There aren't that many experimental artists that truly break through to receive mass appeal. A band who skilfully manoeuvred their ever-widening sonic universe into the ears and hearts of the general public is Pink Floyd.

Despite Floyd’s lack of interest with the singles market (at least when compared to their multi-million-selling albums), Money supplied them with that rarest of things - a popular chart hit.

It would be one of their most notable stabs at the single market - until Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2 came along several years later. Its writer, Roger Waters, would later tell Q Magazine that, “The only other significant single in my career was Money from Dark Side Of The Moon. That was the only one that made any impact at all.”

Written during the making of the band’s legendary The Dark Side of the Moon, Money lyrically found Waters wrestling with his own socialist principles in the face of being, by this point, quite a well-paid pop star. Perhaps this thematic tension is the reason why Waters chose to craft such a musically constricted, and precarious song.

Two key elements of which hit you from the outset…

The first thing we hear is the sound of a cash register - or at least that's what we tend to assume, but the reality is somewhat different.

Roger Waters had a demo studio in a converted garden shed, located at the bottom of the garden at his house in Islington, North London. Many of his songs and ideas during this period were formed here and notably this is where Waters created the demo and the original tape loop for the track’s intro.

The process of creating loops from analogue tape was nothing new; the concept, originally known as Musique concrète, required the recording of acoustic sounds to tape, then subsequent editing and splicing, in order to turn these sounds into new musical forms, often with avant-garde or experimental consequences. It was a practice made famous in the UK by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Waters ran with the idea of creating a lengthy tape loop to accompany a new song, a riff-based piece which adopted a wonky-feeling 7/4 time signature.

Developing the idea with legendary engineer Alan Parsons at Abbey Road Studios, Waters built out the loop sound by recording the sound of coins dropping into a mixing bowl, and then tearing a piece of paper. Only then did he move on to recording a cash register. As he wanted each sound to punctuate each of the seven beats per bar, he chopped the tape in the old-fashioned way, using a splicing block and razor blade, and then delicately sticking them together with editing tape.

To ensure note duration consistency, each small piece of tape would have been the exact same length, totalling a loop with seven individual pieces - all joined together.

"The only way to keep it in time was to take a piece of tape with the sound on it and measure it with a ruler. You would take the exact length of tape and then splice the next exact length of tape to it.,” Parsons told Goldmine. “We would make a circular loop that was supported with microphone stands around the machine, and we would roll the tape, and that was what the band played to."

Waters and Parsons then ran the loop through a Revox tape machine, with a microphone stand acting as a support for the tape. It’s the sort of thing we take for granted in today’s drag-and-drop DAW-based word, but back then was a laborious and time-consuming process.

It's worth noting that this would've been a relatively short tape loop, at least by tape loop standards (a mere 20 feet it has been reported…). Longer loops often employed additional machines, with the extra tape-machine-horsepower used to keep the loop running. There are many tales from the Radiophonic Workshop’s history, of loops being run along the entire length of corridors…

Without wishing to take anything away from the concept behind this tape loop, and indeed the track itself, we have to pay homage to Ronnie Hazlehurst - a prolific TV composer who was active during the 70s and 80s.

Ronnie was commissioned to write the music for a new BBC sitcom, called Are You Being Served? Having written the theme, he didn't have enough in the budget to hire a percussionist, so with the help of a BBC engineer called Larry Goodson, constructed a tape loop of a cash register in operation, to act as the percussion track.

Why do we mention this? Well, Are You Being Served? first aired in September 1972, while Money (and its parent album The Dark Side of the Moon), wasn't heard until its release on the 1st of March 1973. Was Roger subconsciously (or consciously?) influenced by this quirky sitcom soundtrack? The jury's out.

Moving away from the tape loops and to the structure of the song proper, Money certainly keeps us on our toes in terms of number of beats per bar.

To begin with, the song is planted in 7/4; this makes it a beat short of the more common 4-to-a-bar concept, that would occupy the space of 2 bars.

The 7/4 signature ties in beautifully with the main riff, which is rooted in the key of B minor, and doubled in octaves by a picked guitar and bass.

There are embellishments to this construct, notably from a Wurlitzer electric piano, which plays an octave higher than the riff, with a relatively funky placement of the chords Bm7 and E. It’s important to note that this acts as tantamount to the ‘icing on the cake’ - essentially an aside to the main harmony. A heavily tremolo-ed guitar also ‘twangs’ the note B at the beginning of every couple of bars.

Money has an incredibly bluesy feel, and isn’t built around what we typically regard as a more usual verse/chorus structure - we could easily regard verses as choruses, as if playing blues or jazz.

Even so - and despite this blues feel - Money doesn't quite conform to the 12-bar stereotype, but it’s certainly close!

Sticking to our blues-leaning idea of the song’s A-section as its ‘chorus’, the harmony remains relatively static. We stay with the implied chord of Bm for a full 8 bars of 7/4; given that we are only one beat adrift from a two-bar construct, it feels more like 16 bars, so the welcome shift up to F#m at the end of the the chorus is very welcome.

Just when we thought we had got our head around the 7/4 concept, the shift at the end of each chorus presents an interesting timing conundrum (dependent upon how pedantic you want to be.)

We stay on an implied chord of F#m for 8 beats, before dropping to a chord of Em7 for 6 beats. Now we could easily argue that these 14 beats add up to 2x bars of 7/4, but the placement of the harmony supplies the shift to the chord Em7, on the 2nd beat of a bar of 7/4 - that feels so wrong!

It either is wrong - or it’s total genius. Whichever way you choose to count it, the beats will add up to the same, it's just whether or not your head can play ball.

To be fair, if you are just playing the guitar/bass riff, then it slots seamlessly within this off-kilter timing and implied chord structure.

After two choruses - with lead vocals supplied by David Gilmour - we are treated to a tenor saxophone solo supplied by long time artistic collaborator, Dick Parry.

This is where the blues vibe really does rear its head, as the extended sequence adopts a double-length blues form. This means that we hear all of the usual blues chords, but as we remain in 7/4, it feels like each chord is twice as long, which of course it is… nearly (It’s one beat less than 2 bars of 4/4, of course!)

As if improvising in 7/4 isn't difficult enough, Money shifts to a 4/4 time signature for the searing guitar solo that forms the long middle section of the song. Supplied by David Gilmour (who else?), the section feels like a blues shuffle. Although there’s a change in the riff and a subtle deviation to the chords, this section still keeps a consistent feel with the rest of the song.

“Roger came in with the verses and lyrics for Money more or less completed,” Gilmour told Guitar World. “And we just made up middle sections, guitar solos and all that stuff. We also invented some new riffs - we created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7/4. It was my idea to break down and become dry and empty for the second chorus of the solo.”

We close out with another vocal chorus, before the song fades into the next track on the album…

Despite being regarded as one of the most meticulously crafted studio albums of all time, there is a spontaneous, freeform quality to Money. The tempo ebbs and flows, right from the outset - perhaps this is a consequence of the difficulty of playing completely in time with the cash register tape loop.

By our reckoning, the song picks up by about 8bpm from its intro to just the beginning of the first chorus, with the rip-roaring guitar solo motivating the tempo still further. These kinds of tempo fluctuations were fairly usual for live recording at this time, when playing to a click track was not the norm. But Pink Floyd certainly had fun with the shifting rhythmic sands here.

When released as a single, 10 days after its parent album on May 7th 1973, Money became an unlikely hit for the group, peaking at number 13 on the US Billboard Chart.

“We were by no means rich at that time” Gilmour told Uncut magazine in 2003. “Money was the single that helped to really break us in America. It was the track that made us guilty of what it propounds, funnily enough.”

For today's free and easy music producers, the knotty business of music theory has always had a slight whiff of the uncool about it.

Talk of Major and Minor scales conjure up images of dry, dusty, bewigged baroque musicians from centuries past, the nightmare of childhood piano lessons, or baffling overheard discussions in jazz clubs concerning the superiority of augmented 13ths over Neapolitan sixths.

And don't get us started on the joys of soloing in the Mixolydian mode…

This bad rep is entirely unjustified, however, since, regardless of whether you're a composer, songwriter, producer or DJ, shoring up your musical knowledge with a smattering of grassroots theory can have a profound effect on the quality of your output.

Here at MusicRadar, we never underestimate the importance of a good grounding in music theory. After all, how music works is the key to everything we do when we're creating a project.

So instead, try to think of theory as a framework to support and inspire your musical endeavours, rather than inhibit and impose rules on them.

The best part is that you don't have to plumb the murky depths of the subject to be able to use it to your advantage. When a crippling loss of creativity strikes when you're sitting in front of your DAW – and this can happen to any of us at any time, let's face it – having a few tried, tested and theoretically proven techniques in your back pocket can be a lifesaver.

Here, we're going to highlight ten of our favourite, most practical theory-based tips that can help to kickstart the creative process next time your inspiration well runs a little dry.

Let's knuckle down and get theory-ous!

• Best online piano lessons: recommended piano lesson apps, software and websites

1. Broken chords

Should your keyboard parts naturally tend towards the clunky side, things can be improved by employing a technique known as broken chords.

This involves breaking chords up into their component notes and playing them as short arpeggios (runs of notes). The technique doesn’t just add rhythmic interest, but it can be a great way of coming up with ideas for cool melodies that work naturally with the chord progression, since the notes you pick out are taken from the chords themselves.

Here we have a four-bar progression of simple block chords. To the right, we have the same progression, but played using broken chords. Like finger-picking on an acoustic guitar, instead of playing all the notes on the same beat, each triad is split into individual notes.

2. Animating chords with inversions

Moving the order of notes around within a chord can take a progression in new directions without changing the actual chords. This is easily done by selecting notes and shifting them up and down an octave - most DAWs have a shortcut key for this, such as Shift-Up/Down.

Here we’ve taken a simple C, D, Eb, F progression and completely altered its shape by swapping the note order around in the second half. These ‘rearranged’ chords are known as inversions.

3. Change the bass note

The notes a bass part plays can assume the role of root note for the chords played by parts above it. Sticking different bass notes underneath can radically alter the sound of a static chord sequence.

Step 1: Let’s illustrate by looking at a piano part playing a repeated rhythmic C minor chord sequence over and over… and over. It sounds pretty boring, as the chord doesn’t change. Instead of thinking up new chords, though, let’s try injecting freshness by using a more animated bass part.

Step 2: For the first two bars, we stick to a C bass note, as it’s the root note of the chord. After two bars, however, we shift the bass note down from C to A, forming a completely different chord with the piano - an Am7b5 (A-Eb-G-C), in fact.

Step 3: Keeping the piano chord the same, we next move the bass from A to Ab, making an Abmaj7 (Ab-Eb-G-C) chord. Then down to F, up to G and back to C again. If you’re not sure what bass notes will fit, try picking notes that are already in the accompanying chord(s).

4. New flavours with modes

If you’ve never encountered modes before, this one tip could change your musical outlook forever. Scales are a basic component of music theory - most people know one or two of the major scales, the most common being C major (C D E F G A B). But what if we told you that you could unlock a secret world of evocative alternative scales simply by playing any scale from a different starting note?

Try it by playing C major in the conventional fashion, from C to C on a MIDI keyboard. Now give your ears a few seconds’ rest to forget the sound of it, and play the same scale again, but without starting on C. Try going from D to D. Or F to F. Notice how they have a different quality to the major’s happy, kindergarten sound? What you’re playing are different modes of the C major scale, and they sound different because of the different sequence of intervals between the notes that happens when you start somewhere other than the root note of the scale. Underpinning each new mode with a bass note the same as your new starting note will reinforce the effect.

5. Monotony rules

Melody-writing can be tough, but sometimes, if the rhythm is hooky enough, sticking religiously to one note is all you need to do.

Try using a monotone melody in a verse part, and slowly add small variations through the bridge section to build to a chorus hook. This approach also gives you an opportunity to focus on rhythm and sonic variety, rather than just melody alone, for adding interest.

6. Borrowed chords

Diatonic means “in key”, and diatonic chords are formed using only notes taken from a particular scale. So a C major scale containing the notes C D E F G A B - the white notes on a keyboard - would give you the diatonic chords C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, and Bdim, formed by stacking alternate notes onto each note within the scale. These are the basic triads you may already be familiar with; however, a palette of only seven chords can be limiting, so why not borrow chords from other keys?

Borrowed chords are most often taken from parallel keys - keys that have the same root note as the original key. In the case of C major, the parallel minor key is C minor, so we have a whole new set of chords to choose from - Cm, Ddim, Eb, Fm, Gm, Ab and Bb.

7. Layer chords together

For an exotic sound, try combining regular major or minor triads together to form polychords.

For a classic polychord combo, let’s use C major as the first chord (C-E-G). For the second, we need to find the major chord that has its root a perfect fifth above the root of the first chord. In this case, that happens to be G major (G-B-D). Play the two chords together and you get a Cmaj9 chord (C-E-G-B-D). If you’re stuck for which chords to combine, go for ones that already have a note or two in common.

8. Take some giant leaps

To give things a kick when putting together a melody, try making a dramatic leap up the keyboard. A good interval to use for this is a minor or major sixth.

You find these intervals by using the scale degree numbering system outlined in Tip 10. With major scales, the distance between the root note and degree 6 of the scale is a major sixth, so in the case of C, a major sixth above would be A. Jump up from C to A in the course of a melody, and it’ll take you up into a whole different area of the keyboard.

9. Build an extension

Extending regular major or minor triads by adding extra notes can radically transform a track. For instance, in C major, a Cmaj7 is made by adding the seventh degree of the C major scale (B) to a C major triad (C-E-G).

If we extend the scale up the keyboard beyond the octave, we get into the extended range, where a ninth is essentially the scale’s second degree played up an octave. So an easy way to play a ninth chord is to play a root-position triad (for example, C major – C-E-G) and add in the second degree between the root and the third (C9 – C-D-E-G).

10. Go pentatonic

Limiting yourself to notes from a pentatonic scale may give you a smaller choice, but it can give rise to some memorable melodies.

Step 1: While a conventional major or minor scale contains seven notes, a pentatonic scale only contains five. Effectively, they’re regular scales with a couple of notes removed. If we look at a normal C major scale, we can see that it contains the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B.

Step 2: We can then give these degrees numbers, from 1 to 7. To make the scale pentatonic, we need to remove degrees 4 and 7 - in this case, that’s F and B, leaving us with C, D, E, G and A, the C major pentatonic scale.

Step 3: For a minor pentatonic scale, omit the second (D) and sixth (Ab) degrees. For the C minor scale, we’re left with C, Eb, F, G and Bb. Pentatonic scales sound great, and they’re fun and easy to use.

While a mixing console may initially seem like an impenetrable maze of buttons, sliders and knobs, it’s actually a very simple to understand ‘what you see is what you get’ machine when you get down to it. And we're here to help.

The principles of using a mixing console in real life versus an on-screen in-your-DAW alternative are basically identical. That’s because your DAW essentially copied the tried and tested layout of the classic physical mixing console that’s been the focal point of recording studios for over 90 years.

After all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Tracking versus mixing

Getting right back to basics, a mixing desk essentially operates in two different and distinct modes. First of all comes the tracking, where all sounds are incoming and your desk is controlling the levels reaching your DAW (or old skool tape) and the headphones and monitors of the band in the studio.

And if you’re mixing a live performance exactly the same applies. That is, sound comes in, is tweaked to perfection, then heads out again.

Once the performance is over and captured perfectly in your chosen recording method, your mixing desk is then used for its second dual purpose – mixing. Now, rather than recording your band, your mixer is listening to what was recorded. Your band can head home and you can get on with the important business of making them sound great in their absence, with each separate performance appearing on a separate channel of the desk.

Big or small… They’re all the same

The trick to viewing and understanding a mixing desk is to see it as a set of individual channels all lined up side by side. Commonly mixing consoles (and let's just call them ‘mixers’ or ‘desks’ for short) will feature eight or 12 such channels. Larger home studio mixers will go to 16 or even 24. While in a professional studio it’s not uncommon to see up to 96 channels side by side.

But no matter what the size, if you look closely you’ll see each separate channel strip, running vertically from the fader at the front surface of the console, all the way through to the outputs on the back, all identical, all lined up, side by side across the desk.

Each of these channels is available for use by an instrument, be that a vocalist, guitarist, snare drum and so on. And each channel has an input, a volume slider, some controls to tweak the sound and an output. And that’s it.

Each channel’s output is combined into the ‘master output’ and that heads out to your amplifier and speakers with a final volume slider setting the listening level.

In short, the aim is that all the elements of your track, appear on the mixing console and the engineer or producer at the controls can tweak each channel to make the combined output sound perfect.

And, if you understand the workings of a single channel then you’ve got the basics of the entire desk.

What’s in a channel strip?

Starting from the front edge of the console and working through to the back here’s what you’ll most likely see:

First of all there’s a fader – a long, smooth-sliding slider – that’s used for adjusting the volume level of the instrument that’s plugged into it. You’ll use this to set the level of the instrument coming in. Be that while you’re recording – making sure the level is loud but not too loud – and then how much you can hear when you listen back – be that for mixing down a multi-track recording session for a finished mix, or getting the sound right for a live performance.

When recording you want all the sounds recorded at clear, workable volume levels and the mixing console is essential for bringing unruly loud instruments (such as drums) into line with softly spoken vocals or percussion, for example.

Smaller desks (and some classic older units) will feature a knob instead of a fader.

Above this fader usually comes the pan knob. This adjusts the balance between the left and right speakers for that particular sound. Thus you can position a sound within the stereo spread all the way from hard left, to hard right, with dead centre on the knob being an exact 50/50 split between the two speakers.

This allows you to place sounds in space and stop ‘rival’ instruments (say hi-hats versus shakers) from clashing in the frequency spectrum. Placing one to the left and one to the right gives each room to breathe and allows the listener to hear each clearly and enjoy both.

Usually near the pan you’ll find mute and solo buttons. Hitting mute will turn that channel off, allowing you to silence the instrument on it without having to zero the (expertly positioned) level of the fader. Alternatively, hitting solo mutes all the other channels, allowing you to hear that particular channel on its own. Essential for zooming your ear in, to make sure each instrument is perfect.

Next – and occupying a large centre section of each strip – comes the EQ which lets you adjust the bass and treble (and on bigger consoles, everything in between) for each sound.

Smaller consoles will have a basic low and high EQ. A ‘low’ knob will allow you to cut or boost the bass frequencies of the sound on that channel, while a ‘high’ knob will allow you to do the same for the treble.

On larger consoles you’ll find – in addition to the low and high knobs – a third ‘mid’ frequency range, often with an adjustable ‘sweep’ knob to allow you to more precisely pick out which of the mid frequencies you’re cutting or boosting.

A ‘sweepable mid’ is perfect for adding detail to important sounds such as a lead vocal or lead guitar line, ensuring that they ‘cut through’ in between the bass sounds of the kick drum and bass guitar and high frequency fizz of the hi-hats and percussion.

The bigger (and more expensive) the console the more EQ controls you’ll get. Top end desks will feature multiple sweepable bands (in addition to those low and high frequency filter controls) allowing more precise cutting and boosting of the sound on each channel at multiple frequencies simultaneously.

Certain mixing desks are famous for the nature of their EQs, injecting distinctive warmth to the sound or highly regarded for their ability to pull disparate instruments together as a solid, digital ‘block’.

Meanwhile, round the back…

By now we’re getting towards the back of the channel strip where you’ll find a few of the more technical, workman-like controls that, once set for the instrument, are most likely never touched again during your recording session and mix.

Right at the back edge of the console you’ll find each channel’s inputs – most usually in a variety of sizes and shapes – allowing you to plug in whatever you need to add. There’s controls for the channel's input level or gain, allowing you to control how ‘hot’ the incoming signal is, so that that particular sound can sit well on the desk and alongside the other instruments in your mix.

And – as with the EQ – on famous and classic desks, it’s often this input pre-amp that’s responsible for a certain desk’s character or warmth, meaning that certain desks (and their virtual plugin emulations) are highly sought after thanks to their unique pre-amps on each channel.

Adjusting this gain control allows the quietest sound (a simple shaker, for example) to sit alongside the loudest (a blistering solo from a Marshall stack) and for all your track’s elements to then be mixed together as equals.

Watch out for a Pad knob too, which will reduce a signal level to prevent unpleasant clipping (aka distortion).

High end extras…

We’ve already covered most of the basics that you’ll find on every desk, which just leaves the ‘special’ controls that you’ll find on high end consoles (and their virtual DAW equivalents).

Some desks will have built-in de-essers or noise gates, allowing you to fine tune spikes in the levels of the recorded performance, and while separate ‘outboard’ boxes will, of course, do the same job it’s clearly more convenient to have such features built into the channel strip of the desk.

And such per-channel compressors and desks from the likes of Solid State Logic (SSL) made a great play of the quality of their per-channel, built-in compressors (in addition to their ease of use and simply having them ‘there’ for any sound that you have on a fader) with their sound becoming part of their desk’s mystique and going some way to justify their impressive price tag.

Likewise the SSL’s (and other brands’) master bus compressor. Large desks will have a further final mastering compressor on the desks final stereo output, allowing you to give the combined might of your finished mix just one final cohesive polish on its way out to your amplifier and monitors.

Watch out for high-pass filters per channel too. These can be used to quickly remove low end rumble from mics on a hard studio floor for example, or unwanted ‘ghost’ bottom end sounding from badly positioned kick drums and bass amps.

More professional desks will also feature buttons such as Phase Reverse, allowing you to flip left and right channels – ideal if you’re working with multiple sets of stereo left and right mics (such as over a drumkit). Overlaying a pair (or group) of mics listening to the same sound can produce strange phasing effects that can sap their power and clarity. A quick press of Phase Reverse will pop everything back to ‘normal’ again.

You’ll find dedicated sliders for separate monitor mixes too, allowing you to deliver bespoke mixes to each band member’s headphones. The vocalist will always want themselves nice and loud with plenty of effects already added, while your drummer would much rather be listening to your bass player.

And, what was once a luxury on only the most expensive desks, is now a feature you’ll find in any DAW – the ability to record and replay fader and knob movements. This ‘automation’ transformed music in the late 80’s, allowing producers to really perform at the mixing desk and for music to become more complex with chops and changes and sounds and effects suddenly appearing and disappearing.

Today, while only larger professional physical mixing desks feature such ‘flying fader’ automation, every computer-based DAW will let you record knob tweaks and level changes as you mix, freeing up your hands and mind for further experimentation elsewhere.

Finally, special mention to that hardware studio stalwart, the Talkback button – a luxury of only the largest desks. Pressing Talkback enables the desk’s microphone, allowing the producer to be heard over the band’s headphones and monitors. Perfect for delivering a little ‘can we try that one again?’ encouragement to the band…

Take the bus…

So now we’ve got all our instruments – be they coming live from your band or being fed from your recording – lined up on your desk and – thanks to the gain controls on the inputs, EQ, and volume level fader – sounding at least ‘something’ like you want.

Next comes a little bit of mixing desk magic.

On larger home consoles (and on every professional desk) you’ll find mix buses. These allow you to route groups of instruments together and mix them as one. So rather than sending each of your drum channels out to your left and right speakers as usual, you could instead send them to ‘Auxiliary Channel 1’ or ‘Mix Bus 1’.

Give this ‘Mix Bus 1’ its own channel – often labelled as a Sub Group on larger desks – and you can then control multiple instruments on a single fader.

Doing so not only simplifies your mix – want to turn down ALL the guitars? Simple, they’re all on a single fader now – but by grouping tracks together you can process them as one. Also – via a little mixing desk magic – grouping together ‘likeminded’ instruments on a bus allows them to stew a little in each other’s juice and often leads to a pleasing, more cohesive sound.

It’s a quality of classic mixing desks (and one expertly recreated in their software emulations) that sending all your drums to a ‘Drum Bus’ and then perhaps using a compressor on this single, multi-element, channel somehow ‘glues together’ their sound.

Why not send your bass to the same bus too, to share a little bit of that compression magic?

Suddenly, rather than your track sounding like disparate elements all fighting for air, you’ll have a tight, locked down rhythm section all working together and all on a single fader.

Effective effects

As mentioned earlier, some larger desks will have compressors and de-essers built in (and owners pay handsomely for such features) but you don’t have to simply use what the desk has to offer.

Each channel – even on small mixers – will feature at least one Send control. Often two or three. These knobs will send a set amount of that channel’s output out to an Auxiliary mix bus (a dedicated bus set aside for such things). Thus, place a reverb effect on Effects Send 1 and you’ve got a reverb that can be used by every channel on the desk.

Turn up the send on your vocal channel to swamp it in luscious reverb. Add a little reverb to your snare channel. Get your synth pads sounding ‘big’ by nudging up their reverb send too.

And why not place a chorus effect on Effects Send 2? Send most of your acoustic guitars there… And maybe some of your backing vocals too.

Such effects buses are a great way to quickly inject some sparkle and magic into your mix. And they let your effects boxes go a long way – no need for an effects box for every channel when they can all share one.

Of course, this means that you’r using the same reverb setting or delay time for your entire mix, so it’s always advantageous to have three, four or more effects to choose from, each on a different Send. And – thanks to the modern DAW – if your computer can handle the processing (and these days they always can) you can have separate instances of your favourite effects on every channel. EACH with their own settings and levels.

Thus, the simple shared ‘Effects Bus’ and ‘Send’ is becoming something of a has-been… But it’s a good principle to learn and understand, as limiting yourself to ‘one reverb and one delay’ old-skool style is a great way to learn mixing, avoid getting confused by hundreds of options, and allow your mix to ‘sound great’ fast.

Perhaps use a simple ‘effects send’ mix set-up to get your track into basic shape – a shared reverb, a delay and a chorus. Then create more bespoke per-channel effects chains later when you’re ready for the finishing touches?

The sum of its parts

Hopefully by now you’ve got the measure of the desk in front of you. Just remember that all desks, small to big, from four channels up to 96 are essentially the same. Don’t get blinded by science.

Focus on the parts you need – level, pan, EQ – to begin with. Then add compression, use effects, group buses, as and when you need.

Keep it simple… Then keep experimenting.

Black Friday is still months away, but no-one’s told Guitar Tricks who just dropped a mega online lessons offer for guitar players that they’re calling ‘Summer Black Friday’ – and the price is the lowest I’ve seen all year: get a full access 12-month subscription for only $99; that works out as $8.25 per month and is a massive $861 saving on the full price. This deal runs until 7 August.

At its core, Guitar Tricks is home to well over 11,000 technique, style and song lessons, presented by expert teachers. But this Summer Black Friday bundle doesn’t stop there. For your $99 investment you also get personalised learning plans, Bootcamp sessions, and e-books designed to help players make genuine progress. As part of this deal, beginners will also get their hands on the Ultimate Beginner Bundle, loaded with newbie-friendly material such as power drills, the 100 Essential Licks Series, a guitar goal planner and more.

If you’ve been looking to make strides with your playing, or pick up the guitar for the first time, this is your ideal time, and considering this works out at $8.25 per month, there’s no cheaper way to access so much quality, curated guitar tuition. Guitar Tricks is also our number one online guitar lessons pick for most players. You can read our 5-star Guitar Tricks review here.

Now, let’s take a closer look at what’s included for your cash. These are the highlights:

Annual Full Access was $359 now $99Laying the foundations of this plan is Guitar Tricks’ 12-month annual full access to the entire learning platform. Whether you need the structured Core Learning system that can provide human feedback or are sharpening up your technique, there are over 11,000 tutorial videos to dive into. To put this into perspective, annual full access typically costs $359; that saving is worth the package alone.

Premium Bootcamp Access was $79 now freeIdeal for intermediate players, GT’s Premium Bootcamp comes completely free with this bundle, usually priced at $79. This unlocks one full bootcamp course to help refine your technique or deepen your understanding of a specific area. If there’s a skill you’ve been meaning to master, like fingerpicking or alternate picking, you can enroll in a bootcamp dedicated to it. These long-form lessons are a great way to dig deeper into your playing and finally conquer a technique that’s been holding you back.

100 Licks Series was $79 now freeTypically priced at $79, you will get full access to this video series that introduces 100 different licks that are a must-know for any guitarist. Split across genres, from blues to rock and metal, this is a fantastic module for expanding your lick library.

Ultimate Beginner Guide E-Book was $29 now freeGT’s Beginner Guide e-book is also included for free, down from $29. It’s an incredibly useful reference tool for new players, highlighting common pitfalls and offering structured practice routines that help build solid technique. Whether you’re just starting out or brushing up on the basics, this guide makes tackling those tricky chords a whole lot smoother.

Guitar Setup Guide E-Book was $29 now freeAn often overlooked part of learning is guitar maintenance, so I’m stoked to see Guitar Tricks include its Setup Guide e-book with this bundle for free. Instead of falling into common mistakes, this shows you how to handle the fundamentals: string changes, truss rod adjustments, and cleaning practices to keep your guitar in tip-top shape.

Bonus Gifts was $196 now freeFor the cherry on top, there’s a bunch of bonus gifts included for free that would usually set you back $196. I’m talking backing tracks, chord theory lessons, and blues and rock jam tracks, to name just a few. There’s more than enough content here to keep you learning for the full year of your subscription.

For as long as I have been teaching music, people have asked me if there is some way to automatically turn audio recordings into sheet music. Until recently, I told them that it couldn’t be done. But now there are a few AI products on the market that claim to do exactly that.

Klang.io's Transcription Studio promises to turn audio into notated transcriptions, lead sheets and guitar tablature. This would be a valuable tool for music educators, songwriters and composers alike. But does it work? We recently reviewed an AI transcription tool called Songscription, and we were not impressed. It detects pitches well, but it does not do so well with rhythm. Can Transcription Studio do better? Let’s find out.

What is it?

The word “klang” suggests “clang” to English speakers, but it means “musical tone” or “musical note” in German. Klang.io has been in operation as a company for a surprisingly long time; the hype around AI might be recent, but researchers have been working on the underlying machine learning technologies for decades.

