Interview with the artist
You made a track that’s beautiful and complex. Can you tell us about your influences?
My influences mainly lie in 70’s/80’s soul and funk music, this is the music I grew up with.
What genres did you use in this track?
Future Bass with a Nu-Soul touch.
Please tell us about your creative process for the song: how did you get it started?
With 4oF O U R I got started with the drumloop for the verse, I kept layering more drums on top of eachother untill I got something pretty complex that I liked. After that I made the chords for the verse and the lead you can hear in the verse. At first my chorus sounded very different and a lot more laidback, but since I knew I was gonna play the track at a small venue the week after, I wanted to make it a bit more energetic. That’s how I came up with the drop.
There are lots of complex rhythms running throughout this track. How did you layer those rhythms together?
I started with a rather simple kick and snare pattern and I just kept stacking percussive layers on top of that initial layer I had untill I came up with the drumloop you can hear in the track. I didn’t use any loops or anything everything you hear in the track comes from single samples stacked on top of eachother, I guess that gave me a lot of rhytmic freedom aswell.
What are your favorite tools and sounds to use in your productions?
Xfer Serum, Xfer Serum and Xfer Serum. Honestly, Serum is all I ever use. For the E piano I used a plugin called Lounge Lizard. As for effects I mainly use Waves Audio plugins, I bought their gold bundle wich comes with a lot of great stuff like the J37 tape saturator and the Veq series aswell as some neat compressors.
Please tell us about the composition for this track: how many layers of chords, melodies and samples did you use?
That’s a good one, a lot I guess haha. The song has well over 500 tracks (including automation) 70 of those are drums and I used about 20 tracks for chords and melodies. The rest of the tracks is mostly automation and filler sounds. oh and I used 72 mixer tracks in total.
Who are your biggest heroes in music production, and how do they inspire you?
My biggest inspiration is probably Daft Punk, mostly for sentimental reasons because I’ve started listening to them when I was about four years old I think. They’re the guys that got me into electronic music.
Are you coming from a DJ background? Please tell us your story as a musician.
Well noone in my family has a musical ear or anything, my parents and their parent never played an instrument and most of them dont really care about music either. My father likes music a lot though, he’s the one that introduced me to Daft Punk when I was younger but also to The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kleeer, Breakwater, The Brothers Johnson and many more. I started making music myself when I was about 15 I think, with no musical background whatsoever.
Will you continue making tracks like this one – is this a style that’s true to your artistic vision, or a happy surprise that you made it? We’d love to know what you think about this track.
I think I will make more songs like 4oF O U R, I’m really happy with the outcome and I really liked writing it aswell. But mostly I just write what’s in my head.
What would be a dream goal for you as a musician?
Well kind of the usual really, my goal is to get famous and tour all over the world. I know it sounds cliche but that’s what I’ve always dreamt of.
