Tell me about how you attacked the recording of the album.
Well I write mostly everything, so it’s mostly me, and Jeremy joins us in the live thing. And he obviously has input for sure but I do a lot of the writing. I enjoy it, I write music every day, and I’m writing stuff for Big G all the time. So I don’t know, the way I approach the whole Big G thing in general is I’m constantly trying to learn something new every day, you know, in terms of writing or in terms of producing and stuff like that, and the sounds I’m making and all that stuff. So I’m trying to learn different techniques, and then I try to incorporate them into a song, and kind of go at it like that. So I’m trying to learn but at the same time I’m trying to write songs that really have elements of…where you’d go see a DJ, and there’s a buildup and a drop that hits really hard, you know I’m trying to develop things like that in our tunes but still have more of the elements of melody. You know there’s a lot more melody in my tunes than some other electronic stuff that’s going on.
So when I’m in there writing in the process of making the album, I didn’t go “Here’s ‘A Place Behind the Moon,’ this is the title and now I’m gonna write all the tracks to make it,” you know, it just sort of fell into its own in that way. But it’s kind of a process…writing to grow as a band. It’s different every time. A lot of the time I really start with a beat mostly, start with the drums and work with a beat and get a groove goin’ that I really like. And then I go in and sometimes I’ll do some sax stuff, try to write the line, or sometimes do some bass or I’ll just like get the Rhodes out and just like go through some chord changes and stuff that I like and then start developing.
I try to really get what I’m hearing in my head and see how can I get this out of my head out here to my ears and make it sound right. So maybe I’ll be hearing an arc and I’ll try to go in and make the arc, and then the melody line, and then piece everything together from there.
Give me a case study, if you will. Take a tune like “Limelight” and detail the creative process that brings that tune out of your head and into workable form.
Let’s see, what did I do with that. With “Limelight” there’s kind of like this funky clav. So I start with the drums and then there’s kind of like this funky clav in there that I started working with. And then I think I went to the bassline you know, and then I went to just the regular keyboard.
Usually when I have a big groove like that setup, I’ll have like, pretty much everything in there but a melody, and it’ll just be looping. And it’ll be hours just like doing either the melody on my horn, just goin’ through ‘til I find something that really latches on to me. Or I’ll just sit there and play the keyboards, and play a lead synth part ‘til I find something that really hits home with me. I’ll have like 5 or 6 different melodies. I’ll be like “Okay, I like this one, I kind of like this one…” but usually I know the one that’s right when I really love it. And that’s what I like to do with the melodies too, when it’s very sing-able, you know when you’re leaving the club still singing melodies. So those simpler melodies and things like that are something you wanna have so people can really latch onto something.
Can you describe Alex B’s role in the making of the album?
Alex also did Wide Awake. He mixed and mastered Wide Awake and did the same thing with this release. He taught me everything, so much stuff about just producing in general. And he’s just got great tools, he’s got a great ear, he’s got great everything to really mix stuff. And I love the way that a lot of his stuff is mixed and mastered, so you know I really essentially just gave all the tracks to him and he just went in and mixed it how he heard it, and then mastered it. And mastering really just puts that shine on it, makes it sound like a real record. So I pretty much mixed everything how I heard it, and then I played everything for him, and then he got a hold of it, mixed it down, just really cleaned it up, and then mastered it, and we’re just really excited about the way that it sounds, and he did a great job on it. He’s the man, you know we do a lot of different stuff together. We just got off a little bit of touring with him, and so we’re super stoked about the way he made the album sound. It’s always great to work with him.
Where did you physically record?
At my house. I have a studio there, I work out of there, I can record there, and pretty much do whatever I need to get done.
Your remix of Chiddy Bang’s “Opposite of Adults (Kids)” has also been getting a lot of attention recently. How did that opportunity come about, and how has that opened doors for you as musician?
Well what happened is we have some friends who just started this project called ‘Mansions on the Moon,’ and essentially it’s kind of like an electro-pop kind of thing. Actually a couple guys from The Pnuma Trio started this thing, and they put together a mixtape that was presented by Diplo. Diplo did a remix and Deadmau5 did a remix and this guy Xaphoon whose Chiddy Bang’s like producer’s drummer, and us, and a few other people. So we all got together on this remix album and they heard our stuff, and then they met our manager and blah, blah, blah. So anyways they were like, “You should do a remix of our ‘Opposite of Adults (Kids)’ tune,” and they gave me the stems and I just gave it a shot, and they really liked it.
I was extremely excited because I really love that tune and I really like Chiddy and all the beats and stuff that they’re doing. I think that stuff is really fresh. So I was stoked. You know I just kind of tried to put my thing on it and do what we do in Big G. And I just kind of changed up the verse a little differently to make it a little more like a hip-hop track and kind of threw in the chorus kind of thing that we do a lot with Big G.
And fortunately they liked it and you know our manager asked for a quote for the remix and he (Xaphoon Jones) was like ‘Big Gigantic just got your girlfriend pregnant.’ We used the track on Hypetrack and it’s been getting a great response. We have a ton of downloads and it’s definitely getting the same kind of attention that our “I Need a Dollar” remix has and so that’s good. We’re always trying to do more stuff with more hip-hop artists because we’re an instrumental band, it’s like we can do a lot of different stuff you know.
No Comments comments associated with this post