IDEA
While most people use Ableton Live to flip samples due to the ease of audio manipulation, however I only had a day to create the sample flip and I had never used Ableton before, so I just used Logic Pro X. I decided I wanted to make something in a genre I’d never tried before so I started with a Lo-Fi hip hop/Dilla lopsided beat. I made this almost sextuplet sounding groove by slightly pushing the snare and dragging every second hi-hat.
CHORDS AND SAMPLES
Once I had made the beat, I decided to throw on some chords. I played them in live not worrying too much about timing to give it a more Lo-Fi feeling. I used LABS Soft Piano which has a natural low pass filter which makes it sound soft and not harsh at all which I find pianos can be. I then got to work incorporating the sample we were given. We got given the track ‘Bell Rock’ by Haftor Medbøe. The bass was made using a sample of piano and trumpet being played together. There are also a lot of trumpet filler synths made from the original sample which are just time and pitch stretched. You can also hear an unprocessed part of the sample at the end of each ‘drop’. The piano run didn’t quite fit the chords so I pitch corrected one note so it would fit.
EVOLUTION OF GENRE
Once I had the main beat down and the verse chords, I decided I wanted to make a slightly jazzier song. I have been listening a lot to Anomalie recently, so I went down the direction of a sort of electronic/hip-hop/jazz fusion which is when I came up with the chords for the chorus and drop. Again, these were played in live to give a slightly lopsided feel. The ‘drop’ is fairly basic: lots of little added effects and percussive hits to make it sound busy even though it is a sparse drop. Lots of stereo automation to keep it moving and interesting.
VOCALS
Once the outline of the song was made, I decided to make it into a remix. I found vocal stems on my laptop that I’d downloaded years ago, and they fit quite well. The original song is ‘One Day’ by TOKiMONSTA with Bibi Bourelly singing. I also decided that a small rap section would be quite a cool idea, so I found rap stems of Stanley Odd, and combined three different songs: ‘Day 3’, ‘Antiheroics’, and ‘Join the Club’ to make my own verse. This took far too much time which is why it is very short. Once I had chosen the words, I had to change the pitch of each individual word as they are from different songs. I then lined up the words to have a rough flow that I liked. I then added some effects like an octave below and parallel compression along with my normal vocal processing which includes EQ, Compression, De-essing, Saturation, Delay and Reverb.
VOCAL CHOPS
I thought the drop was quite boring, so I added in a vocal chop I made from the vocal of Bibi Bourelly. I split a vocal line into regions cutting at the transients. I then put this into the EXS24 sampler so I could play each transient on a keyboard. I then figured out melodies by messing about. I did this 3 times. One for the original octave, one for an octave down, and one for an octave above. Once this was done, I split up the melody so each note would be a different combination of octaves and panning. It ended up sounding pretty cool. Both drops have slightly different vocal chops to keep it interesting.
SOUND DESIGN
All of the synths that aren’t sampled are made using Serum. Due to this track being quite wavy with a ‘drunk’ feel, the synths are constantly being automated by different parameters. Most of them have an envelope controlling a low pass filter which is pretty common anyway, however in this song I have LFO’s controlling wavetable positions, fine pitch and other parameters which slowly shifts the tuning and stereo width which can make the synth sound more alive and authentic.
INTRO
The intro was the last thing I did. I found the song started quite abruptly so I started by taking a large section of the original sample of ‘Bell Rock’, pitched it down a semi tone, time stretched it out, reversed it, added a large room reverb, and then automated the panning of it. Later on in the intro, I chopped it up a bit so it would drop in and out, however the large reverb tail would mean it is still heard. I then added some storm foley to fill out the frequencies. You can also hear some vocal chops which are down an octave along with a vocal tail sweep that has a tremolo building into the tempo. The wind is automated to increase the rate of panning as the actual song starts.
This was a pretty fun quick project, and I’ll definitely re-visit this genre and experiment more with sample flipping.
Listen to the Remix here:
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