Calvin Harris’s latest single, Blessings - featuring Clementine Douglas - has certainly been making its share of headlines this week.
After celebrating the fact the song had become his 45th Top 10 UK, Harris was swiftly in the sights of Chicane’s Nick Bracegirdle, who alleged in a video that Blessings sounds rather too similar to his 1996 trance hit, Offshore.
This prompted Harris to respond with his own video, in which he forcefully rejected the accusation of any kind of plagiarism, while also suggesting that Offshore itself may have been inspired by Tangerine Dream’s Love On A Real Train, which was released in 1984.
But this isn’t the only Blessings-centric video that Harris has posted: he also put out an Instagram reel in which he demonstrated how the keynote guitar riff in the song - the one that drops about a minute in - was recorded and produced.
“So basically, I became obsessed with the Grateful Dead last summer and I bought this guitar which was the guy’s favourite guitar, apparently, for rhythm stuff,” he begins, showing off what looks like a Martin dreadnought.
“I also bought that bass [points camera at Music Man Stingray] but I didn’t use it.”
Good to know, but what we’re really keen to learn is how that Martin was recorded.
“I set up these mics - you’ve got the condenser in the middle and then you’ve got these two for a nice stereo pair,” confirms Harris.
Mics positioned and acoustic guitar in hand it was time for the DJ/producer to get down to business. But given his lack of aptitude on the instrument, he decided not to try and play the whole riff in one go.
“I sat in this chair here and I recorded - ‘cos I’m not the best player, let’s be honest - I recorded one note at a time,” he admits. “I’ll show you now.”
Harris goes on to recreate what he did - “I always want to start on the one, for energy,” he says - but is fully aware that what he’s just played doesn’t sound particularly impressive. “You’re thinking, ‘that sounds like shit; it can’t be that, can it?’” he asks, with rhetorical flourish.
But it is, and that’s because the real magic happens inside Logic Pro, where we get to see the plugin chain that Harris used. We think we can spot a Valhalla VintageVerb, for that old-school digital hardware reverb sound, and he pulls up an EQ or two and the Waves Smack Attack transient designer for some extra bite.
And this isn’t just one guitar track: we get to see a whole stack of parts - all arranged note by note and pitched to create the riff that we hear on the finished track.
And while traditionalists might quibble with Harris’s methods, you can’t argue with the result.
That said, the video did manage to faux irk another famous producer, Diplo, who jokingly commented that "playing one note pitching it everywhere and pretending you know how to play guitar is my trick." Touché.
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