Klang.io has been offering computer-assisted transcription tools for specific instruments for several years, but their latest offering is Transcription Studio, a browser-based audio-to-notation platform. (It's also available as a VST3/AU plugin, but for this review, we only tested the browser-based tool.)

In theory, you can drop any piece of music into Transcription Studio and get a notated score. However, these kinds of tools are only as good as their training data, and Transcription Studio's transcriptions work better on some kinds of music than others, as we will see below.

One disclosure before we go any further: I came to this review with a strong anti-AI bias, and I believe that we should approach generative AI with skepticism. Before I started writing, I spoke to the company’s founder, Sebastian Murgul, along with his public relations representative. I came away liking Sebastian and feeling more open-minded toward the product as a result.

Why should you care about my thought process, or my feelings about a tech company founder? In assessing a new technology, it isn’t enough to ask what the tool does now; you also want to think about where it might be headed in the future. There are many reasons for a music educator like me to be concerned about AI. Is this tool going to be an excuse to lay all of us off, even if it doesn’t do our job as well as we do?

Sebastian Murgul shares my concerns. He is a deeply nerdy person who just wants to make a useful product, not to disrupt (or destroy) music education as we know it. He does not actually think AI can replace human music transcription and analysis, and he recognizes that it can’t make sense out of every kind of recording.

Murgul has some specific cases in mind for Transcription Studio: for DAW-based composers of film and game music to be able to communicate their ideas to human performers, for example, and for pop songwriters to be able to generate lead sheets for copyright registration. (In the US, you only have to submit a sound recording of your song, but in Latin America you have to submit a notated lead sheet too.)

Murgul is clear that users will only get good results from Transcription Studio if they already have a good understanding of the music they are trying to transcribe, and if they are able to edit its output themselves.

Performance

When you enter the Klang.io Transcription Studio, you can choose between uploading an audio file, entering a link to YouTube, Instagram or TikTok (but not Bandcamp or SoundCloud), or recording straight into the computer mic. From there, you select a transcription mode from the options below.

• Multi-Instrument Mode: the default setting.
• Single-Instrument Mode: the most accurate and reliable mode, especially if it’s a transparently recorded acoustic instrument like piano.
• Classic Mode: this setting is optimized for classical music.
• Rock Mode: a beta feature. It differs from multi-instrument mode in that it is optimized more specifically for guitar, especially distorted guitar.
• Arrangement Mode: rather than transcribing each individual instrument or voice, this mode produces a lead sheet, just top-line melody and chord symbols. (Based on my tests, this should probably be labeled as a beta product too.)

After choosing a mode, you select the instruments in the recording. You can have Transcription Studio detect them for you, but it performs better if you tell it what to listen for. Finally, on the Additional Options screen, you can specify key, time signature, approximate tempo, note duration quantization, and whether you want triplets or not. Again, you can have the software detect all of this, but the results will be less accurate.

Once you have created your transcription, you can view and listen to it as a notated score or as a vertically scrolling piano roll. You can export your score in various formats, including Music XML and MIDI. Transcription Studio also has Note Editor mode, a rudimentary notation editor, though for any serious overhauls or formatting you will want to work in a separate program like MuseScore, Dorico or Finale.

The most interesting feature of the Note Editor is the Anacrusis (Pickup Bar) setting. Transcription Studio’s makers recognize that the software has trouble identifying downbeats, especially if the recording has any silence at the beginning, so they make it easy to move the location of the first beat of the first bar. Unfortunately, you can only move the downbeat in increments of one beat. (This is an issue, as I discuss later in the review.)

In testing out Transcription Studio, I repeated some of the same tests I performed on Songscription for the sake of comparison, but I mostly selected pieces of music that were better suited to showing Klang.io’s strengths and weaknesses.

I started with Nina Simone’s recording of the blues standard Nobody’s Fault But Mine. It’s a simple piano-plus-vocal recording, and had I recently assigned my aural skills students to transcribe it. Could they have used Transcription Studio to cheat on the assignment?

The answer is: sort of. Transcription Studio detected the notes and rhythms of the piano part very accurately. However, it gave the key signature incorrectly as D major; the song is a blues in A. In fairness, there is no consensus on the correct way to write key signatures for blues, but A or A minor would be the usual choices.

Transcription Studio’s take on Nina Simone’s vocal was less accurate. It simplified her melismas significantly, and it was thrown off by her vocal timbre, because notes that she sang with more inflection appeared in the transcription on the wrong pitches.

For a comparison with Songscription, I tried Crazy by Patsy Cline. Songscription had failed to make head or tail out of the song, presumably because its training data doesn’t account for 1950s recording fidelity or instrumentation.

Transcription Studio did not do much better when I asked it for a lead sheet. It could not distinguish the lead vocal from the backing vocal or instruments, and the triplet feel threw off its rhythmic detection, so it couldn’t find the tempo or downbeat. It did get the chord symbols mostly right, and it detected the lyrics accurately too.

However, Transcription Studio shows lyrics in a strange way. Rather than placing each syllable with its corresponding note, it groups entire phrases together in the middle of their approximate location on the score. I would prefer to have lyrics be on a separate page; it is confusing to see them placed so unconventionally.

I wondered whether Transcription Studio would do better on a multi-instrument transcription of Crazy. This time, I specified the instruments, the key, the time signature and the approximate tempo, and also told it that Patsy Cline is an alto. Klang performed better this way. The bassline was quite accurate. The vocal melody was still mixed up with other parts, but now the meter and rhythm were right. The guitar and piano parts were more hit and miss, and the drum part was completely chaotic; I guess the training data doesn’t include drums played with brushes.

Next, I tested Single Instrument mode with a solo piano recording of Blue Monk by Thelonious Monk. Transcription Studio offered me the choice of pop or classical; jazz was not an option. I chose pop, because that seemed closer. I also entered the key and tempo. The results were good, at least until Monk’s improvised solo started. The software rendered some of his expressive timing strangely, but that is understandable; many human transcribers would struggle to represent those rhythms.

Transcription Studio’s chord symbols were mostly on point, but with some odd omissions. The chord library does not include ninth chords, so Klang wrote Bb9 as Fm7. In Monk’s solo, something about his timing threw off Transcription Studio’s beat detection, so even though his tempo is steady throughout, the transcription was off by one beat from that point. Unfortunately, the anacrusis correction feature only works for the first downbeat. This is something you could easily correct in an external editor, though.

Transcription Studio’s training data includes lots of classical music, so I expected it would have an easy time with Prelude No. 1 from the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach, as performed by Glenn Gould. I was right: the transcription took one tenth as long as any of the others I had done so far. It was quite accurate, aside from the fact that it was confused by the silence at the beginning of the recording, which it rendered as a one-and-a-half-beat-long rest. The anacrusis correction only works in increments of one beat, so you would need to fix this in an external editor.

I was interested to see that Transcription Studio added chord symbols to the Bach piece, with about 95% accuracy. I sometimes write jazz-style chord symbols on classical scores for harmonic analysis purposes. It is intriguing to consider the idea of having software do it automatically at scale, though I think people should be doing this kind of thing by hand for the sake of their own understanding.

For a further test of Classic Mode, I used Bach’s Contrapunctus I from the Art of Fugue, performed by the Emerson String Quartet. This chart was mostly accurate too, though Transcription Studio missed the first note, along with a few others that were played quietly. Transcription Studio also combined the violin and viola onto the same staff. Once again, it placed chord symbols throughout, which is not a feature that most classical performers would want, but that jazz and pop musicians might find extraordinarily useful.

I wanted to see how Transcription Studio would do with electric piano, which is not one of the instruments on its list. So I gave it What'd I Say by Ray Charles. I gave the software the key and tempo, and told it to listen for vocals, piano and drums. It did pretty well on the electric piano, with good pitch accuracy and timing, and mostly accurate chord symbols.

The timbre of the electric piano did confuse it somewhat, because it heard the top notes as a vocal part. Transcription Studio got the broad outline of Ray Charles’ actual vocal melody, but the rhythms were squared off and the pitch was sometimes a half-step off. As with Crazy, Transcription Studio could not even approximate the drums.

Maybe the noisy vintage recording was throwing the transcription off? I figured that a cleaner, more contemporary recording would work better, so I tried Everybody Laughs by David Byrne. As I expected, the results were more impressive. Transcription Studio misidentified acoustic guitar strums as hi-hats, but the guitar part itself was remarkably good, with clear and accurate tablature along with notation.

The vocal part was uneven, with David Byrne’s idiosyncratic singing clearly throwing the software off. Transcription Studio did pretty well with the string arrangement, showing that the training data includes a lot of orchestral music. The only real problem was that it heard harmonics as separate notes in places, but this is a problem that all pitch detection algorithms share.

For a more mainstream pop recording, I used Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, assuming that this kind of loud, bright and clear pop banger would be easy to transcribe. Transcription Studio wrote this vocal line extremely accurately. However, it had trouble distinguishing the other instruments, presumably because they are layered and processed so heavily.

For a more authentic transcription challenge, I wanted a song that I didn’t already know how to play. I chose Burnin’ Hell by John Lee Hooker. I wasn’t expecting much for the vocal, but I thought Transcription Studio might do well with the guitar, since it is unaccompanied and has clean tone. Sadly, whether it was Hooker’s open tuning or playing style, Transcription Studio couldn’t make head or tail of it. I guess there isn’t much blues guitar in the training data.

How about the Beatles? I tried Blackbird, figuring that it is sufficiently classical-informed in its harmony and playing style. However, I forgot that the song has a lot of meter changes, and Transcription Studio understandably could not follow them. Also, it had trouble distinguishing Paul McCartney’s voice from the guitar. So some measures were perfectly clear and accurate, while others were chaotic.

My final test was one of my own original compositions, a track I made in Ableton Live using only synthesizers and drum machines. I can’t find my Ableton session anywhere, and I can’t remember exactly what notes or chords I used. I’m sure I could figure it out, but I have never had the time to sit down and do it. This is the exact use case that the company has in mind.

Transcription Studio has an option for synthesizers, but there is clearly a limit to the weirdness and inharmonicity that it can cope with, so its transcription of my melody and bassline was not very good. However, it did get the majority of the chords right. The transcription is not usable as a guide for a performer, but it would be quite helpful to me if I were to transcribe the track myself.

Verdict

As with other transcription and audio-to-MIDI tools I have tried, Transcription Studio does very well at detecting pitches, especially on single instruments that are recorded clearly. It also does a good job with vocals in a conventional pop style. It can identify note onsets accurately, and if the rhythms are straightforward, it can organize those rhythms into a meter fairly well.

However, if the rhythms are too far off the grid, or if they're too swung and idiosyncratic, Transcription Studio struggles. The more complex the recording, the less able it is to separate the layers, and older or noisier recordings are a problem too. Also, even when its output is accurate, you may still need to do extensive editing and formatting before you could hand charts out to an ensemble.

The difference between Transcription Studio and its competitors is that its designers recognize the limitations of their tool. They are assuming that you are not a complete novice, but rather that you already have some musical sophistication. The user interface makes clear that the more you can inform the software in advance, the better the results will be, and that you should expect to edit and adjust the output afterwards.

The best way to understand Transcription Studio is not as a tool for generating sheet music. Even if its scores were perfectly accurate, writing sheet music for human performers requires more than identifying the notes. You need to use your judgment to decide how to lay everything out and how much detail the performers will need. (I expect AI transcription to get more accurate, but I do not expect it to develop editorial or graphic design skills.) I think it’s better to think of Transcription Studio as a tool that gives you clues for writing your own sheet music, and in that application, it has significant value.

After years trying to decide just what kind of act they wanted to be, the Pet Shop Boys eventually settled on a formula that would yield some the 1980s' most enduring hits.

Following the unsuccessful release of their first single West End Girls in 1984 the track was re-recorded and reissued the following year, rushing straight to number one in the UK chart with similar success in other territories. Pop fans were besotted by a winning combo of sharp lyricism, clubby energy, and vocalist Neil Tennant's charismatic presence.

This was just the beginning of what would soon grow into a truly exceptional career, which is still in rude health over 40 years later.

Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe were quick to embrace new gear and sampling techniques, utilising the most innovative electronic instruments of the day to create a slew of timeless pop anthems; Rent, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Domino Dancing, Always on My Mind, the list goes on.

Their biggest tracks would have enormous audience appeal yet were imbued with an intelligence that outclassed their chart contemporaries.

A former music journalist, Tennant explored class, sexuality, politics and the intricacies of the human heart.

Their extensive use of the Emulator II (and accompanying library), Fairlight CMI, Linn Drum, with Roland Super Jupiter synth meant that their sounds too, were truly cutting edge for their day. But, the Pet Shop Boys weren’t just twiddling knobs for the fun of it.

They were transmitting the sounds of the most hyper-intense clubs into the living rooms of Thatcher's Britain.

We could pick any number of PSB’s top tier to examine musically, but their enormous and iconic hit It’s a Sin from 1987 is a particularly fascinating one to look closer at. It draws upon some well-known musical techniques, extending back hundreds of years.

When Neil and Chris started working together in 1982, Neil made use of some redundancy money to rent a small demo studio in Camden, where the two would work on Fridays and Saturdays.

This was the demo location for all of the songs on their critically-acclaimed first album, Please (1986) and many of the songs for the equally acclaimed second album, Actually (1987).

Tennant would man a four track mixer (presumably some form of Tascam PortaStudio) while Lowe would play synth and electric piano. Tennant would also play the odd bit of acoustic piano when required. But mainly, Neil's job was to create the toplines and the lyrics.

Studio owner, Ray Roberts, was very impressed with PSB's early demos, offering them use of the main studio, in return for a percentage of the publishing on the songs. This seemed like a fair deal - particularly given the duo’s lack of financial stability at the time.

Between the ages of 11 and 18, Neil Tennant had attended a Catholic school. In line with the orthodoxy that was instilled in all students, he was taught that sex (outside of marriage) was a sin.

This particularly draconian teaching resurfaced in Tennant’s head when he heard Lowe play a hymn-like chord progression. Suddenly, the basis of It’s a Sin's lyrical theme crystallised in his mind. Although its lyric was an honest admittance of the shame he felt for having absconded from his school's teachings, the music told another story. It was a bombastic rebuttal to the judgmental nature of such prudish restriction.

When I look back upon my life
It's always with a sense of shame
I've always been the one to blame
For everything I long to do
No matter when or where or who

A demo of the first version of the song was recorded with New York’s hi-NRG producer Bobby Orlando, but this version was ultimately shelved.

However, there was a sense that with the right hands and ears on the mix, It’s a Sin had the potential to be something special.

Working alongside producers Julian Mendelsohn and Stephen Hague, Tennant and Lowe transformed the song into a show-stopping pop epic. The re-worked mix was suitably dense, incorporating recordings of ambient sounds captured while visiting the Brompton Oratory, and even included elements of a sung Mass, which was recorded at Westminster Cathedral.

Strangely, they also included samples from an Apollo rocket launch - from the original commentary provided by NASA. Was there something slightly Freudian about that choice, we wonder?

The song sprawled out into a monster of considerable heft, maximising the hi-NRG feel of the original demo whilst daubing it in a dramatic gothic cowl.

“It’s a Sin at its heart is a heavy metal record,” Tennant told the Financial Times. “There is a huge link between hi-NRG music and heavy metal: the urgency, the chords, the slightly histrionic melody. You could do a medley of It’s a Sin with The Final Countdown by Europe; in fact, I don’t know why we haven’t done that.”

Upon release as Actually’s lead single on June 15th 1987, It’s a Sin became the band’s second UK number one after West End Girls. By the end of the year, it’d be the country’s eighth biggest-selling single.

Let's look under the hood at just how It’s a Sin works.

Set in the keyboardist’s favoured key of C minor, the main verse structure is pretty much entirely dependent upon a musical tool which relates back to the late 1600s…

The application of the circle of fifths is clearly evident in the song. This approach is based on the principle of one chord naturally leading to the next, with the distance between these natural shifts always being a 5th.

You can count an interval of a 5th by simply counting in a step-wise movement, with the notes you start and end on being notes one and five respectively. For example, if you are on a chord of C, count 5 notes upward and you reach the chord of G, and so on.

In the case of It’s a Sin, PSB use a descending circle of 5ths for each verse, so our chords follow a downward cycle with the sequence - Cm, Fm, Bb, Eb, and Ab - before breaking out of the cycle to use Fm and G, before repeating the sequence again.

It's worth noting that this song is not alone in its adoption of this musical device. You will hear it used in songs as diverse as the jazz standard Fly Me To The Moon and Gloria Gaynor's disco classic I Will Survive, alongside Basket Case by Green Day and Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix.

That's quite a legacy for a theoretical trick first established in the 17th century!

Above and beyond its basic musical employment, the reason we continue to love this sequence is pure physics.

The ‘perfect 5th’ slots beautifully into the naturally occurring set of frequencies, which are described as the harmonic series. When these harmonics and overtones are used in a musical context, there is something very organic and ultimately pleasing from a listener’s perspective.

When blasted at volume into our ears - as they are in the context of It's a Sin's energetic arrangement - that feeling of inevitability is maximised. It's as if the song were always meant to be.

The chorus section is heralded by the arrival of trumpeting synth brass, which relates back to our home key of Cm, alternating with a chord of Ab/C.

We also hear alternating chords between Fm and G, which are slightly unnatural bedfellows, but add a beautiful sense of discordance, as a reaction to the verse.

Once we reach the bridge section, there is still a heavy reliance upon the key chord of Cm, which is held for two bars, before shifting to a chord of Ebm. This could be regarded as an unrelated chord, thanks to the presence of the note Gb, which is a tritone away from the note C. Its presence here adds angst and fury, before moving to Gm and back to Cm, and a turnaround using a chord of Bb.

Beyond this effective musicology, It’s a Sin’s true power comes from the impact of Tennant’s immaculate and distinctive voice - and, of course, the bravery of his religiously inspired theme.

Contending with this type of repressive, religiously-sanctioned prudishness in a pop context at a time of hyper-tension (and hyper-conservatism) wasn't something to be done lightly. It was a positively incendiary move.

It's a Sin's underlying rejection of imposed restraint had particular resonance due to the ongoing global Aids crisis, where once again the idea of sex - particularly gay sex - being shameful was asserted daily across sections of the British media.

The song’s righteous fire was perfectly visually articulated by the Derek Jarman-directed video, which featured Tennant facing the judgement of a church inquisition. It’d be the first of many collaborations between Jarman and the pair.

However, not everybody was a fan. Several newspapers were critical of the song’s seemingly anti-religious undercurrent, and the very school that had inspired Tennant's words - St. Cuthbert's Grammar School - criticised Tennant’s oft-repeated press mentions of the school’s strict orthodoxy as the basis for the song.

“It is very unfortunate that Neil has painted this distorted picture of his school days and the things he was taught,” the school said in a statement, published in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. “It is very hurtful. It is a long time since he has been here and there have been a lot of changes since then in the Church."

Years later, in a 2009 interview with The Atlantic. Neil reflected on a song that had grown into, for a certain generation, a more meaningful hymn than anything they’d had to learn in school

“When we brought out It’s a Sin, it was quite interesting, because people took it really seriously,” Neil said. “The song was written in about 15 minutes, and was intended as a camp joke and it wasn’t something I consciously took very seriously. Sometimes I wonder if there was more to it than I thought at the time, but the local parish priest in Newcastle delivered a sermon on it, and reflected on how the Church changed from the promise of a ghastly hell to the message of love.”

Having previously claimed that Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter “couldn’t have got arrested” back in his ‘80s pop heyday, producer and songwriter Mike Stock has been fleshing out his argument in an interview with MusicRadar.

Stock, of course, was one third of crack music production outfit Stock Aitken Waterman, who had hits with Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and many, many more. As he discusses how the industry has changed in the almost 40 years since then, though, it’s clear that Stock doesn’t believe that the current streaming-centric landscape is a hotbed for great pop music...

The music business has changed immeasurably since your hits started in the ‘80s. Do you think that now – living in a world of streaming – we’re in a better or worse place for making, finding and enjoying music?

“Well, you could ask this question first: How many artists in the last 10 to 20 years have achieved iconic status? That’s artists that are going to be around in 20 years. Is Taylor Swift that person? Is Ed Sheeran?

“The number of people achieving that ‘superstar’ status is always the same as it ever was – only one or two in any generation. And to be number one on the charts now is to be invisible. If you're a fan you’ll know if your artist is in the charts, but there's nothing now that we can focus on and so there’s nothing to measure your success against.

“For example, you see Harry Styles, and you say, ‘What a fantastic video. What a brilliant blah blah blah’, and it’s an interesting sound, it’s a bit art house, he's a bit this, he's a bit that, he's very… Harry Stylish. That's what he is. But that's all that he is. It's very superficial.”

“And I don't like Taylor Swift as an artist, I don't get that. I want to hear something that’s got the passion in it that deserves the love from the audience. That's what I want to hear, and I don't know many of those now. I can't remember the last time I heard one.”

Do you think that streaming has taken the magic out of making and discovering music?

“Back in the day, when you bought a record, you made an effort. First of all you would show your love for the artist by getting on a bus and going down to Woolworths and paying three quid for it. But that's an effort and who wants to do that nowadays?

“But we used to make records knowing that that's what somebody was going to have to do, and because of that we put love and passion into it, thinking that we want to make this exciting. We want you to love it like we love it. But these days… Who cares if the music just goes on Spotify?

“Most people use Spotify like it's a radio. They pick a list, they start it playing and go about the housework, or whatever. They don't lean forward. They're not going on to Spotify and typing, ‘I want this song’, playing it, and then being happy. They just lean back, put the thing on and let it run. So that means the passion for the music is less from the user, and that bounces back on the maker of the music, who's not that bothered either. Because if you don't have to work up any passion or thought or effort, then neither will I.

“Like, I hated the name ‘hit factory’ [used to describe Stock Aitken Waterman’s output]. I thought it made us sound like a sausage factory – that we were just churning them out – and that couldn't be further from the truth, because we always put the time and the hours and the effort in.”

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

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: The ever-controversial Canadian triple-threat Drake is a veritable pop powerhouse, pumping out hit after hit in his inexorable quest for chart domination.

The most successful of his three most recent albums, Iceman, was met with a somewhat mixed critical reception, but commercially it’s yet another smash and features just the pristine, polished production you’d expect from one of the biggest RnB artists in the world.

Produced by a team of frequent collaborators led by 40, Boi-1da, and Tay Keith, Drake’s remained rather closed-mouthed on his current studio process. However, over a decade ago, 40 spoke to Sound on Sound about how he and Drake typically began writing songs;

“Drake and I do take pride in writing songs together, just the two of us,” 40 told Sound on Sound. “We'll start in an old-school way, with me on the piano or at my Wurlitzer, finding a chord progression, and he'll start singing some melodies.”

One of Iceman’s biggest talking points is the track Burning Bridges which features smooth chords, rolling trap drums, creamy bass and euphoric synthesized ear candy.

And, yes - a lyric that seems to settle one or two scores with former collaborator ASAP Rocky…

But we’re not here for lyrical beef and surrounding drama, we’re here for the rich music itself - gold-standard, top-tier hip-hop all the way.

Let’s see how we can create a similar beat using a selection of popular instrument and effect plugins.

1. Make a trap-style beat with Battery 4

When it comes to hip-hop and trap beats, Native Instruments’ Battery 4 is a great choice due to the huge number of expansions that feature compatible patches.

To get a Drake-style trap kit we’re going to use The Stereotypes expansion, specifically the Climax Kit.

The Climax Kit features processed Roland TR-808 style sounds that are perfect for creating trap-influenced beats.

Setting our DAW’s tempo to a low-slung 65 BPM, we’ll start with D1 snares an D#1 claps on the second and fourth beat of the bar, with C1 kicks on the first, eleventh and fourteenth 16th notes.

Next we’ll add G#1 closed hats and A1 high-hat rolls to provide our drum part with some tasty tops.

To create a two-bar groove we’ll duplicate the bar out, removing the final kick to provide a touch of variation.

To get our beats sounding loud and punchy let’s add Sir Audio Tools StandardCLIP, setting it to Hard Clip Mode with Ceiling on, and an Input Gain of 8.80 dB.

2. Synthwave chords with Nexus 5

Burning Bridges features some classic-sounding brassy synth chords, and we can get just the same sound with presets from reFX Nexus 5. Let’s start by selecting the Synthwavers Brass patch, setting the Filter modifier Envelope to +21 and Cutoff to -74 to get smoothed-out sound.

The chords for this part are straightforward, they’re a D# major 7 followed by a D minor 7. Simple, but infectiously jazzy.

Let’s set both of our tracks to -10 dB so that we don’t overload our master channel.

3. Rich bass with Analog Lab V

To create a thick bass that underpins our synth chords we can use Arturia’s Analog Lab. The Dark Reese preset is a great starting point for our bassline.

We’ll play a part that follows the root notes of the chords, with an octave jump at the end of the first bar and a perfect fifth at the end of the second bar.

This sounds pretty sinister on its own, but let’s hear it with the chords and drums.

This accompanies the chords in a satisfying manner, and if you have a license for the Korg MS-20 V instrument that’s used to create the Dark Reese patch you can make a satisfying tweak: click the Edit Preset button, then click the Open button to bring up the MS-20 V’s interface.

Turn the Portamento down to 158 ms.

This makes the synth glide more quickly between notes, giving us a tighter feel.

4. Awesome ear candy with Diva

When it comes to virtual analogue u-he Diva is hard to beat, and it includes plenty of awesome presets to play with. Let’s load up the HS Space Ocarina preset to create some pleasing ear candy.

We’ll use this to play an A3, C4, D4, F4 glissando at the start of the second bar.

Let’s duplicate this onto the start of the third bar and transpose it an octave up.

This sound could use some delay. You can use any delay you like for this, we’re using Ableton Live’s Delay synced to a single 16th note, with a medium high Feedback and Dry/Wet Mix set to 30%

Let’s set this track to -9.3dB to balance it with the others.

5. Mellow melodies with Analog Lab

For the final sound, let’s use another instance of Arturia Analog Lab, this time sticking with the default Classic Jun Keys preset. Turn down Brightness and Reverb macros down to zero to give us a simple sound.

Copy the melody we’ve used here, which gives us a catchy call-and-answer effect on either side of the ear candy motifs.

This sound could so with some reverb, so let’s use FabFilter Pro-R 2’s Very Large > Darkest Hour preset, turning the Mix up to 44.4% to give us a softer, more atmospheric sound.

Set this track to -4.7 dB to balance it with the other elements.

Here’s how the finished loop sounds:

A simple but effective beat, this arrangement has a catchy, nostalgic vibe and leaves plenty of room for rapped or sung vocals.

It's Burning Bridges-esque, and we're sure someone like Drake could create an entirely new vocal for it.

Why not try one yourself? Just think about that one person who really irritates you and let the diss track flow forth!

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Charli XCX has managed to carve out a highly successful career by treading a fine line between commercial pop and more edgy contemporary styles.

Her music has been heavily influenced by genres such as electroclash and hyperpop and although she works alongside producers from these genres such as A. G. Cook, Sophie Xeon and Finn Keane, she clearly also has a strong vision for how she wants to sound.

On her latest album Music, Fashion, Film she shifts gear yet again towards more rock territory - though inevitably with a twist. Here we’re going to focus on a couple of central aspects of her sound and show you how to create something similar using straightforward plugins.

1. Heavy vocal processing

Step 1. Focused word-specific or phrase-specific vocal processing of all kinds is a recurring theme in Charli XCX’s tracks. The most obvious is pitch correction, often set very fast on specific phrases or words. Check out the track Party 4 U on the album How I’m Feeling Now (YouTube video above) for multiple examples.

Nevertheless, an important starting point is to separate out words and phrases that you think can be processed independently. Here we’ve started moving some parts onto separate tracks ready for processing.

Step 2. Pitch correction is a classic effect that Charli uses in both extreme and obvious ways, often with no attempt to disguise it - listen to the Brat track I Might Say Something Stupid for an example.

The classic extreme effect works best when it quickly bends an existing pitch change in the vocal. So, to get the most obvious effect choose a word or short phrase that already has a note move.

The effect is often best achieved using real time processors, and you need to set the correction speed to its maximum. For the most accurate behaviour specify scale and key of the track, or even select just the notes you want, as we have here.

Step 3. A further technique and something you’ll hear on Charli tracks is artificially shifting of formants. Check out Everything Is Romantic on Brat. You can use this to make vocals sound younger or older without changing the pitch, and it works well as a spot effect on individual words or for harmonies and backing vocals.

Here we’re using Melodyne to process a short phrase. We are shifting up by about 500 cents. You can see the graphic shows the formants set above the pitch of the audio, which remains at its original pitch.

Step 4. You can layer a higher or often lower octave of a vocal manually by simply recording an additional version. Check out various sections on Vroom Vroom. But if you want a more ‘effected’ outcome you can also do this using a plugin.

Here once again we’re using Melodyne, which allows us to do this very easily, and we’ve used the main vocal double track as our source audio, shifting it up 12 semitones.

Step 5. On her latest single releases SS26 and Rock Music, the pitch correction might be less obvious, but the extreme vocal processing is still in full effect. Check out the stutter effect on Rock Music. You can achieve this by looping a section of audio in your DAW, but a Stutter plugin may be more fun. Here we’ve used Air Stutter to try out different timings on the fly.

Step 6. Finally, a great sound when used carefully is a vocoder. On Charli’s track Party 4 U there’s already a lot of pitch correction and formant shifting. The vocoder part gradually adds a further pad and vocal-like effect, and this fits the track perfectly.

Here we’ve separated part of our answer vocal onto a separate track and then used it as the modulator for a vocoder instrument. The vocoder has various onboard carrier synth sounds, which is sound you’ll hear but modulated by the original vocal.

Choose something sparkly for an ethereal effect and then program a MIDI part much like you would for a chordal pad section.

