InMusic – the parent company of Moog Music – has donated an extensive collection of vintage synthesizers, prototype models, schematics and letters to the Bob Moog Foundation Archives.

The vast collection of 4,489 items includes a Fairlight CMI, a Synton System 3000 modular system, and a bench-model Minimoog Voyager prototype.

There are also letters and schematics from legendary synth pioneer Bob Moog's personal office files and effects, alongside rare product catalogues and industry magazines dating back decades.

The donation shines a light on Moog's personal and professional life, revealing thoughts, ideas, and providing fascinating insights into his relationships with other visionaries like Wendy Carlos and Herb Deutsch through letters of correspondence.

The Bob Moog Foundation was established in 2005 to pay tribute to the godfather of subtractive synthesis and an icon of electronic music. Moog's 1970 analogue synthesiser Minimoog is widely hailed as the most influential synth in history, sparking inspiration for a wide range of pioneering artists including Kraftwerk, Gary Numan and Parliament-Funkadelic.

The collection now consists of over 15,000 materials, preserved at the so-called 'Moogseum' in Asheville, North Carolina, where Moog lived for the final 25 years of his life.

"The Bob Moog Foundation serves as an essential steward of one of the most important legacies in electronic music," said Joe Richardson, President of Moog Music and Executive Vice President of inMusic. "We are proud to contribute these materials so they can be preserved and made accessible to researchers, educators, musicians, and fans."

The foundation's executive director Michelle Moog-Koussa added: "This donation helps solidify the Bob Moog Foundation Archives as a world-class repository for Moog and electronic music history. Every donated piece helps us tell the story of Bob's complex, indelible legacy."

Visit the Moogseum's website.

For Rogét Chahayed, every hit record begins the same way: with a musician chasing an idea. Whether he's digging through Kontakt libraries, improvising at the piano or jamming alongside fellow producers, his role is rarely to finish a song from start to finish, but to spark ideas that an artist can transform into a global hit.

It’s an approach that has made Chahayed one of modern hip-hop and pop's most trusted collaborators, and he’s developed a workflow designed to capture inspiration the second it strikes. Looking back on some of his biggest credits, he explains how both technology and collaboration have become equally important parts of his creative process.

“I began as a piano player before shifting into keyboards, but realised that there was a whole world of VSTs that I needed to get into. At first, I was just showing up to sessions with one keyboard, but then it changed to a laptop loaded with Kontakt.

“When I started making a little money, I'd go to Guitar Center, try the keyboards and find myself coming up with all these amazing ideas. I thought to myself, wow, if I had a studio with all these keyboards on a wall I’d be coming up with stuff all the time.”

Success eventually allowed Chahayed to build the studio he'd always imagined, and one that’s designed to capture spontaneous musical ideas before they slip from view. “I finally built my home studio, which is a really amazing place. I have two walls of keyboards with about 30 or 40 synths and a Steinway piano alongside a Fender Rhodes and a drum kit.

“Saying that, over the years, I've developed an amazing system with my engineer Julian Vasquez where I’ll just bring a Nord Stage 4 and my laptop, which has millions of sounds organised for easy access to strings, synths, brass, woodwinds, basses and guitars. It’s like I’m playing one of those games where you're in control of an army and you have access to this whole artillery of sounds.”

Going deeper on his working process with Vasquez, Chahayed explains: “Julian’s usually recording me 24/7, so while I'm coming up with stuff he's locking in a tempo and recording it into Logic just in case somebody hits on a moment. Then he’ll put it into Ableton and start building a session around it.

“Since we built this routine, it’s been like an indestructible weapon. We produced J Lo's album This Is Me… Now, Bruno Mars and Rosé’s APT. and Drake’s Janice STFU on this system, which is designed to capture whatever’s happening in the moment through jam sessions.”

Despite all of the technology at his fingertips, Chahayed still believes the best productions are built on rhythm rather than technical virtuosity. “I've always strived to discover what they would call the perfect loop... four bars, eight bars, four chords or whatever, but I think it's less about technique and more about rhythm. That's why I think Scott Storch is one of the greatest producers of all time - the way he approaches production is so attractive to me because his rhythm is so strong.

“When I first started making beats, I was trying to be Oscar Peterson and doing way too much noodling and riffing. Mel-Man used to say to me, ‘Hey, they teach you how to play all these notes in conservatory, but they don't teach you how to play with rhythm, and you have terrible rhythm’.

“You've got to fill the spaces in between and it's probably harder than people think to consider how you’re going to contribute to a genre or sound and insert yourself musically. The cut-and-paste approach means you’ve got to find the perfect riff for the perfect bassline or few bars because rappers are always saying something different, and the beat is just a mattress for them to float on.”

This philosophy played a key role in one of Chahayed's earliest blockbuster records: the opening of Travis Scott's Sicko Mode, which began life as an improvised late-night studio session. “It started out as a session cooked up with Hit-Boy. We're still friends today, but in this particular scenario it was just another night of going to his studio and making ideas without any aim or direction.

“On this occasion, we were at Chalice Studios in Hollywood sifting through sounds and I was looking through the Kontakt factory library and saw a sound called the Rapman Waw and thought, ‘That's a cool name for a sound’. I didn't know there was a Casio keyboard from the ‘90s called Rapman, but I pulled up the sound, played this chord and thought, whoa, I’ve never heard a crazy organ sound like that before.”

Chahayed completed the progression, layered it with bass and watched as Hit-Boy immediately jumped behind the laptop to transform the idea into the frantic, off-kilter foundation that would eventually become the opening movement of Sicko Mode.

From there, the beat took an unexpected journey before finally landing in Travis Scott's hands. “Within a month or two, he’d sent the beat to Jay-Z who held onto the Sicko Mode part one intro beat for about a year, but didn’t do anything with it.” Chahayed continues. “After that, Hit-Boy took the initiative and sent it to Travis who called him the next day to say, ‘We've got a crazy song.’ It was originally for a track he made with Drake, but I didn't hear a bounce of it until I heard Sicko Mode on the day his Astroworld LP came out.”

Throughout Chahayed’s career, not every success has happened overnight. His long-running relationship with Doja Cat stretched back years before either of them celebrated a mainstream breakthrough. We asked the producer how it all started. “I'm really grateful for my friend Yeti Beats because he’d been working with Doja since she was really young and approached me saying he’d love for me to meet an artist he was working with.

“I didn't really know who Doja was, but she loved the sounds I was playing and her vibe and approach wasn't like anything I'd ever seen. Her talent was clearly enormous and she wrote three or four songs to all the beats we'd made together in one sitting.”

That early faith was eventually rewarded, as years of collaboration culminated in the global success of 2021’s Kiss Me More. “As the years went on, I knew there was something really special there, and she had a big viral moment with the song MOOO! Fast forward to 2021 and Kiss Me More was our first big hit, which felt like a reward for all our patience, but she didn't really have many collaborators in the studio - it was just Yeti, Kurtis McKenzie and Jerry, our engineer.”

By contrast, Chahayed explains how songs destined for pop's biggest stars often take on a life of their own, evolving through countless revisions before reaching the finish line. “A good pop song can go through 14 or 15 versions. Even in the case of Bruno Mars and Rosé’s APT., we had a completely different version before Bruno got on it, but it went through a version that we thought was pretty special, although we didn't think it was going to be the global hit that it was.

“One year later, Bruno hops on it and does his thing, so we’re just planting the seeds of good songs and ideas that will either end up finding their way to a really big chart position or get stuck on a hard drive forever.”

More recently, Chahayed found himself adapting his approach for Drake, with his ideas often pared back to let the vocal take centre stage – a process that was particularly evident on Iceman standout Janice STFU.

“In the case of Drake, I’d already played the horn riff on Laugh Now Cry Later, but there was also this Janice song. We didn't hear his vocal or even know what the song was called, but we knew from our source that he liked the loop we’d sent. Basically, what I’ve noticed is that a lot of the sounds that we did for those songs got filtered to become more background.

For Chahayed, it's a reminder that a producer's job isn't to dominate a record, but to give an artist the strongest possible foundation to build upon. “If you hear the original version of Laugh Now Cry Later or Janice STFU, the beat, synths and horns are really in-your-face, but after Drake did his thing, they're used as support rather than the main riff.

“Drake’s voice is so much like an instrument that it needs support rather than to be led by a sound, so the delivery of an idea has to be big and crazy – and if they like it, they’ll take it from there and make it work for him.”

• Read more: "If I was going away on a trip and could only bring one keyboard, I’d bring that one, because I know where every sound is blindfolded": Grammy-nominated producer Rogét Chahayed on the stage keyboard he can't live without

“It's quite a strange sounding song, in a way,” says Alexis Taylor, reflecting on his band’s 2008 single Ready For The Floor. “You wouldn't really write it down as an idea: Let's have gentle falsetto vocals referencing a Batman film, while singing about a kind of brotherly connectedness – and try to be inspired by UK garage music and Prince.”

It’s this eclectic and at times eccentric mix of reference points that makes Taylor’s band Hot Chip such an enduring force.

Operating at the intersection between dance music and indie pop, the London five-piece have taken something of a mix-and-match approach to songwriting over the years, blending synth lines and sequenced beats with live percussion, rhythmic guitar lines and an inventive approach to arrangement that often subverts the structures of traditional pop music.

Formed in 2000 by Taylor and schoolmate Joe Goddard, Hot Chip evolved into a five-piece by the time of their debut album Coming On Strong, adding Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin to complete a fluid lineup that sees members regularly shifting roles both in the studio and onstage.

The band’s breakthrough came with Mercury-nominated second album The Warning in 2006, which was followed by 2008’s Made In The Dark and 2010’s One Life Stand.

This month sees Hot Chip reissuing all three albums. Ahead of the release, we sat down with Taylor, Goddard and Doyle in the band’s London studio to talk about the making of Ready For The Floor, the Grammy-nominated second single from Made In The Dark and – along with The Warning’s Over And Over and Boy From School – one of Hot Chip’s most popular tracks.

“I think Joe just played it in the middle of us working on something else in the studio,” Taylor recalls. “It was a bit of a surprise to hear all of these sounds that he'd been working on. We were midway through something else and took a pause, and then we heard these drum sounds and that main synth riff.”

That initial sketch was created by Goddard in his home studio, although as he explains, to call his setup at the time a ‘studio’ might be overselling it.

“The computer and a small amount of gear was just next to my bed,” he says. “There was a kind of spaghetti of black cables all over the floor, which traumatised my wife and still does.”

The core elements of Ready For The Floor were sounds sequenced from a Moog Modular, a synth the band would later buy in hardware form when the System 55 was reissued in 2015, although at the time Goddard had to settle for Arturia’s Modular V emulation.

“I’d just got this soft synth version of the Moog Modular,” he says. “I think I was very excited about that synth at the time, because I used that to make the beat and the main chord pattern in the song as well.

“I’d probably just learnt that you could use a synth to make drum sounds, which is something that we still love doing today. It kind of makes things feel a bit more unusual.”

The main body of the beat comes from rounded, bouncy synth kicks interspersed with stereo ‘laser’ tom sounds and noisy snares. The result is a very electro-sounding pattern, where the drums fall into the territory somewhere between beat and bassline. There’s a distinctive shuffle to the track’s rhythm too.

“We were all really into UK garage at the time,” Goddard explains, “so it's got a kind of off kilter feel a bit like that.”

That workflow was typical of Hot Chip’s creative process at the time, where Goddard would bring loose ideas to the band during rehearsal or studio sessions, and the remaining members would then work together to form them into a proper song.

“We have moments when all of us bring in ideas to the studio, but it's always been my passion to make drum tracks and bass lines as the beginnings of things,” Goddard tells us. “I often make beginnings and present them to everyone to be finished together.

“On this song, I definitely would have started just making that drum beat and then making bass and chords to kind of fit in the funkiest way I could with that drum rhythm.”

“It was inspirational,” Taylor continues. “It was just instantly exciting-sounding and interesting. I think the vocal ideas came very quickly. I’ve got quite vivid memories of us all hovering around the computer and thinking, ‘oh, I've got an idea’. Those are the most fun moments for me, in the studio, where you hear something new and you just can't get the recording done quickly enough. You're reacting to the music and to the atmosphere.”

That atmosphere, as the band recall, had a slight edge to it on the day Ready For The Floor was written.

“I think there was something a little bit tense, maybe from what we'd been working on previously,” Taylor explains. “I don't remember what song that was. But the words are partly about breaking that tension and communicating and speaking. And sort of getting stuff out in the open. That's part of what the song talks about. But being a typical Hot Chip song, it's also got these weird allusions to the Tim Burton Batman film for some reason.”

That allusion comes in the form of Taylor’s repeated mantra, ‘you’re my number one guy’, lifted from a scene in which Jack Nicholson’s Joker confronts a crime boss played by Jack Palance in the 1989 film. The line in the film is delivered with an aggressive undertone, although Taylor takes the phrase more at face value.

“In this case, it wasn't really meant to be a kind of threat or anything. It's more taking that phrase from pop culture and just using it in a different context. We’re singing positively about, you know, ‘Oh, this track sounds great. Joe, you're my number one guy. We can do this, we can make this brilliant bit of music all together.’”

The approach of all members chipping-in is evident when the band opens up the track’s stems for us in Cubase. While the beats and chords provide a backbone throughout the song, the rest of the arrangement is built out of a collage of often short ideas. Taylor’s simple vocal hook is fleshed out with harmonies from other members; percussive guitar parts start and stop; simple synth riffs create layers of counter melody.

“We have this thing that somehow happens where there's something on every album that sounds like the Coronation Street theme," Goddard says, soloing at meandering riff played on a Dave Smith Poly Evolver, which does have a passing resemblance to the trumpet motif that precedes ITV’s long-running soap opera.

It’s just one of numerous ear-worm synth motifs that make the song memorable. Another is a telephone-like melodic line, as well as another descriptively named ‘cow synth’ in the stem files – both of which potentially originate from a cheap Casio Tone Bank keyboard.

“There's sounds in there from a keyboard that I bought for Joe for two pounds at the car boot sale,” Taylor tells us.

Hot Chip’s studio resources have come a long way since the band recorded Made In The Dark. We meet them in their current studio, situated next door to the room Doyle was using as a studio at the time the album was made, but now stocked with an envy-inducing collection of music hardware, including the Moog Modular, a Yamaha CS-80 and racks of vintage drum machines and outboard.

On reflection though, the band admit that part of the success of tracks like Ready For The Floor and Over And Over might lie in the naivety of their songwriting and production at the time.

“There's a point to be made about how we didn't really know what we were doing,” Doyle says. “We were still learning our craft at the time. We were definitely very interested in production, and we were listening to lots of cool music and trying to replicate our heroes, but we had a pretty basic setup.

“There was nobody around us that was teaching us how to do this stuff, so we were having to figure it out ourselves. We probably made some quite weird decisions, or just did things that you wouldn't do if you were in a more professional studio or working with a producer.

“It's difficult to get back into that mindset,” he continues, “because it's difficult to unlearn what you already know. It's funny to think that these songs that were earlier in our career have made this tremendous connection with people.

“I think that is something to do with the directness between thought and expression. You're just thinking of an idea and getting it down in whatever way is available to you. People respond to that because there isn't a set of production layers between you and the listener. I think that is quite instructive.”

Watch the band break down Ready For The Floor in full at the video at the top of the page. Hot Chip’s reissues of The Warning, Made In The Dark and Coming On Strong are out now.

Irish rockers U2 have teamed up with Dutch DJ and producer Martin Garrix to release Fireflies, a new single that was premiered during Garrix's headline set at Tomorrowland festival last weekend.

The show featured a surprise appearance from The Edge, who had previously collaborated with Garrix on U2 tracks such as 2019 hit We Are The People and Scars, which features on the band's latest EP, Easter Lily.

“We go back a long way with Martin, and there’s always a sense of adventure whenever we get together," The Edge said.

"Playing Fireflies for the first time at Tomorrowland, in front of one of the most passionate festival crowds anywhere, was such a rush... in fact I might have enjoyed it a bit too much. It reminded me of why I love playing outdoors. I like it better when there’s no ceiling."

The single comes as U2 gear up for the release of their first original new album in almost a decade. Timeline details are hazy, but rumours suggest a new record by the end of the year.

The band recently released a rousing music video for new track Street of Dreams, filmed in Mexico City with original drummer Larry Mullen Jr. back behind the kit having recovered from the major back and neck surgeries that caused him to leave the group temporarily.

It's unclear whether Fireflies will feature on U2's forthcoming record, but either way, it's clearly a meaningful release for everyone involved.

"Fireflies has a very unique mood. It's a special song we started working on six summers ago," Garrix said. "It felt electrifying and very surreal to finally debut it at Tomorrowland with The Edge."

He added: "I've worked with Bono and Edge before, but working with the whole band I got to get a glimpse of their chemistry and why U2 are who they are. It has been an absolute honour to work with them again."

By the time Rogét Chahayed crossed paths with Skrillex, he'd already worked alongside some of music's biggest names.

Yet despite collaborations with Dr Dre, Drake and Travis Scott, the Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter still describes Skrillex as one of the most naturally gifted musicians he's ever encountered.

Chahayed first worked with Skrillex on Hydrate, a highlight from the producer's 2023 project Quest For Fire that also featured dubstep artist PEEKABOO and vocalists Flowdan and BEAM. Since then, the pair have linked up to collaborate on Baby Royal, a high-voltage cut from the imaginatively titled 2025 album Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!!.

Their sessions reinforced a philosophy Chahayed has carried throughout his career: that memorable records rarely come from expensive equipment alone. Instead, it's curiosity, instinct and the ability to hear potential in even the most unlikely sounds that separates truly great producers from the rest.

For Chahayed, the quality of Skrillex's music has little to do with the gear or software that he uses, but the way he treats every sound as raw material waiting to become music. “He’s one of the most remarkable and talented people I've ever worked with and full of life and energy, but you don't feel like you're with this mega-superstar DJ,” Chahayed tells us.

“He's one of the most enormous talents in the world and one of the only people who treats the computer like an instrument. You’ll graze a key by accident and he’ll say, 'What was that?' very much in the same way that Dre is very sensitive to sounds.

“I could hit this table and he'll make a crazy snare out of it, so he’ll take whatever’s available and make it work. Sometimes we’ll be in a room with multi-million dollar speakers and he'll be sitting on the floor listening to a song on the worst quality headphones with his laptop doing his thing. To me, that’s very grounding and cool.”

That approach extended to the studio itself, where Chahayed says Skrillex regularly proved that creativity outweighs even the most sophisticated setup. “There was a day when I went to one of his studios but was feeling kind of lazy and didn’t want to bring any crazy equipment. All I brought was a shitty quality Korg KROSS keyboard and a lot of those sounds are not good.

“They're very basic and in-your-face, but there was something about it that I thought could work and I remember making 10 different beats with him and every sound was hitting because Skrillex is really good at taking raw, fake sounds and making them pop out and cut through.”

Looking back, Chahayed says those sessions proved that great production is all about imagination, and the ability to make magic with a limited set of tools. “He really showed me that it's not about what you have; it's how you use it - I get the feeling I could go to Toys R Us, buy a $40 keyboard and he'll just make something out of it. Skrillex really is proof that you don't need anything but a good ear.”

And yet for all of his technical brilliance, Chahayed claims it's Skrillex's attitude in the studio that makes working with him so enjoyable. “There's no ego there. Every time we work together it's just this insane exploration of sounds, and he likes to keep it interesting and fun.

“I’ve had some of my best days making music with him, and he's always been a great collaborator and friend. I’m hoping to get back in the studio with him soon!”

• Read more: “It's not just about the money – I just wanted my name on there because it was my work and somebody else took the credit”: Rogét Chahayed on signing away his contributions to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly for "a few thousand bucks"

Before becoming one of hip-hop's most sought-after producers, Rogét Chahayed spent years honing his craft as a conservatory-trained pianist, composer and session musician.

That technical foundation, combined with an apprenticeship under Dr. Dre and Mel-Man, has helped him develop a musical identity that's landed him credits on some of the biggest releases of the past decade.

Having contributed to tracks such as Travis Scott's Sicko Mode, Doja Cat's Kiss Me More and Drake's recent chart-topper Janice STFU, Chahayed's studio reflects a balance between classical musicianship and modern production. Packed with hardware synths though it is, he still enters studio environments with the same instruments that first sparked his love of music.

Asked which pieces of gear he simply couldn't live without, Chahayed doesn't hesitate before naming the keyboard that's central to his creative process. “My number one keyboard is definitely the Nord Stage 4, but I combine some of my favourite sounds from the Stage 3.

“If I was going away on a trip for a week and could only bring one keyboard, I’d bring that one, because I know where every sound is blindfolded. It's also a performance keyboard and when you're recording a performance in the studio it's going to resonate like that on the record.

Meanwhile, when it comes to creating depth and texture, two keyboards consistently earn a place in Chahayed's sessions. “Another one that I love is the Korg KRONOS, which is fantastic for layering and organising sound categories. There are a few sounds on there that are just brilliant and it has the perfect combination of what you might call low-quality or low-tier sounds and ones that really cut through.”

