Tell us about your story and how you started producing music.
We've been good friends since meeting in college almost 10 years ago but started producing music together for just over a year. We had each had our own separate music projects but, after working on a song together, we really enjoyed the collaborative process so created our duo project, Kiral.
What has been your biggest inspiration?
We draw a lot of inspiration from a ton of different genres which we think keeps our music and style fresh.
What DAW do you use to produce?
We currently produce on Ableton 10.
What are your top 5 plug-ins in your projects?
Serum, Pro-Q 3, Valhalla Vintage Verb, Repro-5, Ozone Vintage Limiter.
What are you looking for in a track when it comes to playing it as a DJ?
We really enjoy music that really demonstrates an artist's technical skills but also stays true to the universality of music. We want our listeners to enjoy what we're playing, regardless if they're a fan or an experienced producer themselves. There's also a musicality to songs we enjoy the most.
How many tracks are you currently working on?
We usually have one or two main projects that we're working on at a time but always have quite a bit of unfinished projects and ideas at any given moment.
How is your creative process? Do you start with a beat and then work on melodies? Opposite? Tell us the secret.
Having another person to work with really helps the creative process. We trust each other so when one person says something does or doesn't work, we both take that into consideration. Each of us starts our music differently but primarily we begin with a vocal and write a chord progression around it. Then we get a basic arrangement down before really getting into the details. We try to roughly mix the song as we're writing which gives us a good idea of what the final track can end up sounding like early on in the project.
What is your current music production setup?
We each have our own set-ups designed for our individual preferences. We use JBL 305s and Yamaha HS8s for monitoring but also use the Audio-Technica ATH-M50s for headphone comparison. We just added the Apollo Twin from Universal Audio interface after having used the Focusrite 2i2 and we're both really excited to use it! For MIDI keyboards, we're currently using an 88 key MIDI from M-Audio.