Under The Hood... "Closer"

Track breakdown of "Closer" with a download of the Ableton Session.

The first of a series I’ll be testing out: Under The Hood. Keeping it as brief as possible, I’m gonna breakdown the core elements of the track, how it was made and provide the Ableton project file to download and inspect – plugins included. If you don’t have the proper plugs, you can at least see what was used. I am missing a lot of the plugins too.

If there is a track you’d like to see me dissect, lemme know.

Closer

made: 2015 | released: June 2016 | label: SOBO

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Drums

Made of up one-shot drum machine samples sequenced in Ableton’s Drum Rack. Most of the samples seem to be from the Boss Dr Rhythm series. I also applied the MPC Swing 16 to the beat to give it some groove and tediously adjusted the velocity on each hit to give it a live feel. The additional shakers and sleigh bells are just basic loops I ran through delay and other time based FX. In 2015 my processing repertoire consisted of free VSTs and Ableton stock plugs. So the drums on this track are mixed with stock VSTs – very minimal eq and saturation was used, and I slapped a Satin plug on the drum buss at the end for some glue.

Synths

The main pad is a preset on the Korg Monopoly VST called “Analog Tenor Sax”, that I played a series of major/minor 7th chords on loop until it felt right. Nothing fancy! The rest of the synths were all midi sequenced in ableton, then fed to the DX7 I owned at the time for bass, guitar plucks, lead melody, and the breakdown piano solo. When I tracked the audio out of the synth it went direct to my soundcard (no processing), and I was obsessed with flicking the mod/pitch wheel while tracking the audio back then, so that gave it the squiggly sound. I think I was using a Duet 2 those days.

Lead

The lead melody was written by playing the chords on loop and jamming along to it, and eventually I found a loop I liked out of what I have recorded. The melody in the breakdown section was one long live take that I edited a little bit, but for the most part it’s a live jam.

Additional FX/Processing

As I mentioned before, I wasn’t working with much in the gear/VST department back then, so almost everything used was free or stock plugs. I was running with a rudimentary auxiliary FX flow back then it seems, where I don’t tend to use Send/Return tracks much these days, as I like to run time-based FX through the same buss processing as the original audio and Ableton adds latency when re-routing return tracks to other busses (they should figure out how to fix this). Also, zero mix buss processing, just some grouped fx on the synth/drum busses to add some glue. This project file was the final mix.

Project File

if you’ve got any additional questions hmu!

p