"We always struggled to find good acapella, but AI changed the game"
"We tried LALAL.AI, and it was love at first sight! It felt like conquering a brand new world of ideas and possibilities." Chatting with Djs from Mars.
Djs From Mars kicked off their career back in the 2000s, and it wasn’t an easy ride at the beginning. Convincing people that DJing was a serious job was a major hurdle. But after thousands of nightclub sets and years of hard work in the studio, their dedication finally paid off.
The duo racked up millions of views on YouTube, remixed tracks for Sean Paul, Pitbull, and Ennio Morricone. Plus, their music has caught the attention of top DJs like Tiesto, David Guetta, Carl Cox, Chuckie, Oliver Heldens, and Lost Frequencies, who’ve all included DJs from Mars in their playlists.
We sat down with them to chat about their production process, the gear they use, why they're wearing masks, and how artificial intelligence is changing the game in DJing.
“DJing is not a real job.”
It was really the main issue in the beginning, so we had to struggle to make people understand that this was serious. We spent nights in studio while all of our friends were going out, and everyone thought it was really weird. Years later, we can finally say we were right!
In the beginning, even before “Djs From Mars,” we played in the worst venues 😊 Strip clubs, restaurants, gipsy weddings. We were taking every DJ job back then, because we had to pay for our rent. We remember this Gipsy wedding where a drunk guest was asking for the same song ten times in a row, and there was no way to explain it was already playing. It wasn't funny at all!
One of the most memorable moments in our career was, probably, playing at Tomorrowland in 2022 and 2023, and playing at Ushuaia in Ibiza with David Guetta. Those venues are so iconic that being there, on that stage that we saw on million photos before, feels almost unreal.
As for our masks, this was completely random. We started this mask thing as a joke, but people wanted to take photos with us even when we were totally unknown, so we thought it was a good idea to keep this thing going throughout the years. We don’t think we’ll ever perform again without these helmets—now they’re our trademark.
Great thing about mashups is that we’re not bound to a specific genre.
We used to play a lot of Dubstep drops when Dubstep was new and exciting but we were never labeled as a Dubstep act. Then we played a lot of Big Room, Future House, and now, we're playing a lot of Techno drops in our sets, but always with big vocal breaks. We evolve our sound according to our current taste, so it never sounds old.
We don’t play a certain style, we play every style and we make it sound like it’s the Djs From Mars style.
So we are playing a lot of techno drops lately, but also a lot of Tech house. We don’t want to describe our music, we always hated “labels,” like if you’re doing techno, you cannot play a track at 100 bpm? That’s a bit annoying, and it kills the freedom of doing what you want, so we’d just say Djs From Mars play their own unique style 😊
We don’t like to celebrate when something great happens; we go straight to the studio & produce more.
When we produced a mashup of all David Guetta’s biggest hits, like 30 songs in 5 minutes, we sent them to him, and he replied, “This is amazing!” We were like “WHATT is this really you!!??”
He even posted the video on his YouTube channel, and it has about 60 million views now. That was really unreal!! But we don’t like to celebrate, when something great like this happens, we go straight to the studio and produce more and more— that's the motivation we get from every big achievement!
We produce “in the box” with no external hardware. Our favorite VST is Serum and our DAW is Ableton.
Speaking of choosing songs, we just work with what we like. It could be the new Tech house drop, or a song by Linkin Park, or a classical melody by Beethoven, or a rap verse by Kanye West—we try to use everything we love 😊
We think it’s a bit difficult to mix different genres because when we speak with other producers, they always ask us, “How did you do this?!” But for us, it’s very natural, we listen to literally EVERY kind of music, and when we do, we pay attention to production details. So we know how to produce really different styles, it’s a natural process, we just do what we love 😊
We did some research & the best tool was LALAL.AI. It was love at first sight.
The main thing for us, since we produce a lot of mashups and bootlegs, is the acapella extraction. We always struggled to find good quality acapellas, and now AI changed the game totally. We can extract good-quality acapella from basically every existing track. That helps our creative process, the mashup ideas are now unlimited. That helps our studio production, and our set, of course, since today, we can play any track we want. It’s been a game-changer for real.
We knew the Internet was buzzing about these new AI tools for acapella extraction, so we did some research, and the best one, according to all the reviews, was LALAL.AI.
We tried LALAL.AI, and BOOM! It was love at first sight! It felt like conquering a brand new world of ideas and possibilities.
With LALAL.AI, we usually extract the acapella from a song and create the remix with that vocal part. But sometimes, we also isolate instruments. Let’s say, we love the bass sound of a new Deadmau5 track and we want to use that sound in our productions. So we just extract the bass stem, cut a single note, load it into a MIDI sampler (Simpler in Ableton), and we can immediately play that bass sound with our own bass melody. This is really amazing, so we don’t have to spend hours in finding that sound anymore.
The possibilities are now unlimited. Before AI, we often had ideas like, “Let’s make a remix of this track for our sets, it would be great to play it!” but then, “Oh no, there’s no good acapellas for this one, let’s leave this."
Now, this isn't happening anymore, and we can produce in total freedom!
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