“Another keyboard that I love to use is the Prophet X, which has an unbelievable sound selection. The 8Dio sound engine is the same that the Native Instruments and Kontakt people use, so it’s very cinematic.

Though Chahayed now owns a vast collection of instruments, he fondly reminisces about lusting after gear during his early days as a musician breaking into the industry. “When I started making a little money, I'd go to Guitar Center, try the keyboards and find myself coming up with all these amazing ideas.

"I thought to myself, ‘wow, if I had a studio with all these keyboards on a wall I’d be coming up with stuff all the time.’” Fast forward a few years, and Chahayed has built that very studio, which he describes as an “amazing” space to work in.

“I finally built my home studio, which is a really amazing place,” Chahayed says. “I have two walls of keyboards with about 30 or 40 synths and a Steinway piano alongside a Fender Rhodes and a drum kit.

“Over the years, I've developed an amazing system with my engineer Julian Vasquez where I’ll just bring a Nord Stage 4 and my laptop, which has millions of sounds organised for easy access to strings, synths, brass, woodwinds, basses and guitars. It’s like I’m playing one of those games where you're in control of an army and you have access to this whole artillery of sounds.”

Hardware may form the backbone of his setup, but Chahayed says his workflow wouldn't be complete without a handful of software instruments. “I can't live without my Kontakt libraries, so my MacBook is very important and I've been finding some incredible sounds in Native Instruments’ Play Series libraries recently.”

“I began as a piano player before shifting into keyboards, but realised that there was a whole world of VSTs that I needed to get into. At first, I was just showing up to sessions with one keyboard, but then it changed to a laptop loaded with Kontakt.

But what about the instrument that started it all? “I guess the last piece of gear or equipment I need is a good piano. Wherever I am, the piano is always the thing that grounds me; it’s where I discover a lot of movement and things that work with those other sounds, so my Steinway Model B grand piano is one of the most important tools that I own.”

Before making the leap from classical piano to hip-hop production, Grammy-nominated songwriter Rogét Chahayed found his way into Dr Dre's orbit, where long days in the studio taught him to think less like a virtuoso and more like a hit-maker.

Chahayed's apprenticeship with Dre would eventually lead to credits on some of the biggest songs of the past decade, from Travis Scott's Sicko Mode to Drake's recent chart-topper Janice STFU.

Long before those successes, however, Chahayed experienced the harsh reality of the music business while working on sessions intended for Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly LP.

Having unwittingly signed away his publishing rights, he ultimately saw his contributions released without receiving an official credit. More than a decade later, Chahayed reminisces on how the experience shaped both his career and his view of an industry that, despite its continual evolutions, still operates like the "Wild West”.

The story began during a break from working with Dre, when Chahayed found himself bouncing between studios across Los Angeles in search of his next project. “The Kendrick Lamar album was something I worked on, but didn't know I was working on because I wasn’t credited.

“Around the time I was working with Dre, there was a break period where I was going to studios trying to find different opportunities and ended up working with a producer in LA who was really connected to music and fashion. Anyone who knew anyone was saying, ‘Oh, you got to go work with this guy; he's always doing cool stuff.’

“So we’re in there making beats, which were supposed to be for Kendrick, and had a crazy time discovering all these insane samples and playing them over very strange acid jazz-type things, but we didn’t understand publishing and signed away our rights to get some cash. We thought, just give us a few thousand bucks each and if we do this every week we'll be rich. Then about a year and a half later, To Pimp a Butterfly came out and sure enough two of our songs were on there.”

Looking back, Chahayed describes his involvement with Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly as an early lesson in how unforgiving the music business can be. “I love speaking about this situation, because it's a great lesson for people who want to get into the music business. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who still operate with the old mindset and rules whereby if a guy plays keys, just pay him 50 bucks and get him out of there.

“I did a podcast recently and a lot of people were bashing me because I said I’d got robbed even though it was my choice to sign the paperwork. It's not just about the money - I don't care about that or the publishing, I just wanted my name on there because it was my work and my contribution. I never pursued any kind of legal action - I just kept my head down and a lot of blessings came out of that, honestly.”

On apportioning blame, Chahayed continues: “I definitely don't blame Kendrick because, for the most part, artists are unaware of most of the things that are going on. I blame the system and whoever was in charge of executive producing the album, because somebody else took credit for my keyboards on those two songs and my friend's guitar work.”

They say Los Angeles is a small town disguised as a big city, and Chahayed would eventually come face-to-face with the person he says took credit for his work during a chance encounter at Guitar Center.

“I approached him very cool, told him which studio I’d worked at and who with, and just said: ‘You know I worked on those songs.’ It was kind of awkward, but at the end of the day no one cares about the full story. In those situations, there’s not much you can do except keep working and find your way back.”

More than a decade on from the experience, Chahayed believes the industry has changed in many ways - but when it comes to getting recognised for your work, the same issues remain.

“As far as the music business goes, unfortunately, you have to do a lot to get the respect of others and people won't even look at you until you’ve had a big song. You’ve got to keep proving yourself, putting numbers in the charts and maintain that success. It’s like a battle!

“Even today, certain people won't respond or get back to me about business, and if I don't remind anybody I won't get paid. It’s still very much like the Wild West, so the most important aspect of my career was to find friends and people I know I can trust to call into a project.”

Despite the disappointment, Chahayed insists the experience ultimately opened more doors than it closed. “The situation helped me a lot, because I ended up meeting my manager after posting about my work on the album.

“Greg Katz loved the work I was doing and introduced me to people like Imad Royal, who’s an incredible producer that brought me into Shangri-La Studios to work with DRAM. A few weeks later we made the track Broccoli and I let life do its thing.”

As a songwriter, producer and musician, Ian Kirkpatrick has worked with some of the biggest names in pop – Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter and Selena Gomez, for example – and, in a new interview with Antares, creator of AutoTune, he’s been offering us some insight into how important the famous pitch-correcting software is to his process.

In fact, says Kirkpatrick, “If I didn’t have AutoTune, I probably wouldn’t have a career to be honest, because I'm very impatient. I certainly would have less hits.”

Quite an admission to make, but he says that the software’s biggest benefit for him is that it enables him to work at speed and use vocal takes that would otherwise need to be re-recorded.

“The reason I use AutoTune is for efficiency – for help in sessions when I'm writing songs, to make things go quicker, and to take some of the pressure off of the vocalist,” says Kirkpatrick. He adds that this is particularly important when he’s working with a major-league pop star such as Dua Lipa, whose time with him can be limited.

“Sometimes the artist might not have all day and we need to get takes,” says Kirkpatrick. “You know, even at the level of Dua Lipa, she's only available the day we write the song. There's a song called Pretty Please [from Lipa’s 2020 album, Future Nostalgia] where the vocal on it is the vocal we recorded on the day of [writing the song] on an SM7 [Shure microphone], realtime AutoTune, on the couch, and it just ended up – literally, I didn't take it past [AutoTune] EFX. I just left it on the track and that was it.”

Of course, purists might argue that re-recording would be the preferable option, but Kirkpatrick suggests that, in doing that, you might lose something else. AutoTune, he says, “lets me use takes that might sound a little more honest in delivery even though the pitch wasn't a priority. The pitch might be a few cents off, but like, enough to distract a listener from the message and a waste of a take if I couldn't fix that, you know, and AutoTune just helps me do that.”

There can't be many conservatory-trained pianists to successfully transition into hip-hop production, but Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter Rogét Chahayed has done exactly that, turning a childhood behind the keys into a career spent behind the boards, crafting some of the genre's most memorable records.

After beginning his career working as a music director, session musician and piano teacher, Chahayed reoriented his skills towards hip-hop production under the mentorship of Dr Dre and legendary producer Mel-Man. Building a reputation as an ideas man, he became well-known for generating loops and musical sketches that then found new life in the hands of other producers and artists.

It’s a track record that's not only earned him several chart-topping hits, but recognition as one of the industry's most dependable "hit machines", with production credits spanning some of the biggest records of the past decade, including Travis Scott's Sicko Mode, Doja Cat's Kiss Me More and Drake's recent No 1 single Janice STFU.

We sat down with Chahayed to trace his journey from conservatory pianist to hip-hop hitmaker, and he opened up about landing a coveted spot in Dre’s studio at such an pivotal stage of his career. “I initially got in touch with one of his right-hand guys, a legendary producer called Mel-Man who had a very important role behind 2001 and The Marshall Mathers LP,” Chahayed recalls.

“He took me under his wing in 2013 and after six months of working together, surprised me by taking me to Dre's studio one day. Dre already knew about what I was able to do, and put me to the test that night by asking me to put keys on a track that had nothing but a drum beat and a hook. After that, he wanted me to continue working with him.”

At this point in his career, Chahayed had yet to work on any major commercial projects, but Dre saw potential in the young producer. “I hadn’t done anything notable at that point. I'd been in a few cool rooms with people, but nothing had been released. I was still finding my way, but I knew that I had a different approach to keys, chord progressions, beatmaking and trying to make music a more integral part of a song.

“Back in 2013, I didn’t feel like there was a lot of great rap music,” Chahayed continues. “It wasn’t very riff or keyboard-driven, like a lot of the music I grew up listening to, where those elements were the nucleus of a song. Dre was able to see that I had a solid technical foundation, and because I was running keyboards through guitar pedals and had a more complex knowledge of chord progressions, there were more possibilities.”

Under Dre’s tutelage, Chahayed says he learned that survival in hip-hop meant standing out from the crowd and always bringing “something different to the table”, whether that meant having the “hottest drums” or “some kind of weird, rare sample”.

“Dre was constantly flexing and thinking about what you had to do to be different to everybody else,” he says. “One day you'd be playing a riff or making a beat and it would be his favourite in the world, but a week later it would be like it never existed. The most important thing is his ability to see things in other people and put a room together correctly.

“He’s like a conductor with an orchestra; he may not be touching anything on the computer or the keyboard, but he'll be pointing things out and bringing the best out of people until some amazing piece of music comes together. I've worked with some of the best artists in the world, but to this day, working with Dre is like nothing I've ever experienced - it’s like watching Fantasia!”

For Chahayed, the most vital lesson that he learned from his mentor was to broaden his perspective and look beyond the minor details and technical decisions that make up a song’s production, which he says – important though they are – can often distract from the overall vision behind a project.

“My specialty is the keyboards, sound design, structuring a track and seeing it through all the way, but I'm not a great engineer or the best drum programmer in the world – I have people that do that for me,” he says. “All those technicalities can take you away from your vision for a song, and Dre taught me a lot about that.”

“For him, all of his biggest songs, including stuff like 2001, were about the art of collaboration – putting great musical minds together. He’s very much the Quincy Jones of the rap world, and that's when you really know you're a great producer.”

Italian DJ and producer Ciauru has won the Reply AI Music Contest, a competition designed to reward "experimentation across AI, music and live performance".

He took home the prize after performing at Kappa FuturFestival in Torino, alongside four other finalists selected by an international jury. His winning project, titled Raw Botanical Data, used platforms such as Krea.ai, SeeDance, and Higgsfield to turn video footage into "impossible movements, recursive spatial structures and unstable textures".

According to Ciauru, whose real name is Simone Privitera, "Artificial intelligence is not necessarily a danger or an obstacle. In this case, I used it creatively: everything started from the hand of a human being, who guided 90% of the work." (Musically)

1,400 projects were reportedly sent to Reply ahead of the contest, and it ultimately took a creative with genuine pedigree to come out on top: Privitera has previously worked with various high-profile artists including Italian electro house heavyweight Benny Benassi, Dutch DJ Don Diablo and American super producer Steve Aoki.

That being said, Privitera's decision to dive headfirst into the controversial world of AI music would be frowned on by many within the industry.

The Association for Electronic Music's Chief Strategy Officer Jay Ahern recently warned of the dangers of AI being used for "the wholesale ripping of people's creative works" (MusicRadar), while the recent formation of the anti-AI band The Bootleg Velvet Sundown shows the lengths some artists are willing to go to protect live instrumentalists and reject artificial intelligence in music.

"AI was very useful in speeding up a process that would otherwise have taken me much longer," Privitera said. " I hope that more and more emerging artists decide to take part [in this contest], because creating connections with platforms like this through initiatives of this kind is not only possible, but also extremely effective."

This week sees the release of Confessions II, Madonna’s new album and a spiritual sequel to Confessions on a Dance Floor, the 2005 long-player that she made with producer Stuart Price.

Price is back this time, too, and has been talking to The Times about his working relationship with Madonna, which began when he ended up joining her touring band in 2001 as keyboard player and musical director on the Drowned tour

This might not have happened, though; Price says that he was initially intimidated by the “incredible musicians with an array of gear” that he encountered when all he had was a monosynth that “only makes one sound at a time”.

In fact, such was the level of Price’s imposter syndrome that he raised doubts about his suitability for the role.

“I’m from dance music – there’s nothing wrong with staying on one note for six minutes as long as it’s a really good note,” he argues. “So I said to her: ‘I don’t think I’m the right person to do this.’

Rather than accept that he was a bad fit, though, Madonna supported Price’s musical vision. “She reconfigured the whole setup on the basis of that comment. Instead of going back to my parents’ house in Reading, I ended up staying and she made me musical director of the Drowned world tour. So our relationship is ultimately based on honesty.”

It sounds like this high level of trust helps when the pair are in the studio together, too. “You always tackle a problem with a solution,” is Price’s diplomatic answer when asked if he and Madonna ever disagree. “When you have faith in your writing partner, the whole thing becomes pleasant.”

So pleasant, in fact, that Price describes their sessions “like being in a school band,” with both parties feeling able to be themselves. “Madonna will say, ‘I think I have something,’ and what comes out is not calculated, it’s just unquestionably her.”

The biggest hit from the original Confessions on a Dance Floor, of course, was the ABBA-sampling Hung Up, and Price previously spoke about the origins of that record to Music Week.

“Madonna was doing a movie at the time with Luc Besson, that didn’t materialise, which was going to feature music from different generations – a punk rock era, a ’20s era, and a disco era. So she asked, “Do you have anything that is like ABBA at Studio 54?” Originally, I said no.

“However, six months beforehand, I had a DJing residency at a club in Liverpool called The Masque, at the Chibuku Shake Shake night. One night, I was coming back from Chibuku, it was 5am on the M1, I was falling asleep – I wasn’t driving! – and Radio 2 was on. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! started playing, and in that dream state I thought, ‘Wow, that would be a really good sample for a song.’

“So just before I went up to play Chibuku again, I quickly hacked the sample into a track that I could play in my DJ set. It was immediate – the whole room felt pretty special. I played it for the next couple of months, but like most DJs, I wore out my records and moved on. So when Madonna mentioned ABBA, I suddenly went, ‘Well, there is one thing…’

“I played her the track, she listened intently, then she just opened her mouth and sang: ‘Every little thing that you say or do, I’m hung up, I’m hung up on you…’ It really happened that quickly. We were in the studio, which was in the attic of my flat in Maida Vale, so I recorded her. Subsequently, the production took some work, but the whole thing about making Confessions On A Dance Floor was that it was such fun. Hung Up really set the tone for that album. In her brilliantly instinctive way, Madonna just pivoted, and instead of doing the movie with loads of sections, she went, ‘We’re going to make a dance record!’”

Confessions II is released on Friday, 3 July.

Finneas O'Connell is perhaps best known as the co-producer and co-writer behind his sibling Billie Eilish's chart-dominating pop songs, having worked with the Grammy-sweeping artist across all of her projects since they began collaborating in their teens.

Alongside his production work, the multi-talented Finneas is a successful solo artist – most recently releasing 2024's For Cryin' Out Loud! – and a composer for film and television, having penned scores for several productions, including the second series of hit Netflix show Beef, which premiered in April.

It's no surprise, then, that Finneas chose to pick out several musical moments from film and television scores when digging into his favourite "weird production choices" during a recent episode of the Track Star Podcast, a popular music show hosted by filmmaker and content creator Jack Coyne.

Talking through unconventional production in tracks from Outkast, Pink Floyd, Frank Ocean and The Beatles, Finneas also highlighted the work of Ludwig Göransson and Hans Zimmer, with whom he collaborated on Billie Eilish's Bond theme for No Time To Die.

Alongside these Hollywood heavyweights, Finneas singled out a composer behind one of modern television's most memorable theme tunes: Cristobal Tapia de Veer. The Chilean-Canadian is responsible for the music heard in The White Lotus, an Emmy-winning comedy/drama with an instantly recognizable opening theme characterized by a strangely ululating vocal melody.

Finneas reveals that he has a personal connection with the show: his partner Claudia Sulewski is a friend of actor Lukas Gage, who played a central role in The White Lotus' acclaimed first season. "I remember in 2021, this show starting to air, I'm in New York... I'm with Lukas and I'm like 'this show is so sick'," Finneas says.

"Each episode I would be saying to my girlfriend, 'this is the sickest music, this is so cool and weird'," he continues. "Cristobal Tapia de Veer, goated composer to me."

Digging into the origins of the show's theme music, Finneas surprised us with the revelation that elements of the eccentric theme song were originally created for Kanye West. "Apparently, the lore is, that beat was originally for Kanye, like years ago," Finneas tells Coyne. "Then that didn't work out, but he was like... 'I know where to put this', and he used it for the show."

As it turns out, the lore is entirely accurate: back in 2021, Tapia de Veer revealed in an episode of the Broken Record podcast that West reached out to him to collaborate on music for a Nike-related project he was working on. West tasked the composer with figuring out how a certain "Nike shoe relates to music", and he set to work crafting ideas based on this somewhat unconventional brief.

"I had those voices and I tried to find a way to play melodies that is really striking, and this happened by accident," Tapia de Veer said. "At that point I knew that this was like gold. I was like, ‘OK, this I’m going to show to Kanye.'"

West wasn't so enthusiastic, however: "I was there for like a week and I had to leave, and there was problems, and Kanye started firing people and his lawyers and everything was too long," Tapia de Veer recalls. "It was a mess.”

The composer never heard back from West, but what seemed like a lost opportunity later turned into one of the most successful creations of his career, when he dug those "tribal voices" out of his vault and used them as the basis of The White Lotus' Emmy-winning score.

Check out the full episode of the Track Star podcast.

Matchbox 20 frontman Rob Thomas has been paying tribute to the late Clive Davis – and giving us a fascinating insight into what it was that made him such a music industry legend.

In an essay for Rolling Stone, Thomas goes back to the making of Smooth, the 1999 smash hit single that he co-wrote and eventually performed with Santana. Both the song and its parent album, Supernatural, were released on Davis’s Arista Records label, and Davis was involved in the creative process almost from the start.

Smooth was Thomas’s first project with Davis, but he was originally intended to be just the songwriter, alongside Itaal Shur. After hearing his demo, though, Santana and Davis had other ideas.

“We were sitting in his office debating whether George Michael or Jon Bon Jovi should sing it,” Thomas remembers. But Carlos was like, ‘I like this guy’s voice,’ and Clive loved the idea of getting this older generation guitar player together with newer generations.”

Thomas has mentioned the George Michael possibility before. “It was George I had in my head when I recorded the vocals in the first place,” he told Billboard in 2017. “If you listen to the melody and the cadence, it’s an attempt to emulate his style in so many ways.”

Davis knew what he was doing, though: Smooth hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained there for 12 weeks. What’s more, Supernatural was stuffed with cross-generational collaborations, and went on to sell 30 million copies.

This is just one example of Davis trusting his instincts rather than going for the biggest name, and Thomas says that there was another during the making of another Santana album, 2002’s Shaman. It came when Davis was considering what to do with lead single, The Game Of Love.

“He played me The Game of Love with Tina Turner singing on it, before Michelle Branch came on,” says Thomas. “Only Clive would get the magic of Tina Turner on a track then have the wherewithal to say, ‘I’m not sure this is the right look for Carlos.’”

It was Davis’s willingness to go with his gut rather than listen to voices around him that made him so special, believes Thomas, and possibly the last of his kind.

“Losing Clive is the end of an era,” he says. “There were a handful of people like him, people like Ahmet Ertegun [co-founder and president of Atlantic Records] – the last ones who weren’t weren’t all about the algorithm.

“There are fewer and fewer people running labels today who are COMPLETELY guided by their own taste meter. If you come to a label or a management company today they present you with a five-page report on your fan base, how they skew, and what brands they buy.

“I’m sure Clive was aware of those things, but they never informed what he did. Even if everybody around him said, ‘I don’t get it,’ he would say, ‘You don’t have to get it.’”

Alan Myson is a producer, composer and sound designer whose versatility within electronic music spans work for film, TV and advertising alongside his own output as a recording artist. As Ital Tek, he's released eight adventurous, varied albums for lauded underground label Planet Mu.

It’s a two-decade journey of sonic exploration that started when Myson picked up his first effects pedal as a teenager.

“I got an electric guitar when I was about 13, and that was what really set it alight for me,” he tells us when we visit him in his Oxfordshire studio. “My first setup that I remember feeling like I could actually get something cool out of it was an electric guitar, a multi-effects pedal and a MiniDisc player. I used to just make loads of really long droney, ambient guitar effect loops.”

