit, this bit doesn’t work or even just lets start again. We both work long hours not just on tune writing, but doing the admin (extremely considerable duty these days), working on DJ sets and planning the future so it’s pretty vital to have someone to prop you up!
Who does all the wicked NAPT graphics and can you please tell us about them?
Ashley does them all as he is a monster of creation. We are always trying to get the whole package looking just right, the music, the look, the whole bundle needs to be consistent and of high quality.
What do you think is the best produced NAPT track ever?
Man we like them all in different ways. “Gotta Have More Cowbell” was great as we incorporated a very snaking arrangement and lots of constantly mutating themes and it finished up as a big room dance track that was equally at home on your personal stereo or in your car. From a personal point of view I think the vibe of “Work This Out” was pretty exploratory and for us encompassed a bit of an odyssey of styles that we love deeply. The remixes of Deekline & Wizards “Angels” and Ils’s “Hate Is An Illness” are quite special too as they were deeper and more emotive which is something that can, on occasion be hard to translate to the heat of the dance floor.
If an animal were to someday likely be able to listen and dance to your music, what species do you think it would be?
I have to say I have not ever thought through that particular scenario. If you really pushed me I’d say giant fluttering moths slowly twisting and turning their maudlin way toward a mystical light they can never reach, yet feel utterly compelled to follow.
What are your musical backgrounds? How do you come up with those great sounds and melodies that everyone all around the world freaks out over?
Ashley has a long history in music and has been playing the piano since he was 4. I’ve come into the music side later teaching myself and learning from Ashley’s classical training. We both have a love for the more melodic side of things and work hard creating and incorporating melodic hooks into the music. We might create chord progressions and play them with one instrument, say a pad, like in the intro of “Fortune”, or strongly infer a particular progression through the layering of a few different musical elements like in the big funk break down sections of “Gotta Have More Cowbell”. We may also make the melody bass line driven, lead line driven or both, working in lead line counter melodies over the top of bass lines like in “Heart Of Stone”. It really depends on the track! Chords aside, we do enjoy the more outrageous and experimental side of club fuelled bass line insanity and production like in our “Frequency” remix and the prominent bass line sections of “Gotta Have More Cowbell”. All these methods and more are used to create the melodic hooks you hear in NAPT productions with the process of creating melody and harmony in the music really depending on the vibe of the track! We also spend a lot of time making sure we work on the grooves and riffs and get the right sonic palette for them. Once we have down something we like we spend a long time trying to find some original way of presenting it in terms of synthesis of sound and malevolent audio manipulation. Harmony and melody produce innate expressions of human emotion so if you can go someway to harness that it makes you able to communicate your music on different levels. A general and important rule of thumb is that you can’t break the rules if you don’t know them!
I still can't believe you guys work on Cubase on a PC, you guys must be crazy...that’s why you’re on the top. Can you tell us why you love the PC and Cubase, and how long have you been working with it, and how did you first stumble upon it?
We’ve always been PC users and so naturally started producing on a PC. The most professional software available for music production both, midi and audio, on a PC in our opinion is Cubase. There are countless arguments about the audio engines in Logic vs Cubase which we won’t go into now but suffice to say we love Cubase! We use lots of different plugins when engineering and producing our tracks and have tonnes of different compressors/EQ’s/reverbs etc. Each plugin has it’s own character. For example when running the same settings on a TC compressor vs the Waves SSL compressor there is a noticeable difference as to how the end signal sounds. It’s the same difference with EQ, we might use the Sony Oxford EQ when wanting to keep the timbre of a sound the same when deducting a certain frequency range as this EQ is very good at not destroying the innate timbre of a particular sound. On the flip if we want a harsher more precise EQ that destroys the timbre of a sound somewhat but is good for what we’re trying to achieve in the context of a whole mix then we might use the Waves Q EQ series. We have used Logic on a number of occasions when working from other studios but ultimately, whether you use Logic or Cubase it doesn’t really matter as both take top end plugins like Waves/TC/Sony Oxford etc and both are capable of producing high quality output. It’s all about your ears, speakers, the plugins you have, getting to know the plugins you have really well, learning how they sound and how to get the sound you want out of them!!
Any last words of wisdom and shout outs to your global fans?
Have a safe 2009 and come feel the N-Funk with NAPT!!
NAPT DJ Mixes are available at the napt website now with podcasts and much more! www.napt-music.com
Checkout our NAPT MP3 Library here... Checkout our NAPT MP3 Library here...
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