It’s very easy to go cheesy with a piano
but I was just doing this [plays piano sound] and I was like, “Is this good?
I don’t know if we can do something with a piano.”
But I was like, “Sam, do you like this?” And she was like, “Yeah, it’s actually really really dope.”
It’s almost like Jenga but it’s reversed.
You try to add a thing and it breaks it so you take it out.
And it was very clear with this verse that we wrote that it was exactly what it needed to be.
To respond to how stripped and simple it was, we would just have a crazy hard drum moment.
Like this one is very percussive and aggressive.
And then this one which gives it like a boom under it.
We brought in a snare here [plays snare sound].
I wanted a really percussive, intense snare.
And then we added in the hats [plays hat sound].
That is just a chop of her saying “Down” into this sampler here.
And it’s also as a chopped loop.
So that’s in here. The phrase is just mapped out there so I have all the syllables.
There is the piano hit that happens here[play’s clip of track].
The reverb tail zig zags from here to here [play’s clip of track].
I wanted that reverb to continue and change notes so I sampled the back part of the piano
so after the hit the reverb decay and put it in a sampler and you get this thing [play’s sound clip].
There was kind of a build but it’s the lightest of builds
and it was using a few different sounds that I like to play with.
One is this sandpaper sound I got from a ASMR youtube video.
So you have that and that’s what happened here.
It starts very low.
And then the next thing that I added is these pens clicks that I just recorded myself.
They actually show up in a few Marian Hill songs. Just a little more interesting because it’s real.
Those build and fade up.
And then in that second chorus finding subtle ways to make it just hit a little harder
and I use this glitch thing here to give us that fun effect on the main piano.
Adding the cymbal crash on the down beat.
There are three tracks of the piano going on and I have one pan hard right and one pan hard left
so basically they can exist with the drums because the drums are huge.
Oh, and the clap. The clap comes in. Little easy clap track.
I was in a studio in LA that had a piano in it, like an actual grand piano
‘cause it’s so rare to get a studio with one of those that you can record
and so that’s where you get this little figure [plays piano keys].
We actually had to run all of the drums through reasons magical master compressor that I love and adore
before we went into the pro tools mix just to get the exact sound right for those drums that I love.
To me the production is the songwriting as much as the lyric.
Does it make me want to move?
Can I listen to this on loop for awhile?