His career as Ital Tek started a few years later, following a move to Brighton for university that was largely inspired by a desire to break into the city’s music scene. Myson began handing out demos and posting tracks on Myspace, which caught the ear of Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas, best known for his output as μ-Ziq.

Over the 20 years since then, Myson has become one of the label’s key artists, releasing multiple albums, EPs and singles, ranging from his early experiments in atmospheric dubstep and IDM through to the dark cinematic sounds of recent albums Outland and Timeproof.

His latest full-length, Mind Abandon, landed this May, and sees Myson pushing his sound into new territories, warping recorded instruments, synths and vocal sounds into ambient textures with granular processing and creative effects.

We visited Myson in his Oxford studio to break down the multi-layered sound design behind album highlight A Hidden Path (above) and discuss his studio setup and outlook on music (below).

Tell us about your studio…

“I've been through quite a lot of studios, I've been doing music as my full time job for nearly 20 years now. I was lucky enough to start doing it when I was 19. Over that time I’ve had different home studios, rented studios and purpose-built studios.

“The place I’m in at the moment is outside of my house in a separate building. I'm lucky enough to have accumulated quite a few toys over the years, which I get to spend all my time messing around with. It's a cool place to work.”

Tell us about your new album, Mind Abandon…

“The new album is definitely a very introspective album for me. It focuses on the feeling of getting older, kind of losing a sense of your identity as you get older, as your life changes, you have kids, your priorities change, your time changes.

“Music is something that's really precious to me. I put so much of my energy into it and so much of my time into it. As I'm a solo artist, I spend a huge amount of time by myself trying to get something going with these instruments. It's by definition very introspective. I think this album in particular came from a place of really trying to understand my own mind, trying to focus on what makes me inspired, what makes me a better person. It was a deep dive.

“A lot of this record comes from a place of feeling quite shit, to be honest, but there's also a lot of love and a lot of optimism in my music. I like to think that what I'm doing is focusing on harsh extremes. I sometimes go down a path of just making really hard, dark music, and then other times I'm really motivated to try and make something that's soaring or optimistic. Sometimes I merge the two together.”

Your last few albums have been quite conceptual – is having a defined concept important to your creativity?

“I think having some idea of a theme is important when going into a body of work or an album. That can be something that's more conceptual, or it can be something a bit more tangible, something to do with the actual sounds or equipment you're using.

“For each record I do try to have a distinct sound palette or sound world that I'm exploring. That tends to then influence the emotional output of what I might be writing.I kind of see the two things almost the same really. The individual sounds that I create are like a way of expressing a mood, a picture, a story.

“I've been putting out records since 2007. It's been a long time and there's a part of me that feels like it's all part of the same body of work. It's all just this wave you're on and it never stops, but then it is punctuated by these releases. So every two to three years I definitely try to reset my brain a bit and just freely create sounds without thinking about how it's going to be used, what the record's going to be like. Hopefully that creates something interesting and keeps me inspired as well.”

How has your approach to production evolved over that time?

“I think my production techniques have definitely changed over the years, although I don't necessarily see becoming more proficient in the technicalities of what you're doing as a bonus, as such. Some of the best things I've ever written, in my opinion, were quite naive, where I didn't really know what I was doing. I like to keep that in mind when I'm writing tracks and writing larger bodies of work.

“That’s why I collect lots of instruments that I can't play. A lot of the time when I go and visit somewhere, I'll be eyeing up some weird, you know, Indian banjo or something. I have no idea how to play it and whilst it may not even feature that heavily on a track, just having all these inspiring bits of kit, along with synthesizers, guitar pedals, it's all nice to have. It's inspiring and it sparks something in the process.

“There is something to be said for the naivety of just making do with what you've got though. I think those are things I try to balance.

“I'm fortunate in that over the years I've managed to accumulate lots of cool bits of kit, and I enjoy using them, but whether they inform what I'm doing or vice versa, it's hard to say. I don't think of myself as particularly good on any of these instruments either. I'm kind of sound led rather than gear led. I just sort of tinker with them all and try to get something that interests me out of it.”

Were there any new techniques you explored on Mind Abandon?

“Going back to what I was saying about trying to find new sounds every cycle of making a record, I thought this time it'd be interesting to feature my own voice a bit more, although not in the form of traditional singing. There are no lyrics and it isn't even particularly discernible that it is my voice. It was just a way of getting ideas down quickly. I’d pull over the mic arm to the desk, and just be ready to go. It was about being able to immediately just hum something, sing something or make some weird beat boxing sounds – anything like that.

“It just felt quite immediate. There was absolutely no interface – it's just me on the track, I can then mess around with it and treat it like any other sound source, whether that's one of my guitars or a synthesizer or a field recording or anything like that. It was just a nice way of having immediacy and a very personal connection to the music.

“Another thing that has always been a part of my sound but was particularly important for this record is processing sounds. Processing things with guitar pedals and processing live sounds through digital means.

“Going back to when I was a teenager, I was absolutely fascinated by guitar pedals, although I couldn't afford any of them. I just had quite a cheap multi-effect, but I dreamed of having a pedal board with loads of knobs to tweak.

“Guitar pedals were a huge part of this record. Also just trying to dive back into the guitar in general, in a textural way, rather than chords and song structures. That's kind of what I was doing years and years ago, before I started doing my Ital Tek stuff. I wanted to bring some of that DNA from my original music experiments, harking back to when I was doing it on MiniDisc in my parents' garage. I just wanted to bring some of that energy into this record.”

You’ve been doing film and soundtrack work in recent years, how does your approach to that differ from your Ital Tek work?

“Aside from doing all my Ital Tek work, in recent years, I've also been hired to do a few composing jobs, for film and television, and some video game work as well. I've done all manner of things – dance projects, some adverts, stuff like that. I think it's a good way of keeping you sharp, kind of testing your ability to work with other people.

“It's quite an isolated experience, just making solo electronic music. I've spent a lot of time by myself in this room, just hoping that something's going to come out of my brain, whereas I've actually really enjoyed the last few years or so of collaborating.

“It's amazing to work with people where, yes, you might be the person being tasked with doing the music, but it's their project and they've got their ideas. You're trying to make their project as great as it can be by bringing something that you do to the table.

“I've loved doing that, and I hope to do a lot more of it, like working with directors, editors, producers, sound designers, is brilliant, and it makes it feel like being in a band or something. Everyone kind of leans on each other a bit to bring out the best in each other.”

What one piece of studio gear could you not go without?

“My desert island music kit is the Korg MS-20. For making electronic music and doing my Ital Tek records, it is really expressive. I feel like I know what I'm doing with it, which isn't true of all my gear.

“There are lots of bits of gear in my studio that I am not as well versed in, but the MS-20 is just fantastic for getting ideas out. It just gels with me. I think it suits the extremes of my music very well: it's super dark and gnarly, and heavy and nasty, and then it's also lyrical and you can get these beautiful tones out of it as well.”

What one piece of advice would you give to other producers?

“It's easier said than done, but focus less on what other people are doing or expecting, and try and home in on why you’re doing what it is you’re doing. What clicks for you hopefully clicks for other people.

“It took me a long time to get to the point of realising that. I spent a good 10 years feeling extremely unconfident with making music. I still don't really – everyone's kind of got some level of imposter syndrome with what they're doing, but I definitely pay less attention now to expectation, what I'm supposed to be doing or what anyone else is hoping I'm doing.

“I've enjoyed the process of making records a lot more since I tried to harness that kind of mindset.”

Ital Tek: Mind Abandon is out now via Planet Mu

Oscar Scheller isn't a name that'll be familiar to most of our readers, but this London-born producer and songwriter is one of pop music's fastest-rising behind-the-scenes talents – and the man responsible for producing one of 2026's biggest global hits.

That song is a remix of PinkPantheress' Stateside featuring Zara Larsson, a rework of a track from PinkPantheress' 2025 project Fancy That that featured on remix album Fancy Some More?, released in October of the same year.

Going viral in early 2026, the Scheller-produced Stateside remix became PinkPantheress' most successful song to date, hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 and Spotify's global chart simultaneously while reaching Top 10 in the US and generating close 50m weekly streams at the peak of its popularity.

But, according to its producer, the track's skyrocketing success came as something of a surprise. "It's a pretty oddball song to be a hit," Scheller told MusicRadar in a recent interview. "But it feels good. It’s the moment that all producers wait for, but I’m just really happy it happened with her, on music that I’m proud of too."

Now based in Los Angeles, Scheller has forged a longstanding creative relationship with PinkPantheress that began in 2021, and has since led to collaborations across multiple projects. “I knew as soon as I heard PinkPantheress that we had similar musical DNA from the samples and interpolation, that we had a similar way of thinking,” he says.

“She’s insanely melodic, I reached out and we had a session just before I moved to the US. She seemed really shy but was quietly confident, and we hit it off straight away.”

Not only working on the Stateside remix, Scheller was invited to collaborate on numerous remixes on Fancy Some More?, including Girl Like Me (with Oklou) and Tonight (with Jade). However, it was his take on Stateside that was eventually picked up for release, along with a contribution to the Sugababes-featuring rework of Nice to Know You.

“I did Stateside, Girl Like Me and Tonight and was praying for the first one to come out. She wouldn’t tell me who the feature was, then she sent the version back with Zara - it was crazy,” Scheller says.

Despite the astronomical popularity of Stateside's alternate version, Scheller told us that a handful of fans have questioned the song's production, picking up on slight variations in tuning between the elements that make up the track. “There’s all this discourse online about how everything is out of tune on Stateside,” he says.

“But I’ve been pleased with that – we need imperfection," Scheller continues. "It’s like a retaliation to AI and this weird humanless vacuum of sound that people keep pushing down our throats. We need the human touch!”

Read the full MusicRadar interview with Oscar Scheller, where he digs into his musical background, his studio set-up and his recent work with Lily Allen and Kelela.

Rick Rubin certainly knows how to feed into the sense of mystery that surrounds his production style. Both fans and critics have long speculated on what it is he actually does in the studio, and Rubin made headlines during an interview in 2023 when he claimed not to know how to use a mixing desk.

Now Finneas – a much-more hands-on kind of producer both on his own records and those for other people, most notably his sister, Billie Eilish – has had his say on the myth of Rick. And, like many of us, he’s a little perplexed by it.

“He’s made work that I’m really inspired by,” he tells Billboard. “I’m a little confused by his kind of – he swears that he knows nothing at all about music, and it’s like, just Google Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash. There are many videos of him setting up the mics. He doesn’t know nothing.”

Almost certainly not, but Finneas also has a theory as to why Rubin likes to play down his technical abilities.

“I think what I assume he means by that, and I respect this, is similar to what I’ve said before: there are a lot of people that know a lot more than I do. I don’t know the most, but I also don’t know nothing.”

Finneas goes on to suggest that perhaps Rubin is attempting to make sure that people he may be working with aren’t put off because they’re not genius technical producers.

“I think it’s an effective — I think I try to do the same thing, which is, I don’t want to make people feel like it isn’t achievable,” he says. “I think that you don’t want to intimidate somebody out of trying to make something by way of, ‘I have my 10,000 hours, I know so much, you’ll never know as much as I do.’ So I like that about that.”

Discussing his own production style, Finneas says that, although he’s been encouraging his sister Billie to get more involved in the technical side of things and take on some of the vocal engineering work in particular, there also benefits to working with someone who thinks about sound and music more descriptively.

“One of the things I said to her like a year ago was, one of the challenges with the more you know is the less you imagine, I think. So what I want is for an artist to just be purely imaginative.”

Finneas also remembered a key moment in his production journey – when, in 2011, Apple decided to significantly drop the price of its flagship DAW.

“I was saving up to buy Logic Pro,” he recalls, “and it was like $799 or something, and I was saving up, and in a couple months I’d have enough money, right? And then they dropped the price to like $199 and I was like, bro, I can afford this.”

With a new single – A Crazy Shot In The Dark for The Fizz – and the long-awaited release of Suzette Charles’ 33-years-in-the-making debut album now finally a reality, we recently caught up with Mike Stock of legendary producers Stock Aitken Waterman for a lengthy look back at his career.

During that conversation, we just had to ask him about some of the technology that he’s used down the years…

SAW’s studios were famously always equipped with the very latest gear, and you were the first producers to get the latest sounds on record. So were you ever a ‘gear head’?

“I've been surrounded by people who were more interested in the technicality of the synthesizers and the gear that we were using. Matt [Aitken] was very into that and the engineers definitely were, but I definitely thought it was just a tool.

“I would grab whatever new synthesizer was on the market, like, like the [Yamaha] DX7, and decide, ‘This is the best one for basslines’. Or, ‘It's also got a fairly good Fender Rhodes electric piano sound,’ but most of the others I wouldn't bother using.

“Then I'd get a [Roland] Jupiter and go, ‘This is good for the brass thing that we want,’ and the Emulator II was good for the piano, so we’d end up with so many synths just to cover one instrument.

“And I discovered the AMS [DMX 15-80] back in the days of the Marquee Studios, making Hazel Dean singles. You could sample about 600 milliseconds in there and you could trigger it off a drum, or just press the button, and that was a marvelous moment for me. I thought, ‘You could do all sorts of things with this!’.

“And then later on we got the Publison, the French machine that could sample 30 seconds worth of vocals. So if I got a whole chorus structure recorded on tape I could put a whole chorus into that, and then fly it into the rest of the song just by pressing a key. And then I found I could change the key! And you could change the key without making it go chipmunk-y because it had an algorithm that for every percentage of increase in speed it will reduce the vibrato by the same amount, so it always came up even sounding. Though to be fair if you went beyond more than a tone higher than you recorded, it did sound a bit weird.

“But I played it like a keyboard. I played it on Mel & Kim. We would sample things and use the hi-hat to trigger a gate open and shut to the rhythm. And like with Kylie, on I Should Be So Lucky where we couldn’t work out what to do for the middle eight. Anything for a gimmick, but back in the day that was new.”

Is there a bit of gear that's around today that you wish you had back then? Something that would have made things even faster and better?

“Well, can I say something? Everything that's come – ever since the very first recordings we made – has made things slower, not faster.

“Back in the day, when I started recording, you set up the drums, you set up the bass and that's it. You've done it. You've rehearsed it. You play it all down. And theoretically you’re done. You might spend months worrying about the snare drum, I suppose, but that was a problem that the Linndrum solved instantly! But as soon as you got computers involved that allowed you to edit those… It just takes much, much longer.

“Logic and Pro Tools don't make this situation quicker, it just makes it endlessly editable, and that's what you end up doing. So I come to sessions, and I'm looking at the setup and I’m saying, ‘Why have we got 128 tracks going in? Why are there four hi-hats? Why does it take this many bass drums to make a groove? What's going on?’

“And that's all you did. You get every opportunity to try something else. Let's add another. Let's add another!

“Now I work on the principle of cutting to the basics. What do you need to make this work? One bass, one drum pattern… Get those ingredients, and then hone the ingredients. Don't just add more to it.

“I worked with Paul McCartney, and we discussed how The Beatles used to do it. They recorded their first album in a day. But they were well rehearsed because they'd been to Hamburg. They'd been doing gigs every night, and they were ready to do it. If bands come to a studio fully rehearsed with a song they've learned for years then you can do it very quickly.

I’m thinking you must have been crying out for a bit of Auto-Tune from time to time…

“Well around ‘94 I had an Atari and I actually spoke to Steinberg to ask them if they could make something that could do that. What I was describing was a vocal tuner – and this is a few years before Antares and Auto-Tune. See, in ‘92 and ‘93 I would spend a long time editing a vocal using the pitch adjustment on the AMS. You could raise things up and down or use chorusing effects, just to try and smooth over some cracks. So I suppose if I’d had Auto-Tune back then it would have made things quicker.

“But that is the one criticism I have, mostly of modern recordings, is they are using them to the nth degree. Now, mostly, I've gone back. Most of everything I've got in terms of the outboard gears is analogue, and I still use synths. I don't use virtual instruments, plugins, or the ones that are sort of supposed to emulate ‘the real one’. I don't like all that, because they only get close to it.

“And there is a difference in my recordings. The Fizz single is the first record we've actually done, where we've completely gone, ‘No, we're not going to use anything like that. We're going to go straight via hardware’. And, of course, I still use the Calrec microphone, but there's no vocal tuning, there's a real guitarist, real bass, the drums are programmed, obviously, but we're close to being as analogue as you can before you mix it down… And somebody plays in 16-bit on their earphones, and the work you've done is wasted!

“But if you put that track on big speakers in a big hall, it will boom.”

Great to hear that you’re still using the Calrec Soundfield microphone. Is that the ‘secret sauce’ behind SAW’s vocal sound?

“Believe me, I've tried every single mic under the sun. In fact, we did a double blind ‘placebo test’ in a studio. We got the Sony, we got the Neumanns, we got the Shures – alongside the Calrec – and we got them all up and got someone to sing on them, and we didn't listen or watch which mic they were on… And we picked the Calrec every time.

“For transparency, it's very clean, very full, and doesn't colour the sound. All of the other mics coloured it slightly, but then some people say, ‘I like the way the Neumann colours my voice, so I'll use the Neumann.’ So, I’m not saying don't buy Neumann, but buy it because it colours the sound slightly, you know?

“But we get the best result out of the Calrec because it is the cleanest. I've had about five of them now.

“The Calrec was designed originally for orchestra use; it has four heads and you can directionalise them. It's not to record in quad. So, if you put the mic over the top of an orchestra and you want to try and get a balance – you can't hear enough of the violas – you can point the mic down at the violas and get a bit more of them, and you get a nice spread.

“When I have backing singers in, we get them either side of it, because you can change the orientation of things.”

The perception is that the very tight, double-tracked, slightly phasing sound of Kylie Minogue's voice on her hits is all down to the Calrec microphone.

“No, that wouldn't be the reason for that. It just records whatever she sings. There's not a great deal of double-tracking on Kylie’s vocals. I know there is a bit in the chorus, but not as much as you might think.”

Crazy Shot In The Dark by The Fizz and the self-titled debut album from Suzette Charles are out now.

To quote the song itself, when you first hear Ricky Martin’s Livin’ La Vida Loca, it really does hit you “like a bullet to your brain”. Released in 1999, it blended Latin pop, salsa, surf guitar and even a whiff of ska, and sounded quite unlike anything else on the radio. And, for the time, it was recorded in a very different kind of way, too.

“That was the first song to be all done digitally to make it all the way to number one,” confirms Desmond Child, who co-wrote and produced the record, in an interview with Elmo Lovano. “It was recognised by the Library of Congress, the National Registry of Recorded Works. It was like, you know, Thomas Edison or something. We made it all the way to number one in a completely digitised format.”

“We didn’t use any outboard or anything that was analogue,” confirms Child.

These days, of course, working in the box is a quick and convenient way of doing things, but in the late ‘90s, limited computing power and a reliance on additional DSP meant that systems such as Pro Tools – Child’s recording platform of choice – were far from the rock-solid solutions that they are today.

“We called it Slow Tools,” he remembers. “I mean, we’d have 19 breakdowns a day.”

Child overcame these challenges, though: “We made recording history,” he notes. And when it came to the in-the-box mixing, he decided to deviate from the sound that Martin’s Latin audience was familiar with.

“Latin radio, it seemed to me there was an overuse of reverb,” he says. “Everything started swimming, like it was like Italian pop or something. I was listening to urban music at the time, and it was very dry, everything was in your face. So I said, ‘let's mix it like that.’ And so, if you listen to it, you can hear it across, you know, a football field, because it jumps out of the speakers because it's so dry.”

Livin’ La Vida Loca was Martin’s debut English-language single, but came off the back of huge success in the Latin music world. It came about after Child had worked with him on La Copa de la Vida (The Cup Of Life), the official anthem of the 1998 World Cup, and it soon became clear that Martin had the potential to appeal to a much wider audience.

It was after the 1999 Grammys, where Martin sang Copa de la Vida and received a rapturous reception, that the seeds of Livin' La Vida Loca were sown.

“I got a call from [his] manager the next day, who said, "OK, we need a song in Spanglish [a hybrid of the Spanish and English languages], and I said, ‘OK,’” Child remembers.

After he and fellow songwriter Draco Rosa submitted it, though, they got a rather bewildering request from Martin’s record label.

“We got a call from Don Ienner, who was the head of Columbia Records, and he said, ‘OK, we like it, but can you do it in English now?’ And I said, ‘It is in English, really. It's like, it's all in English. There are only three words in Spanish – ‘livin’ is English, so ‘la vida loca’. There's nothing else in the song that's in Spanish.’”

Child clearly won the argument – though he does point out that, when Livin’ La Vida Loca was released and Columbia took out a full-page ad to promote it, they still felt the need to subtitle it ‘Livin' the Crazy Life’, just so people didn’t confused…

No matter, because the song went on to become a massive hit. What’s more, Child believes that it helped to change the course of Latin music.

“That has lasted to this day,” he says of the song’s influence, “because it was the door opened for urban Latin music called reggaeton, culminating, to me, in Despacito.”

Child would go on to have more hits with Martin – who can forget She Bangs? – but nothing can match their incendiary first flourish. We’re still not sure that anyone could convince us to ‘take our clothes off and go dancing in the rain,’ though.