2. Simple but effective beats

Step 1. Despite shifting between various different genres, Charli’s music has one consistent theme when it comes to drum beats - simplicity. What this means in practice is drum parts are often no more than 3 components - kick, snare/clap and hi-hats.

Fills, if used at all, are basic. The skill really lies in picking and fine tuning the sounds and working on the programming. By removing elements of the beat in different sections of the song and then adding them back in, it’s possible to create the minimalist beats key to many Charli XCX tracks.

Step 2. Although simple, Charli beats add interest with additional processing. Let’s take a look at a few ideas. First up, look for ways to make common sounds such as classic Roland kicks and snares more individual. Check out the backbeat on Vroom Vroom or Party 4 U for example.

Rather than trawl through samples, use saturation or bitcrushing to create your own individual lo-fi sounds. Here we’re processing an 808 snare using multiband bitcrushing and some EQ.

Step 3. Next up, the pitched 808. This appears in plenty of Charli productions. The tracks Claws from How I’m Feeling Now and 360 from Brat are just a couple of examples. You can create the basic sound on most synths using two sine wave oscillators.

The second one should be set an octave below and could be a sub oscillator if you have that option.

Focus on balancing the two oscillators and tailoring the amplitude envelope, using the decay to create a ‘one shot’ style outcome. Add a low pass filter and apply the same kind of envelope shape to that. Finally, if you want to add a bit of grit use a saturation plugin or blend in a third square wave oscillator as we’ve done here.

Step 4. Finally, try using reverb selectively on your drums to differentiate sections of the track. Check out the track Out Of My Head on POP 2 or Symphony Is a Knife from Brat. Here reverb on the clap back beat changes for different sections of the track.

To achieve this you can either set up a task specific insert reverb at the end of your channel strip, or use an auxiliary. In either case, use DAW automation to add the reverb selectively. Here we’ve simply automated the auxiliary send for the chorus section.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: The very term ‘saturation’ sometimes feels like it has a negative value attached to it. Throughout recording history, technology has sought to deliver the cleanest signal possible, so why for the love of Joe Meek would you want to turn a clean signal into a distorted one?

It turns out, the answer is relatively simple. As human beings living in an organic world, we quite like impurity and a measure of chaos - and that's where sensible use of saturation can bring an awful lot to the musical table, whether it's individual instrumentation, as well as an entire mix.

The term distortion is very closely linked to saturation, but while they are subtly different, one could not have existed without the other.

If we go back around 100 years, the predominant music of the era was jazz, and particularly big bands. Electric guitar amplification was not particularly advanced, and would now be probably described as ‘lo-fi’.

Guitarists would often turn up their equipment as high as they could go (we don’t think ’11’ was a thing back then), in an attempt to compete with the loud acoustics of a large band. This would lead to equipment overdriving or speaker cones failing, with the resulting sound being something close to the guitar distortion that we know today.

With the advance of electronics, distortion pedals began appearing in 1962, and by the 70s, they were both commonplace and an essential part of a guitarist’s rig. This gave guitarists ultimate control over their distorted sound, without the need to destroy an amplifier on a weekly basis!

But why should guitarists have all the fun? With the rise of synthesisers in the 70s and 80s, synthesists and producers realised that they could get some pretty gnarly tones by attaching the same distortion pedals to synthesizers.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the acid house era of dance music, from the late 80s and early 90s.

It was this period where the now-legendary Roland TB-303 was repurposed from a humble bassline machine to the must-have device for the genre. It turns out, whacking up the resonance on the 303 filter produced an amazing sound through a distortion pedal. Club-avoiding guitarists, however, were largely non-plussed.

So what exactly is saturation, and what does it bring to the production table?

By and large, saturation is designed to be more subtle than distortion, often with a penchant for mimicking good old-fashioned analog equipment. You remember our previous point about clean signals? We rest our case!

Saturation excites and distorts certain frequencies and harmonics in the signal, depending on your chosen plugin. What's more, we can trace the saturation story back to the late 90s.

Back then, CDs were the predominant format, and many musicians and producers were reporting that the overall sound of the digital signal chain was a little cold and sterile.

Couple this with the emergence of one of the first rack-mounted units to offer a one-stop mastering solution - the TC Electronics Finalizer - and basic mastering saturation became commonplace.

TC Electronics described this saturation as 'Digital Radiance Generation', or DRG for short.

DRG applied second harmonic distortion to a mix, designed to mimic analog equipment and specifically analog tape, so it's no surprise that it was quite a hit.

However, over-using it could quickly destroy a mix, forcing mix engineers to pay close attention.

Fast forward to the current DAW age, and we are now flush with a plethora of different saturation plugins, with many being very highly regarded and offering bespoke solutions, depending on your production requirements.

One of the big boons of plugins, is that you can use them as many times as you like, and while it is probably a bad idea to sprinkle saturation on every instrument in your mix, there are definitely places where employment can pay dividends.

If you find yourself recording an electric bass part directly via your audio interface, you could choose to use amplifier simulators to colour the signal. This could be regarded as a form of saturation, but you could also go all-in and just apply a saturation plugin to warm up the signal.

One of the most highly regarded in the current market is Decapitator from Soundtoys. Not only is it flexible, but it can go from incredibly subtle to total extreme very quickly.

When applying saturation, it is always really important to listen objectively. The moment you feel the signal is getting too aggressive, it's time to back off, and that may not necessarily be exclusively down to the saturation amount control.

Just about all plugins will be equipped with a Wet/Dry see-saw control, and adjusting this can scale an extremely saturated sound to help it blend in more nicely.

Of course, this principle could also apply to sampled bass sounds, which may be a little too clean for your mix. It's also a concept which could be applied to drums, specifically if you are working with samples within your DAW.

It's a common complaint that many drum samples are just too clean, so it could be very useful to add a little saturated colour to your drum track. The only problem is, the drums themselves often sound great with saturation, but the hi-hat and cymbals can react less favourably…

A sensible solution requires the creation of 2 drum tracks, both with accompanying MIDI parts. You can then mute all of the drums on one channel, muting all of the metallic instruments on the other. This leaves the path clear to saturating the drum elements on their own, with no effect on the cymbals and hats.

Before you get lost in instrument saturation heaven (or hell, if that's your preference) be aware that some instruments do not embrace saturation so readily, particularly instruments with a more acoustic persuasion, such as acoustic pianos, string sections or brass and woodwinds. There's no harm in trying, but don't be surprised if saturation does little to improve the sound.

With a slight sense of history repeating itself, we have to revert to TC’s DRG concept, and discuss how beneficial subtle saturation can be to an entire mix.

Mastering suites, such as iZotope’s Ozone, offer a number of saturation solutions, designed to be used during the mastering phase. These include tools to excite upper frequencies, and elements for inducing the sound of vintage tape.

But if you want a little more control, one company that personifies the application of saturation to mimic analog is Universal Audio. It has produced an array of exemplary plugins which are perfect for subtle saturation across your mix.

If you are nervous about over-applying saturation, take a look at the Verve Analog Machines plugin, which is available in two forms; the first is an entry-level Essentials version, offering four saturation models, while the upper-level version provides 10 models.

The idea is simple - apply across your mix, and adjust the tone and amount controls to suit your production. The included models range drastically from subtle, through to downright dirty, so it's important to be objective.

For even more control, UA’s emulation of the Ampex ATR-102 Mastering Tape Recorder is stunning. This plugin can induce everything from saturation through to hiss and even wow and flutter. It just depends how extreme you want to go!

One final thought. We've mentioned on several occasions that you need to be objective about your saturation exploits, and be careful not to overuse. You can easily destroy a mix by being a little overzealous.

If you find yourself regularly creating or delivering stems of your mix, be aware that many saturation plugins induce noise.

If you deliver half a dozen stems and they all have noise on them, when all the stems are played back together, that's going to be quite a racket. It’s probably best to defeat the noise element as much as you can, in this setting, so that your music doesn't get drowned out by hiss.

We spent many years trying to get rid of tape hiss and noise, so you don't want to end up back where we all started.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Reverb is a hugely versatile tool that can be used to create all sorts of effects and transitions. Here, we're going to show you how to use reverb to create filters, reverses, risers and pads...

Let’s start by creating some interesting filter effects. Import a drum loop or other sound source into a new DAW project, insert an algorithmic reverb, and set its wet/dry balance to 50%. Choice of reverb has a big impact on both the method and results here, so you may need to experiment to get the effect to work.

What we are essentially trying to do is create a controlled feedback situation. A small room/reverb size combined with longer decay times tends to do it, and some processors also have a feedback setting which does the trick nicely!

Pre-delay can have an influence here, too. In short, experiment with parameters and plugins, and you’ll find a whole bunch of interesting filter effects.

Let’s make a real reverse reverb now. Create a new project and import a vocal or other lead part. Insert a reverb on the vocal and set up a pleasing, medium-to-long effect. When happy, use your DAW’s audio processing tools to reverse the reverb part – not all DAWs can do this, so use a free audio editor such as Audacity if needs be.

Import the bounced audio to a new track if your DAW didn’t do this automatically, then reverse it once again (or, if using Audacity for processing, reverse and then import to your DAW). Carefully position the reversed bounced part so that it lines up properly with the unreversed original part, then mute that dry vocal’s track. You now have true reverse reverb!

Risers use similar techniques to reverse reverb, but tend to be less of a faff. Open a project and find a point in the song that would benefit from being preceded by a riser. Export a short segment of audio from this point – sufficient to seed the reverb, and including any tracks that you want to include in the riser sound.

Create a new project and import the snippet you just exported. Insert a reverb, set it to 100% wet, and create a sound with a long tail and plenty of character. Add other plugins for more sonic interest if needed. When done, export the results, import this new file back to the original project, reverse it and position it.

Let’s now create a synth pad. Open a new project and create a new instrument track using a synth or sampler that supports granular playback. We’re going to use Arturia Pigments, but you could use NI Kontakt, Steinberg Padshop, BLEASS SampleWiz 2, or any one of numerous premium and free granular synths should you not already have something suitable.

Import into your instrument into the unreversed riser sound you created earlier. Use the synth’s sample and granular editing controls to hone in on a pleasing portion of the source sound. Build up a patch for the sound by adding a pad-like amp envelope, and modulating the granular position time to create timbre shifts.

Finally, let’s play with some freezing. Import a drum loop into a new project and insert a reverb that has a freeze function – we’re going to use BLEASS Reverb. Set up a nice ’verb, add an automation track for the freeze button, and create a rhythmic automation pattern. You could then enhance the effect by automating other parameters.

In honor of Oasis's triumphant return, Welcome To Hell World recently asked fans of the band to list their best songs. John Cullen picked Wonderwall, and to pre-empt critics that believe it’s a boring choice, he argues: “This is one of the greatest songs in history. Just because some of your university friends defaulted to it at karaoke doesn’t act as a strike against it, I’m sorry.”

Even though Liam Gallagher sings “like he just fell down the stairs into a dank pub in Manchester”, Cullen argues that he nevertheless “absolutely nails a vulnerable longing that many have tried to capture and very, very few have done so well.”

Wonderwall was a smash hit in 1995, reaching number two on the UK charts and number eight in the US. But in 2024, are young people still pulling out their guitars at parties and playing it? I asked my students, and they assured me that this is very much a thing. These kids weren’t even born when the song came out! The brothers Gallagher have apparently touched a deep intergenerational nerve.

How did this song become such a standard for beginner guitarists? Why did it attain meme status? Before we address these challenging questions, let’s start with a simpler one.

What exactly is a Wonderwall?

No one seems to know. From an article in The American Songwriter, I learned that Wonderwall is the name of a British film from 1968. The titular wall separates two apartments, one inhabited by a scientist, the other by a model. The scientist discovers a hole in the wall and becomes a peeping tom (which, gross.) George Harrison wrote songs for the film, and the soundtrack was the first solo album by a member of the Beatles. Noel Gallagher saw a copy of the soundtrack someplace, and the rest was history.

The song was originally titled Wishing Stone, but Noel thought “wonderwall” sounded better. But what does he mean by it? In a 1996 Rolling Stone article, Liam explains that a wonderwall “can be anything… It’s just a beautiful word. It’s like looking for that bus ticket, and you’re trying to fucking find it, that bastard, and you finally find it and you pull it out, ‘Fucking mega, that is me wonderwall.’” That does not enlighten me much, but maybe I’m overthinking it.

Noel told NME that he wrote the song to cheer up his then-girlfriend, later wife, and finally ex-wife, Meg Mathews. After they split, Noel denied it had ever been about her in the first place, saying instead that it’s directed to an imaginary person. I didn’t know any of this backstory going into this article, and I can’t say that learning it has changed my experience of listening. Whatever power the song has, it isn’t in the literal meaning of the lyrics, such as it is.

The instrumentation

Owen Morris produced Wonderwall along with the rest of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?. He and the band worked fast; it only took them half a day to put the song down, and the entire album was done in a few weeks. Liam sings and plays tambourine.

Noel plays guitar, piano and bass; the band’s bassist Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan doesn’t appear on the track. Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs plays the cello patch on a Mellotron, a kind of primitive analogue sampling keyboard from the 1960s. The paradigmatic Mellotron sound is the flute at the beginning of the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever.

Drummer Alan White used Promark hot rods, bundles of thin wooden rods that are quieter and more diffuse-sounding than than standard drumsticks. He had only recently replaced the band’s original drummer, Tony McCarroll.

In a Q Magazine interview., Owen Morris praised White for being “intelligent and articulate and a real musician”, but then said that he wasn’t a fan of White’s playing: “Alan’s essentially a jazz drummer. He is NOT a rock band drummer. He was always shuffling away on his snare (which actually became the signature rhythm of Wonderwall), and never hitting the basic back beats in a dumb rock and roll way.” Morris has a point. You can see White using a traditional grip in the video, a sure sign of a formally trained drummer.

Hot rods and Mellotron are mildly interesting twists, but otherwise, the song is a standard mainstream rock production. It could just as easily have been recorded in 1975 as 1995; its only era-specific touch was the brickwall limiting. Oasis’ deliberate non-innovativeness is a big part of their appeal; we will get into that below.

The theory

Wonderwall has a reputation for being a big, dumb, four-chord song. It is definitely easy to learn and play, but it has more going on harmonically and melodically than I expected. Noel plays the song in E minor, but he has a capo on the second fret of his guitar, so it sounds in F# minor. In the following section, I’ll be discussing the chords he plays, not the ones you hear. Transpose everything up a whole step to get the key of the recording.

The chords are highly guitaristic; no pianist would ever have written them. Every chord in the song pedals the notes G and D on top, the notes you get on the third fret of the B and E strings. The song’s intro is a loop of Em7, G, Dsus4, and A7sus4, two chords per bar. The first three chords belong to the key of E minor, but A7 is an outlier, because it belongs instead to the jazzier E Dorian mode.

The distinctive note that sets it apart is C-sharp, but because he’s playing A7sus4 rather than A7, Noel’s guitar part doesn’t actually include that note. Nevertheless, it’s strongly implied. Anyway, the verse continues the intro loop until the last line (“about you now”), where it switches to C(add9), Dsus4, and a full bar of A7sus4.

The vocal melody is as guitaristic as the chord progression. It’s based around the easiest possible scale to play on guitar, the open-string E minor pentatonic. The first note of the melody is B, a typical enough choice over an Em7 chord. However, Liam sings it strikingly flat, making it an ear-grabbing blue note.

The drums enter in the second half of the verse, but they don’t come in on a downbeat like you expect. Instead, they start in the middle of the line “backbeat, the word is on the street”. This choice is a baffling one. Why not have the drums hit on the word “backbeat”? I suspect that Alan White may have come in late by accident, and then the band decided that they liked the effect.

The prechorus begins with an Aeolian cadence: C(add9), Dsus4, Em7. That repeats, and then after another C(add9) and Dsus4, there’s a quick descending major scale bassline under a G chord: G, G/F#, G/E. This leads into two full bars of A7sus4 on the line “don’t know hoooow”. Each phrase in the prechorus’ vocal melody starts on F-sharp, the first departure from E minor pentatonic so far.

The chorus is a loop of C(add9), Em7, G, and Em7. The vocal melody includes a new note, C, on the “af-” in “after all” and on the “-der-” in “wonderwall.” That note is native to the key of E minor, but none of the Cs in the melody occur over the C chords. The melody has been more or less independent of the chords the whole time, but in the chorus, it’s particularly striking. You feel the song as a general vibe rather than a harmonic structure with an order and sequence to it.

The final Em7 chord in the chorus hangs for an extra bar and a half. This is a disruption to the hypermeter that I’m sure trips up every dorm-room busker. Everything settles back into structural regularity with the second verse, and there are no further surprises or oddities for the rest of the song.

Brotherly love

You can’t talk about an Oasis song without getting into Liam and Noel’s public persona. They are an easy target for parody, as David Cross and Bob Odenkirk demonstrated on Mr Show in 1997.

Americans like me are not very sensitive to British class politics and regional identity; everybody just sounds “British” to us. But in their native country, Liam and Noel’s roots in working-class Manchester are the most salient part of their identity. Manchester’s closest American equivalent is Detroit, an unglamorous industrial city with a surprisingly rich musical history. Aside from Oasis, Manchester has also been home to the Smiths, Joy Division, Simply Red, the Stone Roses, the Verve, the 1975, and even the Bee Gees (though they technically grew up in the suburb of Chorlton.)

Jason Diamond cites the Gallaghers as examples of a British archetype that he calls “The Lad”, a defiantly uncouth working-class character with hip-hop-like swagger, best embodied by Begbie from Trainspotting. Diamond explains that the Kinks and the Who are Lads, but the Rolling Stones aren’t, and that John Lennon was a Lad even if he wanted not to be. The Lad doesn’t have to be male; Diamond lists Adele as an example too.

The Gallaghers aren’t just Lads; they are brothers, and their relationship is, shall we say, fraught. As the lead singer, Liam might be the voice of Oasis, but Noel is the band’s undisputed leader. He is not humble about this. In the aforementioned Rolling Stone article, he says, “I’m in the best band, and I’ve just written the best album. So as far as I’m concerned, everybody can fuck right off. Those other bands are not even in a position to string my guitar at the moment. Fucking wankers, all of ’em.”

Liam has a similar level of self-confidence, and the brothers do not resolve their conflicts with quiet compromise. They may be more famous for fighting than for music. A tape of them verbally abusing each other was even released as a single, and it made it up to number 52 on the British charts.

It’s not necessary to know any of this to enjoy learning and playing Wonderwall on guitar, but it does give you some insight into the song’s outsized cultural footprint.

The meme

Wonderwall is easy and fun to play, but so are a lot of songs. Why has this one saturated the amateur guitar world so completely? Why do people call that specific voicing of Em7 “the Oasis chord”? Some guitar stores have banned Wonderwall, putting it in the rarified company of Stairway to Heaven, Smoke on the Water and Seven Nation Army.

The specific meme phrase, “anyway, here’s Wonderwall” originates in this video:

It works as a caption for anyone with a guitar - or any other instrument, for that matter. The more incongruous the instrument is, the better, and the same goes for incongruous players.

Amusing though the meme is, Christopher Hill argues in The Voice Mag that it has a deeper meaning: “The Wonderwall meme isn’t about the song; it’s about the player… there is an implied discouragement of new guitarists from trying to learn the piece: it becomes a ‘cringe’ activity.” The song may be a cliche, but it got that way for a reason, it’s a useful learning tool. To some, a would-be guitar bro inflicting Wonderwall on his roommates might be cringe, but we need to careful not to discourage amateur musicianship.

The word “amateur” simply means “lover of”, and don’t we want more music lovers? Amateur musicians will always vastly outnumber professionals, so why not encourage them? Everyone is a beginner at some point. It’s hard enough to push through the early stages of music learning without being anxious about being mocked for it.

Wonderwall is a reassuring song. It’s reassuringly easy to play, and even when it was new, it was reassuringly familiar. Aaron Bady points out that in the 1990s, “guitar bands had stopped being cutting edge - all the cutting edge music was non-white people - so ‘an un-novel pastiche of past guitar bands’ was a way for Britpop to live in its white past”.

But Wonderwall isn’t a simple pastiche of classic rock songs, either. It’s a little peculiar. Liam Gallagher’s voice is abrasive, the chords and melody don’t have traditional harmonic function, and the drums enter in the wrong place. I have noticed that really huge hits tend to be conventional in their broad strokes but weird and a little annoying in their details. If Wonderwall was too easily digestible, we would long ago have moved on. The same is probably true for the Gallagher brothers.

It might be called Stupid Song, but Olivia Rodrigo’s latest single is yet another smart piece of pop songwriting from an artist who can do no wrong right now.

With Stupid Song riding high in global streaming charts, Rodrigo has now given us a little insight into how it was written in a new video interview with Pitchfork.

“It's the only song that I ever wrote on my grand piano in New York,” she remembers. “It was really expensive, and I was like, well, I didn't write any songs on it, but this one, this one I got it out in like the last few weeks of me moving [from] that apartment, so it was all worth it.”

Rodrigo says that the inspiration for Stupid Song came when she was out for an early morning walk in London: “This guy walks up to me – I thought he was gonna ask for a picture and I'm like, oh yeah, that's cool, it's cool – and he walks up to me, he goes, ‘You are so beautiful, like, can I take you to dinner?’ And I was like, ‘No, but, like, wow, thank you so much,’ and I was so like, just joyful and happy, and I went home, and I wrote this song about being infatuated with someone, and just like in total limerence.”

Discussing the song’s arrangement, Rodrigo says: “I wrote it on piano, and so obviously there's an element of it that's sort of piano ballady, but it had such energy, and we're like, let's put dance drums in there. And I think that little bridge part, it's my favorite part of the song, I love that part. I think it was the last thing on the record we finished, because we just could not figure out what that part was supposed to be, we tried everything under the sun, and yeah, I love that bit.”

It sounds like Stupid Song came together in sections, then, and Rodrigo says that she has no problem with it sounding like a hybrid of different parts.

“Whenever I play this song for people, they're like, ‘it's like three songs stitched together, but in kind of a cool way.’ And I think that was the vibe, that's what we were going for.”

Like other Rodrigo songs – Vampire, for example – Stupid Song is also a track that builds, almost theatrically, and she accepts that this is now something of a trademark for her.

“I just sort of write that way,” she explains. “I don't really know why. I’ve just always loved a song that is very dynamic – that's the type of music that I listen to. I think that's why I like rock music so much. I like something that's just really loud sometimes.”

There’s also another genre that Rodrigo and her co-writer/producer, Dan Nigro, have bonded over, along with an artist who’s served as an unlikely inspiration: “Dan and I, we really love a power ballad. We actually really love Meat Loaf songs sometimes, because we're like, ‘this is the ultimate power ballad.’”

Elsewhere in the video, Rodrigo also breaks down two other songs from her new album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love: The Cure and Cigarette Smoke. And, as if she wasn’t already busy enough, she’s also announced a new one-day music festival, Daisy Chain Fields, which will take place on 29 August at Great Park in Irvine California and feature an impressive all-women line-up.

As well as Rodrigo herself, this includes the likes of Chappell Roan, Bikini Kill, Doechii, Garbage, Katseye, Mitski, Rachel Chinouriri, Santigold and The Breeders, while Karen O, Sarah McLachlan and Stevie Nicks are listed as special guests.

All profits raised from the festival will benefit non-profit organisations that advance and advocate for women and girls, and presale tickets go on sale tomorrow, 24 June.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Can you can remember exactly where you were when you heard your favourite album (or a life-changing track) for the very first time? We are fortunate enough to have had many moments like that. But there was one particular album where this writer can remember calmly sitting down in front of a (now old-fashioned) hi-fi system, and having his mind thoroughly blown from the very first track onwards…

I think we can all agree that Radiohead are quite ‘the’ experimental band. Their exploration of the various extremes of music have taken them to the very fringes of what’s usually acceptable in the studio - including the use of some exceedingly cutting-edge production techniques. They’ve also incorporated a fair share of vintage instrumentation, such as the Ondes Martenot, as well as strings and well… you name it, Thom, Jonny, Ed and co have probably done it at some point.

Having experienced exceptional success with their more chart-friendly albums The Bends and OK Computer, the creativity dial was set to maximum for the electronic-leaning follow-up, Kid A in 2000.

The crystalline simplicity of the opening track, Everything in its Right Place (which we’ve analysed at length in an exhaustive song story here), was the first indication that we were in for something special…

The use of Prophet-5 synth as an accompaniment to Thom Yorke’s audio-scrubbed vocals (a relatively new technique which was made possible by Pro Tools-based production) set the tone for an album that would introduce millions to sounds and innovative attitudes previously the remit of a select, Warp Records-signed few.

By the time the third track on the album made it to the front of the queue - the dark, circular bass groove and frenzied, blaring horns of The National Anthem - our socks were thoroughly blown off.

One thing that we particularly remember being amazed by at the time was the exceptionally cool effect being applied to Thom's vocals.

“I think, [Thom] is someone who's very into the fine voice that he has, and at the same time he's always looking for new ways to try and express different personae,” said bassist Colin Greenwood back in 2001 in an interview with the BBC. “A way of doing that is by treating the voice”

Although we can’t be fully certain of the chain used to achieve the particular effect, we know for a fact that, at this time, Radiohead were adopters of a largely experimental package which can certainly achieve the same result.

In fact, this particular piece of software formed part of my own regular arsenal of effects prior to Kid A coming out, so I could conceivably stake the claim that I used it before Radiohead!

Just so that we’re completely clear about the glass-like effect that we’re talking about, we have to wait until around 01: 36 on the timestamp of the song, and the first vocal entry - after the main groove and overlaid Ondes Martenot have set the scene.

It is identifiable by the resonant sound that we hear after Thom delivers a line - it seems to leave a lasting impression in the audio, almost the aural equivalent of a bright light being seared into your retina.

It imprints once the vocal line hits a particular frequency. It's an effect that gives a metallic quality to the vocal, and can be achieved using a comb filter.

Casting my our minds back to the late 90s, and computer-based effects had really started to hit their stride, but pre-VST effects and plugins, an organisation called INA GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) had long been established as a leading centre for research into the use of electronics in music, particularly experimental music.

First founded in 1951 by Pierre Schaeffer, it was known as a centre for the development of musique concrète; the groundbreaking technique of creating music from found sounds using analog tape (an early form of sampling, but using tape and razor blades) which gave inspiration to organisations like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

In 1990, INA GRM released GRM Tools; an entirely unique standalone suite of software and processing effects, running in a DAW-less capacity on an Apple Mac. It’s where we first heard the GRM Comb and its highly recognisable stylings.

“The first GRM Tools came out in the early 1990s but they didn’t just come out of nowhere,” INA GRM’s director François Bonnet told Ableton. “Actually, some of them were trying to go back to some early machines like the Phonogène and the Morphophone [early innovative instruments]. But mostly they were continuing the first real-time treatment system developed at GRM : SYTER (SYsteme TEmps Reel / Realtime System). The Syter algorithms were really inspiring to start a collection of sound treatments as plugins. So as plugins, they were really quickly designed as commercial software, but they come from a long period of prototypes."

Due to its standalone nature, it meant that many avant garde and experimental composers used GRM Tools with an accompanying recording device, such as a Digital Audio Tape machine (DAT to its friends), recording the experimental output generated by the GRM Tools suite.

With the traction of VST plugins, and the adaptation to other formats such as AAX and AU, GRM moved with the times, offering elements from the original Tools suite in individual plugin form.

We know that producer Nigel Godrich and Thom Yorke were keen users, and so it seems likely that it was the GRM Comb Filter plugin that was responsible for the effect we hear on The National Anthem.

The effect was described more broadly as a ‘ring modulator’ by guitarist Ed O’Brien in an interview with MC2. “We are delay and reverb snobs. I think the interesting thing is, we don't go for nice sounds. For example, we processed the vocals on The National Anthem with a ring modulator. We can get up our own asses a bit, but what we do recognise is, when it comes to sounds, I think we've got quite good taste. We're good at judging what is and what is not a good sound. For us, part of recording is finding out different methodologies and techniques to create new sounds - which is what you should be doing in the recording studio."

It's therefore necessary to have either this plugin (or something very similar) in order to recreate the same effect.

With perfect timing, INA GRM has just re-engineered all of the classic Tools from the original suite into a new standalone and plugin format, which it calls Atelier. Moreover, it is also now available for Mac and PC. Nice!

‘What is comb filtering anyway?’ I hear you ask…

The literal definition is as a form of distortion, which occurs when a single audio signal is combined with a delayed facsimile of itself.

However, in the effect domain, it is quite unlike conventional high or low pass filters. A comb filter offers a number of spikes, a little bit like heavily narrowed ‘Q’ points on an EQ curve.

Also much like an EQ, these spikes are exaggerated and excited by the presence of a matching audio frequency, hence it picks out particular notes and frequencies - which can be defined by the user - to create resonant tones and chordal effects.

In order to achieve a similar effect, you are going to need two things; firstly, some form of audio signal to excite the filter - which we are going to adopt as a vocal part - and some form of comb filter plugin.

You can download a demo version of GRM Atelier if you just want to dip your toe in the comb filtering pool, although the originators are now accompanied by a plethora of other brands that have picked up the comb filtering mantle.

Examples such as Polyverse Supermodal or Kilohearts Comb Filter (which is also free) are all ripe for exploration and can be used to follow this exercise.

Start with a simple key note and build the first frequency plot from here

Once you have your vocal part on a track within your DAW, load up your chosen comb filter plugin.

We need to think about which notes we want to excite from our vocal signal. As many plugins use frequency as their parameter of choice, it's a good idea to nudge the frequency plot up and down, until you find a satisfactory note to excite.

To give you a rough idea of value, the note A above middle C on a piano keyboard, has a frequency of 440 Hz. The note A, one octave higher, has a frequency of 880 Hz - so the rest is pure maths!

Some comb filter plugins also offer a pitch value, so you can simply use a note name instead of a frequency value to construct your desired chord.

