It all began with like a dream.
I was surrounded by clouds.
It's this huge enchantment type of melodic thing that was just stuck inside my head.
And I hear this angelic tone.
I'm like, "What the hell is this shit? I need to put this down."
And I wake up, boom.
I first started working on music when I was 13, 14 years old.
My dad is a jazz musician, part-time, and he taught me and my brother how to produce
at a super early age.
It went from us just making beats on the computer to me playing drums and then playing guitar.
Then my dad sat me down and was like, "I want you to listen to Tribe Called Quest."
"I want you to listen to Busta Rhymes. I want you to listen to all these people."
"Ignore all that shit that you see on TV."
I'm actually super thankful for that, because it gave me the shtick I needed to guide me
on the right path of what I wanted to do as far as my sound.
So when I started with "Fallen," I wanted to express everything I heard in the dream.
I started putting down just this keyboard part with this really crappy-sounding choir.
Then I had the idea of using my own voice and just stacking it.
Took a vocal transformer over top of the pitch correction that I put down, and it actually
transformed my voice into a more angelic tone.
Stacked on top of everything.
I got all these multiple takes.
And then put in this choir over top too.
That’s literally just all my voice in just patches.
Bass is definitely the key component to actually giving the song some type of dreamy texture
to it, and probably be the most melodic section of the song.
I just used the ES2.
From there, we did the key parts.
They’re actually separated into six different pieces.
I wanted them to have different elements.
I think the piano adds a lot of strength to the track, because if you just had the choir
in there, it wouldn't give it that churchy, soulful feel.
You know?
As far as the drums, I definitely started with the kick first.
Logic has like, really beautiful-sounding hi-hats.
Next thing was the snares.
I kinda wanted the main snare to sound fake in a sense, and combined it with a snare that
was like a rim shot.
There's also a shaker to top everything off.
Now it sounds like something you're listening to at midnight.
You can listen to that probably by itself and that shit will be the best thing to fucking
freestyle off of.
So then, I took the main part that I made with the piano, the choirs, everything that
you heard, sped it up.
And then I took it to the next level, I put some string instruments underneath.
So the idea that I had in order to level everything in the way that I wanted it to sound.
I took the choir part and the piano, combined them both into just one stream line of audio track.
Through that, I side-chained the kick and the snare to level off.
Added a few effects.
Kramer Tape, little bit of distortion to kinda make it sound super muddy.
And that way, it kind of sounded more like a sample.
You know?
Than like me just doing this by myself.
And now with all the pieces together it sounds like this.
I got connected with Jaden through my brother, actually.
He just fell in love with the beat and told me personally that it's emotionally what he
needed to hear at that time in his life.
He just put his heart and soul into what he was saying on it.
A lot of people have reached out to me and said that there's something about the beat
that they feel emotionally has impacted them.
The thing about it is, everything I personally want to put out there to the world, I want
my kids' kids to be able to listen to and get the same exact feeling as I did when I
heard it.
That's the reason why we even make music is for it to last.
If it doesn't sound like it can last and can affect people for generations to come, then
there's no reason for you to make it.