Sad news reaches us from Nashville, where it’s been announced that the producer Tay Keith has been found dead in his apartment in the city. He was aged just 29.

Police have said that no foul play is suspected in the death. Keith, whose real name was Brytavious Chambers, was found by officers who were performing a welfare check. His death is unclassified pending autopsy results.

The Memphis-born Keith produced two of the biggest records of 2018 – Travis Scott’s Sicko Mode, a Billboard number one that year, and Nonstop by Drake, which reached number two. He received a Grammy nomination for Sicko Mode, and another in 2024 for his production work on Drake and 21 Savage’s Rich Flex.

Other significant hits he worked on include Beyoncé's Before I Let Go, Lil Nas X's Holiday, Eminem's Not Alike and DJ Khaled's I Did It.

He also worked with British rappers AJ Tracey and Aitch, producing their 2020 collab Rain, which reached Number Two on the UK chart. Paying tribute to him on Instagram, Tracey called him: "A legend of the game… I don't think it's an overstatement to say he had a big impact on my career."

Fellow Memphis producer Hitkidd has also paid tribute, writing on Instagram: "I ain’t even got the words, we been doing this since 2010 @taykeith"

Life moves pretty fast in Taylor Swift’s world. In fact, she’s just revealed that she wrote, recorded and produced I Knew It, I Knew You – her new end credits song for Toy Story 5 – on the same day that she watched an early cut of the movie itself.

In a video posted on Instagram that was captured on the day in question, we see Swift addressing the camera. “Kind of a hectic day,” she begins. “At 11am, went to see Toy Story 5. Got so inspired, got the songwriter zoomies. Went home, wrote the end credits song for Toy Story 5. We have now produced it and I’m doing vocals. It’s 6.57pm.”

Explaining the fast turnaround, Swift says: “In two hours, Bob Iger [CEO of The Walt Disney Company] and Tom [MacDougall, president of Walt Disney Music] from Pixar are coming to hear it. We have not recorded it yet [the vocal], and I think this is one of the most fun days of my life.”

Sitting alongside Swift is recording and mixing engineer Laura Sisk, who worked alongside producer Jack Antonoff on the making of the record (Swift was a producer on the song, too).

The video confirms what Swift said when I Knew It, I Knew You was announced – that she wrote it “as soon as I got home from the screening.”

Assuming that Swift made it back around 1pm and her meeting with the execs was at 9pm, this means that her song was created in around eight hours, which is certainly pretty speedy.

We’re guessing that more production and mixing work was done after that, but the story provides further evidence of the worth ethic that has taken the star to the very top of her game. Swift by name, swift by nature.

Toy Story 5 is released today.

The late composer and pioneer of electronic music, Ryuichi Sakamoto, is to have his autobiography published posthumously in the autumn.

It’s called Music Sets You Free: A Memoir and will be out via HarperVia in September. It’s actually a combination of the two previous memoirs Sakamoto had published in Japanese: Music Sets You Free and the beautifully-titled How Many More Times Will I See The Full Moon Rise?

In a statement announcing the publication, HarperVia described it as: “the complete autobiography from the legendary and fearless musician, composer, and activist Ryuichi Sakamoto, in a brilliant translation from the Japanese by Sam Bett and with the full support and collaboration of Sakamoto’s estate and management team.”

They continue: “It offers an intimate, contemplative account of his life, from his first encounter with a piano, to his rise as a global pop star, and his later reflections on mortality and music in the wake of multiple cancer treatments and surgeries.

“An affirming, beautifully written testament to art, life and sound, Music is a lasting gift from a true musical great.”

Sakamoto died in March 2023 at the age of just 71. His career touched on so many genres of music, from electropop to techno to classical to the avant garde. An early adopter of synths, he formed Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s, a pioneering group who were as important as Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder in terms of their use of state-of-the-art music tech.

A solo career followed on naturally; an early highlight being his track Riot In Lagos, which was a huge influence on Afrika Bambaata, Kurtis Mantronik and the electro scene. His biggest commercial success though was his 1983 collaboration with David Sylvian; Forbidden Colours, the theme to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, was a Top 20 UK hit. Sakamoto would also star in the film alongside David Bowie.

Sakamoto went on to become one of the most respected film composers working in the field, highlights being his soundtracks for The Last Emperor and The Revenant. Over the course of his career he won an Oscar, two Golden Globes, a BAFTA and a Grammy. He was also an enthusiastic collaborator – apart from Sylvian, he worked with A list names such as Brian Wilson, Peter Gabriel, Iggy Pop and David Byrne.

All of this will no doubt be detailed in Music Sets You Free, which is out on September 22.

Oscar Scheller is an easy conversationalist, but this laid-back demeanour belies the producer's status as one of contemporary music’s most in-demand studio collaborators.

A breakout viral collaboration with PinkPantheress on recent hit Stateside (with a feature from Zara Larsson on one of several remixes) has seen Oscar's music exposed to millions and become practically inescapable in our online universe.

“It’s the moment that all producers wait for, but I’m just really happy it happened with her, on music that I’m proud of too,” Oscar laughs. “It feels good. It’s a pretty oddball song to be a hit.”

Oddball is a modest description for the song’s irresistible groove, but Oscar’s course has been left-of-centre since the release of his Cut and Paste album, a debut put out under his own name in 2016. Sidestepping the limelight, Oscar has instead settled into a behind-the-scenes production role; one that has seen him grow in stature considerably since his career began.

Alongside PinkPantheress, past collaborations have been with Lily Allen and Natanya while future hook-ups are with Kelela on her forthcoming New Avatar project, alongside work with The Deep and La Goony. Now a resident in LA, he’s clearly confident in his abilities to make magic from ploughing his own furrow.

“There’s all this discourse online about how everything is out of tune on Stateside,” he says. “But I’ve been pleased with that – we need imperfection. It’s like a retaliation to AI and this weird humanless vacuum of sound that people keep pushing down our throats. We need the human touch.”

As a student at Central Saint Martins in London, Oscar’s early music-making ambitions were dictated by the size of his bedroom. Without the space for a drum kit, he could only use samples and software to shape his sound, but cites these limitations as the foundations for much of his early work.

“I had one Yamaha keyboard that I would use all the sounds from,” Oscar states. “The palette was very limited but working like this helped to fuel me creatively at the beginning. Having friends who were musicians but weren’t able to produce their own music helped me get into it too.”

While he helped childhood friend and artist Tyson orchestrate her R&B jams, Oscar also played in bands that would perform at many of the venues making up North London’s guitar-slinging scene. He was a regular at formative grassroots spots including Nambucca and the Good Ship in Kilburn.

“I also grew up near Alex Cook [Charli XCX producer AG Cook] – we were one road away from each other so he recorded my first band’s EP,” says Oscar. “We stayed in touch after that, we’d go to each other’s studios and play each other what we’d been making. My sound then was really chaotic, ramshackle indie rock, while he was making the future with PC Music.”

“Having that proximity to someone like him and sharing ideas like that was really important,” he continues. “I got into his crazy nights he’d put on, he’d come to my gigs, there was that exchange, then I would DJ a lot too – it was a typical London upbringing of being right in the middle of everything.”

Oscar’s relationship with Tyson stretches back to their time at school together. She was also the first artist he worked with that elicited a desire to collaboratively enhance her music by taking on the role of producer.

“That was very early on in my music-making, I was still at Central St Martins when I was working with her for the first time, but we really synthesized a sound together,” he says. “We felt like a real dynamic duo and I hadn’t experienced that until then. Those experiences with Tyson were a real awakening for me.”

At the heart of Oscar’s process is the desire to establish a mutual emotional bond with whoever he works with. For a collaboration to be fruitful, he needs to understand his creative partner and be understood too.

“It’s not a fast-fashion approach, and I’m not a one-size fits all kind of guy,” he laughs. “It’s case by case and I definitely take a lot of pride in that in terms of giving the care and attention to each person who comes through the door.”

“Being intentional and knowing where things can be elevated – and also knowing where things might not match – is important. There have been a fair few times where people have wanted to work with me and I’ve politely declined, as I don’t know what I can offer them.”

Don’t Ask, a track released with Natanya earlier this year, fizzes and pops sonically, pointing to a colourful future R&B sound. The pair had never met until they collaborated in the studio.

“I was worried we might be able to connect, but it worked out,” he says. “You immediately know within the first ten minutes if it’s going to work, it’s a bit like dating - do we have a connection? But it gives me energy to learn about people and get to know them.”

The bedroom set-up is where Oscar feels most at home. In his LA apartment, alongside various basses and guitars is a collection of synths: the Roland V-Synth is a current favourite while the Minimoog Model D is a family heirloom he inherited from his musician father.

“I use it all the time, it’s a classic used by Kraftwerk, the Human League, Gary Numan... it’s my go-to for any bass or lead synth sound,” he explains. “I’m also really into the Akai AX60; it came out the same year as the Juno-106 but has much harsher sounds which you can bend in different ways. I use it all the time too.”

Oscar’s typical approach with gear is to keep things trim, a pragmatic ethos which he maintains when working on music too. “I like everything to be essential, I never over-produce so what’s there is supposed to be there for a reason,” he says. “I try to approach my set-up like this, so I have a good workflow and can really see what I use. I swap things out a lot – I recently sold a synth I didn’t use so everything there now has its function and purpose.”

Oscar’s connection with Victoria Walker, better known as PinkPantheress, began back in 2021. The energy between the pair has always been electric, leading to collaborations on To Hell With It (2021), Heaven Knows (2023), Fancy That (2025) and three cuts on the remix album Fancy Some More.

“I knew as soon as I heard PinkPantheress that we had similar musical DNA from the samples and interpolation, that we had a similar way of thinking,” Oscar says. “She’s insanely melodic, I reached out and we had a session just before I moved to the US. She seemed really shy but was quietly confident, and we hit it off straight away.”

I Must Apologise was their first joint track, and Noticed I Cried came next - so when Oscar did move, they continued to collaborate. Under the melodies, there’s an innate understanding of the bass of London nightlife, a vibe that has remained with Oscar throughout his career.

“Dance music is the UK to me when I think about the history, it’s always going to be there,” he says. “I lived next to an estate that had a grime pirate radio station, my sister was friends with the MC. I was exposed to a lot of grime and garage growing up, then DnB and jungle – she had all the tapes so this music was around.”

The Stateside remix originated via a text from PinkPantheress out of the blue, asking him for three remixes. Oscar produced them without knowing what they were for or how they would be used. “I thought they might be for a DJ set, then she came back to me and said she had features for some of them and they were coming out officially,” he says.

“I did Stateside, Girl Like Me and Tonight and was praying for the first one to come out. She wouldn’t tell me who the feature was, then she sent the version back with Zara - it was crazy.”

Oscar’s forthcoming record with Kelela, New Avatar, is due for release in July with the first single signposting a blend of shoegaze sonics with the American artist’s instantly recognizable vocals. Oscar has been a longtime fan, and found his way into the record by inviting Kelela to the studio to discuss their musical inspirations.

“We just had these conversations on the music we grew up on. I don’t think she realised I’d been an indie boy before all the dance stuff until she saw all the guitars in my studio,” he says.

“We both agreed we wanted to excavate this musical space between R&B and guitars. We talked a lot about Burial and his music too, how that felt – we were trying to find this inbetween world, that’s how we started and we just experimented.”

Linknb is the second track to emerge from the project, and came from a freestyle Kelela improvised at the end of a recording session. She jetted off and by the time the plane hit the runway, the finished track was ready.

“I’m always recording, it’s my number one rule. We did a lot of recording of ideas, jamming, it’s like sampling, I just love having source material to constantly work with,” he explains. “For that track, I had this guitar loop, these vocals and I cut up and made this song out of it – it was almost like a DJ approach, I found it a really exciting way to work.”

Lily Allen and her new record, West End Girl, has been one of the British artist’s most acclaimed projects. Originally part of her North London social circle, Oscar ended up working with Lily on an album back in 2018 that was eventually scrapped. He received a call from friend and fellow producer Blue May a few years later regarding another album project, this time in New York, but again it led nowhere. Then, in 2024, Blue reached out again.

“At this point, I had a few trust issues, but Blue was like, ‘we’re doing it now and you have to come and be a part of it,’” he says. “It was at his place in LA and I was working with Kelela at this point. But I went straight to the sessions with Lily, they’d done five or six tracks and I locked in.”

“Lily and I already had this rapport so it was easy to write together. When we scrapped the previous record, I was so heartbroken, but now it’s come full circle and this new album is so good.”

What’s striking from Oscar’s story is how many opportunities have been forged through working with artists he already knew personally, or those he reached out to himself. It’s a sense of community he urges aspiring producers to lean into when starting out.

“Even if it’s just you and your laptop, go online and build a network,” Oscar advises. “It's so important to have conversations and a sounding board in the form of people learning and making mistakes with you – then find your collaborators, that’s how you develop.”

“In this industry, it’s important to forge your own way and do your own thing,” he continues. “You can look up to people but you really have to find your own sound and your own way. Just be very singular about that – you have to have something you feel very strongly about and have the right intentions.”

With an array of new and forthcoming projects orbiting him, including tracks with Say Now, Natanya and a band called After, we assume that Oscar's phone must be constantly blowing up.

“The line is hot,” he says with a final smile. “But I’m picky, I’m looking to learn about music, and there’s always something to get from each project. This is why I love it so much: I’ve collected and gathered so much energy from each one.”

Follow Oscar Scheller on Instagram.

Producer Jack Antonoff is well known for working primarily with female artists: his production discography shows a series of long-term creative partnerships with some of pop music’s most talented and successful women, most notably Taylor Swift, with whom he’s collaborated across 12 albums, beginning with 2014’s Grammy-winning 1989.

Having also produced records for Lorde, Lana del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter and many more, Antonoff has previously spoken out against “misogynist” assumptions around his collaborations with female artists – but his support of women in the industry extends beyond artists and into the recording studio, where Antonoff has leaned heavily on the talents of Laura Sisk, a recording engineer he’s worked with consistently across multiple projects for over a decade.

Antonoff heaped praise on Sisk during a recent episode of the Tape Notes podcast, where the producer and solo artist discussed the making of the latest Bleachers album with host John Kennedy and answered several questions from Tape Notes' Patreon members.

“You’ve done so much to help women artists be empowered,” one listener asked. “How does that commitment translate into the technical side of the studio, specifically with engineers and producers, where women are still so underrepresented? What are the best ways to tackle that gap?”

“I’ve made all my albums with Laura Sisk pretty much since I started,” Antonoff responded. “In our little world, it’s me and Laura making all the albums.” When asked how his partnership with Sisk began, Antonoff said: “I started working with Laura because she’s the best engineer I’d ever worked with, period. I met her when I was making the first Bleachers album and I never had met anyone that good, and that was that.”

Now one of modern pop music’s most celebrated recording engineers, Sisk has engineered dozens of albums produced by Antonoff, including projects for Lorde, Lana del Rey, The 1975, Diana Ross, Sabrina Carpenter, Clairo and more. She also worked on I Knew It, I Knew You, a Randy Newman-influenced song co-written and co-produced by Taylor Swift and Antonoff that features in the upcoming Disney Pixar film Toy Story 5.

Outside of her creative partnership with Antonoff, Sisk has accumulated a substantial catalogue of work – prior to their meeting, she was already a respected professional engineer, having worked with P!nk, Shakira, Fall Out Boy and Sigur Ros, and since becoming the prolific producer's go-to studio collaborator, she's also found the time to engineer projects for FKA Twigs, Jon Batiste, St. Vincent and Maren Morris.

Despite engineers like Sisk leading the charge for female representation in the recording studio, music production remains a heavily male-dominated field: a recent report from USC Annenberg found that the percentage of women credited as producers in songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End chart fell from 5.9% in 2024 to 4.4% in 2025, and that more than 90% of 1400 songs evaluated across the charts in the previous 11 years did not feature a female producer.

“That lack of representation is very real and the stats are stunning,” Antonoff admits. When asked how those working in the music industry should attempt to tackle the problem, he says: “It’s as simple as who you hire and who you work with – that’s how this shit changes.”

For more interviews with artists and producers like Jack Antonoff, check out Tape Notes’ YouTube channel or subscribe to their Patreon, where members can access full-length video episodes, exclusive offers, merch discounts, artist gear lists and behind-the-scenes content.

Tape Notes also runs a monthly giveaway offering one Patreon member of their Extended Players Premium tier the chance to win a bundle of music-making gear. This month, the prize is a collection of Roland gear that includes the BOSS RC-500 loop station, the Roland T-8 Aira Compact and one year's membership to Roland Cloud Ultimate.

If you asked us to name a few producers that really know what they’re doing in the studio – music-makers with years of experience and expertise under their belt – Jack Antonoff would be pretty high up on the list.

This is a man that has a trophy cabinet stuffed with 13 Grammy Awards, having been named Producer of the Year three years in a row, worked on three of Taylor Swift’s Album of the Year winners, and this year, become the only producer/songwriter in history to have triumphed in the “Big Four” Grammy categories: Best New Artist, Song of the Year, Album of the Year, and Record of the Year.

Undeniably one of the most influential producers in modern pop music, Antonoff has worked with everyone from Lana Del Rey, Lorde and Sabrina Carpenter to Kendrick Lamar, Miley Cyrus, Paramore and The 1975, all while recording his own material with Bleachers, a Springsteenian solo project that has grown to become a six-piece band.

It’s fair to say Antonoff knows his stuff, then. But in a recent interview with the Tape Notes podcast around the new Bleachers album, Everyone For Ten Minutes, the man himself told host John Kennedy that he believes proficiency in production and songwriting is overrated, implying that the best music is often made by inexperienced musicians that are still learning their craft.

Answering a question from a Tape Notes listener on his creative process, Antonoff argues that music-making is “not a job that expertise is interesting in”, and that a little bit of ignorance can go a long way. “You want to be scared and afraid and unclear, and hear yourself in new ways,” Antonoff says.

“I hate when anyone claims to be someone who knows exactly what to do with a song or with an album. If someone says ‘I know what to do with this’, I think, ‘well, that can’t be the most interesting idea, if you’re sure.’ That’s how I approach all this stuff – it’s a bit frustrating sometimes.”

Antonoff claims that his best ideas arrive when he veers off his established creative pathways into uncharted territory, discovering happy accidents along the way. “I try to do things, but I fail when I try, you know?” he says.

“The things that I try to do, I always end up fucking with, and then they become something I wasn’t trying to do – and that’s when they’re interesting. To know what you’re doing in the studio is a bit boring. You’re always trying to find the accidents. Once you know what you’re doing, the magic leaves!”

For more production-focused interviews with artists and producers like Jack Antonoff, you can check out Tape Notes’ YouTube channel or subscribe to their Patreon, where they offer full-length video episodes, exclusive member offers and behind-the-scenes content.

Tape Notes also runs a monthly giveaway offering one subscriber the chance to win a bundle of music-making gear, including software from Soundtoys, Waves and FabFilter.

It’s been confirmed that Taylor Swift will contribute a new song, I Knew It, I Knew You, to the soundtrack to upcoming Disney Pixar movie Toy Story 5. Inspired by the ongoing journey of Jessie the cowgirl, who has been part of the Toy Story universe since the second film, It will be released this Friday, 5 June, ahead of the movie's release on 19 June.

I Knew It, I Knew You was written and produced by Swift and her longtime friend and collaborator Jack Antonoff – putting to bed any rumours of a creative break-up following his absence from Swift's most recent album, The Life Of A Showgirl – and is said to mark a return to Swift’s “country roots”. Its announcement comes after a series of ‘TS’ billboards appeared in LA, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Toronto, Mexico City and London over the weekend; these were indeed – as many fans speculated – a play on Taylor Swift and Toy Story’s shared initials.

Discussing the Toy Story franchise and the making of I Knew It, I Knew You, Swift said on Instagram: “I’ve always dreamed of getting to write for these characters who I’ve adored since I was a 5 year old kid watching the first Toy Story movie. I fell instantly in love with Toy Story 5 when I was lucky enough to see it in its early stages, and I wrote this song as soon as I got home from the screening. Sometimes you just know, right?”

Indeed, but by hitching her songwriting horse to Jessie’s wagon, Swift has some big creative hooves to fill. The cowgirl in question already has her own song in the shape of When She Loved Me, which was written by frequent Toy Story musical contributor Randy Newman for Toy Story 2 and sung by Sarah McLachlan.

A beautiful, heartbreaking tale of loss, When She Loved Me is a proper tearjerker. Indeed, McLachlan told the Zach Sang Show last year that she sobbed the first time she heard it, and immediately knew that she had to sing it.

“It’s so quintessential Randy but the melody is just built for my voice,” she explained. Of the song’s emotional impact when placed in the context of the movie, she added: “It’s gutting – I remember watching it in the theatre just ugly crying and my daughter looking at me like, ‘what is wrong with you?’”

She’ll find out – and we don’t have long to wait to discover how Swift has channelled Jessie’s character, either. “It’s incredible just how meaningful it’s been having Taylor write and perform this song,” says Toy Story 5 director and screenwriter Andrew Stanton. “Her connection to Jessie and the immediate way she understood what the character was going through was undeniable. The song is so deeply connected to Toy Story. So much so that on first listen, it instantly felt like it had always belonged there, like a long-lost family member. It was kismet.”