In our example, we are using GRM Tools Atelier, but many parameters will be duplicated within other plugins. The Decay parameter adjusts the volume of the resonance, and will dictate the length of time it takes for the resonance to decay to nothing. Be careful, because higher values here can be extreme in volume.

The Damp control limits the number of overtones, so this should be adjusted, particularly if you only want a single note to be exaggerated.

Once you've added your first frequency point, it's time to think about adding a second, third or more, but once again, you need to consider which notes you want to bloom.

If your vocal line or song is in a major key, consider exaggerating the 3rd of the chord (in much the same way that Radiohead did). If you are in a minor key, try exaggerating the 5th of the chord, which will also work well in a major key too.

In our example, our song is in C Major, and we have chosen to place the note C on the top, with a G and D below, creating a Sus2 chord in an inverted state.

A note though, the notes in the chord won’t be constant, only appearing as the vocal line stays across the assigned notes in the plugin, exciting the frequency.

Add additional frequency points to build up your chord

As you add each frequency point, increasing its amplitude will bring out each note.

You may choose to temper and increase/decrease each frequency point, meaning that you can balance the chord to suit your purpose. In all cases though, it is important to listen, as a spirited vocal performance can have an extreme effect on an outputted signal.

Always work with a degree of caution - each time you add a frequency point, and increase its resonance, it will stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.

It's therefore important not to overcook frequency points, which is a sensible mantra for the effect itself.

There is nothing so old and obvious as an overused effect, so it might be worth holding this effect back for a point in the song where it really counts. After all, it took Radiohead over a minute and a half on The National Anthem before Thom Yorke’s comb-filtered vocal made an appearance.

When you get it right - as Radiohead absolutely did - it’s an effect that leaves a lasting impression on the ears of listeners.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: There’s still something slightly silly - slightly ‘daft’ perhaps we should say - but smile-inducing, about the classic ‘robot’ voice when used on a track.

Everyone from Kraftwerk to Daft Punk and Bruno Mars have explored the concept, but back in the late 1980s, the amazing sound of robot voices infiltrated RnB. It’s a sound that remains ultra-popular and is not too hard to recreate in software, Particularly when we deploy a smattering of choice plugins. But you need to consider some key things first…

The first major question to address, is whether you are actually listening to a vocoder or a talkbox.

Vocoders can be both hardware and software-based and typically rely on audio input from your microphone-based vocal or drum track. By and large, the sound of the vocoder tends to be a little bit softer, often leaning into aligning your voice with prescribed chords.

The talkbox, on the other hand, tends to adopt a harsher and brighter tone, and is visually identifiable by the plastic tube, which is placed in the side of the player’s mouth.

This is relatively essential, but also means that talkboxes can only really exist in the hardware world, and not as plugins.

There are exceptions, of course, with many talkbox plugins on the market, but these tend to be sample-based and pre-scripted, meaning that you cannot apply your own vocal or lyric to your track.

This can be fine if you just want to add the odd ‘Boom’ or ‘Baby’ as a little garnish to your production, but it’d be nice to be more flexible…

You could of course, consider going down the hardware talkbox route. This would mean the purchase of an appropriate pedal, with the MXR M222 Talkbox pedal being the current best and most affordable option.

You’ll then need a synth to provide the tone; the Yamaha DX100 has become the model of choice, but you'll need to source one through the secondhand market, as it hasn't been made since the late 80s. It's also got mini keys, which might not be the best option if you are used to a full-size keyboard.

The other downside with going the hardware route, is the long learning curve. You'll need to practice using it, to make it as comfortable an expressive instrument as possible.

To be frank, this is the tricky bit!

When ‘talk-boxing’, you effectively have to over-annunciate a vocal, without actually speaking or singing!

You also have to do this while gripping a plastic pipe with your molars.

As one professional talkboxer said in interview; ‘The tube is a slippery little sucker!’ This might be why you see so many talkboxers continually adjusting the tube, while desperately trying to deliver a lyric. It's the musical equivalent of ventriloquism, and ironically, saying a phrase like ‘Bottle of Beer’ is just as difficult!

So if you really want that sound, what are your other options?

You could of course hire a professional.

Bruno Mars hired Mr. Talkbox (the clue is in the name) to deliver the amazing sound at the beginning of 24K Magic, although to be fair, Mr. Talkbox is effectively re-creating the sound of the original master, Roger Troutman.

He was the lead member of the band Zapp, back in the 1980s, before sadly passing away in 1999. But, his creative legend lives on.

“I was just a music head. Then one of my cousins introduced me to Roger Troutman and his band, Zapp,” Mr Talkbox said in an interview with New Release Today. “He played a song called Computer Love. I was like, ‘What in the world is that?’ I asked him if there was more of that music. And, he told me that he had the record at his house.

“It deeply moved me and that’s why I started my journey with the talkbox,” Mr Talkbox concluded. “The talkbox was not easy to find and you had to know someone to get that sound.”

But, if you want to make life a lot easier, you could explore one of the talkbox plugins that are available for purchase, which will offer a few choice sound-bites to sprinkle over your track.

However, if you want to try and work with your own unique and malleable talkbox, you'll need to bring in a vocoder plugin.

When choosing a vocoder plugin, most now offer an internal synth, meaning that you do not have to use a secondary synth plugin or hardware to get the vocoder to operate. The synth signal is described as the carrier, with an inputted vocal being the modulatory signal.

For more contemporary talkbox-style sounds, it is also better to avoid plugins with a vintage flavour, in favour of something more versatile. The vintage offerings will probably sound great, but just feel too retro for modern RnB and pop production styles.

Step 1 - Setup

In our example, we are using the EVOC-20 Vocoder, which is included with Logic. Many of the parameters will be available across other plugins, so the settings should be transferable.

Having loaded your vocoder plugin onto an instrument track in your DAW, the first thing to do is to set the modulatory signal path. If you have a microphone connected, you can select this as an input and start vocoding immediately.

You will need to sing/speak at the same time as playing notes on your keyboard. Alternatively, you can select an existing piece of audio as your modulation signal, such as a recorded vocal track, but you will also need to play your keyboard in time with the vocal.

Step 2 - Settings and FX

Make sure that your vocoder plugin is set to operate in vocoder mode, rather than just behaving as a standalone synth. There will probably be a menu or setting for this in your plugin.

Many vocoders employ effects, such as chorus or ensemble, which are used to thicken the signal texture. This tends to offer vintage feel and colouration, so ensure that any similar effects are firmly switched off.

Step 3 - Timbral settings

We can now start to change the sound, bearing in mind that what we are trying to do here is recreate the talkbox sound.

Start by increasing the number of frequency bands available within the vocoder section of the plugin. The EVOC-20 offers a generous 20 bands, so we are increasing this to the maximum.

To replicate a talkbox, we are going to stretch and shift the formant frequency band, so that it highlights the upper-mid frequency range.

We can accentuate this further by narrowing the frequency band (adjusting the slider above the band graphic), and applying a degree of resonance. Important to stress that this is vocoder related resonance, and not that included as part of the synth engine filter section.

Step 4 - Envelopes

You may find that your vocoder offers two sets of envelope setting. One will relate to the vocal input, and the other to the synthesizer. In both cases, we want to adjust them so that there is a relatively short attack and release.

As each plugin will react in a slightly different way, it's advisable to adjust the settings while auditioning your sound. If you have an envelope sustain phase available (on the synth-side of the plugin) ensure that this is set to a full sustain.

Step 5 - Mono

The most successful talkbox sounds work in monophonic form, so switch your plugin to mono mode.

It is this method of utilisation that also gave rise to the common usage of hard-tune, where pitch correction software would create trill-like effects, as and when pitch adjustments do not settle. We don't need pitch correction, as our keyboard is effectively acting as an auto-tune!

Step 6 - EQ

As a final step to altering your sound, engage EQ to highlight upper-mid frequencies, and consider lessening lower frequencies with some form of low shelving.

The flavour of your outputted sound will be heavily dictated by your source synth sound, and in keeping with the tradition of the DX100, the Logic EVOC-20 provides an excellent FM wave source (like Yamaha DX Synths), which act as the perfect starting point for creating the talkbox sound - harsh, digital and bright.

It is definitely worth experimenting with the synth section, although many vocoder plugins may not offer enormous control of this element.

One final point, which might sound obvious, is that getting the perfect sound will take practice.

Playing or programming a vocoder is certainly easier than performing with an actual talkbox, but it still requires time to get to grips with it - so don't be afraid to put in the hours to get the best results.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Known for reimagining ‘90s and ‘00s dance classics as contemporary pop gems, PinkPantheress has won over both electronic music oldheads and social media-savvy youngsters alike.

Tracks she’s sampled or interpolated into her work include unassailable anthems such as Adam F’s Circles in Break it Off, Basement Jaxx’s Romeo in Girl Like Me, and Sweet Female Attitude’s Flowers in Pain.

One of her biggest tracks, Illegal was based around a sample from Underworld’s progressive techno epic Dark & Long (Dark Train), pitched up and reworked with skippy 2-step garage beats and a beefy 808 bass line. All sounds that are ripe for recreation in software.

On the song, which became a viral smash on TikTok (wherein people would emulate meeting each other and shaking hands) and was the third single from her second mixtape Fancy That, PinkPantheress said, “I definitely was surprised at the reception because I was totally going on a whim, doing the handshake thing,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I didn’t really expect anything to come from it, but I was really happy to see people were enjoying it. I thought it was really sick.”

“The sample is quite timeless,” she told NME of its Underworld-cribbing starting point. “I think the power of the beat itself is what people really like about it.”

PinkPantheress expanded on what she loved about the 1990s-era of dance music further; “I enjoyed how emotive it was, and there was more liberation. Music was allowed to be experimental without being put in a box.”

In this guide to getting the PinkPantheress sound we’ll take the song apart and rebuilt it element-by-element with some of our favourite plugins.

1. Techno chords with Serum 2

Underworld’s uplifting techno chords are musically quite simple, and we can get close to their timbre using a preset from Xfer Records Serum 2. Set your DAW’s project tempo to 141 BPM, load up Serum 2 on a MIDI track, and select the Factory > Synth > SY - Jupiter Duality preset.

The filter movement on this sound isn’t that close to the Underworld synth, but we can get a more appropriate feel by setting Filter 1’s mode to Normal > Low 6.

Sequence C minor chords on the first, fifth and eighth 8th notes, followed by F major chords in the second inversion on the last two quarter notes. For the bass, sequence the root note an octave down for the C minor, with the root then the major second for the F major.

2. Garage beats with Triton

Central to Illegal’s 2-step garage-inspired sound is the rimshot snare. The dependable Korg Triton plugin has a suitable sound in its Standard Kit, so load that up.

Start by programming a standard 2-step pattern which comprises C#2 rimshots on the second and fourth beat, with E1 kicks on the first and sixth 8th notes.

Create a two-bar groove by duplicating the pattern out, and add another kick on the final 8th note of the first bar to provide some variation.

Now program some quieter A#4 shakers on 8th notes, adding some yet quieter ghost shakers during the second beat of the second bar. Move these slightly to the right so that they’re swung in classic garage fashion.

Now duplicate the two-bar second to create a fourth bar sequence, and also move the ghost shakers so they occur during the first beat of the fourth bar.

Let’s also add another rim shot on the final 16th note of the second beat of the fourth bar. This gives us a garage-style beat with enough variation to keep it interesting.

The shaker sound is panned to the left quite a bit, so let’s make the audio mono. In Ableton Live we can do this using the Utility effect with the Mono button activated.

Let’s make our beats sound loud and punchy with some clipping. Add Sir Audio Tools StandardCLIP to the track, setting it to Hard Clip Mode with Ceiling on, and an Input Gain of 8.20 dB.

Let’s balance the tracks and turn them down so that we’re not clipping the master. Set the Serum 2 track to -13 dB, and the Triton track to -3 dB.

3. Heavy 808 bass with Massive X

Native Instruments' Massive X comes complete with a selection of heaving 808-style bass presets. Load up the synth on a new MIDI track and select the Jungle Eight preset for a booming bass tone.

Turn this track down to -18.5 dB to balance it with the other elements.

For the most part the Illegal bass line plays the root note for the C minor chord, and the minor second for the F major chord.

4. Pretty pads with Triton

Later in the track, the music switches up to a jungle-style sustained pad chord, and there are few plugins better prepared to create that style of sound than the Korg Triton. Load up the /\Gods Bathtub/\ Combi preset.

The element isn’t too loud, so set the track to -5.5 dB to make it a touch quieter.

Sequence a C minor chord that lasts for four bars.

5. High-pitched ear candy with Diva

This pad is accompanied by a sparking synth tone, and we can create something similar easily with u-he Diva. Add the synth on a new MIDI track, and load up the HS Baroqualog preset.

Set this track to a restrained -18 dB to balance it with the pad.

Copy the melody we’ve used here that plays in the C4 octave to create some high-pitched, sparkly synth tones.

Now we have A and B sections that create the perfect foundation for catchy pop vocals, while still providing big beats and bass.

It’s a close approximation of the Illegal aesthetic, but you can use these retro-tinged sonics to create something new.

It’s this spirit of invention that attracted PinkPantheress to these legacy sounds in the first place; “These days, I worry that artists feel less willing to experiment with sounds ’cause you’re going to be boxed in,” she told NME.

“Genres have become rigid in the last few years, and I think that back in the day, subcultures felt more blended. I could be wrong, but I liked how free everybody felt at the time and how fun everything was.”

Charli XCX has been reflecting on the frenzied reaction to her recent single, Rock Music, and to one line from the song in particular.

The pushback when Charli sang ‘I think the dance floor is dead, so now we're making rock music’ was immediate, not least from Madonna, who responded with a caption on an Instagram post that read: ‘If your Dance floor feels dead / Maybe you're playing the wrong music’.

All good fun, but XCX has now clarified what she meant by that line in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“That lyric is very much about my relationship with Brat, and my personal experience with that album,” she says, before suggesting that she still appreciates good new dance music as much as anyone.

“My husband [the 1975 drummer George Daniel] runs a dance music label,” she points out. “There’s been such a wealth of incredible dance/electronic-adjacent records that have been coming out recently, whether it’s Slayyyter or Underscores or PinkPantheress. Dance music is in an incredible place.”

On a similar theme, XCX also played down the suggestion that Music, Fashion, Film, her forthcoming album, will be the rock record that some people have predicted. After discussing her love of The Velvet Underground and asking herself “What if we made a record with guitars?” in 2025, some fans assumed that this was the direction that her next album was taking, but it sounds like this isn’t the case.

“Obviously, I know that there’s been a lot of conversation around me making a rock album, which is something that I never said,” Charli says. “But to be honest, I’ve never thought about genre in a binary way. I find that to be a very old-school notion. I don’t even know what the genre is. It’s just me and A G Cook and Finn Keane, doing our thing.”

That means trying to avoid being influenced by anyone else, too: “To be honest, when I make music, I’m thinking less about other music as a reference point. I actually shut myself off, and we just escape into our own world. I’ve spoken at length about loving Lou Reed and John Cale and the Velvet Underground. But would I say that the record sounds like any of that? No.”

This admission comes despite the fact that XCX recently collaborated with Cale on House, one of the songs she contributed to the soundtrack to Emereld Fennell's 2026 adaption of Wuthering Heights.

Elsewhere in the interview, Charli opens up on her relationship with the late producer Sophie, who she worked with extensively on her 2016 EP, Vroom Vroom.

“I lost some­one who completely changed my life, and there are a lot of feelings to work through with that, especially because they were so attached to my creative life in a really positive way, but also sometimes in a difficult way,” she says. “Being able to express those feelings through my work has been really cathartic for me.”

Music, Fashion, Film will be released on 24 July.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Jon Hopkins is a highly influential figure in the realm of electronic music, with a canon of progressive and innovative work that explores the wildest frontiers of techno, electronica, ambient and the spaces between.

Having been championed by Brian Eno (and co-authoring the exquisite Small Craft on a Milk Sea album with both Brian and Leo Abrahams), his career catapulted, working with the likes of King Creosote and Coldplay.

The diverse and often abrasive sounds of his acclaimed fourth album Immunity brought Hopkins to an even wider audience. Its gear-shifts and often invigorating arrangements proved that those who’d rushed to label him as merely a ‘chillout’ act would have to rethink their pigeon-holing;

“I wanted to make things that are emotionally powerful in some way. I think it doesn’t matter what genre it’s in,” Hopkins told The Line of Best Fit.

But Hopkins’ experimental work started long before the public caught up with him, particularly across the gem-filled second and third albums Contact Note and Insides.

Immunity arguably adopted a harder sonic palette, at least in parts. The throbbing distorted bass sounds stood shoulder to shoulder with the beautiful close-miked sound of his own creaky Yamaha upright piano, most often played with the practice pedal engaged for that distinctive felt tone.

After making the record, Jon spoke to the NME:

“It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had writing anything and friends who saw me in the middle of it said that I looked like I was in love,” said Hopkins, “I was just euphoric. The only problem is that it’s just impossible to sleep. And the reality is that you’re on your own a lot and I’m a sociable person. What’s brilliant is that once you do finish you can just go round the world playing which makes it all worthwhile really.”

During this Immunity-creation period, he cited a select few working methodologies, alongside some favourite equipment.

Jon would often export audio files in and out of his DAW (which at that time was Logic Pro), manipulating in other packages, before returning them back to Logic. His vintage Korg MS-20 synthesizer often played a central role too, as did the process of complex effects chains; the topic of our tutorial.

A thread that runs through Immunity - at least for many of the harder-edged tracks - is the use of distortion. Jon has always been a big user of Soundtoys plugins, and Decapitator in particular was a go-to as a distortion effect that could really burn up his audio.

For Immunity, this light and shade was pivotal:

“I think you need the abrasive first half, if you were to just listen to the quiet tracks I don’t think it would do it.” Hopkins said to the NME on the album’s often sudden pivots. “I think you need to shake someone out of the state that they’re in in quite an aggressive way, then soothe it."

However, Jon was also a big user of the Bitcrusher plugin, which forms part of the Logic Pro suite. In the audio equivalent of doing exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin, this plugin degrades the bit depth of the signal, creating an almost gated and distorted texture as a sound decays.

This prevention of a smooth decay, is coupled with a host of audio artefacts which are heavy on the distortion, and can be extended further, with a reduction of sample rate too.

One of Jon’s common tricks was to apply the Bitcrusher effect to a lavishly long reverb tail. His beautiful felt piano - with a resplendently long reverb - is subtly destroyed by the backend use of bit-crushed distortion

We can generate a similar facsimile to the Hopkins sound, while also exploring the medium further. The starting point is to ensure that you have two basic forms of plugin.

Firstly, we need a bitcrusher; many DAWs ship with something appropriate, most likely lurking within the distortion plugin category.

If your package does not have anything appropriate, TAL Software offers a freebie, simply called TAL-Bitcrusher.

Alternatively, Decimort 2 from D16 Group, is one of the most highly regarded paid options, for just €59.

Secondly, we are going to need a good reverb, and one that is capable of generating long reverberation times.

Eventide’s Blackhole plugin has always been the gold standard in this regard, however the ever popular Valhalla Super Massive (or indeed, many other Valhalla ‘verbs) will also do an excellent job.

If you want something more versatile, consider Lunacy Audio’s excellent Space; it is convolution based, and great for other reverberation tasks, but is also capable of generating some very long reverb tails.

Step 1. Creating Your Track

As a starting point, we are going to keep things traditionally ‘Jon’, by recording a track with a felt piano sample, and some very simple chords.

There are a multitude of different felt piano samples available on the market, which include the superb Soniccouture Deep Felt, sampled from a Steinway Essex upright instrument. However, one of the longest standing free examples comes from Spitfire Audio.

Included as part of its freebie Labs series, Soft Piano has been used on more cinematic and TV scores than we care to think of!

It’s basic, but exceptionally good for a freebie.

For the best effect, try working at a lower tempo, and give your chords time to play out and settle.

Step 2. Adding Reverb

It's time to add our first effect, although you can approach this in two different ways.

Traditionally, you can simply add an effect to your channel strip, however it can be very useful to have control over the amount of signal being sent to the effects chain, so applying some form of auxiliary or bus will offer maximum flexibility.

We are working in Logic, and will assign a bus send to an empty auxiliary channel strip. Be sure to turn up the Send amount, and load in your chosen reverb on the related bus channel. We are using Eventide’s Blackhole reverb in our example.

As our reverb is on an FX bus, adjust the Wet/Dry mix, so that the signal is fully effected (or Wet).

Step 3. Adding Bitcrusher

Now it's time to add the Bitcrusher effect. We are keeping it basic, by using Logic Pro's included Bitcrusher, but many of the parameters will be the same across other plugins.

The primary control that we want to explore is the Resolution control, which allows us to alter the bit-rate depth.

Lower values will result in a harsher form of distortion, with higher values being more pleasant to listen to.

You will also notice that lower values take effect far quicker than higher values, so you may choose to alter this value, dependent upon the space between each chord that you have played in your track. Adjusting the length of the reverb time will equally change the Bitcrusher’s effect on the signal.

You may also choose to adjust the level of the Aux/FX chain track, as it may be overpowering against the original piano track.

As always, make sure you listen to the track with objective ears, and adjust your levels accordingly.

Step 4. Additional Elements

Just like Hopkins himself, it is always a great idea to draw inspiration from music convention, but then follow your creative instincts into your own direction, making it unique to you.

With this in mind, there are a couple of details that are worth exploring.

Firstly, in slower tracks, you can extend the reverberation through the use of delays. You could try inserting a delay, with a healthy amount of feedback, immediately after your reverb in the effects chain.

You can also try adding a second reverb plugin, which allows further reverberation of the bit-crushed audio. This would go at the very end of the effects chain and, unlike our previous setting, would need to be adjusted so that you can hear the dry signal, as well as the wet.

Of course, you can tryout multiple instances of all of these plugins to achieve your own unique style and effect.

Always keep in mind though, that this process will be more successful on slow moving parts, or with intermittent and occasional percussive notes.

One of the benefits of the streaming age is the unlimited access to more music than we could hope to listen to in our lifetimes. Here at MR HQ, we consume music at industrial levels, but it never ceases to amaze us which songs our peers cite as their proverbial desert island disc.

One of our brethren is a recording engineer. He’s worked with some huge names, from Depeche Mode to David Bowie, but once admitted to us that there was one particular song that had managed to capture his ear like no other, but if he was ever asked about it in public, he would flatly deny his admiration and liking for Britney Spears' effervescent Toxic.

Pop snobbery aside, there is an incredible amount about Toxic to respect. Released in 2003, the track's tightness in production terms - with heavily truncated and gated sounds - meant it hit the ears of millions with just the right amount of punch. It's also full of fascinating production flourishes, namely that swooping string sample…

Back in the beginning, Toxic wasn't intended to be a Britney song at all. It was originally written by Christian Karlsoon, and Pontus Winnberg (aka Bloodshy & Avant) alongside Henrik Jonback, and the master of commercial pop success herself, Cathy Dennis. Dennis penned the lyric about her recent breakup with former boyfriend Noel Fitzpatrick (aka, The Supervet, trivia fans).

Writing the lyric was difficult for Dennis; "That was sheer torture," she said in an interview with Songwriting Magazine "I beat myself up for seven days, not sleeping. The melody came first, then I had this puzzle of trying to fit words to the right number of syllables. It was really weird. I kept writing and then re-editing myself again, and again, and again."

“Some of my stuff I just couldn’t get, and Toxic is a great example,” Dennis told The Gentlewoman. “It’s not that I didn’t like it, I just thought it was too odd, too complicated. I felt like I had been so in my head that I couldn’t judge.”

Initially, the song was written with Janet Jackson in mind, but she passed, so they moved on to the next artist, Kylie Minogue. Kylie too, wasn't impressed…

Britney Spears was thrilled by the song however. According to sources, Spears was incredibly excited about the opportunity to record the song, insisting that the record company release Toxic as a single, even through there was reluctance and push-back to do so.

“I really like Toxic,” Britney told MTV. “It’s an upbeat song. It’s really different, that’s why I like it so much.”

Her instincts were on point, and Spears must have felt somewhat smug when Toxic became a chart-topper across the globe.

There's several reasons why Toxic has become such an important song for Britney, and continues to resonate over twenty years since its writing. Let's explore why…

One of the most endearing production traits of the song is the sense of space. The drums are gated and heavily compressed, without any sense of reverberation beyond a very short decay.

The guitar and bass tend to sit alongside the drums, adding punctuating rhythms which nicely frame the vocal.

However, one element that inadvertently became a key hook of the song, is the use of the string sample which we tend to hear at the end of each 8-bar section.

It nestles among an additional live string orchestration (recorded as a separate entity) which crescendos and adds a pad-like element to the verses.

The high glissando-based string sample was taken from the song Tere Mere Beech Mein, which was part of the soundtrack for the Bollywood film Ek Duuje Ke Liye. The production team also played around with the sample, stretching it out, and even reversing it on one occasion.

As a song, Toxic conforms to a fairly regular song construct. After a brief introduction, the first verse is driven by an 8-bar section, which is repeated.

Fixed in the key of C minor, Toxic plays around with the tonality of the relative major, and the major dominant.

After four bars which are fixed in C minor, we shift to Eb major and G major, both for a bar each, before returning back to C minor, for two bars, replete with the associated string sample at the end of the sequence.

Having repeated this section, it then repeats a further time, but this time with a different vocal line, acting as a pre-chorus bridge.

The vocal line here plays around with the chord structure even further, by using 6ths and 7ths in the melody, which are the element that adds that slight sense of James Bond-esque mystery to the harmony - it's a similar device to the James Bond theme in fact, where we hear the addition of a min/maj 6th leading line to a minor chord. It’s a classic John Barry trick!

After a short interlude, where we hear a synth bass with a heavy high-pass filter applied (or equivalent EQ), we head into the chorus.

This section gathers pace by increasing the speed of movement to a chord per bar, alongside a greater use of 7ths.

This begins with a straight chord of Cm, followed by a descending sequence of Eb7, D7 and Db7, all for a bar each.

This chromatic and descending movement also provides a further sense of spy-like mystery to the harmony. We then move back to Cm, and Eb, before things alter slightly, with a chord of Ab and a final chord of what sounds like G7 with an added #9.

This is an interesting moment, because while the guitar plays G7#9 for the whole bar, the bass shifts from G up to a Db, for 2-beats each.

This creates a further sense of angst and hiatus, as Db does not fit into this chord, but acts as a tritone pivot, before heading back to the home chord of Cm.

This section then repeats, but this time with a nice change to the chorus construct.

Now we hear new melodic content which is provided by a lead guitar which is also heavily garnished with tremolo, framing an additional vocal part from Britney.

Once we have heard a complete cycle of two verses and two chorus, we shift to a breakdown section, which serves as a form of bridge.

It is heavily reliant upon high-pass filtering with added distortion, and a bass part which leans heavily on the previously-heard chorus harmony.

This underpins the wailing and reverberated vocal which flies over the top, before we head back to the chorus for the outro of the song.

Backed by accompanying iconic video, wherein Britney was famously dressed as a stylised air hostess, Toxic became a worldwide smash, climbing to number one in the UK, with similar successes elsewhere. Toxic was, quite literally, inescapable.

Toxic has of course become one of Spears’ most recognisable songs, nominated for a myriad of different awards and securing Best Dance Recording at the Grammys, and winning the ASCAP and Ivor Novello awards for the most performed song of 2004. Not bad for a song that Janet Jackson and Kylie first assumed was a bit of a stinker…

"I listened to a snippet of it in the record-company offices and decided against it. I knew that Britney was keen for it,” Kylie later admitted to The Sun. “That's cool. I wasn't at all angry when it worked for her. It's like the fish that got away. You just have to accept it."

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.

As many songwriters and composers will tell you, happiness is often not the best state to be in when creativity is needed. Broadly speaking, that little bit of friction and tension in the real world can serve as the perfect raw fuel for a masterpiece or two.

Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody would beg to differ however, having rustled up the band’s biggest hit - Chasing Cars - in a particularly blissful state, having just begun a new relationship.

"Chasing Cars I wrote when I was happy," Gary told Smooth Radio. "That's what came out. It's one of the few songs we've written that is a genuine love song - about being in love, while in love."

The song was birthed during a wine-fuelled writing session back in 2005 when the Northern Irish indie outfit were preparing to make fourth record Eyes Open.

It was one of a batch of songs that Lightbody concoted whilst in the salubrious setting of a converted garden shed, masquerading as a studio. Gary was in the live room, while regular contributor and producer Jacknife Lee was sat at the desk in his control room.

“I was staying with Jacknife at his house in Kent, which had a little studio he called The Garage,’ Gary told PRS For Music. “He was at the desk recording as I just wrote a bunch of stuff - a stream of consciousness. I wrote 10 songs that day, and we were three or four bottles of wine deep by the end of it! But five of those songs ended up on the album, one of which was Chasing Cars.

The song title itself was inspired by Lightbody’s father, who would chastise the young Gary for being utterly besotted by a girl in his youth. According to one source, he would say to Gary - “You're like a dog chasing a car. You'll never catch it and you just wouldn't know what to do with it if you did." It's a phrase that stuck with him.

Lightbody wrote a tender lyric for the song, which basked in the radiance of his new love. Shutting out the surrounding noise of the world, Gary evoked the transcendental contentment of simply laying side by side with the object of his affection.

Its soon-to-be iconic chorus stressed the euphoria felt when sharing a moment of quiet intimacy with the person your want to spend your life with.

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

“It's the purest love song that I've ever written,” Gary told Rolling Stone, “There's no knife-in-the-back twist. When I read these lyrics back, I was like, 'Oh, that's weird.' All the other love songs I've written have a dark edge."

Its emotive lyric in place, it was the towering, rising arrangement constructed by the entire band - Tom Simpson, Paul Wilson, Jonny Quinn and Nathan Connolly - that ensured that Chasing Cars cut through. And boy, did it cut through…

The fact that the song was written so swiftly is perhaps key to its simple-but-effective structure. So let’s break down just why it works so well…

The entirety of Chasing Cars is based around an 8-bar chord progression, and just three chords. This construct could conceivably be quite repetitive and boring, but it’s reliant upon two strong elements which form the supporting cast.

