Jack Antonoff says that the key to producing Manchild, Sabrina Carpenter’s 2025 hit, was working out how to blend two noticeably different ‘feels’, and that two vintage tape delay units helped him to do it.
“The feel of a song is not only what people play, but it’s how you mix them together,” Antonoff tells Mix with Masters in a new Behind the Track video. “And this was such a delicate balance of that”.
On Manchild, adds the producer, “the two main feels [are] the LinnDrum, which is as straight as can be, and then this galloping swung thing on top of it which kind of pushes and pulls in different directions.”
He’s not wrong - the drum machine beat and rolling snare part he plays almost sound like they’re competing with each other, but Antonoff believes that “the space between is where the magic happens.”
To help him find that magic, Antonoff turned to a pair of highly sought-after ‘60s classics: the Watkins Copicat tape delay and Binson Echorec, which creates its delay effect using a rotating metal drum.
In the video, we see him first running the LinnDrum beat through the Copicat, which he likes because “you can literally fuck with the tape”. After getting properly hands-on with the machine, he turns to the Binson to warp and twist the pattern even further.
“This is how I started to make this track feel like something that wasn't just coming from a place where you know it's coming from,” Antonoff explains. “And when you start doing things like this, it informs everything.”
The producer says that the key question he asked himself was “How can I play machines like they're instruments? How do I play these machines the same way I play a piano or a guitar?”
Antonoff points to the fact that “There was like a time not that long ago when people thought that the electric guitar was like a machine and a complete bastardisation of the wooden [acoustic] guitar. And then slowly people just put so much humanity into it that we don't think about it that way anymore. And I see automation that way and I see this kind of gear that way.”
One of Antonoff’s aims with this approach is to “make things feel like they could have only happened in that moment.” He describes his methods as “like the modern version of recording the room,” and “what instruments sound like being manipulated by a person in real-time”.
It’s this creative “chaos” that sits at the heart of Manchild as opposed to a complex instrumental arrangement. “Most of the sonic information is really just coming from the Juno,” Antonoff confirms; specifically, a Juno-60. That includes the syncopated bass and chords.
There are other elements, of course, such as violins, but even the vocal arrangement is relatively simple, with no doubling of Carpenter’s lead part in the verses and just a stack of four in the choruses.
But Antonoff believes that “having just a few things going on” and then processing them creatively leaves space for interpretation.
“I think that leaves the ability for myself when I'm listening and other people when they're listening to imagine it bigger than it actually was,” he argues.
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