However it sounds, you can pretty much guarantee that I Knew It, I Knew You will be a huge success – destined to go to infinity and beyond, you suspect. As well as appearing on streaming services, it's also available to buy as a CD single that includes the song as it appears in the film, a special acoustic version and a special piano version, all with unique vocals and production

As he prepares to release a new album as part of Doublespeak – a synth-pop super-covers-band that also includes Benge and Blancmange’s Neil Arthur – electronic music legend Vince Clarke has been talking to MusicRadar about some of the classic analogue instruments that have defined his career.

“I just like that sound,” he says. “The beauty for me of using a lot of the analogue stuff is the fact that it's very hands-on, it's very kind of tactile. You're not just using a mouse, and I really get a lot of pleasure out of that whole process. The best bit of making music is the process, absolutely. It's not listening to the record afterwards, it's actually the craft of building something from nothing.”

When it comes down to it, though, what would be Vince’s favourite synth of all time.

“The [Sequential] Pro 1,” he replies quickly. “I bought one in 1984 – I'm looking at it now, still the same one. I mean, it's been, you know, in lots of different cities around the world, and I plugged it in in my little setup the other day, bracing myself, and the bloody thing was in tune! I couldn't believe it. Amazing! I mean, it's nothing like as complex as modern synthesizers, but it's got knobs, you know? And I can actually carry it, as opposed to the [Roland] JP-4.”

Asked whether he’s kept all of his favourite synths, Clarke says that he still has “the stuff I use,” but has got rid of some things.

“I've got a bit of that collector's mindset, but then I realised it would be much better in the hands of someone who used it, as opposed to someone that just showed off and said, 'well, I've got an ARP 2600,'” he reckons.

And finally, Eurorack, does he have a million modules? No, it turns out.

“Martin [Gore, Depeche Mode] did say something actually, when we were talking about it [Eurorack] like, 'you know it's addictive', but at the end of the day I didn't find that,” he explains. “I mean, he's got like 17 million modules or something crazy, you know. I've got maybe 30 or 40 and that's enough!”

Look out for MusicRadar’s full Doublespeak interview soon. Their eponymous debut album is out on 29 May.

The fact that anyone can now make music on a computer in their bedroom means that kids can become accomplished producers before they’ve even finished school, but even in this context, the achievements of 16-year-old Arham Paul (AKA AP Melodies) are remarkable.

That’s because Paul has two credits on new songs by Drake. The Canadian hip-hop superstar released a trilogy of albums earlier this month, and both Classic (from Habibti) and Q&A (from Maid of Honour) were made with Paul’s input.

“I don't think there's any other 16-year-old producer for Drake right now,” Paul told CityNews. “So it’s an odd experience, but it's crazy.”

Paul was drawn into Drake’s orbit last summer. Miami-based producer Sebas Lopez, who works with Drake and had heard AP Melodies’ output online, got in touch because he needed an ‘80s-style intro for a song, which ended up being Classic.

“I was shocked because I didn’t expect him to call me to work on a Drake track,” Paul told CTV News.

“But when Drake asked for the ’80s intro, [Lopez] called me because he knew I was on that sort of vibe.”

Paul says that Q&A, the other track he’s credited on, was an attempt to fuse the sounds of R&B and Brazilian music.

“I really loved how I managed to mix two genres together, but still point it towards Drake's direction,” he told CityNews.

As seems to be the way of these things, Paul only found out that some of his contributions were being included on the albums a couple of weeks before they were released.

“I thought it had a lower chance of being on the album because it's been made for so long,” he says of his first track. “But once I found out I had that song, like a week before, I mean, that was just crazy, ‘cos then I found out I had two songs on the album.”

Paul says that he started producing when he stumbled across GarageBand on his sister’s producer when he was just eight years old.

“I just randomly opened it and started messing around with it and it just, like, clicked,” he tells CTV News.

As he honed his skills, his beats began to gain traction online, but his achievements have still shocked his friends and teachers at school.

“Everyone’s all like, ‘How did you do this?’ The whole school is just hyped,” he says.

“My principal even asked me, ‘Are you on the Drake album?’ It was just crazy. All the teachers were talking about it.”

Paul says that he now hopes to collaborate with more big-name artists, and has some simple advice for any kid who wants to follow in his production footsteps.

Speaking to CityNews, he said: “I would tell people to stay creative, be original and just get yourself out there.”

The multi-million-selling songwriter Linda Perry has accused Billie Joe Armstrong of being a “pussy” after getting cold feet over collaborating with her.

It seems that Perry was lined up to produce Green Day’s follow-up album to their huge-selling 2004 American Idiot album – the record that eventually became 2009’s 21^st Century Breakdown. Perry’s track record as a songwriter is second to none: she’s penned mega-selling hits for Pink, Gwen Stefani and Christina Aguilera, though of course she comes from a rock background – 4 Non Blondes were briefly one of the biggest alt rock bands of the immediate post-grunge period.

But then Courtney Love broke the news of the Green Day - Perry link-up and things quickly unravelled…

In a new interview with NME, Perry remembers, “I had a full calendar and cancelled six months of work to do it. I met with Billie Joe and we talked for three hours... Like every artist, I think he had got to a point where you feel like I have nothing to say and need help – there’s a therapy aspect to producing too.”

“Then Courtney blabbed her mouth that I was producing. Suddenly they started getting backlash from their fans, upset they were ‘bringing in Linda Perry, who produced Pink and Christina Aguilera.’”

“And then those guys just stopped calling me,” Perry continued. “I would reach out to figure out what was going on. Nobody called. I lost six months of scheduled work. That was fucked-up – all because Billie Joe’s a little pussy and got all this backlash from his fans and didn’t like it.”

At the time, Green Day issued a statement denying Perry had ever been in the mix for the production gig, saying they were sticking with Rob Cavallo. In the end, they chose Butch Vig for 21^st Century Breakdown.

The decision clearly hurt Perry. “It was harsh and rude to do that,” she says. “Just call me and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go a different way. I’m not digging this backlash we’re getting’. Just balls-up, man. Not returning my calls was such a pussy move, and I lost a lot of respect for Billie Joe.”

“It happened because I was a woman and I’d written pop songs. I was disappointed in those guys, and then I was mad at Courtney because if she would have just shut up, we would have made the record and it would have come out and it would have spoken for itself. I had a vision and knew I was going to kill that record.”

A blind record producer is to take legal action against the owners of an artist management firm he founded over their alleged failure to provide him with proper support.

That producer is Robin Millar, a name those of you who remember the 1980s firsthand will instantly recognise. Millar produced a string of successful albums during that decade, most notably Sade’s Diamond Life, but also Fine Young Cannibals’ self-titled debut, Wonderful Life by Black and Big Country’s The Seer.

He co-founded Blue Raincoat Music in 2014, which currently looks after Cigarettes After Sex, Nova Twins and Phoebe Bridgers amongst others. However, Millar departed the company last year - he said he had been denied a support worker to help him after he faced mobility challenges after cancer surgery.

In addition to his work in the music industry, the producer – who’s now 74 - is also a high-profile disability rights campaigner and has chaired the charity Scope since 2020. In a statement, he’s put on LinkedIn, he said he was taking the legal action reluctantly, but said that he felt he was left with no option.

He described it as “an extraordinarily painful step to take...For many disabled people, the hardest moment is not the impairment itself. It is the moment you explain what you need in order to contribute fully, ask for support, and discover that the response is distance rather than understanding.”

“You hope for loyalty. You hope for humanity. You hope somebody says: ‘This matters. Let’s sit down together and work out what support looks like.’ Too often, that does not happen.”

He continued: “I have spent much of my life building inclusive businesses and advocating for disabled people, and I continue to believe something very simple: inclusion is not charity and it is not political correctness. It is good leadership, good culture and good business.”

A preliminary hearing of the employment tribunal is set for next Wednesday (May 27)

It should be noted that Blue Raincoat is now owned by the US-based management company Reservoir. A spokesperson for them said: “We are aware of Sir Robin Millar’s claims and strongly maintain that we have acted with integrity and in accordance with all relevant employment legislation and the Equality Act. We are confident the facts will support a favourable resolution. As these are ongoing tribunal proceedings, we have no further comment at this stage.”

Back in the ‘80s, Stock, Aitken, Waterman (SAW) were the kings of UK pop, creating evergreen hits for the likes of Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley, Bananarama and Donna Summer.

However, SAW were also criticised for building something akin to a musical assembly line – not for nothing were they known as the Hit Factory – and stretched their credibility at times by producing records for ‘artists’ such as Pat and Mick (British radio DJs Pat Sharp and Mick Brown), Big Fun and The Reynolds Girls.

As such, eyebrows will doubtless be raised now that it’s emerged that Mike Stock – one third of SAW alongside Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman – has been speaking in less than glowing terms about some of today’s popstars, saying that they’d have struggled to make an impact in his heyday.

“Put Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter back in the 1980s and they couldn’t have got arrested,” he tells the iPaper, arguing that, in today’s streaming-centric music industry, where major labels have shares in Spotify, less thought goes into the songs themselves.

“They don’t rely on record sales any more,” says Stock. “They can control the apparent success of an artist. They’ve got the whole market sewn up and can put out anything and it will get a million streams a day. They don’t have to worry about the song.”

Warming to his theme, Stock says: “And Taylor Swift, the doors to her have been thrown wide open. I don’t particularly like her as an artist. I don’t think she’s got a great voice or anything. I just see a very pale artist. And I think the same of Sabrina. It is soft pornography. What else to call it?”

Well, we’re sure Carpenter’s millions of fans would call it pop music, but let’s move on – what about the UK’s own Harry Styles?

“Well, it’s a good name for him, that, because he’s all style.”

Ouch.

To be fair, Stock isn’t the only person to say something along these lines, although when the Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant questioned the standout quality of Taylor Swift’s music in 2024, during an on-stage interview for The Guardian, in 2024, he was rather more measured with his words.

"Taylor Swift sort of fascinates me as a phenomenon because she's so popular and I sort of quite like the whole thing," he said. "But then when I listen to the records - we [Tennant and fellow Pet Shop Boy, Chris Lowe] both have the same feeling actually - for a phenomenon as big… where are the famous songs? What’s Taylor Swift's Billie Jean?"

Stock’s comments, though, are still surprising when you consider that SAW were once criticised by the music press – “They were constantly slagging us off” – for releasing a production line of songs that sounded the same. And for every I Should Be So Lucky or Never Gonna Give You Up, there was an I'd Rather Jack.

He doesn’t agree with this characterisation of SAW, though: “Everything was handmade, handcrafted, specific to designed for particular artists. It was never anything off the peg.”

While Stock concedes that he “can sound like a Grandad,” with his ‘it was better in my day’ comments, he’s still backing himself. He’s currently working on the debut album by Suzette Charles, a former Miss America, and says that it will stand out in today’s pop market because it doesn’t use “vocal computers that take all the soul and the light and shade out of everything.”

Based in Los Angeles, multi-platinum producer, mixer, engineer and songwriter Carlos de la Garza started his musical life behind a drum kit, cutting his teeth in Southern California’s DIY punk scene.

Raised in Cerritos, he dove headfirst into music as a teenager, playing in high school bands before joining punk outfit F.Y.P. and later hitting the road with ska favourites Reel Big Fish.

Those early years weren’t just about performing, though: de la Garza quietly harboured a broader ambition to build his own recording studio. That vision began to take shape in the mid-2000s at Capitol Records, where he honed his engineering skills before going it alone as a producer, subsequently collaborating with the likes of Paramore, Ziggy Marley, M83, Wolf Alice, and Young the Giant.

Despite reaching Grammy-winning success, de la Garza continues to push for a deeper impact on the industry. Drawing inspiration from trailblazers like Quincy Jones, he expanded his creative scope in 2024 by signing as a songwriter to Warner Chappell Publishing.

Today, he fluidly moves between producing, mixing, engineering and co-writing, with recent projects including indie-rock favourites Death Cab for Cutie and punk prodigies The Linda Lindas, a group featuring two of his own daughters, Lucia and Mila.

Following the publication of Universal Audio's Apollo Creators episode with Carlos de la Garza, a documentary that offers viewers an insight into his creative process, we sat down with the multi-hyphenate maestro to hear more about his diverse career, his go-to gear, and his work on the new Death Cab For Cutie project.

Like many who begin working in a recording studio, you began life as a runner for Capitol Records. How long was it before you could finally get your hands on a mixing desk?

“Luckily for me, Capitol had full-time janitorial staff, so I never had to clean toilets or take the trash out, but I definitely had my fair share of making coffee and fruit baskets and all the wonderful things that go along with being in an entry-level position at a studio like that. I got in at a time when Pro Tools was definitely becoming more standardised, but a lot of people were still tracking drums and bass on tape so it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now.

“Luckily, my first break was one of those moments where opportunity meets preparedness and I was able to edit a session to prove that I could do the job. From then on, my studio manager, Paula Salvatore, started calling on me to do more sessions as an engineer. The Capitol experience was fantastic. I learned so much and was able to observe the greatest of the great producers and mix engineers, absorb it all and cherry-pick things that I thought would help form my own vision about the best way to record.”

What sort of projects were you working on independently?

“At first, I wasn't working on too many records of consequence - it was friends’ bands and a lot of random things. I’m grateful that a lot of that never saw the light of day. We all have musical skeletons in our closet, but that was the time to learn and make mistakes. Like anything in this world, you get good by practising over and over and putting in your 10,000 hours.”

What sparked your interest in learning how records are mixed or engineered?

“There are two types of people – those who are cut out for touring and those who aren’t, and I was one of the latter. Reel Big Fish was an amazing opportunity, the band were friends of mine and it paid good money, but I never really connected with the music and knew that I wanted to move on to something else. Production seemed unrealistic until I got my foot in the door at Capitol, but as soon as I had that job lined up I left the band and focused on the studio world.

“I’ve always had a genuine affection for record-making and a passion for understanding how things worked. I also think that drums are the most difficult instrument to record because, generally speaking, the mic placement is so particular. No-one in a band hears drums like a drummer does, so we have a leg up when it comes to recording. Some of my favourite producers, engineers and mixers were drummers, including Al Smith who was working at Capitol at the time.”

Did setting up a recording studio still make sense at a time when people no longer needed a £200,000 mixing desk?

“It's funny because I’d bought these pristine Studer A27 and Ampex ATR-102 tape recorders in 2006 and they just sat in the corner because nobody wanted to use them or pay for tape. Now, tape’s back in vogue, but I still think those machines are probably too clean for what most people are looking for because when they hear the word ‘tape’ they want something that's very gritty and maybe even slightly lo-fi.

“But I think you're right that the advent of digital recording and the availability of plugin emulations that are so incredible means that you can essentially have a studio in a box. A Universal Audio Apollo x8p has eight ins and outs, a headphone amp, monitoring, mic preamps, and plugins, which is like a one-stop shop for everything you need to make a record.”

When you started engineering for Paramore they'd already topped the charts in several countries with Brand New Eyes. Your association seems to have endured?

“It was a huge step up, but I went into a unique situation. The band were in a little bit of flux because they’d lost their primary co-writer Josh Farro, and Taylor York was writing songs with Hayley Williams for the first time and they were working with producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen for the first time too.

“They’d also lost their drummer, so we brought in Ilan Rubin, who’s now in Foo Fighters, but we had a mix of all these people who had never really worked together. I look back fondly on making that record and how it all went down; it really paved the road for a lot of future collaborations between us and a lot of success.”

On subsequent Paramore LPs, you heavily relied on the AMS Neve RMX16 NonLin reverb. Was that an early example of a plugin replacing a role that would traditionally be taken by quality outboard?

“It's tricky, because I think there are times when plugins are the right thing and hardware is the right thing. The frustrating, but also beautiful, thing about vintage gear is that there's so much variation from unit to unit. Universal Audio has faithfully recreated some amazing stuff, but I have a vintage 175 tube compressor and a Blue Stripe at home and they don't really sound like the Universal Audio ones. That doesn't mean that they sound better or worse - they're just different.”

So it’s horses for courses?

“I use both, but the great thing about the UA stuff is their speed and efficiency. Recall has always been the problem with hardware, so my first instinct is to print through the hardware and commit to a sound. Ultimately, I'm a big fan of committing because that’s how great-sounding records have always been made and I think that's how you create a sonic imprint or vibe on a record.

“It's about having the vision and the confidence to say, this is it, let's record it and move on, and hardware definitely plays a role in helping to achieve that. The plugins are great for when you're mixing or quickly jamming through a songwriting session. I really like the new Universal Audio Paradise Guitar Studio plugin - that thing’s pretty incredible for getting great guitar sounds really easily.”

What’s your strategy for committing to sounds when working with punk or rock bands?

“The first ideas are often the best, and sometimes artists try to second guess or beat a part they did and end up going down a rabbit hole of uncertainty. I try to avoid that and generally believe that the inspiration or genesis of an idea comes within the first few takes - then you should have a limited amount of takes to figure out the best way to execute by subtly changing some nuance about the sound or performance.

“By take three, the performance locks in and takes four, five and six are generally the best ones before things begin to start going downhill. One of the interesting things about production is that it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. You have to tailor it to every artist and situation because they all have different strengths and weaknesses, and being able to identify those and adjust accordingly is part of what makes a great producer.”

Is that something you learned early on, or did it evolve over your 10,000 hours of practice?

“One of the things I learned at Capitol from watching so many different producers and engineers is how they adjust to every type of situation. Take, for example, live band tracking. Some producers really love doing that because they feel it brings a performance aspect to things and there's something magical that happens when people are all in a room reacting against each other.

“I also believe there's some truth to that, but it doesn't work for every band. Some bands operate better if you multitrack, focus on one thing at a time and build with overdubs, so being flexible and able to adjust to whatever makes sense for every situation is critical for success.”

In 2016 you mix engineered Ziggy Marley's self-titled album and he interviewed candidates for specific roles. Is that typical?

“There was a little bit of a mix shootout for that and it's become more common in the last 5-10 years to have anywhere from three to five candidates be a good fit for a record with each person mixing a song. Fortunately, I won the mix for that, the self-titled Paramore record and the one I just did for Death Cab for Cutie.

“So these things are a little more common, especially when records have budgets. Nobody likes to work for free, so the label will pay for, say, three to five mixes even though they’ll only use one. In the case of the Ziggy record, it worked out fantastic because I threw my name in the hat and we ended up winning a Grammy.”

In recent years, you seem to be doing less engineering and throwing yourself more into mixing, production and co-writing. Have you outgrown engineering in favour of more creative roles?

“You're exactly right. I hate to generalise, but in terms of creative input, engineering is probably at the bottom of the totem pole. With mixing, you have a little bit more creative freedom, there’s much more with production and writing is the ultimate expression. That’s the transition I’m going through and that path has been very intentional.

“I see mixing as an extension of production, but songwriting is the newest frontier and I'm trying to set my sights higher each and every time. It's funny how the initial goal was simply to have a job at a studio like Capitol Records - even as a runner, and here I am 20 years later and those goals have very much changed.”

You've co-written with bands like Destroy Boys and Cold War Kids. In those cases, we’re guessing your input starts at the conception point and is a little more pressurised?

“Everyone's trying to make something great, but sometimes you feel the pressure to write a hit or even just include a song on the record out of the 50 demos being thrown around. As a producer or engineer, you're taking a song or idea and moving it around or shaping it, but creating something from zero is the final frontier.

“As I get older I want to create something lasting that has weight and become as much a part of that process as possible. The gold standard for a producer is to write, produce, mix and engineer a song, and throughout the history of recorded music, the people doing that were multifaceted giants like Quincy Jones. That's what I'm trying to hold myself to, but even if you're flying just below Quincy you're doing pretty good, right?”

Lately, what technologies have you found replacing others in the studio - maybe unexpectedly?

“My approach to gear is to cherry-pick the best of vintage and whatever’s new and put it together in a delicious stew. Right now, I’m using a Rupert Neve 5088 console, which is a gamechanger. It's a newer addition to my setup, but I haven't been mixing on it - I just want to do a lot more guitar and drum tracking at my studio. I knew I was going to like the preamps and EQ on it, because I've had a Shelford Channel and always liked that.

“The other added benefit is that I'm trying to use hardware inserts in my setup. One of the things I see happening in pro audio right now is that everyone's using the same plugins and virtual instruments. Some plugin companies are starting to do really unique things outside of the box, but if you can get your stuff sounding unique, by any margin, while still being very professional it’s going to give you an edge.

“My UA X16 has been another phenomenal upgrade for me because the processing power and sound quality are a no-brainer. I come from using Avid HD I/Os, which were great for their time, but it's a big difference in quality and you’re getting the added benefit of the plugin processing power.”

We understand that you’ve also upgraded your speakers?

“My monitoring has been upgraded to ATC 100s with dual subs (also ATCs), and I have room correction, which is really integral to my setup. It was a big decision because the setup I have now cost close to $40,000. The decision was two-fold. First, I’ve probably had close to 15 different brands of speakers in and out of my studio and although I really got to know which ones were working for me, I wanted to finally get the be-all-and-end-all speaker if price wasn't a factor.