Firstly, there’s the aforementioned strength of the vocal performance and melodic line, which switches construct as it moves between the verse and chorus sections.

Secondly, the arrangement ebbs and flows, moving from very minimal, to an elevated dynamic to heighten the chorus elements.

If we consider the opening section, we hear the distinctive picked guitar motif. The song is rooted in A major, but the initial open chord, with the picked notes of A and E, remains a constant in terms of texture.

The chord sequence itself consists of A (open/major), C# minor, D major(9) and back to A, with each chord being played for a full 2-bars.

The exact nature of each chord slightly alters, depending on its location within the song, and this is down to a number of differing factors.

To begin with, the sparseness of the picked A and E is shored up by a guitar playing open chords underneath, in a relatively subdued and muted style.

The second chord C#m, is not fully revealed in the first verse, although the picked A and E does switch to a G# and E here to embrace the harmony, and could imply a chord of E major instead.

It's only as the song progresses that the solidifying nature of the harmony becomes more apparent, although as we reach the chorus sections, the emphasis on an increased dynamic through the use of distortion plays a trick on the ear. It adds harmonic overtones to fill in the notational gaps in a chord. It's a very clever and common trick, and one that works very successfully here.

We do particularly like the 3rd D major chord in the sequence, which thanks to the presence of the picked A and E, turns the chord into D major9. This is bolstered later in the song, with the addition of a fuller orchestration, laying the sweetness of a major9 chord in the perfect location, before resolving back to the tonic chord of A. It's a choice that emphasises the size of the underlying emotion.

The ‘chugging' effect which presents itself throughout the track, is generated by the continual emphasis on 8th notes. This becomes far more apparent once we reach the second chorus, although the full arrangement salvo isn't released until we get to the third chorus, when finally the bass and drums embrace the 8th-note chugging in a form of band unison.

There are some nice production tricks to maintain the dynamic energy and ‘blooming’ nature of the song. There are synthetic sustains in both the bass and pad form, which help to maintain the gradual build, with each chorus giving us just a little bit more of a dynamic rise, before pulling back toward the end of the song. Nicely symmetrical!

Chasing Cars was clearly a winner, but post-release as a single on June 6th 2006, the song - like its arrangement - built and built, eventually becoming an evergreen radio staple.

Despite the fact that it never reached the top of the UK charts, it remained within the chart for more than three years.

And live, the song went off…

“It felt like it didn’t matter what room we were playing in, what size, what festival — the whole place would be singing,” Gary told PRS.

In the US, its placement in the season finale of uber-popular medical drama Grey’s Anatomy took the song - and Snow Patrol - to a whole new level.

According to Lightbody, Chasing Cars started out well outside the top 100 on the US iTunes chart. (In 2006, standing within this newfangled iTunes chart was deemed to be one of the best benchmarks of popularity in the nascent iPod era.) The day after the DVD release of the show's second season later that year, it was at No.1.

The single release peaked at number #5 on the US Billboard Top 100 - the band’s biggest success to date and one of the top selling rock songs of the 'digital' era.

Aptly, for a song that had achieved such mass exposure, Chasing Cars was chosen to be the very last song to be performed on the legendary BBC music staple, Top of the Pops. Gary considered the song one for the people;

“It’s a song that has perhaps got into the musical consciousness, which is something we're very proud of. It's rare that any band has a song that goes that deep into the world,” Gary told PRS

The most notable recent accolade came in 2019, when it was crowned the most-played song on UK radio by music licensing body PPL. "It's unbelievable," Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody told the BBC. "I'm not sure how that happened.

"It's an emotionally open song and it's a simple song. But it's also unabashedly a love song, and we don't really have any others” said an overwhelmed Gary. “The way it unifies an audience is the thing I most cherish about it. It's a beautiful moment every time you play it."

We’ve all been there. Sometimes the music just flows… More often you spend days chasing a four bar loop round and round… Waiting for inspiration to strike… And it never does.

We’re here to help.

You’re suffering from writer’s block – an affliction that prevents your mind from escaping preset paths and keeps your creativity locked down until you can finally shake it off. And the good news is that freeing your mind from writer’s block and releasing that creativity could just be a simple matter of getting a fresh perspective and undertaking one or two creative exercises.

1. Get a fresh perspective

Often, subtle shifts in your mental state can get you past a block and, better still, potentially open up pathways of creativity hitherto unexplored.

Writer’s block often stems from an expectation that something should be possible (or even easy) and a frustration grows when that’s proving harder (or even impossible) for reasons beyond your control.

Thus, your first mental shift should be to remove any sense of expectation. That is to say, just because you’ve made tracks before, why should it be the case that it will be easier or just as straightforward this time? After all, circumstances change.

Just because you’ve switched on your same computer and loaded the same DAW doesn’t mean that today will yield the same musical result as yesterday, so removing that expectation can remove a lot of unnecessary pressure.

2. Change your pattern

Repetition is the enemy of creativity, so it should come as no surprise that, at some point, your brain will rebel if you fire up the same sounds, work at the same tempo, program the same beat patterns or reach for the same chords. Changing things up can be as simple as changing the order of the musical parts you bring to your tracks. Do you always start by programming beats? Then don’t - make that the last thing you do.

Do you usually plonk down some chords and a guide melody before getting to work on sound design and production? Turn off your keyboard and draw notes into your DAW instead, so that you’re forced to think about every note you add to a chord - if you’re going to the trouble of adding notes manually, it may well prove to be the case that you’ll pick different chords or voicings to the ones your muscle memory selects when you’re playing to a click track.

3. Get a production partner

Collaboration is another way to eliminate writer’s block. Having someone else’s idea to kick-start the creative process takes the pressure off having to come up with all of the ideas for a track on your own.

Similarly, asking others for feedback on your work in progress will throw up some ideas you won’t have had on your own. Even if you don’t agree with the advice you’re given, you’ll be forced to think about your tracks in a different way, which can get you over a hump.

Better still, there may be a good reason why you disagree with any constructive criticism, which will make you defend your work. The more you talk and try ideas the more forward momentum you're injecting.

There’s nothing better than this for finding your self-confidence and realising that, just maybe, you’re not as bad at this music stuff as you’d been allowing yourself to believe.

4. Outside contact detox

Try to have a music production day without any other distractions. Set aside a day on the calendar, be prepared to set an alarm and have an early start and – just like a professional musician who’s attending a paid-for session at a studio – have a day of exclusively making music.

Leave your phone off. Turn off the WiFi and unplug that ethernet. Go 100% internet free for a day and exclusively use your computer to make music with none of your usual distractions.

Have fun with your studio. Perhaps start with something simple like tweaking a synth sound. Or creating some kick drums. Ditch that one-man-band, jack-of-all-trades, writer/engineer/producer role and knuckle down to one simple job at a time.

With nothing else on your mind you’ll soon be inspired to add notes and beats and begin building something fresh from scratch. Most of us find we work quicker and more efficiently if working towards a daily deadline. With your studio day drawing to a close you’re forcing yourself to deliver the goods before you have to finish.

5. Give it a rest

If you reach an impasse with a project and can’t get it over the finish line, don’t simply delete your work. Make sure to save your in-progress projects – and label them clearly – so you can return to them later.

It’s amazing how returning to something a few days, weeks or even months later can allow you to see it from a fresh angle. Often, within a few seconds of hearing a ‘familiar’ old, unfinished loop, your brain will imagine that hidden ingredient to take it to the next level.

6. Remix yourself

Starting from an existing finished project and rearranging it is often a lot easier than creating something new. Try starting with a track you’ve previously finished and using it as a basis for your next track.

The rule you need to set here is that your new track must be completely different from your starting project, thereby forcing you to up-end your previous sounds and track elements.

Try changing tempo. Swapping out synth sounds for acoustic sounds. Deliberately go in unfamiliar directions by imagining you’re on a remix project with a brief to completely change the track.

7. Give yourself a goal

Staring at a blank DAW screen will get you nowhere. Instead have a ‘mission’ to accomplish and stay focused on delivering that.

For example, you could decide that this afternoon is all about ‘130bpm percussive techno tool’. Or your mission could be to create a ‘beatless synth jam’. Or set aside a day to make some ‘peak time DnB’.

Stick to this original aim, and file any ideas that arise along the way to one side for a later date.

8. Start arranging early

Instead of endlessly listening to that loop, start turning it into a track early.

As soon as you have a few fundamental building blocks – for example, a chord progression and basic beat – duplicate these across your timeline to create the foundations of a full track. Delete elements as necessary to designate an intro, outro and breakdowns. Break your arrangement up into 8-bar sections and colour code or label these for easy delineation.

Now change the energy of your track in some way each time you reach a new section. As a rule of thumb, there are three ways to do this: add an element, remove an element or change an existing sound – for example, changing the instrument used to play your lead melody, or moving part of your bassline up or down an octave.

Knowing when to add and when to take something away is a matter of personal preference but by letting your arrangement force you into making changes you’re always inching towards a finished track.

A couple of quick tools to help your arrangement along include creating a set of Auxiliary effects (on sends from your tracks) that you can quickly lean on for spot effects or enhancing the sound of a track. Have a template with your favourite reverb, delay, and chorus ready to go and then simply add (or automate) them to your tracks as you go.

The sooner you have something sounding ‘great’ the more likely you are to stick with it and finish the job.

9. Find your hook

One important step when it comes to developing a track lies in establishing what element provides the focal point, aka the hook, of your track.

This should be the most distinctive element of your composition. In a pop or rock song this would usually be the lead vocal, but when it comes to electronic or instrument music, the hook could be a lead synth riff or a bassline or rhythmic pattern.

Whatever genre you’re working in you should be able to identify a specific focal point for your track which will inform a lot of your decisions when it comes to arranging. For instance, your hook will likely be something you want to build up to, meaning you may choose to remove it from your track’s intro and breakdowns.

It will also provide the basis from which to create elements like counter melodies. For example, if you have a descending synth riff as your lead hook, try creating a counter melody that ascends through the same scale, with a rhythm that works around, rather than on top of, your lead line.

Introducing this in the background after two or four repetitions of your lead will help add depth and keep your lead hook fresh.

10. Use transitions and automation

The key to keeping your track ‘happening’ lies in creating dynamic movement both within and between sections.

The easiest way to do this is by using transition FX. These are things like white noise sweeps, pitched risers, crashes or reversed cymbals – elements that can be placed at the start or end of a loop in order to create a pull-in or release to signify the change in your track.

Even if you’re just using placeholder FX that you plan to replace when it comes to applying finishing touches, having some sort of transition in place will go a long way towards giving your arrangement the correct ‘feel’, and could help inspire what elements need to be added or removed for the next section.

An equally essential technique for introducing movement to an arrangement is through automation of sound parameters and effects. The most obvious example of this is by automating the cutoff point of a low-pass filter to make a lead, bassline or chord progression brighter as a track builds.

And finally… One more…

11. Commit early

Bounce plugins or external instruments down as audio as soon as you’re happy, to remove temptation and avoid endless tinkering and reworking.

If you need to make changes later you can get creative with effects or editing.

The modern DAW has given us unlimited power and potential, often to the detriment of creativity and getting the job done. Don’t let the possibilities of your DAW get your track stuck in a rut!

There's a lot you need to learn if you want to make it as a remixer, but these half dozen bite-sized tips are a great place to start.

Remixing is all about extracting the parts and elements from a track and then rearranging them – and adding new parts of your own – to form a new mix.

Let's get started.

1. Beyond pitch and time

Timestretching, pitchshifting and contorting audio and MIDI tracks to fit with chords are essential skills for remixing and bootlegging. Take the time to learn how your DAW handles these tasks and investigate the many plugins out there designed to make everyday remix chores even easier.

2. Layer by layer

If a track’s made up of layers, with one new element added every few bars, there’s a chance you’ll be able to duplicate the channel and use phase inversion to isolate elements from each other.

That's to say that you can take a sample of audio from an earlier part of the track then phase invert it alongside the next part of the track. The two 'original' samples will then magically mute each other out, leaving only the audio of the new addition.

This is a great technique for extracting vocals or new synth parts ready for further use or manipulation elsewhere in your remix.

3. Straight down the middle

With a mid/side plugin like Voxengo MSED, you can mute the mid or side signals, helping isolate certain elements of the mix.

The mid information comprises any audio that’s exactly the same in both speakers at any given point (mono), whereas the side signal represents what’s different in both speakers. The point being, as you’ll see, certain mono elements can be extracted from stems or full tracks.

4. Sound conversion

Many DAWs have some form of Audio to MIDI conversion, meaning you can take an audio file and spit out a MIDI representation of it. Naturally, this is great for remixing, helping you quickly layer or replace recorded parts with virtual instruments.

Want to replace one sound with another? This is how you do it: Turn the audio into MIDI, then use that MIDI track to drive your own synth sound or sample.

5. Beats working

Getting a great drum sound is an essential part of making a great remix.

Listen through your work-in-progress mix to find individual hits you can chop out and lift. Load them into a sampler or arrange them on a track and create your own rhythm additional rhythm tracks with all the polished pro-quality sound of the original source.

You can also isolate individual hits from a full beat using phase-inversion, mid/side processing and manual or automatic slicing. Again, look into your DAW’s particular tools in this department, as each has its own ways of doing things.

6. Groove is in the art

Groove templates let you steal the exact feel (ie, the detailed timing and dynamics) of an original piece of audio. By imprinting the exact swing or ‘groove’ of the track you're remixing onto your own audio and MIDI clips, you can make your re-imagining feel a little more authentic.

It's therefore possible to extract the feel and timing of one track and totally superimpose it onto another. Or give your lifeless work-in-progress track a whole new lift by 'borrowing' the timing and feel of someone else's success.

Ryuichi Sakamoto was a man of numerous gifts; a pianist, keyboard player and musician, producer, singer, songwriter, composer and even an actor. Despite considerable success as a solo artist and founder member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Japanese artist made his acting and film scoring debut in 1983, in the feature film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

Directed by Nagisa Ōshima and starring in the film himself alongside David Bowie and Tom Conti, Sakamoto not only played the pivotal role of Captain Yonoi, but bagged a BAFTA award for his original score. Not bad for a first outing in two different feature film camps!

Ryuichi Sakamoto was well known for playing synthesizers as part of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, but the acoustic piano continued to be an integral instrument for his work.

While touring as a solo artist (albeit with a superb group, which included Manu Katche and Pino Palladino) he could often be seen fronting the band from behind a Yamaha grand piano, which he also used to trigger MIDI devices live.

When working in film scoring, the piano often became a central element to his work, and there is no clearer example of this than the extraordinarily haunting theme from Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

Sakamoto was heavily influenced by Asian music, while also citing Claude Debussy as an enormous influence on his work.

“Asian music heavily influenced Debussy, and Debussy heavily influenced me,” Sakamoto was quoted as saying on his official website. “So, the music goes around the world and comes full circle.”

Despite the film also starring the global superstar David Bowie (then at the peak of his commercial fame following the release of Let's Dance), there was never any doubt that it was to be Sakamoto who would write the score.

“We never wanted David Bowie to write the score,” said the film’s producer, Jeremy Thomas (as quoted here). “It would have been a cliché for him to write the score and secondly, he didn’t want to do it. But also Ryuichi Sakamoto was always going to write the score for the film. He’s an enormous rock’n’roll star in Japan. [Director] Nagisa Ōshima told him to write the score as if he was [his character] Captain Yonoi and he did.”

Sakamoto hit upon the divine melody by chance, when searching for a particular ‘timeless’ motif that wouldn’t obviously date.

“I had read the script and knew the story, and I thought about how to come up with a special Christmas song that’d be played in a tropical Asian island,” Sakamoto said in 2018. “That’s a strange concept in itself. And then you add in war. But anyway, I was thinking logically about it for weeks. One afternoon I was sat in front of the piano looking for an appropriate melody. I was unconscious for a while. Then the melody was written. Right in front of my eyes."

There are several versions of the main theme to this film, including versions which make greater use of acoustic instrumentation, but we are going to concentrate on the music theory that underpins the original theme from the soundtrack; a layered tapestry of acoustic piano and early 80s music technology, including a Prophet-5, LinnDrum and Fairlight CMI.

For the moment, we are going to dive in at the point where we hear the main theme for the first time. We’ll come back to the introduction later

In its most basic form, the pianistic inspiration is pretty obvious. The right hand plays the melody, which is set in the key of Bb minor.

Adopting Asian influence, the melody is completely based around the minor pentatonic - starting on the note Eb, it rises up to F, back to Eb and then down to Bb, before settling back on Eb.

If we analyse these first five notes, the role of the note Eb is central, yet it arguably plays against the harmony.

We’ll ignore the synthesizer chords for the moment and concentrate on the harmony which is provided by the left hand on the piano.

The influence of Claude Debussy is obvious here, as French piano composition from this era often found the left hand playing extended chords as arpeggios, a popular device which Sakamoto similarly exploits here.

Coinciding with the start of the main theme, the left hand plays a low Gb, followed by Db and Bb. This first chord provides us with a beautifully-voiced chord of Gb major. The second arpeggiated chord (playing Ab, Gb and C) adopts a similar style and arrangement, for a chord of Ab7, before the final arpeggiated chord (Bb, F and Db) brings us home to Bb minor.

These chords are repeated, but not before the left hand plays two higher pitched triads of Bb minor and F minor, before dropping to Gb to repeat the cycle.

The coupling of the French accompaniment with the pentatonic melody, creates the perfect hybrid. It has minimalist sensibilities, thanks to considerable degrees of repetition.

With our analysis of the harmony, we have purposely left the pad-like and higher pitched synthetic elements out of the equation. These also appear in a similar guise during the fade-in introduction, so let’s revisit this element now.

These upper musical colours offer jazz-like chord extensions, which add a tremendous amount of sweetness to the overall harmonic impact. Arguably, part of this extension format is added by the melody too.

Take the very first chord of the theme - Gb Major - if we take the first note of the melody into account (Eb), it arguably turns this chord into Gb add13.

However, the synth pad element adds all sorts of other notes, as a form of cluster, with one of the most important notes being F, which is the Major 7th of Gb. Hence, this first chord, adopting the synth-cluster, could also be described as Gb major13.

As with all harmony, especially harmony with a heavy influence from jazz, chords can be described in various ways. However, we cannot ignore one of the strongest elements of this theme, which is that in its most reduced and pianistic form, the simplicity adds to the glacial beauty of the piece. The synth and chordal extensions are merely icing on top.

The initial theme adopts another form of jazz construction, being in a form similar to an AABA, 32 bar jazz-form.

Turning to the B section, it takes a slightly darker turn, with a melody which is played in unison, but two octaves apart.

The chordal accompaniment here is more sedentary; Abm7, followed by Gb major 7, Abm7 and F7sus, which resolves to F7, before returning to the main theme in order to repeat the A section.

Calling upon Sakamoto's influences again, this final A section adds a further Asian colour. If you listen closely, you can hear the melody is joined by an additional note, a perfect 4th below.

This is a highly recognisable and archetypal trait of traditional Asian music, and one that serves to enforce the melody and harmony further, as well as adding a notable flavour.

Given that this fantastic theme was to become one of the film’s calling cards, it was decided that Sakamoto should add a vocal to the track, resulting in the single Forbidden Colours in August 1983.

The theme remains identical in form, structure and harmony, but with the addition of a beautifully haunting vocal, provided by friend and co-creative David Sylvian, the former frontman of Japan (who'd only recently broken up).

In an interview with Sakamoto on the film's Blu-Ray release, he stated that originally, he asked his co-star if he wanted to take the lead. “I really wanted to work with David Bowie, so I asked him to sing on this but he didn’t want to. He said that he wanted to focus on this project just as an actor, purely as an actor. I understood, so then I asked another of my friends, David Sylvian, to work on this and he said yes. He did it beautifully.”

Sakamoto had previously worked with Sylvian, both as a solo artist and as part of Japan, occasionally playing with them live.

The connection, through influence, was very obvious but the addition of the vocal to the theme not only added another dimension to the material, but added a valuable marketing tool. The single made the top 10 in the UK and became perhaps the most enduring legacy of the (underrated) film.

Ryuichi Sakamoto continued to work as a solo artist, throughout the 80s and 90s, beyond his time with the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence was the film which launched his scoring career. Film composition became an increasingly important part of his life's work, and he was awarded many gongs, including an Oscar for 1987’s The Last Emperor.

Sakamoto’s sad passing in 2023 left us with an extraordinary legacy of cinematic, emotive and highly original music, amongst which sits themes that have transcended their original purpose. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in particular remains his most evocative gem.

Don't fear the tab. Tab is here to make reading music simple and, while at first glance it may SEEM just as confusing and fiddly as conventional music scoring, it's actually a WAY simpler way to explain which notes to play (and where to put your fingers).

Plus there's a whole bunch of picking and bending instruction - essential for modern playing - that old-fashioned music notation simply doesn't provide.

Tab is short for tablature, and it basically shows where notes should be played on your guitar's fretboard. i.e. Rather than being a list of notes you need to play (and letting you figure out the realities of how to do that) it's literally a map of where to put your fingers.

Tab often appears underneath conventional music notation as six horizontal lines that represent the strings of the guitar, from the sixth (thick) string at the bottom to the first (thin) string at the top.

It's like this so that if you sit with your guitar in your lap and look down at it, the tab on the page (or on the screen) will match the strings on your guitar neck.

Thick low E closest to you (at the bottom of the tap)… Top E furthest away (at the top of the tab). Simple.

On these lines, numbers represent the frets where you should place your fingers. As per our example above, a D note on the 2nd string, 3rd fret will be shown as a number ‘3’ on the second line down on the tab.

Unfretted strings (or 'open' with no fingers on the fretboard) are shown with a ‘0’. i.e. No fret needed - just play the string.

The key and time signatures are shown in the traditional notation. A helpful timestamp may also tell you where in the actual audio track this bit of music appears. And a tempo marking is expressed in beats per minute.

Fret boxes: chords, scales and capo notation

Hand labelling

Of course, with tab telling you where to put each finger on the fretboard, you're going to have to know which finger it's talking about…

Here are the tab abbreviations. On your fretting hand that's 1, 2, 3, 4 and T for thumb

And on your picking hand that's p (thumb), i (index), m (middle), a (annular), c (little finger)

Chords mapped on the fretboard

This is a fretbox.

The fretbox diagram represents the guitar’s fretboard exactly, as seen in the photo. Now, by placing numbered 'fingers' on the fretbox it can be used to quickly show you where to put your fingers in order to play chords or a scale.

Playing a chord

This diagram shows you how to play a G chord. The ‘o’s are open strings, and a circled number is where to place your fretting hand finger. A black ‘o’ or circled number denotes the root note of the chord (here, G).

Simply place the right fingers where it says… And strum… Done!

Using a capo

If you see a blue line on the diagram that represents where to place a capo.

In our example above, for this A chord, the capo is placed at the 2nd fret. Note that capos – by effectively shortening the neck of the guitar – change the fret number ordering.

A capo on the 2nd fret moves everything two frets up. So here, the original 5th fret now becomes the 3rd fret. The 7th fret now 5th fret, and so on.

Basically the capo can be considered as being the 'nut' at the end of the neck and so all counting starts from there.

Capo notation

Here, the chord looks like a C in the tab, but the capo on the 2nd fret raises the pitch to make it a D. The 2nd fret capo’d notes are shown with a ‘0’ in the tab as if they were open strings.

Tab showing a scale

Here the fretbox diagram illustrates the fret hand fingering for the A major scale.

It's using black dots for root notes and red dots for other scale tones. Meanwhile the photo shows part of the scale being played on the fourth string with the first, third and fourth fingers.

Guitar techniques: Picking

Down and up-picking

Tab does its absolute best to tell you as much information as possible – even down to how to pick notes.

Here symbols under the tab tell you the first note is to be down-picked and the second note is to be up-picked.

(Remember that '7' in our example is the fret number you need to hold down rather than being a seventh finger…)

Tremolo picking

There's even symbols for tremolo playing. Here each of the four notes are to be alternate-picked (down- and up-picked) very rapidly and continuously.

Palm muting

And here's the symbol for palm-musting notes. A palm-mute is acheived by resting the edge of your picking hand palm on the strings near the bridge saddles which stops them ringing so brightly and gives that distinctive 'muted' sound.

Pick rake

Here you've got to drag the pick across the strings shown with a single sweep. This is often used to augment a rake’s last note.

Arpeggiated chord

And here you have to play the notes of the chord by strumming across the relevant strings in the direction of the arrow head.

Fretting Hand

Hammer-on & pull-off

Let's get into some more techniques that tab can features.

For the hammer-on and pull-off here you must pick the first note then hammer down on the string for the second note. Pick the third note and pull-off for the fourth note.

Note trills

And for a trill, after picking the first note, rapidly alternate between the two notes shown in brackets using hammer-ons and pull-offs.

Slides (glissando)

A glissando (or slide) looks like this.

Pick the first note and then slide to the next. For the last two notes pick the first, slide to the next and then re-pick it (that's the 'RP' symbol).

Fret-hand tapping

Sound the notes marked with a square by hammering-on/tapping with your fret-hand fingers, instead of picking.

Fret-hand muting

Here, the X markings represent notes and strings that are muted by your fret hand when struck by your picking hand.

Bending and vibrato

Bend and release

Fret the first note (here, the 5th fret) and bend up to the pitch of the bracketed note, before releasing again.

Re-picked bend

Bend up to the pitch shown in the brackets, then re-pick the note while holding the bent note at the pitch shown.

Pre-bend

Silently bend the string up from the 5th fret (PB5) to the pitch of the 7th fret note, pick it and release to the 5th fret note.

Quarter-tone bend

Tab really has got everything… Here you have to pick the note then bend up a quarter-tone (a very small amount). This is sometimes referred to as a ‘blues curl’.

Vibrato

Vibrato is an essential playing technique and tab has got you covered.

Here it's telling you that your fretting hand should vibrate the string by small bend-ups and releases. You can then exaggerate this effect to create a ‘wide’ vibrato.

Harmonics

Natural harmonics

Pick the note while lightly touching the string directly over the fret indicated. Get your technique just right and you'll get a lovely chiming harmonic.

Artificial harmonics

Fret the note as shown, then lightly place your index finger directly over ‘x’ fret (AH ‘x’) and pick (with a pick, p or a).

Pinched harmonics

After fretting the note in the triangle, dig into the string with the side of your thumb as you sound it with the pick.

Tapped harmonics

Place your finger on the note as shown, but sound it with a quick pick hand tap at the fret shown (TH17) for a harmonic.

Touched harmonics

A previously sounded note is touched above the fret marked TCH (eg, TCH 9) for it to sound a harmonic.

Vibrato bar/whammy bar

Whammy bar bends

Here, the note is picked as shown, then the vibrato bar is raised and lowered to the pitches shown in brackets.

Scoop and doop

And you can even scoop and doop…

Scoop: depress the bar just before striking the note and release. Doop: lower the bar slightly after picking note.

Sustained note and divebomb

A note is sustained then the vibrato bar is depressed to slack. The square bracket indicates a further articulation.

Gargle

Sound the note and ‘flick’ the vibrato bar with your picking hand so it ‘quivers’. This results in a ‘gargling’ sound!

Whammy bar vibrato

Gently rock the whammy bar to repeatedly bend the pitch up and down. This sounds similar to fret hand vibrato.

Others

Pick scrape

The edge of the pick is dragged either down or up along the lower strings to produce a scraped sound.

Violining

Turn the volume control down, and play the note(s) with the volume off. This removes the initial 'pluck' from the sound. Then turn the volume up for a smooth 'pluck-less' fade in.

Finger numbering

The numbers in the traditional notation refer to the fingers required to play each note.

pima directions

Any kind of fingerpicking requirements are shown at the bottom of the tab notation.

Pick-hand tapping

Tap (hammer-on) with a finger of your picking hand onto the fret marked with a circle. Usually with ‘i’ or ‘m’.

And that's it!

Don't stress over some of those more advanced techniques. We've included them here for completeness and – chances are – you'll come across some of them only very rarely.

Spend time nailing the basics and practicing the tab on songs you're familair with.

Then, as your confidence grows you can tackle more complex tab and always come back to this guide to remind yourself of what some of those little squiggles really mean.

Want to learn more. With tab under your belt why not try learning a few open-position guitar chords?

It’s one of his biggest songs – and now considered a classic of the retrospectively created yacht rock genre – but Christopher Cross says that his 1980 hit, Ride Like The Wind, actually owes a big debt to Paul McCartney.

Speaking on the Questlove Show, Cross has now revealed the true origins of Ride Like The Wind, his debut single, for what he thinks is the first time – specifically, the famous instrumental turnaround that occurs frequently throughout. He says that this came to him while he was onstage performing a fan-favourite McCartney composition that was released in 1974.

“So we used to play at a club, you know, covers and stuff like that,” says Cross. “We were doing 1985 [Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five], the Wings tune. And we played four or five hours a night so we’d extend tunes – it was a dancefloor – so we're playing 1985, it's in C minor, and we’re getting into a jam, and people are dancing, and I started doing that [sings turnaround from Ride Like The Wind]. And people, I noticed that they were really getting into it, you know, and it was another level of energy.”

Sensing that he was onto something, Cross says that he decided to expand the turnaround – which he saw that people were responding to – into a full song.

“So I took that part, and I went, ‘you know, there's something about this that's got the thing,’ so then I wrote the tune around that,” he confirms. “I had that part first, and then I wrote the verses. And I don't think I've ever told Paul that. He's probably gonna say ‘I should have gotten royalties.’”

Cross is clearly joking when he says this – or half-joking, at least – and we can’t honestly say that the two songs are similar enough to warrant McCartney calling his lawyers any time soon. They are both in C minor, though, and once you know the backstory, there is something about Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five’s rhythm that strikes you as similar.

