Prior to 2012, brothers Howard and Guy Lawrence were, by their own admission, best described as just one of many up-and-coming electronic dance outfits, but their act, Disclosure, was about to go global…
During their latter school years, Howard and Guy had both studied music and music technology, but had different influences.
Guy was in thrall to the classical greats, particularly JS Bach and Debussy, but also developed a passion for Detroit-based production and rap. Meanwhile, Howard was drawn to funk and soul for his own listening pleasure.
Armed with a copy of Logic Pro, the two brothers started deconstructing tracks that they had heard, creating their own unique sonic brand with further influence from Detroit techno, garage and 2-step.
It was to prove a mighty combination, particularly when combined with their meeting a then-barman and part-time singer called Sam Smith.
Their first collaboration proved it to be a winning partnership. The single Latch launched all involved into the stratosphere. Its success made the Disclosure brothers major players, both in their own right and as hired hands for remixing and production duties. Sam Smith fared fairly well too, launching an incredibly successful solo career.
One of the most extraordinary facts about Latch is that the entire track was produced and created using Logic Pro, and for the most part, Logic plugins.
That means Logic compressors, Logic synths, Logic delays…you get the idea!
As Guy explained via the Disclosure YouTube channel, this feat proves that you can make a hit using just the core content from a package like Logic. Some users can be a little ‘snobby’ about bundled DAW plugins, but let’s be honest: when put to work by professional users, they’re as good as anything else.
The drums of Latch are a case in point; Guy’s drum production weapon-of-choice was the exceptionally flexible drum plugin called Ultrabeat. A drum synth of sorts, Ultrabeat allows the creation of unique drum sounds, using on-board oscillators and modulatory architecture, with the added capacity to employ samples.
The kick drum is generated by an oscillator within Ultrabeat. The snare and claps alternate within the song (snare on beat two, claps on beat four) and are both sample-orientated, but still triggered within Ultrabeat.
“We thought Latch was too weird for the radio and not clubby enough for the clubs,” Guy told Billboard “It’s in 6/8 time — not even 4/4, which is house’s tempo.”
There are also lots of strange and unique sounds, which Guy played around with in order to make them more unique. Some of this was just simple transposition, but nonetheless, it moves a sample away from its original form, giving it an entirely fresh quality.
While Ultrabeat provides its own onboard sequencer, all the drum sounds were triggered over MIDI, in the context of Logic’s main arrange page.
The drums were then treated, both individually and as a bussed sum, with nothing more than Logic’s own compressor plugin, although some other plugins have been adopted, such as the Logic Space Designer reverb; this convolution reverb plugin provides the long reverberated tail for one of the claps, thanks to the stock ‘Gymnasium’ setting, which was further tweaked to Disclosure’s taste.
The carefully conceived rises and falls work to create the impact of the climaxes and the rising intensity of the builds.
For this, Guy used a humble Korg Monotron - a synth of sorts which is so cheap, it may well have been a Christmas stocking present one year!
Essentially just an oscillator in a small box, it is responsible for the pitch tremolo sound that we hear just before we hit the chorus.
Moving to the sample domain, the classic opening vocal sample, is often described as the word ‘Never’. It's actually culled from Fairplay by Zed Bias, and is a stretched form of the word ‘Another’. Who knew?
One area of the song that has often been the subject of intense debate online is the overall key of the song, as well as descriptions of the chords.
The brothers were even slightly confused about this themselves, which is hardly surprising, because there is a lot to unpick. So, they got in touch with musical supremo Jacob Collier to get his view. He came back to them, revealing that the song was in the key of ‘Banger’!
Nice compliment, but not much use!
The brothers seem convinced that the song is in F minor, however there is an association between this key and Bb minor, which is the overall key that we will put our money on if we had to hazard a guess for a diatonic home.
This isn't based on speculation, but the fact that while much of the song doesn't have a bassline or sound (which would provide some very useful clues about key and tonality) when the bass sound does appear in the chorus, it always returns to Bb, with a familiar pull toward a II-V-I cadence point, which is a time-honoured device that has been used for many hundreds of years, from Bach to the Beatles!
The use of Cb in the bass line, at the end of each 4-bars in the chorus, could be considered a replacement for chord V (Fm), using a technique drawn from jazz described as tritone substitution. As the name suggests, the note Cb is a substitute for F, which is a tritone away.
Turning our attention to the chords, and particularly the chords in the verse section, this is far more complicated to describe.
Thanks to Guy’s video breakdown, we are able to see the exact notes being played on a MIDI grid, which (in preparation for this article) we took the time to notate, in the hope that we could shed some light.
The chords themselves were written by Howard, and – by his own definition – are unplayable. He composed them while placing Logic in Cycle mode, and playing around with notes-on-screen, moving them around, until he had something that he felt was unique and exceptional. We have to agree, although the important ingredient here is that there are lots of note clusters.
Using a fairly broad brushstroke, we could describe the four chords in the verse as: Bbm7 - Fsus7 - Ab69 (no 3) - Gbsus#4 add9. Phew!
“We’re trying to bring class and soul into the songwriting … using jazz chords that have emotion instead of boring, stabby EDM triads,” Howard said to Billboard. “You can play Latch in a massive nightclub or cover it in a jazz ensemble”
However, and we need to make this very clear, there are so many notes in these chords, it’s difficult to place them all in a concise chord symbol setting, so if you were going to try and replicate this tune, you would want to notate it perfectly on a score, rather than rely just on chord symbols, simply for accuracy. However, this could be considered a starting point. It's important to note that this is not to be regarded as gospel! As with so much music theory, it is open to debate.
One thing that we can say for sure though, is that we love the lusciousness of the pad synths that are playing these chords, particularly as the filter gradually opens up during the build towards the chorus.
The sounds used here are a composite of two layers; firstly, they use the Logic synth plugin called ESP Polysynth. We have to say, this is one of our favourites too, despite being quite an old synth in the Logic arsenal. Its adopted architecture is very similar to a Roland Juno, which might also explain why it is doubled by a real Juno, both of which employ Logic’s Chorus plugin to thicken the texture.
One of the most surprising sounds in the track is the enormous bass sound which enters as we hit the chorus.
This probably won't come as a surprise now, but this sound is also generated by Logic’s ESP polysynth, albeit with a healthy dose of compression and sub. Once again, it just goes to show what you can do with basic plugins, and a little bit of creative inspiration.
Of course, we cannot leave this song without mentioning the exceptional vocal performance from Sam Smith. Captured using a fairly high-end microphone (Telefunken or Neumann, according to Guy), the vocal is tracked-up considerably as the song builds. It helps that Sam Smith has quite an exceptional vocal range, shifting into very high vocal territory, particularly during the chorus.
Given Disclosure’s obvious talents for writing and production, it was clearly a matter of time before they made it big, but Latch acted as a springboard. Its heavy radio and club play, coupled with YouTube and streaming popularity, secured Disclosure a position in the big leagues.
“We weren’t trying to make a hit, but it became one,” Guy said in a Twitch stream to fans. “I almost felt like I had impostor syndrome - people would be telling me how great the mix is, and how analogue it was, and in my mind I’m thinking… it’s definitely just Logic plugins.”