“The other thing is that I'm working with artists every day and you have to have something that sounds impressive in the room - something that makes them feel confident and comfortable about making sonic decisions that are not only accurate, but sound big, fun, exciting and inspiring. That's a tricky balance because oftentimes what’s accurate is the cold, harsh reality, which is not always inspiring, but I think I've hit a sweet spot with the ATCs and I'm not looking around anymore.”

These days, what tends to inform your decision regarding who to work with and why?

“The first question I ask artists is: ‘What’s your vision for the record?’ That doesn't mean it has to be a concept record, although it's cool if it is, but I love it when bands say we did this on our previous record, but now we want to create a slightly different version. I have to feel we’re aligned, while also feeling I can contribute and help.

“The producer’s role is basically to help focus the artist’s vision and help them, logistically or creatively, to amplify and fully realise that and reach the finish line. I'm operating in a certain sphere of genres, like alternative, indie or punk, and feel comfortable working on something that is pop-adjacent, so it’s about integrating what they do into my world. The Ziggy record was a great example of that, because he wanted an outsider's approach to making a reggae record.”

Are there any specific artists that you'd love to work with regardless of the vision?

“Hayley from Paramore is always fantastic to work with, but one of my favourite bands of all time is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and I'd love to work with The Strokes, even though those are not younger bands per se. I think that Ecca Vandal is also doing some really interesting things and there’s a really cool band called Julie signed to Atlantic Records. There are also some icons I'd love to work with, like Tame Impala or Radiohead, but I don't ever see that happening.”

You mentioned working with Death Cab for Cutie, although it’s John Congleton in the producer’s chair?

“I'm friendly with John and he's a great producer. It was a case of the band wanting to have a different take on things, so I came in to take notes and mix the album. It’s had its challenging moments, but Death Cab for Cutie is another one of those bucket-list bands because I was such a huge fan of the handful of records they first put out.

“To be able to work with and mix one of their records is definitely one of those full-circle moments and I’ve been very lucky to have a few of those in my career. When I hear Ben Gibbard’s voice on a song that I'm mixing, he already sounds great, but carving it up and trying to make it feel otherworldly is such a rewarding experience.”

You mentioned challenging moments. What represents a challenge at this point in your career?

“All records have mixes that you nail on the first or second pass, but there are always a few songs where the vision isn't quite aligned and that require multiple passes to get to the finish line. Those are the challenging moments I'm talking about, because people don’t always hear things the same way.

“With Death Cab for Cutie, there were a couple of mixes that took longer because they really loved the rough version. It was a challenge trying to get them back to that point, but that happens on pretty much every record. Cracking that code is part of what makes this job so interesting and fun, but I'm really just trying to serve their artistic vision.”

Visit Carlos de la Garza’s website or check out Universal Audio’s Apollo Creators series.

As well as being an artist in his own right, Charlie Puth often likes to explain the nuts and bolts of other people’s music – and the way it was created – on his social media channels.

Discussing this side of his career during a recent podcast appearance with Conan O’Brien, Puth drew some interesting production parallels.

He began by breaking down how the ‘pumping’ sound of modern dance music is made using sidechain compression, but pointed out that this is something that’s been used – albeit more subtly – for decades.

“It's just volume down, volume up, volume down, volume up,” Puth explained, before pointing out that a similar ‘pulsing’ effect was achieved on Donna Summer’s I Feel Love back in the ‘70s.

“It wasn't as obvious, though,” he says. “It was more of, like, a really secret engineering trick.”

Puth then moved on to discussing rock music production’s sonic family tree: “When I first heard the Black Album, Metallica, like, Sad But True – the really bright ‘90s large like a motorcycle metal kind of sound – that came from, or might have been inspired by, like Livin’ on a Prayer, Bon Jovi, or like, another Mutt Lange record [Livin’ on a Prayer was actually produced by Bruce Fairbairn] where they were experimenting.”

Continuing down this rabbit hole, Puth took things even further back. “What came before Livin’ On A Prayer?” he wondered. “I'm generalising, [but] like, In The Air Tonight, Phil Collins. Big Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, gated drum sounds. The cool thing about music is that you can trace everything back to something.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Puth reflected on his celebrated performance of the National Anthem at this year’s Super Bowl, noting that it’s an incredibly hard song to sing because it starts at a low register and ends high. “You don’t get a break,” he says.

She might be known as a hugely successful pop-country artist, but Shania Twain says that she’s a “rock chick at heart”, and was singing Def Leppard songs in bars long before she became famous.

Twain and Def Leppard have something significant in common, of course: their biggest albums were produced by Mutt Lange, who Twain was also married to between 1993 and 2010. And on hearing Leppard’s 1987 hit Pour Some Sugar On Me on the Track Star podcast, the star was quick to heap praise on her ex-husband’s musical talents.

“The Mutt Lange story is very long,” says Twain. “He's a legend – he created that record many, many years ago, before I met him. But I used to do this song as part of my rock repertoire once I was a little older. I graduated out of, you know, my grandparents' country restaurant music, and then I was doing the folk-rock stuff, and then I started doing Def Leppard. I am a rock chick at heart.”

Pour Some Sugar On Me is taken from 1987’s Hysteria, the third Def Leppard album that Lange produced, and the biggest of their career. He then worked with Twain on three of her smash-hit records, including 1997’s hugely successful Come On Over, which remains one of the best-selling albums of all time.

Asked to explain Lange’s hit-making prowess, Twain says: “Mutt definitely had a signature style of working, and that translated into the records for the most part, in everything.”

She goes on to mention a specific production element that Lange not only liked to focus on, but to be part of.

“Mutt loves all the background vocals,” she says. “On my records, Mutt and I did all the background vocals together, so it was just the two of us, which was still a great sound, but with a band like Def Leppard, it's the band, it's all their voices, it's him in there, and he was almost like the other member.”

Elsewhere in her Track Star episode, Twain offers further evidence of her rock credentials by praising Fleetwood Mac and Pet Benatar. “I think I was 15 when this song came out, and this got me into performing on stage with black tight leggings,” she says of Benatar’s 1980 single Hit Me With Your Best Shot, calling it a “really true rock chick record.”

Conversely, Twain says that she was also learned a lot from listening to The Carpenters: “This music, it was a huge influence on my songwriting and my vocal style – my phrasing, more of the alto tones, definitely – and I kept a lot of the vibrato and a lot of the vocal arranging,” she says. “It was complex and layered… we loved to layer sounds, and The Carpenters did that. They were the masters at it.”

As Sam Battle (AKA Look Mum No Computer) prepares to represent the UK in the final of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, the odds are certainly stacked against him.

For the benefit of those who don’t follow Eurovision, we should say that the United Kingdom’s scoring record in recent years has been pretty abysmal, with only a guitar-toting Sam Ryder, in 2022, managing to make an impression (he finished a very creditable second, just behind Ukraine).

What we can say for certain, though, is that Battle is staying true to his eccentric electronic music roots. We got our first look at his performance of his song, Eins, Zwei, Drei, during Thursday night’s second semi-final, and this has him leaning into the mad professor shtick that has become his trademark. And, in keeping with his DIY philosophy, he also plays his own self-built “mega-synthesizer”.

In fact, Battle was heavily involved in all the staging. Speaking to the Press Association this week, he revealed that there were certain things he couldn’t do because “the BBC didn’t trust my welding,” but apparently he did have a hand in the electronics and props.

Indeed, it was Battle who built the synth panels that you can see on stage with him. "Many holes were drilled," he told the BBC. "I drilled so many holes that my nipples chafed. True story.”

We don’t doubt it, but there could be more pain to come for Battle if he ends up with the dreaded ‘nil points’ in the public vote on Saturday night. He’s phlegmatic about that possibility, though: "I always say to expect nothing," he says. "Because if you expect nothing, you lose nothing.”

That’s probably as good a way of looking at it as any, and if Battle does fail to trouble the scorers, at least he’ll have a story to tell – and possibly a merch opportunity.

“That’s a really good T-shirt: Look Mum No Points,” he argues.

Best of luck, Sam – you’re probably going to need it.

Jack Antonoff has told the world, in no uncertain terms, what he thinks of AI-generated music. In short: he’s not a fan.

The songwriter and producer, who’s worked with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter, amongst many others, has written a lengthy blog on his Instagram account, in which he calls creating music “a holy process” and those who use AI “Godless whores”

And it’s all in lower case. Make of that what you will.

“We… have never been looking for this work to become quicker or easier,” he explained. “We were never frustrated by the randomness and magic it takes, we do it for that exact reason.”

Addressing those who do use AI in their music, he writes: “So to everyone who is gassed up about the new ways you can fake making art, by all means drive right off that cliff.

"We’re genuinely happy to see you go. Generations coming will be engaging in the ancient ritual of writing, recording, and performing as it comes to us from God.”

He continued: “As we embark on this strange detour where the bad actors will willingly reveal themselves through slop, and the struggling greats will be further spread thin to make an honest living doing what they were put on earth to do, we (myself, the band and everyone I know frankly) remain more dedicated than ever to reveal what comes from within.”

Antonoff is well known for being opinionated about many of the music industry’s pressing issues. Talking last year to Rolling Stone about the virtual monopoly that certain companies have in the live sector, he said: “You and your band can’t turn a profit, and then we have to watch the companies that own all these rooms and monopolise the whole f***ing thing and post billions of earnings.”

And last month, he reacted sarcastically to news that Ticketmaster had caught scalpers using its services, posting: “You caught you?” on Twitter/ X.

Antonoff also used his Instagram post to remind the world that his band Bleachers have a new album out next week – Everyone For Ten Minutes – and that they’re going on a North American tour soon. The first date is in New Orleans on May 20. “Cannot f***ing wait. Sending love!” the 42-year-old producer added cheerily.

The drum fill in Phil Collins’ 1981 hit In The Air Tonight is deservedly iconic, but it’s not the only notable rhythmic element in the song. In fact, the beat is driven not by any live playing, but a pattern from the Roland CR-78 drum machine which plays throughout.

It’s fair to say, then, that without the CR-78, In The Air Tonight might never have existed, but in a new interview with Eddie Trunk’s Trunk Nation podcast, Collins says that, when he first brought his unit home from Japan, he thought he wouldn’t need it and so gave it away.

“We'd come back from Japan with Genesis with these drum machines, and being a drummer and thinking like a drummer I didn't think I needed a drum machine, so I gave mine to one of the road crew,” Collins confirms. He says that he realised that he’d make a mistake when he got back to his home studio and started making music on his own.

“I asked the road manager if I could get my drum machine back and he said ‘sure,’” Collins remembers. “So I got it back and I started to learn how to use it, how to program it. I mean, it was nothing like what you get today if you buy a drum machine – it was very basic. It was really a cocktail drum machine, you know, for people that play piano in bars, and I wrote this nice pattern which was kind of moody.”

Said pattern was a slowed-down, adapted version of the CR-78’s Disco 2 preset, and provided the perfect bed for Collins’ synth pad chords, which he played on a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5.

“I had a keyboard which had a couple of really nice sounds on it, and one of them was number 36, which was the In The Air sound,” says Collins. “That became the pad sound if you like, for the song. I went for some chords and the chords sounded great with the drum machine pattern. And then that was it, you know? I mean, it just went round and round.”

There was a little more to it than that, of course. The haunted vocal, for example… but even that was recorded spontaneously.

“I set up a microphone and I sang improvised lyrics,” says Collins. “That first verse is all improvised. It just came to me – I sang it and then I wrote it down. I didn't write it then sing it, you know? It was the other way round. So I felt something was going on, but I didn't really know what to do with it.”

Collins says that his attempts to get a good sound for the live drum overdubs at home were unsuccessful, so in the end, his demo multitracks were copied over to the 24-track system in the Townhouse studio in London.

It was here that Collins worked with producer Hugh Padgham to record that famous gated reverbed drum fill, but once again, this was something that just happened in the moment. “That was the fill I played on that particular take on that particular day,” Collins confirms.

In The Air Tonight may never have got to that point, though, if it hadn’t been for Collins re-acquiring and tinkering with that CR-78, a creative moment that kickstarted several others and resulted in a career-defining debut single.

“It wasn't thought out or choreographed, you know?” Collins insists. “Everything fell into place gradually, and it became the record that people think of when they think of me.”

It’s been announced that Jack Douglas, the record producer who was behind the desk for John Lennon’s final studio album, 1980’s Double Fantasy, has died aged 80.

According to a statement on his Facebook page, Douglas passed away on Monday (May 11) from complications from lymphoma. “He passed away peacefully on Monday night,” his family has written. “As many of you who follow him know, he produced great music, and lived a colourful life. We know that he touched many of your lives. He will be missed.”

Other than Lennon, the group that Douglas was most associated with was Aerosmith. He produced their run of classic 1970s albums – Get Your Wings, Toys In The Attic, Rocks and Draw The Line – before returning to helm their 1998 live album A Little South Of Sanity, as well as 2004’s Honkin’ On Hobo and their most recent album Music From Another Dimension, released in 2012.

Douglas was born in the Bronx, just months after the end of the war, in 1945. He travelled to the UK in the mid '60s, where he spent some time as a folk musician, before returning to the States and training as a sound engineer. In the early 1970s, he joined the staff at New York’s Record Plant, where he worked on records by Alice Cooper, The Who, Blue Öyster Cult, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls and Cheap Trick.

The latter were another band Douglas enjoyed a long relationship with – he produced their 1977 self titled debut and was still working with them as late as 2006’s Rockford.

For Double Fantasy, Douglas brought in a number of ace session players, including Bowie alumni Andy Newmark and Earl Slick, Peter Gabriel bassist Tony Lewin and guitarist Hugh McCracken. Stunned by Lennon’s murder just weeks after the album was released, the same band worked on Yoko Ono’s 1981 album Seasons Of Glass.

Douglas went on to work with names such as Supertramp, Clutch and on Slash’s 1996 solo project Slash’s Snakepit.

Producer Warren Huart, who was mentored by Douglas, has paid to tribute to him, saying: "Jack carried decades of success with humility and grace. He never acted like a legend, even though he absolutely was one. He treated people with respect. He listened. He cared. He gave so much of himself to the artists, musicians, friends, and family around him."

"There are producers who make hit records. Then there are producers who leave a lasting mark on people’s hearts and lives. Jack did both."

As the originator of new jack swing, Teddy Riley has produced some big records in his time, but perhaps none so iconic as Blackstreet’s 1996 hit No Diggity, a US number one that featured a rap from Dr Dre and a verse from Queen Pen.

Now, speaking to TmrO Network, Riley has been explaining how he came up with the famous beat for the song, which is built around a 1-bar sample of Bill Withers Grandma’s Hands, which dates from 1971.

Sitting in his studio, Riley explains that he came to the sample in 1994 via his collaborator William "Skylz" Stewart, who was playing around with the loop but couldn’t get it to sync.

“I said, ‘Yo, what you gonna do with that?’” remembers Riley. “He said, ‘I don't know.’ So I said, ‘Give me the sample.’”

Discussing that single bar phrase, Riley says: “That's the grits, right there. So I had to turn it into grits and eggs.”

He did this by speeding and pitching it up, to add a bit more urgency, and then cutting it into four slices on his MPC so it could easily be synced to tempo.

And then, of course, there’s that famous piano stab turnaround, which Riley compares to the ‘ba-dum-tss!’ that a drummer might play on stage after a comedian has landed a punchline.

“I wanted that because I [wanted] to make it to feel like there's a tag on the end,” says Riley.

As you’ll be aware if you’ve heard No Diggity, this is also the only thing that resembles a bass part on the song. Asked why he didn’t put a proper bassline in throughout, Riley says that he just couldn’t come up with anything that made sense.

“You just can't put bass on a song like this,” he argues. “What would you put? We tried with the band, we tried to have the bass in there. It just doesn't work.”

Keeping things sparse in the low-end certainly leaves plenty of room in the mix for the vocal melody, which is dripping in blues and soul history. Riley suggests that he wanted this to remain in keeping with that Withers’ sample – “I didn't want to take it away from its roots” – and says that No Diggity marked a turning point for him musically, as he started to explore blues, jazz and soul and looking for ways to fuse them as a producer.

Perhaps the biggest lesson we can all take away from the making of No Diggity, though, is not to be too heavy-handed when we make our own music.

“You don't have to do too much,” says Riley. “This wasn't over-produced, because, you know how we can over produce a song and be like, this is too much? We didn't have to do much.”

Over the past decade, British producer and DJ O'Flynn has carved out a distinctive sonic identity, sitting somewhere between the melody-rich electronics of his past collaborators Bonobo and Barry Can't Swim and the more bass-driven sound of artists like Floating Points or Caribou.

Following releases on Ninja Tune and Blip Discs, this summer O'Flynn returns with his third LP, Kairos, on his own Hundred Flowers label.

We visited him in his London studio to watch him build a track from scratch and break down the elements of new single Sekete. This is what we learned.

Don’t worry if something is “good” while you’re making it

Being too critical of your own work can be one of the quickest ways to kill creative momentum. As O’Flynn explains while sketching out the idea for a new track, it’s important to get your ideas recorded – you can worry about whether or not you think they’re any good later.

“I don’t know if anything’s actually any good when I’m making it,” he explains. “I think you’ve just got to get stuff out, not think about it too much and, you know, play it to a few mates after you’ve made it. Then see if it’s good, rather than worrying about if it’s good when you’re doing it.”

Sampling from vinyl adds ‘warmth and texture’

Sampling is at the core of O’Flynn’s production style. Although he doesn’t religiously stick to a single source – often pulling samples from YouTube, sample packs or field recordings – he says there’s something special about capturing sounds from vinyl records.

“When you sample from vinyl, you immediately just get so much texture,” he tells us. “It’s all been run through really expensive compressors and mixing desks, sometimes recorded to tape as well. So you just got this really nice, warm sound, which just lacks in a lot of sample packs.”

Work on music while you’re “not working”

One of the downsides of crate digging for vinyl to sample is that it can be incredibly time consuming. Even when you’ve got your hands on some records with potential, the process of listening through each track to identify breaks or vocals can be laborious in itself.

O’Flynn uses downtime away from the studio to listen out for samples, making quick notes that he can return to later.

“When I’m cooking or playing FIFA or cleaning I’m listening to records, it’s a great time to sort of work whilst you’re not actually working,” he says. “Every time I hear a sample, I will then make a note on a sticky note. It’s a really easy way to do it, so I don’t have to immediately sample it. Then I can just come back to it.”

Using external processing to bring a bassline to life

In the video, O’Flynn demonstrates how he uses external hardware to create a more vibrant, humanised version of the bassline he writes in Ableton Live. He does this by duplicating the MIDI part and sending it out via an External Audio Effect device.

“I send external MIDI out to this Moog Mother‑32 and then record the bass through the Kaoss Pad,” he explains. “It can do some mental stuff, basically… it’s really fun to suddenly make a bassline feel alive.”

Rather than replacing the existing bass part, O’Flynn layers the new recording on top, creating a thicker bass that has lots of top-end interest but also has a solid sub foundation.

When you’re bored, add something

Turning a great loop into a full track is often easier said than done. O’Flynn’s approach is simple: when you grow tired of one section, add something new.

“I think [the answer to] trying to get the full track from the loop is to, first of all, extend it and then listen to it” he tells us. “Then when you realise you’re bored by one section, you need to add something to it. That could be more percussion, another vocal chop or whatever.”

In the case of his new single, Sekete – which he talks us through in the video – that meant adding a completely different bassline for the second half of the track, creating a B section with a whole different feel.

Released in 2004 as her debut solo single, Gwen Stefani’s What You Waiting For? sounds like a highly energised call to arms, but co-writer Linda Perry has revealed that it was actually inspired by its singer’s decidedly downbeat energy.

Speaking to Go With Elmo Lovano recently, Perry says when Stefani came to her studio for a writing session after coming off her band No Doubt’s Rock Steady tour in 2003 she didn’t get the sense that she was ready to start a solo career.

“We have small talk and she's just like, I mean, dragging her feet,” says Perry of their first day working together. “She does not want to be in there and she's just like, she's scared, you know?”

Despite the fact that she was by now an established hitmaker (Pink and Christina Aguilera could both attest to that), Perry goes on to say that “every excuse was being pulled out” by Stefani, who told her “I didn't even want to do this. I don't know even if I'm ready to be in the studio. No offense to you. Blah blah blah. I've never worked with a woman before. Blah blah blah blah.”

In the end, Perry gave up, and told Stefani to go home and come back the next day. “So she leaves and I'm like going, ‘What is this girl waiting for?’ You know, like, what is the deal?”

Inspired, Perry used this frustration as songwriting fuel. “I just went to my MPC and I just started putting this beat together,” she says. “And the guitar part comes out and then I just do everything. It was like one fluid movement. It was just this whole thing that just came out. I was moving so quickly. I didn't even know what time it was. It was just happening.”

With the beat completed, Perry grabbed a microphone and came up with the chorus, and after working late, she was back in the studio the next day, ready for Stefani’s arrival.

