Alive With Worship Remix #4: Grey Gold

Straight out of Leeds, Grey Gold are a duo of music producers with a wealth of experience in composing music for film and TV. For this project, we gave them the remix stems to Alive With Worship and asked them to make magic. We love the result of this collaboration and are so excited to share it with you all.

Grey Gold, we know that you’re a collaborative duo, but would you like to introduce yourselves?

We are Kamal Kamruddin and Will Featherby. Hi there.

You both professionally compose music for film and TV with Leeds music studio WMP, what was it like creating this compared to the stuff you usually work on?

We’re used to working to pretty tight deadlines and quite detailed briefs, and although we love that way of working, projects like this allow us a bit more freedom in both these areas, which gives us a chance to follow our own path a bit more.

Do you find working on a remix more limiting than creating original music because you have something to rework, or do you think it actually encourages greater creativity?

In the work that we do day to day, we're accustomed to working within limitations because there's always a specific purpose and context in mind for what we're writing, and so in some ways we thrive off that and would probably argue that restrictions do encourage greater creativity (although we’re probably biased!). With the type of remix we were working on here, the end goal was to reinterpret the original track in our words (so to speak) whilst retaining enough of the essence and heart behind the original, and so this automatically sets limitations, because you can't just try something and hope it works, but instead have to be quite deliberate about your direction. Setting limitations for yourself is really helpful, especially when we’re having to work quickly, because it forces you to make decisions.

What was the inspiration for this remix? Were there certain sounds/artists who influenced you, or was it more a matter of playing with the original vocals and stems to produce something cool?

In some ways it’s the original song that’s the inspiration, because our approach to remixes is to listen to the stems and ask, “What story are these telling and how can we tell it differently?” So we’re always trying to uphold the essence of the original song whilst at the same time totally reimagining it. The great thing about creativity is that every producer will hear the stems in a different way, and their ears will lead them in a unique direction, and so instead of trying to achieve a particular style, we essentially followed our instincts and took it from there.

What was it like having your faith spill into your work life on this project, do you think it altered the way you approached the track?

Really good, in the sense that working with a worship song isn’t something that happens very often for us at work, and so it was a new experience in that sense. Hopefully the faith element didn’t alter the way I approached it though, because the goal whenever I sit down to write or produce (regardless of the project or client) is to try to do so as an expression of worship - in the words of Chali 2na, “If you ain't giving God the praise then it's useless.”

If you could produce a track for any singer/rapper who would it be?

Frank Ocean.

How did you get started in the music production business?

We both started out in fairly similar ways, just over slightly different timeframes. Having studied music production degrees in Leeds, we then worked various jobs to pay the bills whilst finding or creating opportunities to play or write music wherever we could and connecting with other musicians and creatives. We’ve both come to be working as full-time composer/producers through a combination of putting ourselves out there, getting to know people and taking an interest in what they’re doing, asking for opportunities, and then continuing to turn up until we were either paid or told to go away!

What would your advice be to young musicians out there wanting to pursue music as a career?

Basically, as above. Whatever it is that you’re wanting to do in music, do it a lot - practice, get experience however you can, be reliable and see things through. Particularly if you’re writing or producing, get good at being decisive, getting tracks finished and getting them in front of people - however awesome your ideas are, if nobody hears them it’s pretty much guaranteed that they won’t earn you any money, which is pretty key when you’re trying to earn a living from them. Don’t sit on ‘that awesome idea’ you’ve had until that perfect moment comes along… finish it, get it out there and move on to the next thing, because you can count on the fact that you’ll write something even better in the future. Whatever area of music you’re working in, you’ll learn something new from every project/gig/session you work on, and the key is to take those lessons on to the next job, learning from your mistakes as you go so that you don’t end up making the same ones again. Consequently your work will naturally get better and better.

Finally, when people say it’s hard to make a living in the music industry, they are right, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. So grit your teeth and go for it!

Lastly, where can people keep up with your work?

http://w-m-p.co.uk/