Creating The Scratch Track

ALOT happened this week,

Towards the end of last week we started to construct our scratch track. We had figured out the main concept and had all of musical elements written out at this point, so now it was more of choosing the right samples, synth sounds and instruments.

I thought that the biggest part of the song or at least be part with the most work that needed to be done to it would be the drop (in this case the instrumental section after the build up). I expected this would be an area that would need some time put into it as sometimes a lot of elements and layers are needed to make a drop sound full and not too empty / dull. Although our original scratch track was originally going to be based off of “Mama” by Jonas blue, I thought that the concept we created sounded more like a track called “Hey” by Fais featuring Afrojack.

I really liked the idea of that sort of Deep House style drop, and I thought it would also be easier to achieve as they are relatively simple (compared to lets say a complextro dubstep drop with a bunch of different unique synths). Although Hey came out in 2016, this sound can still be heard in a lot of pop songs in 2018, for instance the top two songs on Shazam top 100 in Australia at the moment are: In My Mind by Dynoro & Gigi D’Agostino and Body by Loud Luxury both have deep house style, plucky bass sounds.

In order to create the Bass Sound in our scratch track I went through the factory presets on Sylenth1, a third-party synthesiser, and found sound that was similar to what I was looking for. I then decided to tweak this preset by turning down the decay and changing some other parameters to alter the filter to give it more of a song like that heard on Hey. I then opened Serum, which is my current favourite synth, and went into some of the deep house preset banks (third party preset settings that people make purchasable to create certain sounds) I have to find sounds to layer the main bass synth with.

I was going through my collection of samples and had noticed that a lot of the samples from the Sounds of KSHMR sample packs were very clean and modern sounding. I thought that this would be good for a modern pop record by achieving a cleaner sound with good quality, pop sounding samples. The group and I decided on using a dance hall type drum pattern with offbeat snares which is a pretty trending sound in a lot of pop songs that have come out recently. This is often used by artists such as Major Lazer and DJ snake. We also included some tropical house percussions and chants to make the drums a little more interesting.

We really liked the sound were Jonas blue uses thick, layered piano chords in the breakdown which builds to a drop. I discovered in the KSHMR sample pack a bunch of claps under the category “church claps”, these were basically a group of human claps that were recorded together with a long tail of reverb. This sounds as if it were a choir a Gospel Choir clapping in a church. We really liked this sound and wanted to implement it worth it piano chords to create a memorable rhythm part in the song.

A guitar VST (Virtual Instrument) has also been used to play some of the chords in a rhythmic pattern in the background, this is done so that the high end strum sounds can still be heard, creating some movement in the mix. I had watched a video of The Chainsmokers going through how they created their song roses, and they mentioned a technique that they had taken from Avicii’s hit song, Wake me up where the the guitar track is split into two and panned hard left and right of the stereo mix to achieve a really wide sounding guitar, so I implemented this into the scratch and liked the sound of it.

An interesting thing that I have learnt in this process is actually how much of a role the sound effects play in this song to glue things together, and come to think of it after starting my track teardown i’ve realised how many sound effects are used in pop music. If you disable the FX tracks on the scratch track it sounds so much more empty than it does with it enabled. Carissa and I used the time in class to finish off the main idea of the scratch track and she created a reese bass in the synth Xfer Serum, and then we shared this with our artist.

Next week we do our first recording session, hopefully all goes well so we can start the mixing stage.

References Avicii - Wake Me Up (Official Video). (2013). [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcrbM1l_BoI

Disclosure - Latch feat. Sam Smith (Official Video). (2012). [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93ASUImTedo

Dynoro & Gigi D’Agostino - In My Mind. (2018). [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9P_qUnMaFg

French Montana - Unforgettable (Major Lazer Remix) (Audio) ft. Swae Lee. (2017). [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4_rxtEngOc

Jonas Blue - Mama ft. William Singe. (2017). [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPTfXwPf_HM

Kygo - Firestone (Official Video) ft. Conrad Sewell. (2015). [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Sc-ir2UwGU

Loud Luxury feat. brando - Body (Official Lyric Video). (2018). [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IetIg7y5k3A

Sounds of KSHMR Vol. 3. (2018). [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAsmo9czaKo

Syfer Music. (2018). [Complextro/Breaks/Dubstep] - Synthion - Quick Attack [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTMfovXjCDI&feature=youtu.be&t=52

The Chainsmokers on making Roses – The Track. (2018). [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlUGRbPLn-4

What is a Reese Bass? "DnB" Tutorial and Theory. (2016). [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9A-FqZV5ow&t=44s