“I come back in the morning before she gets there and she seems a bit more chipper and she's like, ‘What are you doing?’" recalls Perry. “And I push play and the song plays and she's like, "Holy fuck dude, where did that come from!?" And I said, ‘It came from you.’ And I go, ‘This is what your energy inspired yesterday because I'm trying to figure out what are you waiting for? It's time to go.’ You know, it's like, you're Gwen Stefani. You don't need No Doubt. You're going to be amazing, right?”

Confidence boosted, Stefani finally got going, and she and Perry started trading melody ideas for the verses. Then, as Stefani was writing the lyrics, she got it into her head that each line was being sung by a different character. This gave Perry a brainwave - that each of these characters should have a different microphone during recording.

“So I go put a 67 up,” says Perry. “I put a 57 up. I put, like, you know what: this is going to be good with a 251. I'm going to use the U47 for this character. I put all the names on them. And she's like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I go, ‘You're going to sing it like this: so this lyric is this microphone, this lyric is this, this one you're going to just bounce around.”

Perry goes on to demonstrate how Stefani jumped between mics as the whole vocal was recorded live. “It was amazing, and she nailed it,” she says.

The song was a hit – note the references to its singer's initial lack of inspiration in the video – and set Stefani on a path towards solo stardom. Her debut album Love Angel Music Baby was released shortly afterwards, and this yielded more hit singles in the shape of Rich Girl, Hollaback Girl and Cool..

“When you work with the right people, great things happen,” says Perry, and What You Waiting For? certainly provides evidence of that.

If you’re a songwriter and producer who’s worked extensively with an artist on their previous seven studio albums, there must be a part of you that assumes that you’re going to get the call to collaborate on the next one.

Jack Antonoff, however, says that he totally understands why Taylor Swift chose to go in a different direction on The Life Of A Showgirl, and suggests that it was a “weird miracle” that the two of them had such a long run together prior to that.

The Bleachers frontman made his remarks in an interview with Howard Stern, explaining that “I only feel grateful for the work that has happened.”

In light of a question about his absence from 2025’s The Life Of A Showgirl, which Swift made with Swedish producers Max Martin and Shellback, he added: “Maybe it’s only because I write my own songs and sing them, but I understand that need to have different collaborators and jump around.”

In fact, says Antonoff, it’s actually the constant creative partnerships that should be the ones that raise eyebrows.

“I don’t think it’s normal to have the same collaborators over and over, and when I’ve had it with people, I think it’s a weird miracle,” he confirms.

For some, it is the greatest pop song of all time.

For Brian Wilson – a man whom many consider to be pop's greatest visionary – Be My Baby by The Ronettes was the record that changed his life. Recalling the first time he heard it to the New York Times back in 2013, he said: “I was driving and I had to pull over to the side of the road - it blew my mind. It was a shock.

"I started analysing all the guitars, pianos, bass, drums and percussion. Once I got all those learned, I knew how to produce records.”

Phil Spector had been refining his techniques and gradually constructing what would become known as the ‘wall of sound’. Using a group of musicians that would later come to be known as ‘the Wrecking Crew’, Spector would rehearse the ensemble over and over again until he could hear what we wanted.

"Phil's routine almost never varied," said Larry Levine who was engineer on Be My Baby in an interview with Sound On Sound in 2007. "He would start off with the guitars - usually three or more - and have them play the figure that was written on the lead sheet. Jack Nitzsche (co-arranger) built the lead sheets, and that was the thing - it all got built.

"I'm not sure that Phil had the sound in his mind as to the finished product. He would have the guitarists play eight bars over and over while the rest of us were listening, and then he might change the figure. Once he thought it sounded OK, he would bring in the pianos.

"Then, if all of that didn't work together, he'd go back to the guitars, return to the pianos, and when everything fit he'd bring in the bass. He always brought in the instruments piecemeal in the same way.”

Then, finally, would be the drums. “The guy who worked the least on all of those sessions was the drummer Hal Blaine,” said Levine. “Because he didn't come in and start playing until everything else was right. Then, when he did play, it was magic. He didn't play his instrument, he was part of it. He totally owned those drums."

Spector was fast gaining a reputation. He’d already had a Billboard Number One with The Crystals’ He’s A Rebel, but things moved up a gear when the Ronettes entered Spector’s orbit in early 1963.

The group had auditioned for the producer, and for Spector, it was love at first sight. Talking to the Guardian in 2015, Ronnie Spector (nee Bennett) said: “He just freaked out. ‘That’s the voice I’ve been looking for,’ he said. He went nuts over me from that moment.”

The first original song the Ronettes recorded for Spector’s Philles label Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love was so-so, but Spector knew he and his co-writers Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry could do better. Inspired by the growing attraction between the producer and lead Ronette, they came up with Be My Baby.

Speaking to NME’s Roy Carr in 1975, Greenwich recalled how the trio would write: “No matter what happened, Phil was the boss. Both Phil and I were stronger on the melodies than the lyrics, while Jeff was the opposite.”

“Really, it was a hotchpotch way in which the three of us wrote all those songs because Jeff, Phil and I were all spewing out ideas simultaneously.

"Many times Jeff was banging on something, I was working at the piano and Phil was in another room strumming a guitar. Suddenly Phil would hear something that would appeal to him, dash into the room and before we knew what was happening, we’d written a new song.

Interviewed in 2010 by Best Classic Bands, Ronnie remembered overhearing the construction of the song: “I used to have to go to (Phil’s) penthouse, because he had a piano, to learn the songs. One day, Jeff and Ellie were coming up.

"He said, ‘Go into the guest room because I don’t want them to see you.’ I’m listening to them and Ellie kicking ass on the piano. And they said, ‘It’s perfect for her. Because she’s like a child. She’s like a baby. Put that down. Be my baby.’ And she said, ‘Phil, you like her, right?’ And he said, ‘I love her!’ Be my little baby!

"Everything from that day came from my actions and my voice and the love Phil had for me.”

Having learned the words to the song, Ronnie – the only Ronette to feature on the actual recording – flew out to LA to record it. Just 19, it was the first time she had flown on her own, without her mother.

The recording was set for 29 July 1963, at Gold Star in Hollywood, Spector’s favourite studio. “He was very superstitious,” drummer Hal Blaine told the Guardian in 2015. “He always wanted the same studio, the same microphones, the same night – Friday. For a normal session, you’d have piano, drums, bass and guitar. But Phil would have at least three bass players and four pianists playing at the same time, with seven or eight guitarists strumming.”

The band that were assembled that night reads these days like a supergroup. It includes some of the most famous Wrecking Crew notables – Blaine, Carol Kaye and Ray Pohlman on bass, three pianists that could have included Leon Russell and Al Delory, four guitarists including Tommy Tedesco and Bill Pitman (whom the instrumental B-side Tedesco and Pitman is named after) and possibly Glen Campbell.

Sonny and Cher ended up doing backing vocals; others came in too. “Friends or admirers of Phil would show up to see and hear what was going on," Levine recalls, "and most of them would invariably end up in the studio playing percussion or some other instrument.” As well as all this, there was a full orchestra. Indeed, this was the first time Spector had worked with one.

Together, they formed the components of the wall of sound. But to ensure there were no gaps in this edifice, Spector rehearsed them over and over. And over.

Reputedly, the musicians were made to do 42 run-throughs before tape started rolling during the Be My Baby session, but as Levine confirms, this was not unusual.

“We almost never got into rolling tape before we got into overtime on a session," said Levine, who suggested it was a deliberate ploy of Spector’s to ensure the musicians were tired and less likely to go off piste. "I often had a hunch that Phil needed that to happen. All of them were really great musicians, and what he didn't want was any individuality to show. They had to fit into the overall picture, whereas until they got tired enough, they might be playing their hearts out.”

The exception was the main drummer: Hal Blaine. “It was the opposite with the drums,” he said in 2015. “I was like a racehorse straining at the gate. But he wouldn’t let me play until we started recording, because he wanted it to be fresh. That famous drum intro was an accident.

"I was supposed to play the snare on the second beat as well as the fourth, but I dropped a stick. Being the faker I was in those days, I left the mistake in and it became: “Bum-ba-bum-BOOM!” And soon everyone wanted that beat.”

Finally, it was time for Veronica Bennett to lay down her vocals. “In the studio, I had to hide in the ladies’ room so the musicians could get their work done – I was very pretty and they’d keep looking at me,” she said in 2015. “While I was in there, I came up with all those ‘Oh oh ohs’, inspired by my old Frankie Lymon records.”

“It took three days to record my vocals, take after take. The recording captures the full spectrum of my emotions: everything from nervousness to excitement. When I came in with ‘The night we met I knew I needed you so,’ the band went nuts.”

Be My Baby was the most perfect realisation of Spector’s vision yet. Released the following month it climbed to Number Two on the Billboard (though it reached the top on Cashbox). In the UK it reached Number Four that autumn. The Ronettes had arrived.

There would be other peaks in both Spector’s and the Ronettes’ careers to come - arguably Walking In The Rain is just as good. But Be My Baby has become emblematic, not just as the apogee of the wall of sound, but of pop music itself.

There’s something prelapsarian about it, coming as it did before the Kennedy assassination, before The Beatles turned American culture upside-down, before we knew the horrible truth about Spector’s abusive relationship with Ronnie. Listened to now, it’s a love letter from an innocent age, when pop itself was a teenage art form still grappling with its place in wider society.

Rick Nowels, producer of several generations of LA pop stars, including Belinda Carlisle and Lana Del Rey, described it in a 2017 Billboard interview as “Ground Zero” for modern pop. “It was a line in the sand that left everything that came before in the rear view mirror. It was the beginning of pop music being a serious American art form.”

“To me, Be My Baby is one of the great art pieces and testaments to the essential goodness of humanity of the 20th century. Along with Picasso’s Guernica, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can and (Salvador) Dali’s Persistence of Memory, I’ll take Be My Baby.”

He might have been Madonna’s key creative collaborator while she was at the height of her ‘80s powers, but songwriter/producer Patrick Leonard says that he’s never listened to any of her later albums – or, indeed, anyone else’s.

Leonard made the surprising admission in an interview with The Telegraph. “I’ve never heard one of her records, ever,” he said. “You know why? I haven’t listened to anybody’s records… I haven’t listened to any new music in almost 30 years. And I really mean that.”

Given his standing in the music industry – Leonard has also worked with the likes of Elton John, Roger Waters and Bon Jovi, and he collaborated with Leonard Cohen on his final four albums – and the fact that he's made definitely made music in that time, this certainly comes as a shock, as does the admission that his close association with Madonna has sometimes weighed heavily on him.

“It’s been a burden, because I’ve never been in a dance club in my life, but I’ve written some of the biggest dance songs in history,” he says.

For context, Leonard is talking about some of Madonna’s greatest hits: between 1986 and 1990 he had credits on her albums True Blue, Who’s That Girl, Like a Prayer and I’m Breathless, which yielded the likes of Live to Tell, La Isla Bonita, Cherish and, of course, Like a Prayer’s title track, which was given a new lease of life recently when Madonna performed it with Sabrina Carpenter at Coachella.

Before all of that, he served as Musical Director on Madonna’s Virgin world tour, her first. Having initially said no, he changed his mind when he was given complete creative freedom.

Explaining his U-turn, he recalls: “She basically said, ‘I’ve never done this. You’re in charge. I will push back on nothing…’ And I went, ‘OK.’”

Despite his apparent reluctance to celebrate his pop legacy too wildly, Leonard certainly doesn’t try to play down the role he played in Madonna’s success, the Like a Prayer album in particular.

It's this era that's rumoured to be covered in the forthcoming Madonna biopic, but Leonard says that, despite being heavily involved in the events of that time, he doesn't expect to be contacted by the makers of the film.

“I was there every day and producing, and it was my studio, I hired all the musicians and the engineers, and pretty much made the record,” he says. "What I’ll be curious to see is how I’m portrayed."

What’s more, he’s still proud of the way the music sounded: “For years and years and years, I said, ‘Look, if you have a really good stereo, and you sit in front of those speakers and you put Like a Prayer on – try to find something better. Good luck!”

PinkPantheress has been on quite the music production journey. In the space of five years, she’s gone from using samples to make beats in her university bedroom to being named Producer of the Year at The Brit Awards, picking up millions of fans along the way.

Now, in a revealing interview with the In Proximity podcast, Pink has been explaining how her music-making process has changed.

“When I first started, I had a lot of songs that I really wanted to sample,” she says. “Speed up, slow it down. That is a form of production. It's sampling, but in terms of what I was doing, I was being quite low-lift with it.”

Explaining further, she says: “So I would take a track, and I would basically take it and then speed it up, slow it down. And then I'd add things to an already existing bit of audio. I would use GarageBand for that. So I would just rip the audio and then cut it up and then add all this stuff to it, and I would add drum loops, and this was what it was at the beginning.

“As time went on, I started to gain a bit more confidence in what I could do, and I also started to collaborate with other people.”

Those people included Mura Masa and Oscar Scheller. “These are producers from the UK, so they have a strong understanding of what my sound is,” says PinkPantheress, but she admits that she was initially reluctant to step outside of her bedroom bubble and go into a studio with them.

“My manager at the time was like, ‘Oh, I want to set you up to do a session.’ I was like, ‘What is a session? Like, I did all this myself – you want me to do a session now?’ I was not offended, but I was like, I don't want to break this cycle that I'm in of making music my way. And I was all worried and like, I'm gonna hate it. I didn't know what a session was. I just had no idea.”

Part of this reluctance, she says, came from the fact that she already felt like she already had the production side of things covered with her own skillset. “I'm a producer first, and then vocalist last, or like, second, or whatever. So for me, it was like, ‘Well, what is this for?’”

Fortunately, PinkPantheress’s first experience with Oscar Scheller was a good one, and she quickly realised that collaborating with him and others was going to be beneficial.

“I was like, ‘Wow, he can do things that I want to do, and so, I'm watching them work. I was kind of picking up on what they did.”

“It was very hard for me – I just wanted to do everything myself,” she says later. “But after I collaborated for the first time with Oscar, I was like, yeah, this has to be the norm. It has to be. I mean, there's a reason it makes your life easier, and I wouldn't have these songs without these people.”

One moment in particular sticks in PinkPantheress’s mind: when she discovered how useful a MIDI keyboard could be.

“I'd never used a MIDI controller in my life like that. A MIDI controller is like a mini piano, which you can input notes with. Before then I was just using my keyboard on my laptop, and I thought that was the only way to do it. Then I watched them do it. And I was like, ‘Oh, I can just buy a keyboard and do it myself.’”

Asked to explain how she makes her songs now, PinkPantheress says that she has three ways of going about it.

“Some of my songs are songs produced by these producers, which I would then listen to and take, and then I would add my own production on top, or I would manipulate the audio again and then write over that.

“And then some songs are the reverse, where I make basically the whole beat, and then I get a producer to come in and kind of like, add things they think they hear, and then some songs are just me.”

PinkPantheress also says that, although she’s now happy to let other people be involved in her creative process, she likes to keep the circle pretty tight.

“I have a set few producers that I work with,” she confirms. “I only work with about three in rotation. I don't really stray outside of my three.”

That said, she also accepts that others can find success by taking a different approach. “Some people only work with one producer. Some artists I know only work with one, and then some artists work with everyone – different songs have different producers – and I think all methods work.”

Jack Antonoff has been involved in some pretty big records over the past decade, but he says that there’ll never be another song quite like one particular Beatles classic.

The tune in question is none other than Happiness Is A Warm Gun, taken from 1968’s The White Album. With its complex structure and frequent timing shifts, it might lack the immediacy of the Fab Four’s pure pop works, and it isn’t their most famous ‘experimental’ song, either, but for Antonoff, it represents a gold standard, and the song that he’s previously said was his first “production memory”.

What does he think is so great about it, though? A lot, it turns out – in fact, he was happy to provide a running commentary on the song’s genius while in conversation with Howard Stern.

“I mean, listen, the guitar, the way they're plucking it, he's singing like that,” says Antonoff over HIAWG’s opening bars, but it’s not long before we get the first musical pivot.

“You don't expect this fill,” he says, as we arrive at the second of the song’s five sections. “Then, all of a sudden, the guitar is stabbing. Listen to the bass. It's amazing.”

Soon enough, we’re into the ‘I need a fix’ section, and Antonoff is certainly getting his from it.

“I've never felt anything more like heroin than this guitar here,” he says, bluntly. “I mean, I'm floating now.”

While Stern thinks it’s the guitar that’s delivering the high, Antonoff suggests that it’s more of a cocktail of things.

“I mean, there's the bending and the phasing, but it's something else. John's vocals doubled and they're kind of off.”

Next up, the ‘Mother Superior’ part, and there’s a production element here that Antonoff seems genuinely confused by.

“Like, why does the tambourine come in there?” he ponders. “Who decided that? It's totally random. It came in what, like, two bars late.”

And then, says Antonoff, “the greatest moment of any song ever 100%” – the switch to the doo-wop section, which contains more magical mysteries.

“So you focus on John, you know, doing his soul thing. You don't realise the band, they're just like just dropping beats here and there.”

What seems to impress Antonoff as much as anything else is that none of this comes across as contrived: “I mean, this is the genius of it: The Beatles were never annoying to be annoying,” he argues. “But tonight, Howard, sit down and play along to this. Blow your fucking mind [with] what they're doing timing wise.”

As we hit the outro, Antonoff has made up his mind. “I mean, this is the greatest recording ever made,” he says. “This is the greatest recording. And I think George Martin stitched it together from what I've read, but every fucking element of that recording – on an analytical point of view – I could break down why it's so good. The compression, the sound, the panning, blah blah blah, but more than anything, what the fuck were they thinking? And how did they end up with this? There's nothing like it. There never has or never will be.”

SYNTH WEEK 2026: One of pop and hip-hop's most renowned producers, Mike Dean has a discography that could make even the most successful hitmaker drool, having worked with The Weeknd, Beyonce, Kanye West, Drake, Madonna and Jay-Z, among many others.

A gifted multi-instrumentalist, Dean is also a noted synthesizer aficionado, his productions laced with licks from an extensive collection of instruments that includes classics such as the Oberheim OB-X, the Memorymoog and the very same Yamaha CS-80 used on Michael Jackson's Thriller.

His studio may already contain more sought-after vintage synths than many of us will get to play in our lifetime, but Dean's collection is still growing, as he told gear marketplace Reverb when they stopped by his studio last month.

In a video shared to Reverb's YouTube channel, Dean revealed his latest purchase, a rare digital synth among his mostly analogue arsenal. This isn't just any digital synth, however, but the PPG Wave 2.3, a historic instrument that Dean says is the "best piece of gear" he's ever bought on Reverb.

"I've always never been interested in it because it's a digital synthesizer, you know, with analogue filters," Dean says. "Some friends of mine said 'you should definitely have one of these in your arsenal', so I started searching for one, started looking on Reverb and tried to find the cleanest-looking one."

"Everybody in the '80s had one of these. If you were a successful band that could afford it, you had a PPG Wave." Dean auditions some of his own patches for viewers before praising the synth's bright but gritty tone: "It doesn't sound digital, right?"

The Wave may be digital, but its a digital synth from the early '80s, not a sterile modern soft-synth: its low-resolution wavetables produce stepped waveforms and aliasing that create a distinctive and artefact-rich sound when run through its 12-bit DACs and analogue filters.

"All the messed up shit is what makes it cool, you know?," Dean says. "I'm so glad I got it, because it's a very cool synth. It's one of my favourites now."

Released in 1981, the PPG Wave 2 was a pioneering synth that introduced the concept of wavetable synthesis, a technique that's now relied upon by thousands of instruments across both hardware and software. Dean's variant, the Wave 2.3, came out a few years later, doubling the oscillator count and adding 12-bit sampling and multitimbrality.

While a vintage PPG Wave will likely set you back north of $10,000 in 2026, there's no shortage of options for synthesists looking to recreate its characterful sound on a budget: Behringer's PPG Wave clone is available for a fraction of the price, and Waldorf makes a respectable software emulation if you've no space left in your studio.

If your pockets go a little deeper, Groove Synthesis' 3rd Wave is a modernized homage to the Wave that we described as "one of the most powerful synths you could imagine" in our 2024 review.

Subscribe to Reverb's YouTube channel.

A lot of the many negative reviews of Michael, the new Michael Jackson biopic, have criticised it for shying away from depicting any of the more controversial aspects of the singer’s life. However, it’s also reported to make scant mention of the British songwriter who played a significant part in turning him into the biggest pop star the world has ever seen – Rod Temperton.

Perhaps, though, this is how Temperton would have wanted it. Throughout his career and right up to his death, in 2016, he was nicknamed ‘the invisible man’, such was his reluctance to be in the limelight.

A new audio documentary from BBC Radio Lincolnshire, though, seeks to bring Temperton’s achievements out of the shadows. Specifically, it details how he came to the attention of Jackson and his producer, Quincy Jones.

Temperton first made his mark as part of funk-disco outfit Heatwave, who were formed in London in 1975. Guitarist Roy Carter joined a short while later, and he remembers Temperton having a slightly unlikely musical hero.

“I think, If he hadn’t joined Heatwave, he’d have joined The Carpenters,” he remembers. “He said Karen Carpenter was his absolute favourite artist.”

