Audeze catches up with electronic duo Lucas and Steve

Beyond their breathtaking melodies and explosive live sets, you’ll find dance music's closest friendship. Dutch powerhouse duo Lucas & Steve have seen a momentous rise to stardom in recent years with consecutive summer hits, multiple platinum and golden records, an endless string of international performances.

"Our LCD-5s are a rare workflow-changing piece of gear. It allows us to work on our music wherever we are."  - Lucas and Steve

Here's our chat with Lucas and Steve:

Can you pick out any highlights from your work that you're particularly proud of?

Work we’re very proud of are our biggest hits "Where have you gone" and "Perfect". Also, we recently had multiple dreams come true working with Tiësto, Afrojack, Galantis and R&B legends Black Street.

How would you define your main role on most of the projects you work on these days?

We like to work on our music from A to Z. We like to be involved in songwriting, song design, production, mixing and mastering.

How did you get started in music? What kind of music did you listen to while growing up and how has that progressed?

Lucas: my mom’s a professional piano player and she thought me to play the piano. Also, I started playing the drums when I was 5 years old. From that moment on I was always making noise. Took me a couple of years to create electronic music.

Steve also got nurtured with a lot of music. His parents were always playing music and when he as about 10 he got his first set of turntables to play around with. We started making music together around the age of 16. Later Steve went to the conservatory and nowadays plays the piano as well. Lucas added the guitar to his arsenal.

Can you name any factors that influenced the course of your musical life? Heroes, role models, moments, interactions, etc?

We both got inspired a lot by Tiesto when we started to get int electronic music. His trance album Just Be got us hyped. Later Avicii was a big inspiration.

Can you briefly describe a moment of frustration from your past work, and what you may have done to overcome the obstacles? Would you approach it differently now?

The biggest issue is when you start to be less satisfied about your work because you’re raising the bar. On the bright, this exact frustration will get you to the next level. What helps is to realize that you’re approaching a big next step. Hold on and be patient!

Is there any gear you find yourself turning to most when working on a project? What are some of your favorite tools/instruments recently?

Our Sequential/DaveSmith prophet 6 and prophet x are our favorite analog synths that we always turn to if we wanna have our sounds sound different than anything else. We also always use our analog SSL g-bus compressor. It does something unique to our mix and we also use it on separate sounds and stems. A big game changer for us now that we’re constantly on tour again, is the Universal Audio Spark software. Some of our favorite plugins are in UAD’s spark bundle and with spark we finally don’t need the UAD hardware anymore to use it on the road. HUGE luggage saver without any loss of quality.

Do you have any words of wisdom for people who might aspire toward a similar path for their own careers?

Know your hardware and your software. It’s better to start with a couple of plugins or instruments and get to know them really really well, before advancing to the next similar one. Dive in deep! It will eventually save you them and make you improve big time!

How long have you been working with headphones, and how do you typically use them in your workflow?

While producing we’ve worked with headphones for many years already. We’re using those mainly at home and on the road. Headphones are very important to us because we’re making music on the road as well. We get inspired by different countries and different environments and it would be a waste not to use that inspiration for our music.

How have your Audeze headphones affected your work?

Our LCD-5s are a rare workflow-changing piece of gear. It allows us to work on our music wherever we are. Also at our studio we use the LCD5s as a reference. Turning knobs in our hardware and software while producing and mixing never had such an accurate response on any headphone/in-ear we used before.

Can you tell us what you've been working on with them recently?

Did the biggest part of the production and mix of a big club tune that we’re about to release, when on the road working. But we use them alongside our studio speakers (PMCs and ATCs) for every track that we work on.