I’m going to cut to the chase and say straight away that Santero (or Will as he’s known to his mum) is a fucking awesome DJ. In a very early post, I’m pretty sure I mentioned that he is responsible for some of my favourite nights out ever and therefore when I heard that he’d recently released his debut EP ‘Drop the Bomb’, I thought it was time to have a bit of a catch up with the man himself.

First up congratulations on the new release! How did it come about?!

I’ve been working quite a bit from a studio in Leeds, and Utah Saints are based in the same complex - they heard the instrumental for Drop The Bomb one day and came in and said hi. It turned out they were starting the Sugarbeat label to complement the club night, and asked me to do the first release for them. They put me in touch with Matty from Credit to the Nation, as they have known him since back in the day, and we linked up to get the lyrics recorded.

The remix package is pretty big as well…

Yeah - I’ve known Tomb Crew for a while, and their productions have just been getting better and better, so I was very keen to get them on board, and then the Utahs know Deekline well and wanted to get a breaks remix in there, so we were able to get him on board as well. Absolutely delighted with how both remixes turned out, I’m returning the faour for Tomb Crew some time soon, I really hope I can do them justice as they absolutely smashed this one out of the park!

How did you start out DJ’ing?

I used to sing and play guitar in a Pixies-ish band, and basically went to uni with a view to getting into a new band and very little thought about actually getting a degree! Within a couple of months I was completely immersed in dance music, and ended up selling all my guitars and amps and buying technics and a crappy Gemini mixer and starting to buy up as much vinyl as I could afford.

How has it changed since you started? Any big changes?

The obvious change is the technology - when I first started out very few people even used CDs, now hardly anyone plays vinyl at all.

How did you get into production? 

As I said, I used to be in bands, so I’ve always written songs, but I never really took production in dance music very seriously, as I have always seen myself as a DJ first and foremost. But more and more I started wanting to do my own takes on tracks, and from that I’ve developed the skills to take it further. I’ve had a lot of different set-ups over the years, from MPC’s and Ataris through to PCs, but the biggest leap I had was when I switched to Ableton, I just find it really intuitive in the composition process, even if I still go back to Logic for mixdowns.

Whats your current set up looking like? Any secret weapons you like to use on your tunes?

At the moment I have an iMac, M-Audio Axiom Pro, Focusrite Saffire soundcard and Samson Rubicon monitors. I’d like to get some biggers speakers ideally, as on my home set-up I struggle to mix bass effectively and reliably, so have to rely on my trips to the Leeds studio for most mixdowns. I compose on Ableton, and my workhouse plugins on there are Trilian, which I probably use on every track I’ve done, T-Racks mastering stuff is great, Cytomic Glue is really, really good too for just “gluing” a mix together. I use Logic to mix tracks down. As for secret weapons - Supatrigga is great for messing with loops and can throw out some really useful bits that you’d otherwise never come up with.

Alot of Dj’s these days get really bogged down in the technical side of things, where as it strikes me that you are more focused on the tune selection?

I guess thats true - I certainly would rather see a bad technical DJ play good tunes than a good technical DJ playing boring stuff. But I do think that the least any DJ should be able to do is competently mix two tracks together - it blows my mind how many DJs can’t actually mix or build a set, as it really isn’t all that hard! I’m not one for using loads of FX in a set - I’m happiest with a mixer with a good quality 3 band EQ, and maybe a filter on it as well - I love the EQs on the Rane ttm57sl, they just work perfectly for DJing. If I could get a mixer with that EQ and the channel FX from a DJM800 that would be ideal! Ha, and after saying I’m not into the technical stuff I’m now nerding out about a fantasy mixer!

Santero & Jordan Revolution Mix by Loosesynths on Mixcloud

Do you miss vinyl? Is there any real loss? Should people care?

I think that its a shame that vinyl has gone the way of the dodo, not because I think vinyl is intrinsically “better”, but because of the things that went with it - record shops in particular. That was a great social part of DJing, you’d get to know people into the same stuff, the people working in the shops would get to know what you are into and suggest things, it was a real social hub for music scenes.

The other thing that the old vinyl scene brought was a certain level of exclusivity - this had benefits and drawbacks; it meant some quality control, but at the same time maybe stopped good things from being released. And of course, because a DJ had to have a record box full of tracks before they could play out it meant there was a kind of “apprenticeship” period before DJs would even consider trying to get gigs, while they built up a vinyl collection.

What are your thoughts on the current scene? Genre divides seem to be almost non existent these days, compared with 10 years ago perhaps when DJ’s tended to stick more rigidly to one style?

I think this is a direct consequence of how cheap it is to acquire music these days - a hell of a lot of DJs have never even paid for music, which to me is just appalling. 10 years ago, if you played hip hop but wanted to play house as well, and maybe funk, and D&B, and whatever else, then you needed to have deep pockets and a certain level of knowledge, and be truly committed to want to spend that much money. Now people can just hit the torrents or blogs up and have every big tune of a genre within a couple of hours.

Of course, the other massive factor is that you can have so much on your laptop, whereas at most you could take maybe 120-150 12’s out with you. So rather than having to ration out 20 house 12’s, 20 hip hop, 20 dubstep etc etc, you can take your entire collection out with you and really experiment, which is fantastic for open minded DJs and crowds. 

I think that on balance its positive for music that this possibility exists.

What do you reckon the next 10 years of dj’ing holds?

What a question! I think that DJing in 2020 may well be barey recognisable to what we know today. Vinyl will almost certainly be on the scrapheap, as even now many clubs’ technics are barely functioning, to the point where I often use the CD version of Serato. You have the Serato/Ableton Bridge thing which could be the first step in a very different sort of DJing - and lots of kids have grown up using the likes of Ableton as they couldn’t afford CDJs or whatever, so I think that will inevitably result in a move in that direction from a lot of tomorrow’s DJs. I think people do like to see DJs on CDJs or vinyl as part of the “theatre” of DJing, but laptop controllers as they are refined should make it possible to do a set without having to touch your laptop.

To celebrate the release Will has given LS two recent remixes to give away:

Armand Van Helden - You Don’t Know Me (Santero Remix)

Mr Scruff - Get A Move On (Santero & Freeman Remix)

You can pick up a copy of the Drop the Bomb EP from iTunes & Beatport