Tag: Production

When making my song. I wanted to really focus on the synths and the vocals. However, I wanted to start with how Jane Remover started their songs with a guitar when making Frailty.

After I laid that down and put effects on it I started adding a myriad of crunchy synths to get a large feel. I then sound designed my own drums to give them that electronic feel then finally added vocals (which i decided to layer with a guitar part to make it feel whole).

I did the very whispery vocal style Jane does is Teen Week and Frailty, but I rushed my vocals, so they were one takes that I fixed using the FLEX tool in Logic.

I wanted to extend this drop for another phrase but I wasn’t sure how, however, many times Jane Remover has said that Porter Robinson was a very big inspiration and their idol when making both Teen Week and Frailty so I decided to first put in a sample of Porter Robinson’s Is There Really No Happiness as well as make the second phrase of the song be a resampled, chopped up version of the first phrase.

I processed my vocals differently to create a very broken robot sound and the instrumental (minus the drums) followed to create this glitchy beat that is only being kept together by the drums which I really liked. I really like this way of producing, resampling yourself to create something new yet familiar, since it creates a very unique feeling that other techniques can’t really do.

Ever since I made this song, I’ve been experimenting more with sampling myself both within the same song and across different songs to see what works and what doesn’t. The vocal chop processing is also something I have carried over to other projects since the effect layering of a heavy bitcrusher with a low resolution and a very heavy distortion saturates the sound in a way I haven’t seen (like OTT however much glitchier and more interesting). 

The main thing I took from listening to Moor Mother is the very eerie ambient tone that the songs can have. I wanted to keep this ambience whilst also having punchy drums to drive home the message.

I began with making the drums, using a preset drum kit that I had made in the past and added heavy distortion to it. I then added the speech; I used the “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr and began chopping the sample up, taking some powerful lines that still had some quality to them. I then processed them, using the outro of DANCING WITHOUT MOVING by Quadeca as a reference for the static, radio effect I wanted.

Once i had made this effect using heavy compression, EQ and effects such as Deelay (a unique delay plugin) and bitcrushers I wanted to use the cheers heard in the speech, so I put them through a shaper plugin to add a pumping rhythm at the end of the loop. I then made a reese bass by lowing the pitch of a saw wave and raising the unison. I cut off the top and added some white noise to fill it out with heavy distortion to heavily saturate it. I then added a very glitched out piano that is only almost following the beat to give a weird, uncanny valley-like sound. I made this by putting half-time and codec on the piano to crush the sound into a coherent yet glitchy mess. To finish it up, I added a quiet violin that is played in such a way where it mostly can’t be heard until a very resonant frequency is brought up, making it very noticeable.

This way of working really put emphasis on the drums creating not only the groove, but the vibe (which are normally left to the chords and sound design I do).

I have a lot of prior experience making breakcore-influenced production, so I employed my usual workflow whilst pertaining to both ultraviolet but also Paranoia by KENTESHI.

I began with the drum break, beginning with drums is very unusually for me but I like to start with the focal piece of my songs so, when making breakcore, this is normal. I put an amen break I have into the Logic quick sampler and set it to slice so I would get all the individual drum sounds on the piano. Then started placing them in, glitching them out using techniques such as velocity ramps and pitch bending but not making the song unfollowable to match the new wave of breakcore artists.

I then brought in a synth pad preset that I had made a while ago and wrote some chords. After which I created a bass using an 808 preset I made and raising the unison and sustain to create a reese-like bass. I then added a sample from the song third eye by the pillows and pitched it up for a vocal on the song. Once I added a few guitar parts since that was something toyed around with by older breakcore artists (such as Drumcorps which he speaks about in the Notes On Breakcore documentary) and some simple layers to fill out the song it was done.

The breakcore workflow is very unique since, like the Moor Mother track, the focal point are the drums and everything should surround and support them which is very backwards compared to my usual workflow; however its a change I always accept since it leads to very unique results.