What’s more, Cross is adamant: “The seed of the song came from 1985, McCartney,” he reiterates. “Yes, I ripped him off.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Cross also discusses the guitar solo in Ride Like The Wind, and his decision to play it himself rather than offer it to one of the many great players that he had in his orbit (Steve Lukather, Larry Carlton, Eric Johnson and Jay Graydon, for example).

Despite being buried in the mix somewhat, the solo is highly regarded, but Cross says that he’s not sure how it ended up being him that took it. “Maybe Omartian [Michael Omartian, producer] said ‘Hey, you should play a solo on something,’” is his best guess.

Cross goes on to suggest that, given the company he was keeping, he was always slightly reluctant to put himself forward for a solo spot, this is also the recollection of Omartian himself.

Speaking to Mixonline in 2015, he said: “He always wanted someone else to play a solo, and I’d say ‘no’. I’d say, ‘Dude, play the solo,’ and he’d just burn it up. After we were done with the record, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen both wanted him to play guitar on one of their records, and he was so intimidated, afraid to do it, and he never did.”

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

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.”

Olivia Dean's rise has felt nothing short of meteoric. The release of her debut album Messy in 2023 was that rarest of things in the current era - an album (remember those?) that became instantly iconic amongst young people.

But Dean's talent-timeline started much earlier than 2023, as she began writing songs at the age of 16 while also busking on the Southbank in London and attending the prestigious BRIT School.

Attention soon followed from the likes of BBC Introducing and Amazon, for whom she won their Breakthrough Artist Award of April 2021. But between those milestones, the road to recognition was long; “I think it’s easy for people to think that things happen overnight, but nothing does. It’s just a lie. It takes time and life experience to make something that will last a long time,” she told Dork.

Signing to EMI, Olivia released a genre-hopping first album; the aforementioned (and quite brilliant) Messy. With it came a staggering amount of publicity, most of it praising the fact that a pop artist was working on a wider stylistic canvas than was typical.

“When I titled my album Messy, I wanted precisely to explore different musical genres,” Dean told Numero in 2023. “I think what I really fear is the day I will stop having fun. When I will no longer feel anything while I sing. Sometimes artists lose themselves a little, and their passion for songwriting fades away. It’s a kind of breakup. Before I signed with a label, I was simply writing songs at home for my own pleasure, without ever imagining that people might actually listen to them.”

Released on March 28th 2023, The track Dive was the third single from Messy, and soon became a contemporary neo-soul classic.

Penned by Dean herself alongside songwriters Bastian Langebæk and Max Wolfgang (who also co-wrote additional single, The Hardest Part), Dive was an obvious love letter to her formative influences, with a modern, buoyant energy that became infectious.

“This song is just one of those honest songs,” Dean said of the song’s lyrical theme in an interview with Genius. “It's really pure and from the heart. I think people like to fall in love even though they say they don't. I was listening to Diana Ross. I was listening to the Supremes. I'm very like a Motown-head. I went through a phase of writing a lot of quite sad breakup music and I was like, 'I want to write something light'. I was falling in love which is, you know, crazy. But a nice feeling and it's just really changed my mindset. I think I'm happier because of it."

It’s obvious that Dean’s personality and lyrical frankness are big components of why Dive became such a success, and the reason her devotees adore her so much more generally. “A barometer is if I wouldn’t say it out loud, then I probably wouldn’t use it as a lyric,” she told Dork. “I like to base everything in reality. I’m not a great abstract person.”

But beyond the giddy euphoria of the song’s love-infused lyrical theme, just why does Dive work so well?

Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on in its arrangement.

The first overarching element, is that it has an innate sense of familiarity; it feels like we’ve heard it somewhere before.

Feeling sunny and optimistic, Dive is very much a sum of parts. By Dean’s own admission, she took influence from artists such as Carole King, Diana Ross and of course the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. High benchmarks, but there is an extra element that resonates through Dean's vocal delivery. Herself.

The instrumentation reflects music from the classic era of soul. The rhythm section has been treated with a degree of lo-fi processing and EQ that provides a fittingly retro flavour, in much the same vein that Mark Ronson engineered with Amy Winehouse on the sublime Back to Black.

The drums are imbued with a vinyl crackle that also nods toward the DIY, sampling scene. Meanwhile, the song’s kinetic bass pins down the song’s movement, and adopts a pseudo-muted tone, straight out of the 60s.

Of course there is a horn section providing the odd stab and harmonic accompaniment; a sensibility normally reserved for big band or string section writing. With a further nod to Motown, an upright piano punctuates eighth-note chords, reflecting the halcyon age of Motown.

The instrumentation only forms part of the picture, as the uplifting harmony adopts an extraordinary sense of familiarity too.

Dive does rely fairly heavily on chord IV moving to chord I, and it does so using extension harmony - a trick that is common in jazz and soul.

The home key of the song is G Major, but Dive opens with the prolonged use of the extended chord Cm6. The horns sustain the chord, with a swell into the first bar of the verse, accompanied by a sampled repetition from the drums.

The chords used in the first four bars of the verse adopt a degree of ambiguity, as the piano is quite far back in the mix, performing in a relatively improvised way. There is certainly an implication of C Major9, followed by G Major9, which is then repeated, as each chord plays for a bar each.

The next few bars break up the movement, by employing Bm7 and Em7, both for two beats at a time, before landing on Am7(9) for a full bar.

Once again, there is familiarity to this pattern, which repeats three times before we hear the return of the opening chord Cm6, leading to the final bar of the sequence, on C/D.

One musicological characteristic employed throughout Dive, is the sense of movement from major chords to minor chords, and back again.

Anyone familiar with the classic Cole Porter standard Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye, will know the lyric; “From major to minor’, in which Porter references the song’s harmony very literally. There is similar harmonic movement in here, and given Dean’s fondness for the classics, we would put some fairly serious money on the fact that she was influenced by Ella Fitzgerald's amazing interpretation and delivery of this song. If you don't know it, you should definitely give it a listen. In a time long before autotune, Fitzgerald's performance will stop you in your tracks!

As we hit the chorus section of Dive, we are treated to some beautifully simplistic vocal harmonies, adopting a basic triadic formation, with a chord sequence which repeats from the previous section, albeit with an abridged ending.

As we get further into Dive, we hear an incredibly unique and subtle bridge section, in which the instrumentation breaks down, before building back up again.

Quiet and subtle repeating notes occupy the horns, while the same rhythm is doubled in the backing vocals, albeit at a higher pitch.

In actual fact, the bridge is heavily dependent upon a device which has been around for hundreds of years, and was a key device used in the work of composers such as Bach. A dominant pedal, as it is known, is where the dominant note (in this case the note D) is held or repeated continually, over a series of bars.

The idea behind this popular compositional device is that it creates tension, which is exactly what we hear in Dive’s bridge. Of course, what goes on above the pedal adds to the build, and in this case, we hear a repeating of the chord C/D (or even C Major7/D) for a bar, and a chord of Bm7/D.

In other words, the note D remains the constant in the bass, while the harmony moves around above it. Throughout this section, the instrumentation builds, leading us back to the final chorus.

The beautifully lilting nature of this song’s central vocal melody - supplied by Olivia’s characterful voice, coupled with its joyously familiar instrumentation and harmony, helped Dive to bed itself in the minds of millions. It quickly became a radio and playlist staple, and with good reason.

It paved the way for her 2025 follow-up, The Art of Loving, and its similarly ebullient hit, Man I Need.

If neo-soul is part of the future of pop, we are all in!

The brainchild of Blur frontman Damon Albarn and artist/illustrator Jamie Hewlett, the fictitious band Gorillaz were quite a unique concept when first introduced to the world via 2001’s Clint Eastwood. Today, in a world dominated by virtual artists and AI-generated tracks, the overtly non-existent conceit of the group now feels highly prophetic.

What clearly wasn’t virtual was the band’s music, which was painstakingly created with a variety of real human creative contributors, spawning a wide array of brilliance across the band’s impressive and diverse discography.

The pseudo-anonymity of Gorillaz has allowed Albarn to explore music avenues previously denied to him, blurring himself and his collaborators amid the project's animated protagonists, 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Russel Hobbs and Noodle.

It was 2005's second album Demon Days that really pushed Gorillaz outside of the realm of quirky Albarn side-project and into being a household name.

When the incredibly infectious first single from the album, Feel Good Inc, dropped, it was obvious that the band’s production and arranging game had been significantly stepped up, thanks in part to the contributions of artist and producer Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse.

Albarn had heard Danger Mouse's iconic Grey Album and was entranced. As we noted in our lengthy song story last year, the pair hit it off during a phone conversation which led to an invitation to hook-up and try out a few tracks.

Working at Gorillaz’ Kong Studios and 13 in Essex and London respectively, the free-flowing sessions led to the ebullient tone of Feel Good Inc. “I didn’t think that many people were going to get it. Given the way radio formats are set up in the States, I didn’t see any one song that could really fit in anywhere, and that always hurts a major label release,” Danger Mouse stated.

But Feel Good Inc. would end up clearly being a song that worked extremely well, hitting the top 10 in 16 countries (it reached #2 in the UK) and entering the regular rotation of radio stations and clubs across the world.

There’s a reason that Feel Good Inc. has stuck around, and that’s largely down to its arrangement.

In a virtual interview with MTV News in 2006, Albarn explained (via his band avatars) that he realised the song would be a standout from the beginning of the process. “I saw it's potential from the very first beat,” Albarn said through the guise of virtual basist Murdoc. “It was like, panning for gold. Amongst the brown murky waters, I saw this track all shiny and glimmery, shining like a big rock of gold. It said, 'Play me, play me!' and that, I knew soon as the De La Soul boys dropped their glorious rap about Motowns and ghost towns. This one was gonna explode."

In an interview with Ultimate-Guitar.com, Damon mentioned that the band used one of Danger Mouse’s drum machines in the production of the song. Closer scrutiny reveals a heavily gated sound, which also has the attributes of a low sampling rate.

Danger Mouse is a well-known user of the legendary EMU SP-1200; a classic sampling drum machine, with a maximum bit-depth of 12bit, so it's a fairly safe bet that this is the machine behind the track.

One of the hookiest elements of the song is undoubtedly the downright incredible bass line. This 4-bar part runs throughout the introduction and verse sections.

At first listen, it sounds as though the bass part is doubled by a guitar part, one octave higher. This is a throwback to a classic arranging feature, which was made popular by composers such as Henry Mancini. It's been cited by many artists in their own work, including bands such as Steely Dan.

However, a closer listen reveals that rather than a doubled guitar part, the bass part seems to have an octave pitch shifting effect applied, with the effected part an octave lower than the upper original part.

There are a few other clues, such as the accuracy of some of the articulation and slides across parts, as well as a subtle and small amount of latency (at least to our ears), between the upper and lower parts.

While we are on the subject of this inescapable riff, we have to consider its key and overall tonality - which is not as easy as you might think.

The song itself is rooted in Eb minor, which is a strange key for a guitar-based song, given that the lowest note on a regular guitar and 4-string bass is an E natural.

Before addressing the chords themselves, we have to consider the upper guitar parts, as used in the verse structure. This is another curious element, as there are degrees of de-tuning littered in a number of places, particularly within a couple of the guitar parts.

The first guitar part is the most obvious, picking out 6ths above the bass riff, but a second guitar part appears further into the verse, which also adopts some interesting tuning.

As we previously mentioned, the song is rooted in Eb minor, but the picked ‘6th’ guitar part suggests the use of the note G, instead of Gb.

This is pivotal, being the third of a chord of Eb/Ebm, so this singular note switches the song from a major to a minor tonality. Whether accidental or intentional, it promotes a sense of ambiguity in the harmony, in line with the song’s thematic sense of doubt.

Working with the bass and guitar parts, we can suggest a harmonic progression consisting of Eb minor (or major, depending on your viewpoint), Bb minor, Ab minor and Bbm/Eb (aka Ebm add9).

Adding to the general guitar-led construct, there is the occasional interjection from synthesizers. The most obvious being the heavily LFO pitch-modulated chord, that we hear at the end of each four bars.

A less obvious interjection comes from a filter-modulated lower mono synth part, which occasionally intrudes into bass territory.

Lyrically, Albarn seems concerned with the illusion of contentment within a consumerist, disposable society. An illusion that shrouds a deeper unhappiness.

As our writer Fred Garratt-Stanley perfectly articulated last year in his song story, “Feel Good Inc. expertly interrogated damaging developments in how the modern music industry and broader capitalist culture operate. It communicated its ideas with catchy, inventive sonics that connected with the masses.”

City's breaking down on a camel's back
They just have to go 'cause they don't know wack
So, while you fill the streets, it's appealing to see
You won't get undercounted 'cause you're damned and free

The first verse adopts more of a spoken lyrical approach, performed by Albarn (in the guise of 2-D) using a Shure 527B CB radio microphone to create a grainy, lo-fi texture (a typical choice for his vocals across Gorillaz' back catalogue). The chorus provides us with a beautifully-constructed vocal, backed by a slight change in the song’s harmony.

The chords in the chorus are very similar to those used in the verse, but without the dominant presence of the bass riff.

We become fully reliant upon the guitar parts to indicate the harmony. The continuous rhythmic strumming of the tranquil acoustic guitar, employs chords of Ebm, Db, Abm, Bbm7, all of which are played for a bar each. As we reach the end of the chorus, the final chord is replaced by an extended 3 bars of Db.

Lyrically, Albarn expresses the overall theme of the song in breezy fashion, with a recurring allusion to windmills (that were also depicted in the song's entrancing music video)

Windmill, windmill for the land
Turn forever, hand in hand
Take it all in on your stride
It is ticking, falling down

Albarn explained - in the guise of guitarist Noodle - a slightly stylised reason for this constant windmill-alluding; "My attention wandered. I played something more acoustic, just something that reminded me of the countryside," Albarn/Noodle told MTV News. "So I wrote down some key words to help with the lyrical imagery. 'Windmill' was one of them. It was a trigger to symbolise a different time and also a reference to the 'dark, satanic mills' that William Blake wrote about in his verse of 'Jerusalem.' I remember that it all started when I was reading the ingredients of the back of a [potato chip] packet."

Meanwhile, in the arrangement, an additional production twist enters into the chorus, as either a guitar or keyboard part has been heavily layered with some form of harmonizer, which results in the high shimmering effect that we can hear throughout its duration.

As we reach the second verse of the song, it falls to the featured artist, hip-hop outfit De La Soul, to entirely handle this section.

They are also responsible for the outro, and the incredibly infectious laugh that we hear right at the beginning of the track, provided by member Vincent Mason. In true De La Soul style, they combine elements of spoken and sung vocals, with emphasis on particular lyrics.

All of these arrangement choices were vital in shaping a song that has racked up a seriously impressive 2.6 billion streams on Spotify alone. In 2026, Feel Good Inc. remains a perennial playlist staple that, by dent of its timeless production (and fronted by its ageless band) never seems to date or fall out of fashion.

It's not unusual for collaborations to take place in dance music - some might say it’s the norm - but 2017's Feels was quite a notable collision of superstars. Essentially performed by a studio supergroup, the track's players consisted of Pharrell Williams, Katy Perry and Big Sean, led by the uber-talented Calvin Harris.

The impressive collective all shared writing credits for the song, along with additional composer Starrah (aka Brittany Hazzard), but Feels started life as a relatively simple demo, which Harris presented to Katy Perry following a fortuitous encounter at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.

"I saw Calvin actually at [the] Vanity Fair Oscar party,” Perry told Ryan Seacrest Wednesday back in 2017. “We just bumped into each other and he's like, 'Oh, you know, it's so funny, I think I have a song that maybe you should come check out. I was like, 'Cool,' because we'd always meant to work together for years and years and years."

But context is key here. A few years earlier, the two had a relatively public Twitter spat, triggered by Harris pulling out of an appearance on Perry's California Dreams Tour at the last minute, citing set production issues.

"Calvin Harris will NOT be joining in on the fun and has CANCELLED last minute", Perry posted on Twitter back in 2011. Cue a series of back-and-forth bickers in full public view that led most to assume that the pair had burned their respective bridges

Following this long-awaited air-clearing meeting, Calvin played a basic demo of the backing track of Feels to Katy. She was immediately was struck by it.

"It was time to put all that behind us. Then he played me this one part for this new song called Feels and I was like, ‘Oh yeah.' This is like my favourite song off the record. I was just down to do it."

The Feels-wheels then began turning as one of 2017’s biggest summer hits started to be crafted into shape. Built around an Earth, Wind & Fire-recalling bass groove, the tune had a lightweight, danceable energy and a salvo of hooky toplines. These elements eventually made the tune irresistible to millions

Dropped shortly before the release of the parent album Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1, Feels became an instant international success story, hitting the top of the chart across Europe and the UK and the top 20 of the US.

But, beyond the name recognition of its roster of collaborators - what was it that made the song work so well? Let's dive in to its inner workings…

Feels utilises a two-bar sequence, which provides the backbone for verse, pre-chorus and chorus elements.

There is an opening introduction, which is heavily infused with reverse effects, all based around the single scale of Em pentatonic, before we hear the two-bar chord sequence in a short introduction, and the first vocal part.

The main chord construct is based around Em for 2 beats, A and Em/G for a beat each, then F#m7 is followed by B major, both for 2 beats.

This chord sequence is a relatively common and basic progression, but it offers a strange sense of reassurance and familiarity, particularly given its extensive usage throughout the duration.

The use of Em/G after the A major chord is an interesting device, acting as a passing chord, which breaks up the sequence slightly, although plenty of heavy lifting is done by the arrangement, which we will come onto later.

With three amazing artists working alongside Calvin Harris, each individual adopted clearly defined roles within the song.

The verses are sung by Pharrell Williams; each verse contains two sections, which are clearly defined through the use of different melodic content, alongside the developing lyrical content.

There is therefore an argument to make that the latter part of the verse construct could be presented as a continuation of the verse - although it’s commonly described as the pre-chorus bridge.

Either could be considered correct, with the former carrying more weight, thanks to the continuation of the same chord progression.

Either way, Pharrell's vocal performance is lyrical and soul-like, juxtaposed against the rhythmic and punctuated arrangement. The lyric pertains to being present in the moment, and enjoying the fleeting happiness of a relationship.

Now nothin' ever last forever, no
One minute you're here, and the next you go
So I respect you wanna take it slow
I need a mental receipt to know this moment I owe

As we reach the chorus section, Katy Perry takes centre stage, with a melodic (and often mis-heard!) line that starts on the note F#.

No, she's not singing 'Don't be afraid to catch fish'. It's actually;

Don't be afraid to catch feels
Ride drop top and chase thrills
I know you ain't afraid to pop pills
Baby, I know you ain't scared to catch feels
Feels with me

Beyond its lyric, which reinforces the 'you only live once' theme, this part adds something quite unexpected musically, as it brings a 9th to the chord of Em. This is only realised in Perry's vocal part, leaving the instrumental components to carry on as before. It's one of the strengthening attributes of the chorus melody.

Having been treated to two rounds of verse and chorus, we reach the formal bridge section. Continuing the strength by definition, Big Sean provides an extensive rap over this new section.

The simplistic progression here begins with a chord of Em7, which is played for 3 beats. The note D, within this chord, is played right at the top of the harmony, allowing the note to drop by a semitone to a C# for the final beat of each bar, thus creating a chord of Em6.

This subtle deviation is kept back for the second part of the bridge section, remaining somewhat muted and elusive during the bridge’s first half.

The bridge section is a full 16 bars in length, and while the Em7/Em6 groove occupies most of this space, bars 7-8 and 15-16 present a rising figure, employing chords of Am, Bm, C and D, before we head to the chorus outro.

This rising figure is also further embellished by the use of additional chords, which move down and up. This promotes the sense that we are ascending back to the home chord of the key.

As well as being a notable and successful producer of great repute, Calvin Harris is also a little bit of a gear-hound. This might explain why he listed the equipment that was used in the making of the track at the end of the song’s vibrant promotional video.

This provides us with some fantastic clues as to the instrumentation used at various moments.

Beginning with the drums, Harris lists the Linn LM-2 (a misnomer, it's actually officially named the LinnDrum) drum machine as the unit providing the percussive backbone.

It's a basic construct, of kick on 1 & 3, and snare on 2 & 4.

This is further embellished with live claps, which accentuate the fourth beat, alongside the snare.

There are also some 8th note hi-hats in play, but these are often masked by a live tambourine part, which is something of an outlier. This part does not seem to lock in terribly well, which suggests that its presence is more of an instrumental colour than an exacting rhythmic entity. It’s also quite a way to the back of the mix.

Despite the basic drum construct, the underlying feel of the track is supplied by Fender Stratocaster and Gibson SG Custom guitars, bolstered by a Yamaha upright piano.

These components provide continual offbeats, with the occasional rhythmic embellishment which supplies the lilt and feel of the track, drawing influence from reggae and ska.

There is also an additional Wurly electric piano, which tends to cement the harmony by playing on the beat, although not all of the time.

Between these elements, there is wonderful interplay as they are woven together rhythmically. They also work to flavour-up the chords; sometimes the Wurly plays in a higher inversion, against the piano's lower inversion, for example.

The bass part is played live by Harris, on a Ibanez 1200 Bass, and performs two roles expertly. Firstly, it underpins the harmony, but stylistically it adopts hints of funk, with the occasional octave leap.

Undoubtedly, one of the total strengths of this song is in the simplistic, repetetive feel of the arrangement.

It is a textbook example of what can be done with limited instrumentation - and a hypnotic circular groove, garnished with instrumental colour.

Oh, and a cast list of the music industry's biggest names bringing the song to life certainly does no harm.

As we alluded to earlier, the song's basic groove was consciously derived from Earth, Wind & Fire’s iconic Let’s Groove Tonight, so much so that Maurice White and Wayne Vaughn of the original band were credited as co-writers.

Listen to the two tracks side-by-side and you'll see why…

SYNTH WEEK 2026: The wonderful thing about the emergence of synthesizer technology in the '70s and early '80s is that it gave rise to many fantastically engaging stories, which have since entered the folklore of the synthesist’s almanac.

One of the most often recounted moments could be described as ground zero for Gary Numan.

So the story goes, he walked into a studio with his band, Tubeway Army, with the intention of making a punk album. Unfortunately for punk, there was a Minimoog sitting in the corner of the studio, set up with a patch that literally made the room shake - and the rest (as they say) is history!

In 1979, Numan released The Pleasure Principle, the first album under his own name and away from his band. While there were clearly band-driven elements scattered throughout the album, its reliance on synthesizers was groundbreaking in pop culture - with no track exemplifying this more clearly than its lead single, the (UK) chart-topping Cars.

Surprisingly, according to Numan, the iconic riff of Cars was actually first written on bass guitar.

“I just wanted to do pop music, and thought Cars was here today, gone tomorrow,” Numan told Chaos Control. “I don’t know what happened with that, the fact that it’s done so well over the years - I never quite figured it out, really. It was the quickest song I ever wrote. I wrote it on bass guitar, I didn’t even write it on the keyboard, and it took about 10 minutes, the tune and the lyrics. The keyboard part came later, I mean the main melody and arrangement of the song and lyrics. It was about 10 minutes, beginning to end.

It’s the distinctive sound of that iconic main riff that we’re digging into today, which also forms part of the melody for Numan’s vocal.

When we focus on this element of the song, it's actually quite difficult to hear exactly what's going on because, despite the overall simplicity, it's tricky to filter out the additional elements, such as the bass and drums, but we can certainly derive some useful detail.

First of all, the main riff has been recorded twice, once for the left channel and once for the right. The two sounds used for this riff are both generated by the Minimoog (a Polymoog with the ‘Vox Humana’ patch, was deployed to create the additional swirling lead sounds which enter the mix later).

The twin-Minimoog-driven main riff provides a solid musical foundation, whilst also providing a feeling of movement in the sound. Both sounds are quite ‘reedy’ in harmonic makeup, suggesting that they are predominantly formed from a pulse wave.

The Cars riff patch is a sound that could be recreated using any synth that offers subtractive synthesis, armed with two or three oscillators. For this exploration, we are going to create a soundalike patch using Cherry Audio’s cost-effective Miniverse plugin, which is a hugely exacting software emulation.

One of the unique features of the original Minimoog is that it did not offer pulse width modulation (PWM).

There were post-market customisations available to add this, but Moog’s answer to the issue was to provide three different pulse wave shapes, within each oscillator section. It is these wave shapes that are fully exploited for the sound of Cars, with a slight variance between the left and right channel.

If you would like to re-create the sound in your own DAW, then you must start by creating the patch for the left channel. It's important to note that you should load your plugin synth in a mono instance, rather than stereo, as this will allow you to pan the synth fully to your left channel.

How to replicate the Cars main riff sound

Using Oscillators 1 and 2, set these to a middle frequency range, such as 16’.

As a starting point, select the first and second pulse waves respectively, making sure that the volumes are set roughly the same. If your chosen synth offers PWM, alter the pulse width settings so that the two oscillators differ slightly in tone.

Depending on the synth you are using, it will be worthwhile creating a small amount of de-tuning. In the case of a Minimoog-in-software, this will mean changing the tuning of Oscillator 2, as the tuning of Oscillator 1 is fixed.

The other related elements to the sound are fairly simplistic, but will once again be open to variation, according to your chosen synth. The filter Cutoff Frequency should be set very close to fully open. In our experience, software versions of the Minimoog often include a cutoff frequency that opens wider than the original hardware, so you may need to reduce the brightness by a small degree. There is no resonance (aka emphasis) applied to this sound.

The filter envelope doesn't play a part here either, but the Loudness Contour (aka Amplitude Envelope) certainly does.

The patch fully sustains, and adopts a very fast attack time, and a rapid decay/release time. If you haven't done so already, switch your synth to monophonic mode or single voice, which will also limit any release phase time to the end of phrases.

That’s pretty much it for the left channel, but the patch for the right channel adopts very similar sensibilities, in fact, it would be worthwhile copying the L/H patch over to the R/H channel, for ease and speed of setup.

The subtle variation between patches takes place within the oscillator section again, where you need to select different pulse waves, providing a sort of ‘ying-yang’ effect between the two channels.

There is also a thought that a triangle wave is used in the R/H patch, which is something worth trying and applying. If you have a third oscillator available, use this and subtly apply a triangle to the existing sound. Much like our first patch, you will probably need to apply a little detuning, to avoid unwanted beating, caused by precise pitch accuracy.

All the other settings, relating to filter and envelope remain the same, although you could subtly tweak these, to create a slightly different tone and envelope tail.

If you haven’t done so already, pan the first patch hard-left, and the second patch hard-right. This will create a gloriously thick and complex texture.

Bussed for Phaser

Having created the two patches, you can record the riff on one part, and copy it to the other part. However, if you would like to adopt the purist’s approach, play and record the riff for each channel, without using quantize. The subtle timing discrepancies between parts will add to the overall flavour, getting closer to the original.

Like many synthesizers from this era, Minimoogs were very reliant upon external effects, and no other effect was more exploited on this album than a phaser.

As most DAW’s offer phasers in one guise or another, bus both of your synth patches to a single bus channel, and apply phaser to the bus. This is certainly an area for experimentation, as you could try various forms of stereo phaser, with variance of setting to get the perfect effect.

Other Elements

While Gary Numan’s music from this era was intrinsically linked to synths, he still made considerable use of conventional instrumentation.

The drums are provided by an acoustic drum kit, and the bass is provided by a bass guitar, however there would be no issue with using a further Minimoog-style patch, to provide a bass one octave below the riff we have been discussing here.

In fact, in the spirit of experimentation, you could use a third oscillator tuned an octave lower, to provide a thicker texture, all sounding simultaneously.

“I think to this day that Cars remains the most poppy song I’ve ever written” Numan reflected on his unlikely hit in an interview with Billboard, “I do not think I have a talent for pop music. It’s too light for me, for my taste in music. It’s too…happy. I’m just not very good at it! I’m much better if I slow it down a bit, make it a bit menacing, add a hint of mystery or oppression, I’m in my element at that point!”

When it was released on 21st November 1980, Steely Dan’s seventh studio album Gaucho was reported to be the most expensive album ever recorded. Over a two-year period, the band's fastidious co-leads, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, pushed perfection to its very limit, with a revolving door studio policy that resulted in the absolute elite of the American musical fraternity being called upon to record each song, before the next set of equally masterful musicians turned up the next day to do it all again… and again…and again!

There were some major bumps in the road on a technical level during the process though. Gaucho was released as a seven-track album, with several additional tracks being dropped along the way.

One song (The Second Arrangement) was accidentally erased by the engineer, wiping out several months of work in the process. Alternative versions of the same song were deemed to be inferior, so the track was consigned to the Steely bin!

Despite these issues, the world was finally presented with a musically dense record that many would eventually hold as the gold standard of audio engineering.

Opening many an audio (and muso-) phile's favourite LP is the track that's receiving our analysis today, Babylon Sisters.

As if to endorse its perfectionist’s charter, Babylon Sisters was mixed 274 times before Fagen decided that he was happy - and that’s not before the prolonged 50-second fade-out took more than 55 attempts to get just right. (Mixes back then were manual affairs, with all hands on desk!)

The infectious groove and beautiful drumming that defines the track, begins with a legendary half-time shuffle. Also known as the ‘Purdie Shuffle’, it was the trademark of venerated kit-legend Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie, he would often arrive at sessions with two banners, which he placed either side of his kit while recording. One of which read, 'You done it!' and the other stated ‘You done hired the hit-maker’ - playing on his storied career which had been replete with success.

The concept behind a half-time shuffle, is as the name suggests; the kick and snare effectively play at half speed, employing the primary elements of kick on beat one and snare on beat 3.

Meanwhile, the hats shuffle, much as they might play under normal circumstances, but with the addition of numerous snare drop-sticks. The tempo remains the same, but the half-time groove makes the pace feel half-as-slow.

