Growing up in Haiti, there were all these different genres of music that I was hearing.
But then at the same time, I knew that maybe the rest of the world didn’t have a chance
to hear it.
The instruments, the rhythms, the energy…
It’s all very distinctly Haitian.
This track captures, I think, the essence of what the streets in Haiti sound like.
The sounds, the texture, the life…
That’s what this was really all about was just capturing that moment.
‘Cause that’s what I felt.
I never wanted to do music full time.
I never thought it was an option.
I was going to be a doctor.
So I went to school for medicine.
I was a bio major in college.
When I was 15, I had my first mash-ups and edits that I was doing.
Then I started doing bootleg remixes of different tracks that I liked.
It just kinda like continued on from that point ‘til I was a sophomore in college.
I just put out some collab tracks with a few DJs that I was a really big fan of.
One of them was Dirty South.
So he signed me and a bunch of crazy things just happened all at once.
During the process, I was just keeping in touch with my advisor, my biology advisor.
I didn't want to just throw my school and everything away because to me, I felt like
being a doctor was a responsibility.
It was a chance for me to really give back all of the blessings that I got in my life
in Haiti.
When I realized that music, I could do that, but on a way bigger scale.
I could reach so many more people than if I was a doctor, it made sense.
The school was like, "Do it."
The track really started two years ago.
I was working on a project with The Beat Making Lab teaching music production, teaching songwriting.
It was a week long trip.
And I would take my phone and just record random things like claps, the kids playing
in the field.
And then over the course of that time, I got in touch with J. Balvin through a mutual friend,
Marissa from Apple Music.
And we ended up talking and he sent me back his idea like a few days later.
It was crazy.
The first thing was this guitar line.
It’s supposed to be like a different take on Compas music.
That was something that I hummed on the way to the studio.
I got the idea and put it in a voice note.
Then when I came back here, I played it on guitar and then pitched it down to get it
like that weird watery sound.
The next thing for the track was like putting the rhythm in.
The way I tried to set up the arrangement of the track was like, every eight bars, four
to eight bars, there would be one additional element so you never had too much happening
all at once.
It was these live claps I recorded on my phone.
We’re gonna do this rhythm.
You hear the metronome cause it was actually really hard to get everything on beat so we
just kept the metronome in.
And then added more hi-def claps so it filled it out.
What I did is I took guitar that I recorded on my phone, the same melody from that voice
note melody, I played it out on guitar.
So now you got rhythm and the music.
The next that comes in is actually the vocal.
The vocal dropped in at that section.
It filters down and then slowly builds up with a kick as well.
The filters opening up and you hear more of the sound coming.
But it’s also not a drop in the traditional sense where like it doesn’t feel like purely
electronic and you're like, “This is an EDM song.”
I wanted it to be a balance of both.
And I also put analog noise, like tape noise, as if it was resampled.
I played out one note.
And I put a pitch shifter on it so it went from low to high.
These horns, they started out as feedback on the speaker when I was plugging my phone
in to the speaker.
But it had a tone to it.
I had a note and then it stuck in my head and I was like, “That’s a really sick thing."
So I sampled it and put it into Ableton and was messing around with the notes.
Pitched that.
What I would use is like Simpler.
Simpler just lets you like put any sound into this interface and it lets you play it out
like a piano.
So we can literally just do it again.
We can take this sound.
So just drop that in.
You just like select the part you want.
So I was like, “How do I take that aggressiveness and still have melody and for it to sound good?"
And my friend Alan was with us for the project so I asked him, “Could you play it on your
saxophone but like, play it loud so it sounds distorted and it sounds weird?”
Dropped his take into a bunch of little sections so I took off a lot of the dead space.
It just gave it that choppiness and that swing.
And then one by one, I just added different effects to it.
This distortion, Decapitator, is like…
It gives it like a grittiness.
It makes it feel like really aggressive.
And I just EQ’ed it, added like multiband compression to it, like OTT.
It’s a really good multiband compression.
The horn comes in with the drop and the drop has the drums filled out.
So it has a kick drum, some snares and the whole rhythm of the song comes together the
first time you hear the drop.
There’s like a Rara band.
I recorded a Rara band but I wanted to find a way to take those sounds and then mix them
with hip hop.
There’s no bass but there’s all these drums.
And that’s what a Rara band is.
When you hear a Rara band, it’s a horn, it’s drums, and it’s people’s voices
like yelling, foot stomps…
So I sampled all these different sounds that represented a Rara band.
And then mixed them with like an EDM kick and the claps from earlier
And put that all together.
I think that’s what made the swing of this so cool.
And it feels alive.
So it’s like a wall of sound.
Crazy amount of sounds.
For me, the process is like having so many things to work with, the craziness and it’s
like through that chaos, I'm able to hear these little moments that feel right.
Going through every element and pulling back on certain things.
So it’s just like the balance of everything and through that chaos, there’s always beauty.
After we had made “Positivo,” J. Balvin, he called me and he was like
“There's a chance that there might be something with the World Cup."
"Would it be cool with you if that track we did, we could use it?"
And I was like, “Why are you even calling me man?”
It’s just a blessing ‘cause I always hoped there would be an audience around the world for this.
There’s been a few world cup songs with Colombian artists and Haitian artists, like
Shakira and Wyclef.
It was just like déjà vu to see it happen again with “Positivo.”