Carter believes that Temperton learned a lot from listening to The Carpenters, and applied that knowledge to the songs he was writing for Heatwave.

"We'd all sit round a piano and he would do the best he could to sing them to us," he says. "He could sing harmonies, because that's what he liked to do, but he's not a lead singer. So, he'd be in the background, he'd be playing these songs, and we'd go, ‘What chord is that?’ So I'd have to convert what he was playing on the piano into guitar chords."

Heatwave’s big breakthrough came with 1977’s Boogie Nights, which became an international hit. And one of the people paying attention, suggests Carter, was a young Michael Jackson.

“Michael heard Heatwave and said, ‘I’d like that sound,’” he says.

At the time, Heatwave were being produced by Barry Blue, and he says he was the one who answered the phone when Quincy Jones, who was also a fan, called the studio and asked to speak to Temperton.

“There was a call that came into the studio and I picked it up: 'Can I speak to Rod Temperton please?' I said to Rod, 'There's a call for you here'. And he goes, 'Who? Quincy?'”

Temperton wasn’t convinced.

"He said an eff word and put the phone down, because he thought someone was winding him up,” Barry Blue remembers. “And the call came back and it was actually Quincy Jones calling Rod to say, ‘I love the songs you’ve written. Would you come over to LA and work on a project with me?’ He didn’t tell Rod what the project was – he said, just come over and I’ll fill you in.”

That project turned out to be Off The Wall, Michael Jackson’s 1979 breakthrough solo album and the first that Jones had produced. Temperton would later say that he submitted three potential songs for the record – Rock With You, Off The Wall and Burn This Disco Out – on the assumption that one would be selected and the other two rejected, but when he asked Jones and Jackson which one they wanted they said they’d like them all.

According to Roy Carter, Temperton workshopped some of these songs with Heatwave first. “We started rehearsing more songs that Rod would come up with,” he says, citing Rock With You as an example.

“He said, ‘No, that’s not a Heatwave song,’ so he gave it to Michael,” he recalls. “I’ve got the demo on cassette in my basement somewhere.”

Things went so well for Temperton in LA that, soon enough, he felt like he wanted to leave Heatwave behind. Discussing the making of Off The Wall, he would later say: “By the time it was over, Quincy and I had become such close buddies that he said, ‘I want you to work on everything I’m doing.’”

The pair went on to have more hits outside of the Jackson bubble – George Benson’s Give Me The Night and Stomp! by The Brothers Johnson were notable examples – and he also got to write a song, Lovelines, for his hero Karen Carpenter’s one and only solo album.

Temperton’s crowning moment, though, came with Thriller, the next Michael Jackson album and the one that would go on to become the biggest-selling in history. He wrote not only the title track, but also Baby Be Mine and The Lady in My Life, cementing his place in pop history.

Jimmy Jam is back. Not only appearing live in Vegas in a showcase of classic tunes alongside his longtime production partner Terry Lewis, but also providing hundreds of drum patterns for EastWest’s new DrumX drum machine plugin, released April 27.

For ‘80s and ‘90s aficionados Jam and Lewis will need no introduction. Starting out as part of Prince’s backing band (before being “let go” by the temperamental superstar) the pair swiftly moved into music production, crafting such classics as Just Be Good To Me for the SOS Band, Change of Heart for Change, Saturday Love for Cherelle and Alexander O’Neal, plus their incomparable work across the decades bejewelling hits for Janet Jackson.

To date, they’ve scored 42 Billboard No 1s and more than 100 gold, platinum, and diamond records. Check the sleeves of beloved albums by Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, Usher, Boyz II Men and many more, and you’ll find Jam and Lewis in Control.

Meanwhile, EastWest’s DrumX brings together 10 of the most iconic drum machines ever created – including the LinnDrum, TR-808 and TR-909, DR-55, DMX, DrumTraks and SP-12 – all meticulously sampled by the producers and reimagined for modern production by Jimmy Jam himself in an exclusive collaboration with the award-winning virtual instrument developer.

We caught up with the production legend alongside EastWest’s founder, producer and king of the sample library Doug Rogers to talk sampling, AI and what comes next in Jimmy’s illustrious career.

What is it about DrumX that made you want to get involved?

Jimmy Jam: “I liked the concept of going back and doing things the way that I used to do them. In the early days, a lot of the stuff we did started with drum machines and beats. So the idea of having something starting with a drum beat again was very intriguing.

“I think it was not only the ask, but who was doing the asking. What Doug has built is pretty amazing and it was exciting to be a part of.”

And it's not just your sounds? It's got your grooves in there as well?

JJ: “Somebody literally gave me the drum machine and said ‘Go create’. That's what we did for a couple of weeks – just experimenting, learning things about it. There were things that the machine could do that I don't even think the designers knew that it could do. And there were other things where I’d say, ‘You know, man, it'd be great if we could do this…’ and then the next day I'd come back and they'd say, ‘Oh, it's there now.’”

Doug Rogers: “I know we changed things on the quantization.”

JJ: “Yeah, we changed some things where it wasn't quite right. They said, ‘Where do you think it should be?’ And I said, ‘Right here’, and then the next day, there it was. I always like when people are creating software or whatever and include the creatives in the process. I had a great time doing it.”

What were your aims for DrumX? What makes it different?

DR: “Jimmy. [laughs] That makes it different! You’re not gonna be able to get Jimmy to do your drum tracks so that's a great foundation to build any piece of music on – something from a proven hitmaker, that forms the foundation of whatever you’re working on.

“There are a lot of drum machines out there and a lot of people have sampled 808s, 909s, and the rest, but what we have are 10 of the real classic drum machines really deeply sampled, spending a lot of time capturing every nuance. Plus we also wanted to add something so as not to be stuck in the ‘80s and ‘90s – to create something that could be used in modern music.”

So what’s your take on the ‘modern’ sound?

DR: “The thing that’d happened between the ‘80s and ‘90s and now is that people use a lot more distortion. EDM didn't exist in the ‘80s and ‘90s. With DrumX we were running these machines through four levels of tape saturation, using an analogue Studer A820 and then the fifth one with the [Studer] J37 tube, which really sounds great when you push it real hard.

“And Opus – our audio engine – has got hundreds of effects. The default reverb is a simulation of an AMS [RMX16] gated reverb, but you could change the reverb to another 100 different reverbs if you want to do that, just by going into the mixer.

“The thing that I think that was most interesting to me was how musical Jimmy got the drums. He was going for notes, musical notes. I haven't seen that before, I've seen a lot of people using drum machines, but I've never seen somebody honing in to create a piece of music on a drum machine.

“Jimmy was pulling sounds from all those 10 machines and stacking them, tuning them, putting them through effects, adding tape saturation, adding some crush. Just screwing them up as much as possible, but in a very musical way. It's almost like the drum machine became a drum synthesiser, with all of those tools being added together.

JJ: “My thing – with any piece of equipment – is I want it to inspire me. I love it when I turn it on and instantly a song idea comes or a drum idea comes or a melodic thing comes. And that was the thing with DrumX. The more I got into it the more inspired I got.”

Jimmy, what would you say the secret of your drum sound is? Those famous ‘trash can’ snares. When we listen to one of your classic tracks, what are we actually hearing?

JJ: “Well, a lot of it was sound effect-based stuff. It was things piled on top of each other. It wasn't one snare drum, it was a combination of three. And then the AMS. We use the AMS a lot on our records – the non-linear setting on there. It was always combinations of things.

“I loved the records Trevor Horn made and the way that he took sounds that were percussive, not necessarily drum sounds, but glass breaking or trash can lids or whatever. A lot of stuff we did in the early days was Linn Drum, and we used the 808 back in the day, but we took those sounds and then combined them with other things and ran them through an AMS… You could change the complexion of the sound totally.

“I always liked the idea of having a super distorted drum palette then putting something beautiful over the top of it. And I have to give a lot of credit to Steve Hodge, our engineer. These were very ugly sounds but he would find the beauty in them.

“Terry and I came along at a time when drum machines were very new and drummers were, in a lot of cases, kind of scared of them. But I started off as a drummer, and I loved the drum machine because I felt like, ‘wow, I know how to do it!’ I should be able to do this better than anybody because I started off as a drummer, so I never felt threatened by it.

“I never felt threatened about pushing the envelope. Working with Janet Jackson on Control, Janet was so open to whatever we wanted to do. She grew up listening to musicals, movies, so the idea of rhythmic sounds with picture and choreography and those things together – I think she loved the fact that we were doing things so rhythmically aggressive. She loved that.

“Like when she heard the drums in Nasty, she didn't go ‘Oh, that sounds ugly’ or ‘that sounds too aggressive.’ It was like, ‘No, that's really cool’. She embraced those kinds of things and when you work with artists that don't really have limits on what they wanna do, you can do all kinds of different things.

“We wouldn't have come up with those drum programmes and pushed the envelope the way we did – and it's really true of all the artists that we work with – it's really them that's the inspiration. Some things we would push more than others, but Janet always really wanted us to come up with whatever weirdness we could come up with. She was totally into it.”

Like the incredible sounds you got for Scream, with Janet and Michael Jackson together.

JJ: “Yeah, I think we came up with probably six or seven tracks for that. Scream – or what ended up becoming Scream – was the track that he liked the best. But then after we were done with that, he came back and he asked, ‘What about that other track?…’ Tabloid Junkie was another of the ones we did. And the title track, History. I think we ended up doing like five or six on that album. We probably would have worked again with each other at some point because it was a really enjoyable experience.

“But Scream. I think that Janet always felt like that was Michael's track, that she was just a guest on his record. She didn't really feel it was a duet, because it was very much Michael's kind of lyric and where he wanted to go. And also even the key of the song was more Michael's than Janet's. But we love the way it turned out.

“Janet was the inspiration for doing it because we knew that Michael was in love with a song on her Rhythm Nation album, The Knowledge. That used to be his warm-up, so we knew if we gave Scream some of that sonic character then that would be it. And Janet said, ‘I knew that was the one he was gonna pick. I know my brother!’”

Tell us about the process of putting DrumX together.

DR: “We did the DrumX sampling maybe two years ago, before Jimmy came on board. I'm an analogue buff and the best you can do if you're an analogue purist is do as much analogue before you get to that final stage, where it has to be converted to digital. I put the audio down to Pro Tools and direct to tape, so I have the choice between both, and usually, I end up using the tape version because a lot of these sounds benefit from a little bit of harmonic distortion.

“Where tape falls down for me is in the bottom end. The digital bottom end is much more solid and has better bass than analogue. So we use both. We just get the best signal chain we can and then figure out what's going on with the machine, and what settings are there, and make sure we capture every setting that is important. At the end of the day, it all ends up digital, whether you like it or not, because we live in a digital world.”

For your Fab Four project, where you re-created all The Beatles most famous signature sounds, you put together an amazing collection of kit. Do you still have it all?

DR: “Well, I kept the [Studer] J37. But I sold the REDD desk. And I sold the TG12345 because they cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once the project wrapped, I just didn't see the need to keep them. And I actually didn't like the TG! I know it's sacrilege to say something like that, but I really didn't like the sound of it.

“To me, it was absolutely amazing that Alan Parsons and Pink Floyd got the sound of Dark Side of the Moon from that console. It was such a credit to them as a team. But I did like the REDD because that was tube-based. I think Abbey Road was the first album that The Beatles used a transistor-based console with the TG. I think right up until then they were using the REDD and the J37, so everything was tube-based and that has a sound – a fatness.

“There's something about a tube that's living and breathing. It never repeats itself. I equate it to being like the ocean. The waves are never the same a second time, you know? There's something about that movement inside a tube. It's unpredictable and it's a sound that people just love. So I kept the best part of it, which was the J37. But someone offered me an insane amount of money for the REDD, so I had to let go of that.”

Jimmy, you were saying earlier you started out playing drums?

JJ: “My dad was a musician, still is a musician, 99 years old, Cornbread Harris. I was a drummer in his band at 12 years old. When I met Terry [Lewis] later that same year, 1973, HE said, ‘I already have a drummer’, who was Jellybean Johnson, who recently passed away, but Terry said, ‘Be a keyboard player because your Dad plays keyboards’. Terry was the one that got me into playing keyboards.

“At home my mom controlled the record player, so everything I heard, whether it was Ray Charles or James Brown… All those things back in the day. All of those combinations of things led to this. I was a DJ as well as a musician. All of those things taught me how to pack a dance floor… or clear a dance floor! Learning other people's songs taught me how to make hit songs, I guess. And then, obviously, going back to Terry. I have had a great partner for over 50 years. All of those things kind of go into it.”

It’s great that these tools are only getting more useful and more powerful but when does music tech cross a line? How do you both feel about the role of AI in music-making?

DR: “I think that Jimmy and I are both on the same page here. In 1987 when I got my first sampler there were no sounds for it. There was nothing, and that just seemed ridiculous to me. It was like having a computer with no software. So we made the very first drum sample CD of all time and put it out. I think it was early ‘88.

“But they said the world was gonna fall apart, that we were destroying music. We were gonna be putting all these people out of business… But actually, the complete opposite happened. Now there are millions of people making music that weren't before because they didn’t have a record contract. Or they didn’t have access to an expensive studio. So I've kind of been through the ‘AI thing’ before, and I saw that it was just a load of crap.

“I'm working with an AI company now, Ace, who are the leader in musician-based AI. Suno, for example, is a consumer product. They’re for the people that just want to type in, ‘Make me a good song’, but there’ll always be real musicians and they want to make music.

“Right now you have to become a rocket scientist just to create a musical passage that sounds real. My whole thing has always been about simplicity and I see AI as really opening that up. So someone can sit down at a keyboard and the software will interpret perfectly what they intended to do in terms of their performance. They won't have to learn all the articulations and all the rest of it that goes with it.”

JJ: “When I think of AI I think about two things: permission and compensation. Permission has always been in place for any sort of copyright, and so it should be for AI. Where AI is taking people's voices or they're taking art without the permission of the person or the people who they’re scraping the information from, they should be compensated.

“So if they're being compensated, and they give permission, then I think that’s good. There needs to be some sort of regulation or some sort of rules in place, but this train has left the station. You can either get on the train, or you're gonna get run over. So learn as much as you can about it and find a way to use it in a way that's respectful, and as a tool to help you create. Then I think AI is a really good thing.”

Do you use AI in the studio?

JJ: “We've always embraced the idea of technology. I won't name the artist, but there was a legendary artist we were working with who's on the older side, and there was a part that they just couldn't get as we were recording.

“Well, now with AI I can take the demo vocalist – who sang it exactly the way we wanted it to be – and I can take the voice of the person that we've been working with, and I can combine those two things together. And now I have him singing it perfectly, the way we want to do it.

“So now the choice is, do I have this older gentleman come back and sing his part, or do I say to him, ‘We can correct this so it's the right timing. Is that OK with you?’ That’s where the permission comes in. They said, ‘Yes, that's perfectly fine’. That’s the problem solved, and this person is being respected. We're not just ‘taking his stuff’”.

DR: “It’s like when sampling first started – sampling records. On the creative side, there were no guardrails in place. Clyde Stubblefield [the origin of the Funky Drummer riff] being a good example. He was the most sampled guy ever and never got a cent for it.”

JJ: “I love sampling because I love the idea of being able to take a song and bring together generations of people. Like Got Till It's Gone for Janet. That started out as a Joni Mitchell sample of Big Yellow Taxi and then I added a drum beat to it.

“Or a song like That's the Way Love Goes which started off as a James Brown Papa Don't Take No Mess sample alongside an Impeach the President sample. Rhythm Nation itself is probably the best example – that's Sly and the Family Stone’s Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).

“There are two samples in particular that we used, that I always think about because I ran into the people that did them. Once, I got on a plane and a guy turned around and he said, ‘Are you Jimmy Jam?’ And I said, ‘Yeah’. And it was Gerry Beckley of America and he said, ‘You built me my pool,’ because Someone To Call My Lover, the song we did for Janet, sampled their Ventura Highway. He said ‘If you ever wanna redo any of our stuff, just call me!’”

“Another one was after the Grammys, I was stood in McDonald's by The Staples Centre, waiting in line and a guy came up to me and he said, ‘You bought me my house.’ It was Wayne Garfield, the writer of The Glow of Love for Change that we sampled for Janet’s All For You.

“So we were able to introduce a song to a new generation of people, but we were able to compensate the songwriter that wrote the original song. But at the beginning of sampling? People didn't think twice about it. But once the lawsuits started flying they got serious about getting permission and compensating the artists. AI is that same wild west right now, but it'll get sorted. I'm confident it's all gonna work out.”

And you’ve got a Vegas residency coming up?

JJ: “We're gonna head to Vegas tomorrow. It's Terry and myself and then our kind of our foundational singers are Ruben Studdard for the male singing and Shanice Wilson for the female. And then we'll have a few other folks drop by on different nights to do different things.

“It's kind of like going back to our roots because before we were songwriters or producers, we were just musicians in a local band playing everybody else's hits. So now we go back to just being musicians, but we get to play our own music! We’re doing six shows, at The Venetian, a club called Voltaire. It's about a thousand seats, intimate, every seat is great – really great sound, great lighting, just a really cool place. It's a kind of a trial run. We'll see how it goes.”

Find out more about EastWest DrumX.

One of Britain’s most reclusive electronica outfits have announced their first album in 13 years will be released at the end of May.

Boards Of Canada, aka Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, haven’t released any new music since 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest. But a new 18-track record, Inferno, is now set to land on May 29.

The duo, who were brought up and still live – as far as we know – in rural Scotland, have hardly ever given interviews and rarely play live. Their best-known album is still their debut, Music Has The Right To Children, which became an unexpected crossover hit in the late 1990s. Since then, they have released just a further three full-length records, interspersed with the occasional remix and EP.

Long-time fans will know that the duo have a habit of teasing their albums in a cryptic style, and for Inferno they seem to have surpassed themselves. In recent weeks, various fans have received VHS video tapes (yes, how quaintly 20th-century!) with Boards Of Canada iconography emblazoned on them. Those that still have video players have reported that the footage contained therein was a few minutes of degraded analogue visuals and layered voice fragments with some very Boards Of Canada-style music.

Fans started a-speculating and according to one Reddit page, it seems the footage includes audio samples from an advert for a Christian Bible school magazine that dates from 1991. Again, all very Boards Of Canada.

Next came posters that featured artwork similar to that of Music Has The Right To Children – degraded family photographs from the 1970s with the faces blurred out - were spotted in London, New York and Shibuya in Japan.

Then last week came a new track that was uploaded to their Youtube Channel. The video for Tape 5 features the same sort of degraded footage that was on the teaser VHS. However, with the tracklisting for Inferno confirmed today, it seems Tape 5 is separate from the album.

All good fun, of course. And yes, Inferno is released on May 29 through Warp Records.

Having previously advised that “MIDI controllers can be expensive” and that using your QWERTY keyboard to record notes “works just as well,” PinkPantheress has now conceded that she really would like to own one particular wearable performance controller that definitely doesn’t come cheap.

We’re talking about the Mi.Mu gloves, the wearable musical mittens that enable you to trigger and control sounds using hand and finger gestures.

The idea for the gloves came from Imogen Heap, who began developing them with her team back in 2010. Heap, it turns out, is a big inspiration for PinkPantheress, something that she recently revealed to Derrick Gee on his YouTube channel during an interview.

But Gee was way ahead of her: he already knew this and, prior to the interview, had invited Heap to send a question for PinkPantheress that he could surprise her with, and she had been happy to oblige.

“I would like to ask you a question about production,” began Heap, in a pre-recorded clip. “So, I know you produce a lot of your work, which is brilliant. And I would like to know if you've got any special tricks, basically anything insightful that I could go buy or something that you know about in one of the programs you use that I could have a play with.”

There was more, though, because Heap was also wearing a pair of the aforementioned gloves, and set PinkPantheress a challenge.

“I have just now recorded a little bit of me singing one of your songs. A little bit of one of your songs. And I have it in my gloves, and I'm going to ask you to try and figure out what it is. But I'm going to go backwards to forwards.”

All of which drew quite the reaction from PinkPantheress, who was clearly astonished to see one of her songs, which she managed to correctly identify as True Romance, being sung by one of her heroes.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “That’s going to hit me later, and it’s going to make me cry.”

And then a plea: “Those gloves are everything. I've always wanted a pair of those – I want to ask her for some.”

Well we guess she sort of has now.

PinkPantheress went on to reveal that she and Heap have been close to working together in the past, and to explain just why she was so overwhelmed at hearing Heap singing one of her songs.

“So many of my melodies I feel like are born from her. It feels like it's full circle. Like, that is a melody she would sing… I am her daughter.”

That might come as news to Heap, but we get where she’s coming from. And if Heap doesn’t come through with a pair of gloves, PinkPantheress might like to know that they’re available on the Mi.Mu website, though she’ll need to find £2,699 if she wants to buy a pair.

As for production tips, despite being named Producer of the Year at this year's Brit Awards, PinkPantheress humbly suggested that there was nothing she could teach Heap that she didn’t already know.

“As if she's asking me. She's asking me what tricks I have. I have no tricks that she doesn't know about.”