"The way a locomotive kind of pushes and pulls, that's what I was feeling," Bernard told us back in 2019. "I played it for my music teacher, Mr Leonard Haywood, when I was a kid, and he tried to stop me. 'That's not the way to play a shuffle,' he said. But I heard what I heard - whoosh, whoosh, whoosh - so I kept it. Eventually, he said, ‘OK, you work on that. It could be something… but not today.’ [laughs] That’s all right. I knew I’d get my chance.”

Purdie embellishes his shuffle continually, particularly in the intricate hi-hat part, providing a beautiful blend of open and closed placements.

After just two stellar takes, Purdie was done.

“We did two takes, and after the second one, he put on his overcoat, and he walked in the control room and said to everyone, ‘Well fellas, that's it!' And he left! It was amazing,” remembered guitarist Steve Khan in an interview on his own website. “We were all relieved, because we knew we had played great.”

With Steely Dan sifting through their Rolodex of L.A.'s finest musicians to make Gaucho, we have to highlight some of the other key luminaries that brought the final version of the track to life.

Chuck Rainey played bass guitar, having worked with Don and Walt on previous projects, most notably the beautifully playing on the track Peg, where Rainey apparently hid his playing technique from the duo.

They didn't want any hint of slapping, yet that's exactly what they got. Somehow, Chuck got away with it!

On Fender Rhodes and Clavinet, jazz legend Don Grolnick rustled up a host of classic lines, which may or may not have been improvised.

The point is, he made them sound so laid-back in performance that they sound utterly effortless. It's a similar story with the aforementioned Steve Khan on guitar, whose contribution feels smooth and chilled, yet laden with detail.

Leading the horn section, Randy Brecker, who supplied the notable trumpet solo, while playing alongside Tom Scott on alto and tenor sax.

Apart from being another stellar player, Scott is also the composer and performer of the best known of the Starsky and Hutch themes. (There were three themes across multiple seasons).

Bizarrely, two bass clarinets are employed, adding a darker colour to the chorus section, played by George Marge and Walter Kane.

The all important thick, textural backing vocals were supplied by Lesley Miller, Toni Wine, Lani Groves, Diva Gray, Gordon Grody, and renowned R&B and jazz vocalist Patti Austin, with percussion supplied by Errol Bennett.

Donald Fagen notably supplies the lead vocal, with Walter Becker taking a backseat from playing duties. This is not a stance that continued throughout the album, where Becker made contributions on guitar and bass, with Fagen also playing Rhodes and synth on several other tracks.

Despite having the crème de la crème of musical talent on-hand, Don and Walt were continually frustrated by players not hitting precisely what was directed.

Many musicians were disappointed and upset that their contributions did not make it to the final cut of the album. One such musician was the Dire Straits' guitar hero Mark Knopfler, who was recruited to help lay down licks for Time Out of Mind.

After recording 10 hours of material, his contributions did not satisfy the pedantic pair.

“It was a strange experience," Knopfler said in Brian Sweet's Steely Dan: Reelin' in the Years."It was like getting into a swimming pool with lead weights tied to your boot.”

Back to Babylon Sisters, and the track has to be one of the most complex pop songs (if we can call it pop) that has ever been written and produced.

It is well known that Fagen had been listening to plenty of jazz around this time, notably artists such as Keith Jarrett, and this influence is pretty overt across Gaucho.

Jarrett himself was fully aware, and sued the pair over copyright infringement for the album’s title track. It was settled out of court, with Jarrett later being credited as one of the composers.

On the one hand, the structure of Babylon Sisters could be considered fairly conventional - containing introduction, verse and chorus - but many of the section lengths have been mutated. The introduction runs to 22 bars - not your usual 4 or 8 bars and away!

It's a difficult task to dissect every harmonic twist and turn of this song in a single article, in fact it has been the topic of lengthy analysis over the years, with its heavy use of chordal extensions. So we're going to zoom in on two elements, beginning with the introduction.

One trait which presents itself for the most part of the song, is the presence of the bass part, doubled on the Rhodes. The Rhodes is continuously played in an interval of a perfect 5th.

Trying to identify exactly which key could be regarded as Babylon Sisters' home key, is quite a challenge, as there are various modulations which muddy the waters.

However, the first intro chord is Gb5, which plays for two bars, before shifting to Cb5 and Ab5 for a bar each. This then shifts to Fb5 (E5 if thinking enharmonically), Abm7 and Ebm9(11).

What makes this more complicated, is that the open 5th element and specified chord alters, with the presence of the meandering Rhodes melody which is played over the top.

This changes certain chords, I.E. Ab5 becomes Ab Major, with the addition of the note C, which is also embellished with a turn.

Without getting too hung up on the complex nature of the intervening harmony in the verse, we're going to skip over it to talk about the chorus, and think about the chords used alongside the lyric, ‘Babylon sisters, shake it’.

This motivational line is slightly less complicated, presumably so not to overcomplicate the chorus element. By this stage, we are rooted in D minor, having modulated!

The classic vocal line rises up from the note A, taking in the notes C, D and F. These are the notes found in a chord of Dm7, all the time accompanied by the open 5th lower part in the bass and Rhodes.

In the second bar of the chorus, the lower part rises a semi-tone to Eb5, with the upper part of the Rhodes and the vocal, employing the chord Eb, followed by F/Eb. This creates a very strong rising movement, which is particularly effective when backed by the thick vocal texture.

In order to fully grasp the harmonic complexity of this track, you will probably need a fairly good understanding of how to work with jazz harmony, and particularly the use of chordal extensions.

It's one of the reasons why Steely Dan have always been held in such high regard by so many musicians. Much like jazz, their output is not to everyone's taste, but if you’re looking for an artist that works far beyond the frontier of conventional music theory, then you should really listen to Steely Dan.

For our money, Babylon Sisters (and the Gaucho album as a whole, for that matter) is undoubtedly one of the first places you could go when diving headlong into the Dan-verse.

Scales might sound daunting at first, especially with names like Dorian, Lydian and Mixolydian – but don't be deterred. Follow along as we break down three essential scales into digestible bite-sized chunks that will help you play along to your favorite songs and save you in a jam scenario when your fellow bandmate says a song is in a particular key.

Scales usually revolve around a single chord shape. You then just add extra complementary notes around them to complete the scale – we'll show you how to do this below.

Once you've learnt all of the notes in the scale pattern, there are basically no wrong notes – this is perfect for jam situations, whether improvising over a song or just a few simple chords that you've looped together.

Practising scales for a few minutes every day will also hone your alternate picking technique, help make your fretting hand more accurate and - with the help of one of the best metronomes - improve your timing and stay in the pocket of a groove.

All of this will result in two things: your playing will be more accurate and professional sounding, and you will almost certainly become capable of playing faster.

It's important that you don't play scales just to get faster, though. Speed is a happy by-product of trying to play more accurately. Even if you don't fancy becoming the next über shredder, practising scales is still important.

Make sure your guitar is in standard EADGBE tuning – the scale won't sound quite right if one or more strings are out of tune, then let's jump in to clear up the confusion around those pesky scales and you'll be improvising brilliant solos in no time!

1. A major pentatonic 

Everyone knows the A chord. As you play it here, make sure it’s the cleanest A chord ever heard!

The major pentatonic scale is great for creating bright, melodic lead lines. It also contains the A chord.

The idea here is to see how the chord, scale and lick all relate to each other – the three shapes are pretty similar. Play the A chord with a first-finger barre. Your third finger should fall into place.

Play our first track to see how the scale could sound over the top of some basic chords, then when you're ready load up the second track and use the tab above to follow along using just the D, G and B strings.

Once you've got the hang of it why not experiment with other notes using the A major pentatonic scale diagram above – don't worry, there aren't any wrong notes to play so there's no incorrect way to play them – get creative!

2. A minor pentatonic 

Play each note one by one to check they’re ringing clearly – adjust your thumb position if needed.

Notice how the notes of the chord are found within the scale. It means they’ll sound good together.

Jimi Hendrix used to thicken his lead lines with doublestops. This lick shows how he might have combined them with a bluesy bend. Try branching out your ideas by using other notes from the chord and scale.

Rather than sliding your fretting hand up from the 5th fret to the 7th in this scale you could get creative and instead try bending the note at the 5th fret one whole step instead and this will give it more of a bluesy feel.

Alongside famously playing a right-handed Stratocaster upside down to suit his left-handed playing, Jimi was also know for playing bar chords with his thumb over the top of the neck to fret the low E string – experiment with this thumb over style and fretting the bar chord with your index finger to find which you find more comfortable.

3. Mixolydian 

Notice how the dominant 7th chord sounds unresolved, like it needs to move to another, more final chord.

Look closely! Once again the notes of the chord are found in the scale. Jam around the two together.

This laid-back melody is inspired by the North Mississippi Allstars’ softer moments. Once again, play close attention to the lick’s feel and try some more ideas with other scale and chord notes.

Learn more about the minor pentatonic

Take it further: Finesse your timing with a metronome

A metronome is a device used to give a steady, constant pulse for you to practise to. It is also referred to as a click track, especially in studios. Metronomes are fairly cheap (they're available for as little as £15), and if you're thinking of getting into guitar you should probably invest in one. If you like to record into a DAW on a computer they will have a click feature built in too, and you can experiment with how fast or slow it clicks.

To start off with, set your metronome to 100 beats per minute (bpm). Then, using a single note, try to play every time there's a click. The key is to anticipate when the click sounds and play at exactly the same time. It may take you a while to get this right - so don't feel bad if it takes you 100 attempts. Tapping your foot along to the beat can also help you keep a rhythm.

Once you feel comfortable playing one note per click, try playing two notes per click. Once you feel comfortable with that, try this example (the tempo here is slower as it's more difficult to play).

Open the 'Playing a minor pentatonic scale with a metronome' tab (Right-click to download)

Tip: Play two notes of the scale for each click of the metronome. Make sure the notes are evenly spaced. Remember to alternate pick - or else!

Read more: Best metronomes

There are some hefty bangers in the Britney Spears back catalogue, but when it comes to naming the best of them, Dua Lipa seems pretty sure.

The star revealed her top Spears smash in a high-concept video for Vogue, in which she was required to prepare cocktails that pair with some of her favourite songs.

Around halfway through, she started mixing up a Basil Smash (that’s gin, lemon juice and some “simple syrup”, in case you were wondering), a drink that Lipa first had at the festival that she and her family host every year in Kosovo, a place that they have strong ties to.

This, reckons Lipa, is a cocktail that makes you feel “very excited, silly, giggly and fun,” – and that’s where Britney hit from 2003 comes in.

“I need to hear Toxic at the end of every single night when I'm feeling like that,” says Lipa. “It's one of my favourite songs. I think it's one of the greatest pop songs ever made. It makes me feel nostalgic, but also at the same time, if it came out yesterday, it would be an absolute smash.”

She’s not wrong - Toxic sounds as good today as it did when it was released, more than 20 years ago – but its writing process was anything but straightforward. In fact, according to co-writer Christian Karlsson, its various parts might never have coalesced into a song at all.

“Before Toxic became a song, basically, it was, like, 10 beats I was working on on just one given day,” he told Music Week in 2018. “I had the strings on a loop, and then I left it to think about it. The next day I came back and I listened to it and I was like, ‘This is impossible to make a song out of, but I love it!’”

Luckily, Karlsson persevered: “I didn’t know how to make it a song but I wanted to try, so I immediately looked to get some acoustic guitar in there,” he says. “It was all piece by piece – it was all about trying to make that freaking string thing work in a song without making me nuts. I’m happy we did that.”

Cathy Dennis, another of the song’s writers, also struggled with it, later telling Songwriting Magazine that the process was “sheer torture”.

“I beat myself up for seven days, not sleeping,” she admitted. “The melody came first, then I had this puzzle of trying to fit words to the right number of syllables. It was really weird. I kept writing and then re-editing myself again, and again, and again.”

Despite these initial difficulties, in hindsight, Toxic sounds like an obvious hit single, but when it was offered to Kylie Minogue, she decided to pass on it (she’s since referred to it as “the fish that got away”). What’s more, it wasn’t an immediate ‘yes’ from Team Britney, either.

“We didn’t know it was going to be a big hit or anything, because we didn’t even know if anybody was going to take the song,” Karlsson remembers. “I sent the song out to the first artist and we didn’t hear anything back. When I was in a session with Britney, I played it for her and her A&R and they were like, ‘We’ll get back to you.’”

Fortunately, Spears and her team saw sense, and Toxic went on to become one of the star’s signature songs, topping charts around the world and winning her a Grammy.

“Britney just has that tone of voice that, no matter if you like it or not, you know that it’s her,” says Christian Karlsson. “I like that you’re never going to think it’s another artist, you’re going to know that it’s her. I think that’s the most valuable thing, more than maybe being the best singer in the world – to have that tone that is recognisable is worth so much.”

Dua Lipa is one of many artists to have praised Toxic in the intervening years, and the song has undoubtedly had an influence on the sound of pop in general, proving that quirky writing and production doesn’t have to be a barrier to commercial success.

“I think Toxic resonated because it was just fresh-sounding, in so many ways, within pop music when it came out,” reckons Karlsson. “It was both original and very strong in the melody. The production was also something that people thought was very new. I think the Bollywood string thing really grabbed people’s attention.”

Beyond his legions of dedicated fans, the name Kevin Parker may not be immediately recognisable, but this dextrously talented, multi-instrumentalist's artist identity of Tame Impala, has become synonymous with a modern strand of psychedelic indie, infused with elements of electronica and synth pop.

Originally from Perth, in Western Australia, Tame Impala attracted a strong homegrown crowd first, but it took a little longer for the rest of the world to pick up on the unique musical magic that Parker was conjuring.

Parker began working on the third Tame Impala album Currents three years before it finally saw the light of day, following the breakthrough success of his aptly titled previous album Lonerism. Its first song, Let it Happen established the LP's themes of transition - both lyrically and musically.

“I think most of that song was put together at different times,” Parker told Under the Radar in 2015.

“When I was on tour, actually. I remember it came to me, I think I was walking to my hotel room in Oklahoma. And then the chorus, I was at a festival in Hungary or Turkey. And then the midsection, the jam bit, I was on a train. I had my laptop on a train in France, going to Toulouse. With that song, one thing led to another. I was just jamming by myself in the way I do, and I put it on a loop to see what sounds cool. I just see where it takes me”

As a live entity (with help from other musicians), Tame Impala could easily be the band's name, but in the studio, Parker was (and is) lord and master of his own domain - taking on all composition, recording and production duties himself. Sometimes, however, he might call upon the talents of other individuals to undertake processes such as mixing.

As its lead single, Let It Happen quickly became one of the most successful tracks from Currents, winning the APRA award (an Australian award for excellence in songwriting and composition) for the song of the year back in 2016.

Lyrically, the song was purposefully ambiguous. “There’s this part at the end where I’m singing through this keyboard sampler thing, almost like a vocoder but not really. And the first take I did, I was just singing gibberish and making sounds with my mouth just to test it out,” Parker told Under the Radar.

“I didn’t even know what I was saying. I was saying words and stringing sentences together that weren’t really words. I left that for months and months, always planning to go back and re-record it with real lyrics. And I only did it a few days ago, a week before mastering. I’m totally contradicting what I said before, but I couldn’t get back the same groove I did when I was speaking in tongues. So I had to make the decision, like, ‘I’ll just leave the speaking in tongues version on the album'.”

Dissecting Let It Happen musically must begin with highlighting the hypnotically repeated note C#.

Its presence as a single note, played in an almost funk-based rhythm, is one of the common threads throughout the course of the song, which is initiated from the very beginning.

Moreover, the harmony shifts around the C#, as heard in the chords which make up the chorus, although in a slightly less obvious twist, Parker employs three bar phrases, which in itself creates a slightly unsettled form.

Chordally speaking, the opening section relies upon the following chords; A major and F# minor (7), for a bar each, followed by G#(sus4) for 2 beats, before resolving to G# major.

The sequence changes slightly on its repeat, with the final chord becoming G# minor. It's also interesting to note the presence of the 7th, on the chord of F#m, as this is supplied in the background, by the synth pad texture.

We've already mentioned the irrepressible nature of the repeated C#, which is at the forefront of the mix, and appears to be played on guitar with added distortion.

Residing alongside this is a synthetic texture, and notably a bending of the note C# at the end of each third bar, shifting the C# down to a C natural.

The eclectic fusion of instrumentation that has become Tame Impala's calling card, is part and parcel of his recognisable sound. It's difficult to dissect exactly which guitar equipment has been used on this track, but we know that Parker has a modified Fender Stratocaster in his arsenal, along with a Vox AC30 amp, Dunlop JDF2 Fuzz Face pedal and Boss BD-2 Blues Driver pedal.

Any of these elements, or even a sum, could be responsible for the overdriven nature of the repeated C#.

Alongside the guitar elements, this album made notable use of two synthesizers, both of which provide unique vintage identities.

It's fairly likely that the Roland Juno-106, noted as one of Kevin's favourite synths, is responsible for the pad-like and chordal elements, although he is also the owner and user of the lesser known Realistic Concertmate MG-1 synthesizer.

Originally produced by Moog Music for Tandy (Radio Shack in the US), the MG-1 was an entry-level monophonic analog subtractive synthesizer, which offered all of Moog’s qualities, but at a mass-market price, and more readily available at music stores.

It wasn't enormously successful, hence it became a cheap secondhand option, which has now become an underrated classic, thanks in part to its use by artists such as Tame Impala.

As it feels appropriate to describe the opening of the song as the chorus (as it contains the repeated line ‘let it happen’) the verse section feels more subdued by comparison.

The verse adopts a more traditional 4-bar form, although there is further ambiguity, due to twists and turns in the synth pad harmony.

The verse starts with a chord of D# minor, for a bar, followed by a chord of B major, also for a whole bar. We then hear a chord of C# major, which seems to be held for two bars, although the bass moves in the second bar, creating a harmony of C#/F#. In guitar circles, this chord could also be described as F# Maj9 (omit3) - it just depends on your preference, which we tend to think depends on how your harmonic brain works!

This sequence repeats, but changes slightly when we hear the third chord, with a bass drop to an F natural (more accurately described as E# in this setting, due to enharmonic transposition), before rising to F#, as before.

Given the relatively simplistic harmony within this song, its development is fairly reliant upon builds in the arrangement and production, in common with so many other contemporary songs.

When the chorus returns, Parker includes numerous embellishments which change over time. These include rising scalic passages in the synth parts, with new riff-based material in the guitar parts, as we head toward the end of the song. It all adds to a sense that the song’s cauldron of elements are bubbling up, particularly as the album version of this song extends to nearly 8 minutes.

But, as we’re fond of asking our friends over at Prog Magazine, does this lengthy, oddly-arranged song count as ‘prog’?

In Kevin Parker’s eyes, absolutely.

“I guess, actually, Let It Happen is prog in its purest form. I stand by that one as decidedly progressive,” Parker told The Skinny.

“When I was writing it, I got the sense that… you know, like you’re on a train? There’s different scenery that you go through. A city, then the middle is some weird tunnel, and you come out the other end and you’re in the country. It has that landscape, you know? That must have something to do with the essence of prog?”

One much discussed production technique, which becomes a particular feature later in the song, is the ‘glitching’, which is designed to sound a little bit like a skipping, scratched CD - not something we have to worry about in 2026.

While it's unclear exactly which method he employed to create this effect, it is achievable through a number of different production techniques, all of which can result in the exact same effect.

Firstly, there are glitch plugins, such as iZotope’s Stutter Edit 2 which make light work of creating glitch-style repeats, which might have previously been meticulously edited manually, which is of course another option.

It's also possible that the glitch elements were triggered or sequenced manually, using sampling software, although this method would require a large degree of preparatory programming.

Let It Happen is an excellent example of a song which demonstrates how much creativity you can unlock with just a little equipment, the spark of an idea, and a whole lot of ingenuity.

For Parker, being bound by genre isn't a concern. Instead, he lets his ideas develop and grow organically. Let It Happen then could be said to be a statement of creative philosophy, as well as one of his most spellbinding pieces of music.

“You work on something for so long, and you listen to it and you get so involved in a different realm of the music that you lose all perspective of what it sounds like to hear it for the first time and what it will sound like to other people and what they think it will sound like,” Parker related to Under the Radar. “For me, by the time I’m finished with an album I have absolutely no idea what it sounds like. I have no idea what genre it is. I have no idea what people will say it sounds like or what category it will be put in. To me, it sounds totally different from anything ever."

A good techno track can appear incredibly simple, but techno is not necessarily a simple genre to produce. From club-moving subs to subtly shifting percussion, there's a lot of nuance and skill that goes into creating a good techno track.

To help you improve your techno productions and inspire new ideas, we’ve compiled more than 40 minutes of essential techno tips, which you can watch in the video above, all drawn from our In The Studio series.

Between MusicRadar, Future Music and Computer Music, our team has been visiting electronic artists in their studios for decades. These are eight of our most insightful techno-focused sessions from our back catalogue.

How Tom Hades creates techno rumble

Belgian techno maestro Tom Hades has released tracks on labels including Drumcode, Suara and Rhythm Converted. Back in 2018, Computer Music visited him in his studio to watch him build a club-ready track from scratch, resulting in a session packed with techno production knowledge.

Particularly insightful is his approach to creating the genre’s distinctive low end ‘rumble’. The process starts with a solid four-to-the-floor kick, which doubles up as a sub bass using some creative effect processing.

He processes the kick with heavy saturation and compression, bounces it, and then sends it to a return track.

"Afterwards, what I do is I just put a lot of effects on the return track,” he explains. “An overdrive, a convolution reverb, a filter delay, and then I will finish with a simple filter, which gives me the typical techno rumble."

He then uses sidechaining tools to have the sub bass element duck out of the way of the original kick.

"This rumble is very nice because it's not really a character sound,” he says, “but it will give you the power of the kick underneath."

Matador’s drum layering

Irish DJ and producer Matador, aka Gavin Lynch, is known for his stripped-back, hardware-focused take on techno. Future Music visited him in 2015 to watch him break down the making of his track The Enemy featuring Felix Da Housecat.

In the video Lynch demonstrates his approach to creating layered, intricate percussion. He explains that, for him, the secret to thick-sounding drums is to layer multiple hits that occupy different elements of the frequency spectrum.

In his example a tight 909 kick is augmented by claps, hats and percussion lines sitting on top of one another. The clap, for example, is layered with a tambourine, while the hats are thickened with shakers.

To have everything sit together neatly, he runs the sounds through analogue-style processing, using EQ and compression. The effects are merely acting to gel everything together though, rather than reshape specific sounds.

"Instead of loads of EQs on one particular channel, I’ll layer up, say, two or three different hats and work on it that way,” he explains. “You get some original thickness there, so we're not depending on plugins."

Secret Cinema builds tracks with randomisation

From 1991’s hardcore sounds through to his more recent deeper, darker output, Jeroen Verheij has been a key figure of the Netherlands’ techno scene. His formidable discography includes releases on labels as diverse as Rotterdam, Cocoon and Drumcode, under pseudonyms including Meng Syndicate, Point Blank and his most well-known moniker, Secret Cinema.

In 2017, Computer Music magazine met up with Jeroen in his then recently-completed Amsterdam studio to find out how he used a sophisticated combination of software and hardware to create his tracks. In the video, he walks through the process of building a track up from its initial idea, into what would eventually become Ex-Drummer from his Seance EP.

As part of the creative process, he demonstrates how he uses the randomisation tools in Bitwig Studio to create spontaneous melodic ideas and percussion lines.

He does this by sending CV out to a modular synth, driven by a randomised LFO. A scale device is used to control the pitches being sent to the synth.

"If you're a drummer, you will always hit that snare drum on a different setting… which makes that one drum loop so interesting," he explains. “What I want to do is use all these little tricks with LFOs and random step sequencers to make those drum loops humanised again."

Paranoid London's studio jam strategies

When hardware-loving UK acid duo Paranoid London released their album Arseholes, Liars and Electronic Pioneers in 2024, Future Music magazine visited their London studio to catch up with band member Quinn Whalley, and find out how their proudly old-school, raw and analogue take on house and techno comes together.

As Whalley explained during the studio session, the band’s creative process is built around studio jamming and hands-on creativity. Key to making that approach work is having a handful of instruments and effects that the pair know really well – and sticking with that limited setup.

"I'm not a massive fan of using loads and loads of gear,” Whalley explains. “We don't really use a lot, each time we do a track we'll only have a couple of little things."

He also explains that, for Paranoid London, a lot of the magic happens when it’s least expected, and it’s important to capture everything.

"Record everything all the time, and keep it all,” he advises. "You can drag something that you did, like, three years ago, over whatever you’re doing now. When you take a bit of [something old] and put it over something that's in a different tuning or whatever, that's when weird stuff starts happening."

Luke Slater’s (Planetary Assault Systems) outboard effect processes

British techno legend Luke Slater is a man of many aliases. He’s probably best known for his work as Planetary Assault Systems, a moniker under which he’s been releasing tough, drum-machine-focused techno since the mid-’90s.

Slater’s prolific body of work also touches on ambient electronics, acid, house, psychedelic dance music and crossover electro-pop, working as aliases including The 7th Plain, Clementine and LSD, as well as under his own name.

In 2024, Future Music visited him in his hardware-packed studio as he prepared to release a new album under his L.B. Dub Corp alias via Dekmantel.

Among a whole host of production insights, he explained the important role that outboard effects play in shaping his sound.

"Most of this gear is actually made for rock and roll,” he explains. “But I just find it amazing when you put electronic music through it. You can get results that are sometimes amazing."

In the video he demonstrates how he uses things like Pultec EQs to shape his master track, the Overstayer compressor to apply overdrive and tone shaping, and a Culture Vulture to turn a 909 kick drum into a booming techno bass.

Creating rolling techno percussion with Wehbba

In 2017, Future Music paid a visit to Brazil-born techno producer Wehbba in his Barcelona studio, to break down the creation of his track Fake, released on Drumcode.

Tying the track together are lines of rolling percussion, which Wehbba explains are created using heavily processed drum machine rimshots.

"I really love rim shots, and I use them extensively in my production," he says. "This part was from a big jam on the TR‑8. I chopped up the bits I liked and picked different loops out of them.”

Wehbba then demonstrates how he adds body, character and movement to the percussion line. First he applies saturation, reverb and EQ. He then adds ValhallaDSP’s free FreqEcho to create an ensemble-like effect using frequency shifting.

Finally, he tames the sound using limiting and filters.

Less-is-more techno arrangement with BEC

Berlin-based techno producer BEC, real name Rebecca Godfrey, creates hypnotic, groove focused techno. Back in 2021, as she had just released her Pleasure Seeker on Pan-Pot’s Second State, Future Music visited her in the studio to find out how she created the trance-influenced track, Trusting the Mystery.

One particularly distinctive feature of the track is its simplicity.

"It's probably one of my most simple tracks ever,” Godfrey explains. “15 elements, and that's including three kicks, so there's actually 12 separate sounds in here. I think there's beauty in simplicity."

She demonstrates how the arrangement is built using a two-note melody and simple bassline, along with short, looping percussive patterns.

The tension comes from shifts in effects and automation, with reverb added to create space towards the drop, and the synth line’s filter cutoff opening as the track rises.

Tomy DeClerque's techno mastering tricks

In a classic 2012 studio session, Future Music visited Eastern European techno producer and DJ Tomy DeClerque in his studio.

One particularly noteworthy tip shared during that session is DeClerque’s approach to mastering. As the producer explains, he would often do a ‘mastering pass’ on a track at an early stage.

“Everybody else is doing the loop, then they create the song, then create the mix, and then they do the mastering,” he explains. “I prefer to do the mastering early in the stage."

This approach, he explains, helps him identify issues with the mix and production early on, that he can then fix.

"The mastering always brings up some frequencies you don't know,” he says, “so I prefer to do the mastering thing, break everything up, make it loud, and then go back and repair the things that mastering has brought out."

Any wood that comes into regular contact with foreign bodies needs to be kept clean, conditioned and protected – your guitar's fingerboard is no different. But I've read some conflicting advice when it comes to the best ways to look after different types of fretboard for acoustic and electric guitars – including rosewood, laurel, maple, pau ferro and ebony. It's time to simplify and demystify this essential piece of guitar maintenance.

As with a lot of things in the world of guitars, there isn't one correct answer. But we need to understand what substances perform different functions for our fretboards before we can experience the satisfaction of seeing and feeling them at their best.

Firstly, there are two main types of fingerboard wood; finish and unfinished. An unfinished fretboard has no protective lacquer over the wood and examples include rosewood, pau ferro, laurel, walnut and ebony.

Finished fretboards tend to be maple – though unsealed maple 'boards do exist. The finished type will only need cleaning and no conditioning because they have a thin lacquer that acts as the protective layer to keep things like sweat from seeping into the wood.

So before you condition a guitar's unfinished fingerboard, you need to clean it first. And a seemingly unlikely substance is good as a starting point.

1. Naphtha is a cleanser

Guitar techs first recommended Naphtha (petroleum distillate and most commonly referred to as lighter fluid) to me and I was initially confused. Surely a flammable substance and wood are a hazardous pairing?

It can clean finger oils out of your wood by breaking them down before it evaporates. This process will often make your unfinished dark fretboard wood look dry and even slightly opaque after application to work its magic. Don't worry – it's not a conditioner and this is supposed to happen. It's simply removing the foreign bodies in your 'board before you use an oil conditioner to rehydrate it.

It's also a safe body cleaner for nitrocellulose finishes when used sparingly – and like rubbing alcohol, it's good for removing residue from stickers that you might have regretted customising your guitar with.

2. Lemon oil isn't what you might think it is

Lemon oil is what comes up most frequently when the subject of fretboard care is mentioned. Some people even advise against using it. But if you are using it, is it a cleaner or a conditioner? Taylor Guitars co-founder Bob Taylor suggests it's both.

"I’d have no worries about using lemon oil on my fretboard," he stated in a Taylor Q&A with regards to acoustic guitars. "It’s safe. Use it only on the unfinished wood like the fretboard and bridge. The wood can dry out over time, and an oil like this, or linseed oil, or even mineral oil, can protect the wood and beautify it as well.

