I went over to Donald's studio, didn't really know what was going to happen that day, or
what was going to come out of it.
We were just chilling and then Donald started playing drums.
He was like, "Yeah, I have this beat.
Let's just play this drum beat," and I was like, "Okay, yeah."
We had all the instruments spread out in the whole room, in the whole studio, and just
went from one to another to another, hearing ideas and basically just recording a bunch
of tracks on top of each other.
That was kind of the seed of the idea, that was sort of the first of Redbone kind of started.
There was a time before we started on that album where I started listening to, Donald
sent me a bunch of Funkadelics albums.
I hadn't really experienced Funkadelics.
I was more kind of raised off of jazz and blues.
I didn't really experience that 70s psychedelic music so it's all very organic.
Just how instruments sounded back then.
I think that was just something we wanted to capture with our music.
The song structure, the three choruses are uneven bars.
The first chorus is six bars, three chords, but the second chorus is seven bars.
In my Ableton right now is just the drums that Donald did.
The first sound that kind of opens up the song is this little Mellotron.
You have that and a kick.
Then you have the Rhodes.
Going into the pre-chorus, little spooky.
I always dreamt of slapping a bass in a song, and I finally got to do it now.
Here, D minor.
Then we go to the synth base, and then we have a second base sound.
Then we have the synth block.
Now we get to the guitar part.
Playing this vintage Telecaster.
This is a guitar pedal that I got.
It's a 1960s Maestro, and it has these amazing sounds.
Here's the clean signal.
Then for Redbone.
To make it a little cooler, I added this EchoBoy triplet delay, 8 milli triplet.
I'm going to record this, this little kind of like organ.
Donald started singing out ideas for the verse, and he sang this line and he stopped.
And I kept hearing that.
It's kind of like a response to what he was singing.
I have this cool Clavinet part.
It kind of reminds me of almost like a brass thing.
It goes ...
Then to the glockenspiel.
I added this kind of vocal thing for the base.
It goes on with a slap on my base.
I was just like, I need to add this, I need to do this sound when I'm slapping it.
You can't really hear it, you know.
There was an idea of how to make the outro play around with this idea of having a major
chord in there.
It's basically this choir note that holds just a major third and a minor third, it goes
between those intervals.
Minor third.
The melody that came out of that was for our melody.
I'm using the same Maestro pedal with a fuzz tone.
There's also an octave underdone.
There's a little synth element in this.
This is actually Oddity.
It's just made by GFORCE.
It kind of sounds like ... I mean, I think it's mostly a mood sound.
Last thing, all right.
Somehow this melody started showing up.
Put a little chorus on it, and some distortion.
Doubling it.
Donald was like, "Yeah, we should also have this little piano at the end, to make it a
little bit more classic."
That's the end.
There we go, guys.
Why I really enjoy film scoring is because
is that depending on different genres of the film,
I get to do different genres of music.
Before I met Donald, I hadn't really done a lot of hip hop before.
It was such a challenge.
That's what I really love.