For this project I wanted to write and produce a 90s sounding dance track, combining elements from Acid House, Piano House, Breakbeat Rave and Eurodance. To achieve this sound I used mostly hardware synthesisers, mainly the Behringer TD3 (TB303 Clone), Roland Boutique SH01A (SH101 Clone), Korg Monologue and Novation XIO. I combined these hardware synths with classic drum machine racks in Ableton to give me the TR808 and TR909 sounds that feature heavily in old school dance music along with a VST clone of the Korg M1. To add some extra level of old school analogue colour to the track I decided to route some of the sounds through some analogue outboard using an SSL AWS900 (mainly the G- Buss Compressor), The Distressor, and I just had to run the 303 bassline through The Culture Vulture to get that aggressive sounding distortion that I could run in parallel.

I had originally planned for this track to be an instrumental, but as the track developed I felt it needed some vocals and It needed some diva style female vocals, tying in with the 90s vibe. I contacted a session vocalist that I knew could get me the vocal performance I needed and scheduled her into the studios to record some vocals I had written. She really knocked it out the park with vocals and with a bit of vocal tuning and processing I got the perfect vocals for my track. I performed some vocoder vocals too in the verse sections as this has become one of my signature sounds and also works well with the oldschool vibe.

I plan on sending this record over to a label as a demo along side some other material I am working on and had a graphic designer put together some artwork for this track to accompany this when sending off to labels. I gave him a brief for this and how I wanted the art to look, using Peter Saville’s work for Factory Records as reference.