Vicetone have dropped their long awaited debut album Legacy today through Monstercat. The project spans ten addictive tracks, each with their own distinct flavor from Vicetone’s profound musical palette. The album takes you on a journey through a wide range of sounds, which together with some amazing vocals result in a superb debut album.

Since forming in 2012, Vicetone have released some incredible music, highlighting their meticulous production detail. The duo have seen many successes such as the viral track ‘Astronomia’ and ‘Nevada’ as well as feats such as playing the Ultra Miami mainstage.

Celebrating the release of their terrific album, they’ve brought us into their studio and detailed many components. From their speakers to software, even to their Lovesac. Dive in below to see where Vicetone created their Legacy album and more.

Check out their album at the end of this feature or Stream/Download now.

STUDIO

We have two main studios that we built ourselves, which took about 2 to 3 months to finalize. It was a ton of work, but ultimately rewarding, and we’ve been reaping the benefits ever since. Our main goal was that they needed to feel homey — like an extension of our house and a very comfortable place to be in at all times. A lot of producers have what we call “spaceship studios”, which all look incredibly beautiful and slick, but we prefer the more down-to-earth and cozy studios where you can really relax in and get that homey feel (in Dutch we have the perfect word for it: “gezellig”). We have a big Lovesac in there too and a lot of acoustic treatment. We made the whole ‘Legacy’ album plus all of the songs that we’ve released since 2017 in those two studios.

SOFTWARE

Our favorite DAW is Ableton Live, followed by PreSonus Studio One. We love Ableton for its fast workflow and intuitive layout, we simply cannot work in any other DAW as fast as we can in Ableton. Studio One has a brilliant integration system with Melodyne as well as comping, and we use that to edit a lot of our big vocal projects as it’s faster and more convenient. Our favorite plugin recently has been Soothe 2, we use it on everything from drums to vocals and it has become an indispensable tool for us.

SOUND

Our favorite speaker brand is Genelec. We started with the 8040s about a decade ago and have now moved to a digital setup featuring 8351A speakers in combination with 7370A subwoofers. We actually use two subwoofers per studio and found a way to make it sound great (which was a painstakingly slow and tedious process) and our low-end mixes translate very well to clubs and festivals due to the tuning of the low-end in the room and the speaker system. GLM is being used in every step of the way and we’re really happy with the sound in our studios.

As for headphones, we still like the Sennheiser HD800s. Although it doesn’t beat the Genelec speaker system, it’s still a good reference point for the mid and high-end balance and small, hard to hear crackles in audio samples that might go unnoticed on the Genelecs.

HARDWARE

We mix everything in-the-box and have yet to find a hardware unit that cannot be 98% replicated by one or a series of plugins in a chain. Being a duo and having multiple studios in multiple countries also makes it much, much easier to keep everything in-the-box. The only thing we’d potentially want to add is a hardware preamp and compressor for vocal recordings, but with solutions like Slate VMS and Townsend Labs Sphere L22 and how this niche is developing, it doesn’t seem worth it (we’d rather rent a high-end studio with an engineer for a few hours to record a final vocal at that point). So we’re very happy with how far digital plugins have come and we have no real need to buy a bunch of hardware gear. The only hardware gear that you absolutely need in the modern era is great quality audio interfaces, and we exclusively use RME for that. We use the Fireface UFX+ as well as the Babyface Pro for on tour.

EXTRAS

We have a few instruments like pianos and guitars, but the real star of the show seems to be the Lovesac… we’ve had enough writing sessions here to know that that’s the favorite piece of studio gear for most musicians who come here!