"Don’t overdo it," added Taylor. "Once a fretboard has been oiled a few times, you can slow down the frequency. The nice thing about lemon oil is that it cleans while it oils, so it won’t build up as easily, but be sparing. I don’t think your fretboard will need oiling more than twice a year, and eventually, once a year."

But a lot of the confusion around guitar lemon oil is due to assumptions about what it actually is. Despite the name, most guitar lemon oil is actualy often more mineral oil with less actual lemon oil than you'd expect. It's more for scent.

So it's actually mineral oil that's the more effective conditioner. This helps to break up the kind of unwanted oils from our hands, for the cloth to wipe away.

I like to do a clean, then add a little more on a second sweep over for a little conditioning – removing any excess with the cloth. And if you notice a guitar lemon oil that's actually yellow coloured, it's because artificial colouring has been used. This can actually help enhance your fretboard's "warm tone", as Gibson Master Luthier Jim DeCola points out in the video above.

3. Other alternatives are available for cleaning and conditioning

Aside from lemon oil, some of the big names in guitar accessories have their own takes on the ideal recipe for fretboard conditioner. MusicNomad F-One Oil is a cleaner and conditioner to be used on unfinished fretboards. It uses natural seed and tree oils and it smells nice too, I have to say!

Elsewhere, Daddario, Taylor, PRS and Dunlop all have their own takes on fretboard conditioning oil too.

4. Pick the right cloth for the job

In my article on how to clean your guitar, I pointed out why two different types of cloth are good for specific jobs when it comes to applying polishes and creams to the guitar. And this idea extends to the fretboard.

You only need a small dab of oil on each fret, then use a microfibre short pile lint-free cloth to move it around the surface of the fretboard without the cloth absorbing too much, too soon and before the oil can seep into the unfinished wood. Then use a different part of the cloth to remove any excess oil after a couple of minutes.

5. Don't forget your toothbrush!

Using your cloth to get into the edges of the frets and clean where grime can gather usually does the job, but for fingerboards that have been neglected for a while (and might be due a fret polish as the next step in a proper spring clean), a clean toothbrush can help with a little oil applied to it.

6. Maple needs love too

Finished (sealed) maple fingerboards don't need conditioning but are still due a clean every free months. Use your clean microfibre cloth with guitar cleaner to wipe away any grime from the 'board that may shorten the life of your strings.

I like to use MusicNomad's Guitar Detailer, because it can also be used on satin and matte body finishes too, plus its anti-static formula helps to repel dust and is has UV protectants to help sun damage for those summer days when your guitar is sitting on the stand.

• For more information on MusicNomad guitar maintenance and cleaning products, check out musicnomadcare.com, Thomann and Sweetwater.

By the time Stevie Wonder released Superstition at the end of 1972, the former child prodigy had solidified himself as a songwriter and performer of significant importance.

Right before the release, a string of other notable songs which included the invigorating Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours) and the sparkling My Cherie Amour were blazing new ground for the former Motown star.

In Wonder’s growing canon, traditional soul arrangement tropes were giving way to fresh approaches and more expansive instrumentation. Namely, this was offered by the Rhodes electric piano, Hohner Clavinet and of course, the hi-tech sounds of synthesizers.

Superstition is taken from the album Talking Book - one of many classic albums by Stevie. In a recent poll conducted by the BBC, Superstition was voted the most popular Stevie tune, quite an accolade for a song that rubs shoulders with so many other classics, scattered across the decades.

Despite being signed to Motown, it was around this period that Stevie began to assert more artistic control over his work. He was the driving force, but had the help of a couple of key industry figures.

Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil became Stevie’s production team. Both were technically adept and highly capable recording engineers.

Malcolm was the more musically-inclined, while Bob was an exceptionally talented sound designer and programmer, which was just as well, as the fourth member of the team wasn’t so much a musician… more a synthetic entity!

TONTO was an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra - a massive, custom-built multi-timbral and polyphonic synthesizer system, which integrated elements and instruments from Moog, ARP, Oberheim and EMS, along with many others.

It was a unique, one-of-a-kind system which was extensively used on much of Stevie’s output from this era, under the guidance of Bob and Malcolm.

“Stevie came in and we showed him the instrument [TONTO] and he put his hands all over it,” Bob recalled in a lengthy interview with Anthony Marinelli. “And then he started trying to play chords on it and he said ‘Malcolm! Bob! What’s wrong with this instrument? It only plays one note at a time!’"

After explaining that the version of TONTO that Wonder was playing was monophonic, Margouleff says, “Stevie got it in a second. We started recording that weekend - we recorded like 15 or 16 songs. We went completely bonkers.”

The sessions for Superstition took place at Electric Lady studios in New York. Formerly a facility co-curated by Jimi Hendrix (before his death in 1970), Electric Lady was designed to be an artist-led environment; the perfect space for unfettered musical creativity.

Also in town was guitar legend Jeff Beck, who was keen to make good on a deal with his label CBS.

“I said I loved Stevie's stuff, so they [CBS] quietly broke it to him that I was interested in doing something together, and he was really receptive. The original agreement was that he'd write me a song, and in return, I'd play on his album, and that's where Superstition came in,” Beck was quoted as saying in The Guitar Greats by Stuart Grundy and John Tobler.

“They met each other face-to-face in the studio,” recalled Margouleff. “Stevie said ‘if you play on my [new] record [Beck would end up playing guitar on Lookin' for Another Pure Love] I’ll give you a song.’ And first off he was going to give him Superstition, which had already been recorded.”

Contrary to Margouleff’s recollection that the song had already been recorded, Jeff Beck remembered that he himself was present during the song’s initial creation, and was in fact pivotal to its birth;

"One day I was sitting at the drum kit, which I love to play when nobody's around, doing this beat," Beck was quoted as saying in Jeff Beck: Crazy Fingers. "Stevie came kinda boogieing into the studio: 'Don't stop.' 'Ah, c'mon, Stevie,' I can't play the drums.' Then the lick came out: Superstition. That was my song, in return for Talking Book. I thought, 'He's given me the riff of the century.'"

Recording the studio take of Superstition relied on a setup that included the aforementioned TONTO, a Rhodes, a Clavinet and drum kit in the live room, along with an open ‘hot-mic’, so that multi-instrumentalist Stevie could quickly and easily go from one instrument to another, which was conducive to speedy multi-tracking.

The beat went down first - and relatively quickly. Stevie's drumming style could be described as a little freer than contemporary studio drummers, but even so, his sense of time and rhythm allowed him to record without the use of a click track. Once complete, the bass part was added, supplied by a Moog synthesizer.

This raises an interesting question, from the perspective of instrumental performance. As any bass player who has to regularly play Stevie Wonder tunes will attest, many of his classics are recorded in keys which are less helpful to guitarists and bass players. There are a couple of reasons for this. In the case of Superstition, Stevie worked in the key of Eb minor - one semitone below the lowest note on a standard 4-string bass.

This may have been partly to do with the range of Stevie's voice, which was capable of producing effortlessly high vocal lines. However, as we all know, Stevie is visually impaired, and his ability to feel the black notes on a keyboard also influenced his choice of key.

Another classic example is I Wish which, much like Superstition, adopts a keyboard/Rhodes riff which is also centred completely around Eb minor.

If you wanted to choose a demonstration track for the Hohner Clavinet, you would be hard-pushed to find a better example than Superstition.

Apart from the drum intro, and the repeated Eb bass, the opening Clavinet line introduces an infamous and highly identifiable riff. It's no coincidence that it is wholly reliant upon the black notes on the keyboard, being based around the Eb pentatonic minor scale.

However, once the main riff is heard for the first time, Stevie introduces further Clavinet lines, which work to compliment the main riff.

There has always been some debate about exactly how many Clavinet lines are being used at one time - but it's at least three (possibly more!) If you listen closely to the recording, you can hear the Clav’s spacing in the stereo spectrum, along with the use of effects. There’s extensive use of wah pedal, alongside delays and reverberation.

Analysing Superstition in conventional song form prevents challenges, as it’s open to interpretation.

Given that the opening lyric of the song is “Very superstitious…’, do we consider this the chorus?

Our inclination is to think of it more as a series of verses. There are plenty of hooks, but anything we might call a conventional chorus is missing. This unlikely form is perhaps something that many a casual listener hasn't noted before, as it takes absolutely nothing away from the overall makeup and impact of the song.

During the first eight bars of each verse, the instrumentation and arrangement remains fairly static, but once we reach the second eight bars of each verse, things get a little more enthusiastic and involved on the playing front.

The bassline changes, moving away from its sedentary and repeated Eb, to a full-on classic line which is echoed, to a large degree, by the horn section consisting of trumpet and tenor saxophone.

The horns are bright and exuberant, complete with flourishes and trills at high-points of phrases.

Under normal circumstances, doubling between horns and bass might not be such a great idea, but thanks to the extended interplay between the Clavinets, the bass and horn combo provides amazing spirit, in the way that a horn line can so often lift a song.

After four repetitions of the horn/bass riff (8 bars) the song finally switches chords, but beware, because this short bridge section is often played incorrectly.

The first chord we hear moves up to the dominant chord of Bb7, but it is the next chord that is often misheard, being a chord of B7 flat5, not the more obvious and mistaken B7.

The sequence returns to Bb7, before dropping to A7 and Ab7, before finishing the section with a chord of Bb alt - this is another popular Stevie chordal device, where he plays a straight major chord, but raises the fifth by one semitone, hence this chord includes the notes Bb, D and F# (also known as an augmented chord.

Returning to the main Clavinet riff, the song settles back into its groove, before commencing the second verse, but not before the horns have provided another classic linking riff line, which moves downward in pitch, and employs the technique known as a ‘fall’.

This is where a horn player might play a note, and then fall off the note either quickly or slowly. In this instance, the falls are quick and sharply accentuated, punctuating through the Clavinet-based backdrop.

Later in the song, we do hear an instrumental bridge, which is based upon previous bridge content from the song, but with a slight change in the groove, as Stevie leaps over to a ride cymbal.

Whichever way we dice this up, Superstition is one of Stevie's ultimate classics. As the production team wanted to push the boundaries, they not only produced a stereo mix, but also produced a quad-mix! Apparently it sounded fantastic.

Despite its obvious brilliance, at the time Stevie didn’t quite realise he’d created such an outright classic, evidenced by the fact he was prepared to gift the song to Jeff Beck.

Whether Beck was intrinsic to its creation or not, one thing was clear - everyone around Stevie told him that he should under no circumstances let go of the song.

“The powers that be, including me and Malcolm, said, ‘Steve, you have to do this song. You cannot give this song to anybody’, Margouleff recalled. “But, in the meantime, before that happened, they did a demo of it where Jeff Beck played the drums. And when Berry Gordy heard about that, from what we hear, he said ‘Steve, don’t do that. You need to keep that song for yourself.’”

Motown pushed Wonder to release it as a single, but - as a man of principle - he still allowed Jeff Beck and his new trio, Beck, Bogert & Appice to record a version of the song and release that as the priority. Stevie would release his version as a single too, but, as he later shared, assumed that Beck would get the first shot at success with the song.

"Motown decided they wanted to release Superstition. I said Jeff wanted it, and they told me I needed a strong single in order for [Talking Book] to be successful,” Wonder said in an interview with Ben Fong-Torres. “My understanding was that Jeff would be releasing [his version of] Superstition long before I was going to finish my album. I was late giving them Talking Book. Jeff recorded Superstition in July, so I thought it would be out."

But a series of delays in the Beck camp meant that Stevie’s sublime version of his song would be the one to land on shelves first, on October 24, 1972. As lead single from Talking Book, it was well ahead of Beck's take (belatedly released in March the following year).

"He played it to Motown, and they said, 'No way is Beck getting this song, it's too good'", an understandably frosty Jeff was quoted as saying in The Guitar Greats. "They had the right to say what Stevie released at that time, I lost the song as an original."

Although a degree of bitterness ensued, Beck and Wonder would later reconcile and even duet on the song at the 25th anniversary of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

The array of plugins, synths, controllers and sequencers on the market these days offer near limitless potential. When creativity strikes, there’s no end to the roads it can lead you down.

Sadly though, alongside this comes a lot of admin, necessary preparation and potential issues, all of which can get in the way of your creativity. Unlike, say, composing a song on an acoustic guitar, where – aside from tuning and possibly changing a string – your instrument is almost always to-hand and ready to go, composing an electronic track or recording music in a DAW comes with a long list of potential pitfalls.

Whether you’re largely in-the-box or running a varied selection of hardware and outboard, the truth is that your studio has as much potential to get in the way of your creativity as it does to unlock it. Whether that’s the process of having to find, load and access the right sounds, dealing with latency or connectivity issues or struggling with an awkwardly designed or bad-sounding space.

With that in mind, we’ve collected some of the best workflow tips from our team of experts, to offer quick ideas that will help turn your studio from a hindrance to a help…

5 quick ways to get more from your studio sessions

1. Template it up

DAW templates are among the most effective ways to organise your workflow. So much time can be lost browsing and waiting for a plugin to be instantiated, and sometimes you can almost feel the excitement at a good musical idea fizzling out as you browse for a sound.

The issue for those who work with electronic music tools is that not only do we have to think about ‘the notes’, we also have to think about the sounds those notes will play, which means we’re constantly toggling between being musicians/composers and then programmers/engineers, looking for the right sounds that can do our best ideas justice.

Most musicians are prepared to compromise on the finer details of sounds until the songwriting/composing stage of their work is complete, so long as the sounds in front of them are inspiring enough to allow a good idea to be explored. Enter the template. This is a working environment for your DAW which can be tailored to your specific musical needs.

Say you’re a songwriter who likes to work chords out on the piano before recording guitar through a microphone, then entering a basic idea for a bassline via a favourite plugin and finally adding basic drum grooves via a specific library. Why would you open a blank document in your DAW each time if, almost always, you reach for these same instruments and audio tracks? Wouldn’t it be better and more time-saving to have a track saved with your specific preferences and instrument choices, so that you can have all of those sounds ready and waiting in front of you? Yes, it would.

Perhaps a better example would be a template for those composing music for picture. Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg) has switched his career from producing stadium-filling dance music to that of a film composer (his scores include Mad Max: Fury Road and Deadpool) and his Studio Time With Junkie XL series on YouTube is well worth a watch.

His composing template extends to over 1,000 tracks so every time he sits down to work, every orchestral section, with every possible articulation, in every different size of orchestral group from solo to massed orchestral players, is available.

Alongside these, he has a huge array of drum libraries (third-party ones, as well as those he’s made himself), access to a phenomenal collection of hardware synths and vast swathes of instrument plugins too. Add to this effects solutions aplenty, when he finds a sound he likes, he’s ready to place it in one or more ‘spaces’.

Now, you might be thinking, isn’t that overkill? Even the fastest computers in the world would take several minutes to load up that level of track count, so what do you do if inspiration strikes and you don’t want to drum your fingers on the table, restlessly awaiting your computer to complete the loading process just for you to have access to a single piano plugin? The solution is to make several templates to cover your assorted needs.

At the very beginning of the writing process, limiting yourself to provide momentum might be enough to allow you to get up and running quickly: perhaps just use a piano, some ensemble strings (rather than dedicated instruments for every string section) and a couple of percussive instruments.

This will be particularly effective if the instruments and effects settings within this smaller template are a pared-down version of the larger one, as translating these scratch ideas into more sophisticated ones will be more straightforward. Templates aren’t the only way to streamline your creative process but they’re among the most worthwhile.

But avoid template fatigue…

For all that we’ve advocated building templates to kickstart your creative process, it’s incumbent upon us to address the elephant in the room…

If you always work with the same template sounds, won’t that make your music dull and predictable? Of course, there’s no fixed answer to this question as it fails to take into consideration the kind of music you make and the size of template you’re intending to build. 

Let’s suppose you’ve been commissioned to write a computer game soundtrack for a hybrid ‘symphony orchestra plus electronic texture’ kind of score. Are you really going to set up every instrument of your strings, woodwind and brass instruments every time, from scratch, for every cue? That would waste a lot of time, as those instruments are going to be ‘common’ to each cue. However, the electronic textures might well vary from one cue to the next, so potentially not including a specific group of these in every cue might help keep this side of the soundtrack fresh. 

The same rules can be applied to any other kind of production. If you write electronic music and you’re working through songwriting ideas with a singer, having a ‘known’ collection of sounds in a template might well save you valuable time when a great new hook or lyrical idea needs putting down quickly. You can then abandon the template altogether when the production really starts. If the alternative is setting up every sound from scratch, templates will – at the very least – get you making music more quickly.

If you’re lazy enough not to modify or adapt each track with the bespoke choices your music needs… well maybe that says more about you than it does your template! 

2. Get organised

Searching for the right power adapter, audio connection or MIDI lead can cause an unnecessary slow down in your workflow. Or worse still, plugging all your gear in only to find there’s some kind of fault you need to find and address. Take some time to make your accessories neat and tidy!

Group your cables 

This will make fault-finding easier, allow gear to be moved and patched quicker and help reduce cable-borne noise problems. Keep cables grouped together by type (ie, audio, power, MIDI, etc) as this will make it quicker to find a particular line.

Putting some distance between types will reduce the potential for EMI problems (electro-magnetic interference), as mains cables can induce a 50Hz hum on audio cables. If mains and audio cables must cross paths for any reason, then do so at a 90° angle to minimise hum induction. 

Tidy your cabling

Use Velcro cable-ties, easy-release plastic ties or flexible trunking to keep your grouped cables together. This means that the bunches can be arranged to allow for maximum floor space and minimal cable treading. 

Save money by getting lengths of sticky-backed Velcro and making your own loops. Don’t bunch cables with electrical or gaffer/duct tape as they leave an annoying sticky residue after only a day or so – only use tape as a temporary measure.

Cable storage

Having organised and tidied your installation cabling, why not treat those patch and instrument leads to some respect, instead of leaving them in tight coils and tangles on the floor? Most music gear outlets sell cable hangers, but you can also make your own by adapting any number of shelving brackets, coat racks and long screws wrapped in foam and cloth.

Start a ‘faulty’ box 

Every dodgy cable or faulty stompbox should go in this box so you can either repair it or recycle its components, instead of putting it back in the collection only to disappoint you again. Don’t put up with a cable that needs a wiggle when you use it – put it in the box now and rid yourself of its time-sapping ways. Every now and then recycle/repair the contents or sell it as a job lot on eBay.

Organise your gear

Identify any items that you don’t use and consider selling or swapping them – space is always at a premium. Are there items that you don’t use because they’re not wired up? If it’s not hooked/racked up, it’s rare that you’ll use it. If you can’t bear to part with it, then hook it up to the patchbay or set it up ready for later use – you never know when it might provide just the right sound or treatment.

Access and elbow room

Spend some time considering the layout of your equipment with regard to workflow. Make sure that items you use regularly are within arm’s reach from your seat and that the controls and displays do not require you to bend and stretch too much. Try to arrange gear so that nothing else needs to be moved before you can work with it. If something is loose enough that pressing buttons, turning dials or plugging into it makes it move (ie requires one hand to hold it in place) get it racked up or secured in some way.

Buying stick-on rubber foot pads can prevent slippage on work surfaces. Use a lot of stompboxes? Why not have a go at sticking some Velcro (hook side) to their undersides and stick the opposing strips (loop side) to a wooden board so that they can be kept patched together and placed anywhere.

3. Set up a patchbay

In our modern world, analogue patchbays might seem a little like antiquated tech. Certainly, as multiple input interfaces become more affordable – or ones that can be easily expanded using ADAT – you might think there’s little need for something as apparently old school as a patchbay. There are, obviously, some musicians who will have absolutely no need for one.

It goes without saying that if you’re entirely in-the-box, or you’re confident your audio input needs won’t exceed that of your interface, then there’s little point. But for those with a growing collection of hardware instruments or those wanting to make use of hardware effects, patching up can be an affordable route to I/O flexibility. Here’s why…

Organise 

A well set up patchbay (ie all equipment I/Os connect to it and are labelled accordingly) will save time when routing signals as you will no longer go fumbling around the back of your rack (or gear pile). It will save wear and tear on the connections of your equipment and experimentation with routing options, thus making the most of what you’ve got. The patchbay centralises the grounding of your gear and reduces the potential for ground loop noise problems – where loops occur a ground ‘lifted’ patch cord can be used to alleviate the problem.

Connections

Most patchbays also feature user-configurable signal flow options referred to as ‘normalling’. A ‘normalled’ patchbay will feature a permanent connection between the top and bottom row connections that is broken when a jack is inserted into either top or bottom row sockets. This will, for instance, keep a mixing desk channel insert send and return connected until they are routed into an external processor.

A ‘half normalled’ patch restricts this signal breakage to the bottom row only so that, for instance, the insert send can be routed to another destination while keeping the flow uninterrupted. Patchbays can also be configured to be ‘non-normalled’ so that there is no connection between top and bottom rows without the use of a patch cord.

Labelling 

As a final note, it might be obvious but a patchbay is only ever as good as its labelling – you do have to know where everything is, otherwise it’s useless. Having said that, the patchbay ‘lucky dip’ can produce some unexpectedly creative results, though often you’ll just get silence or a slight hum.

4. Saving and mining sounds

You’ll often hear it said that you should record everything you do in the studio, and save any project or ideas, even if you hit a creative dead end. This is definitely good advice; even if something doesn’t inspire you in the moment, you never know when a forgotten idea might gel perfectly with a new project. Devising a good system of saving and labelling ideas – whether as DAW projects or bounced audio – is a must-do for maximising your workflow. 

But how should you actually engage with these old ideas? One of the most interesting ways in which you can bring new levels of creativity and originality to your workflow is to find new ways of thinking about sound. Most of the time, if we’re working with software plugins and instruments, we tend to think about making new sounds in fairly ‘traditional’ ways: dial up an instrument, browse presets, make tweaks or build sounds from scratch and then play them into our DAWs, usually via MIDI keyboards. But this does tend to lead us along familiar musical avenues, as the muscle memory in our hands makes us reach for the same kinds and shapes of chords. 

One way around this is to turn your creative brain upside down, so that rather than it feeling responsible for creating sound in this way, you can imagine instead that a huge lump of it exists and it’s your job to ‘sound mine’ it, chiselling away at it until it becomes your own. So instead of reaching for a MIDI keyboard, find a way to get a chunk of promising audio into your workstation and then start to probe at it, looking out for sonically rich bits.

Listen for little moments where something odd happens, or where a surprising ‘pitch’ emerges out of something noisy. The moment might only last for a moment and yet, with timestretching, pitchshifting, looping, effects processing and more besides – granular tools like Output’s Portal, a favourites of ours – you can take a ‘rough diamond’ and mine it into something original, new and entirely yours, without a note having been pressed on your keyboard.

The beauty of working this way is that, because the ‘sonic details’ which catch your ear will be different from one day to the next, the range of potential music you could make as a sound miner will be correspondingly diverse. Start with a different chunk of sound and you’ll make completely different choices. So once you’ve explored the ideas and techniques we showcase, go your own way from your own starting point. 

5. Stay updated

In order to hit the ground running during your creative studio sessions, it’s important to set aside time to tick off those non-creative admin chores that can otherwise get in the way and cause you to lose momentum. One important such chore is to ensure your gear is updated to the latest version. This is obviously most relevant to software, where the latest update to a DAW or plugin is likely to include important bug fixes and workflow improvements, but may also add new features, sounds or presets.

Some software applications will check for updates automatically, but others require you to open up an additional update application – such as Arturia’s Software Centre – or even such on the developer’s website manually. It’s worth setting aside time to check that all of your most used apps are up-to-date.

This goes for hardware gear too; while software updates are a common consideration, many of us overlook the benefits of checking our hardware is running the latest firmware. As with software, doing so can help avoid bugs, but in modern times firmware updates often bring new features to instruments and controllers. Take time to read the release notes for each firmware update; exploring the possibilities of a new feature or capability could inspire you for your next session.

One caveat to all of this is that you should pick your moments for OS updates. While updating your operating system is a necessary part of digital existence, rushing into it can cause issues; particularly for Mac users. Hold off a few weeks to make sure your DAW, interface and plugins are compatible with any new OS. And don’t even consider making an update in the midst of an important project. 

The popularity of British synth-pop outfit Talk Talk was something of a slow burn. Despite a constant stream of albums throughout the 1980s, the group seemed to be continually denied the kind of success that they hungered for. They would, of course, later be chronicled as a shining creative force - an inventive alternative to the more ephemeral synth-pop of the era.

The title track to the band’s second album, It’s My Life, was released as a single in January 1984. Surprisingly, this extremely effective song reached a meagre 46 in the UK chart, but elsewhere, more promising results proved that Talk Talk's work had legs.

In the US, It's My Life struck a notable chord, and reached number 31 on the Billboard Chart, their highest position to date. The track - and parent album - did quite well in Europe, too. But, the UK maintained a frosty disposition toward a band it was difficult to pigeon-hole.

It was released again in Britain the following year, but this time only managed to climb to a depressingly undeserved 95 in the UK chart. Britain, clearly, wasn't having it.

It took the release of Talk Talk’s greatest hits album Natural History in 1990 for It’s My Life to finally gain traction on home soil, peaking at 13 in the UK chart. This was largely thanks to a number of DJs realising that it had the same BPM (126) as many club favourites, ensuring it was more widely played at nightspots across the country.

Further recognition came much later, with the beloved No Doubt cover of the song.

Gwen Stefani's vibrant vocals and on-trend pop-punk arrangement helped thrust the song to an incredible number 10 in the US chart in 2003 - exposing an entirely new market to the genius of this Talk Talk gem.

Talk Talk were always a little bit different; despite the bemused incredulity of publications such as Smash Hits, who described Talk Talk as “…yet another synthesised pop group, complete with singer who wants to be Bryan Ferry…” Talk Talk were much more than another chart-hungry pop conceit. They drew influence from a number of creative quarters, and had considerable production and songwriting chops.

The group’s perennially shy lead singer and songwriter Mark Hollis initially studied psychology at university for 18 months, before drawing the conclusion that the course wasn't for him.

His interest in the complexities of human behaviour was not wasted though, and recurred as a theme throughout his work as a musician. It’s My Life is a good example. Its lyric stressed the importance of retaining hold on individuality when in a particularly angst-ridden relationship.

As with Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, It's My Life has become something of a post break-up staple. Best belted out at the top of your lungs after several large glasses of wine…

Tim Friese-Greene produced the record, and would eventually become a fully-signed up member of the band, co-writing many further Talk Talk cuts.

The stylised playing of bassist Paul Webb was a signature component of Talk Talk’s output, predominantly through the use of fretless bass. Playing fretless was a fashionably unique calling card for bass players such as Mick Karn from Japan, and Pino Palladino, who was a regular band member for Paul Young.

Drummer Lee Harris completed the band, known for playing both acoustic and Simmons kits, although drum machines were often used in production too.

Synths and tech infiltrate and influence It’s My Life in a number of ways. There is plenty of Roland Jupiter-8, with other probably instruments being the Oberheim OB-X, Fairlight CMI and TR-808 drum machine.

Despite being often labelled as a synth-pop outfit, synths had begun to make Hollis’s blood run cold. He became more vocally anti-synth over the ensuing years.

“You see, when we made It's My Life, we had to rely a lot on synthesisers,” Mark Hollis said in an interview with fan website, Within Without. “Now, I do not accept that we are a synthesizer band. Synthesizers mean electronic things to me, and I don't think we have any sort of relation to that. We used synthesizers on that album because from an economic point of view it was the only way we could do it."

He was even more forthright in a 1986 interview with Electronics and Music Maker; “In terms of the first two albums and the live field, synths are simply an economic measure. Beyond that, I absolutely hate synthesizers. To me, the only thing that was ever good about them was the fact that they gave you large areas of sound to work with; apart from that they're really bad - horrible. I can take their existence from a live point of view now, but if they didn't exist, I'd be delighted.”

Back to the song itself, and beyond the electronic elements, there are also plenty of live and acoustic additions within the track too, provided by guests Robbie McIntosh on guitar and Morris Pert on percussion.

We can also hear Yamaha’s CP-80 stage piano, which was a firm staple for pianistic output during this period, largely thanks to its convenience when used live or in the studio.

One interesting facet of the song is that it begins on an eighth-note/quaver anacrusis. This entry from the outset immediately throws the listener off-balance, before quickly adjusting as the 1st bar of the song settles into a regular backbeat, with the snare on two and four.

We've already mentioned the beautifully complex bass lines that form part of Talk Talk’s DNA, with It’s My Life being a shining example. It also offers some twists and turns, if we consider its position against the underlying harmony.

We are going to think of the harmony in a relatively pianistic way, although there are other relevant ways of describing the same chord sequence, particularly if you prefer guitar symbols.

Firstly, the song opens with a chord of Eb major - not the most obvious chord for many commercial tracks, given that it lies a semitone lower than a guitar's home key.

It’s a less obvious choice for fret-based musicians, although popular with keyboard-based musicians. We hear Eb major for two bars, before shifting to a chord of Db major and Ab major (add6) for a bar each, although the movement between chords is handled very fluidly

When we hear the chord of Db, the chord moves downward by a tone, while the bass part moves up to the note F, placing the chord of Db in a 1st inversion, before rising to Ab for the final chord of the 4-bar sequence.

You remember the anacrusis at the beginning? This continues with each chordal entry, providing a push into each bar as the chord changes, it’s a regular move in the jazz and funk domain, but feel incongruous here.

We also hear a repeated entry from a lead synth, using the notes F to Eb, although this entry also throws us off, timing-wise, with the last entry in sequence occurring earlier than in previous instances.

One of the unique twists in this song occurs at the pre-chorus bridge. After the final chord of Ab in the verse, there is a preparatory dominant chord of E major which is held for 2 bars, before modulating to A minor for the bridge.

Although this has nothing to do with our previous home of Eb, it sets us up nicely for the following seismic harmonic shift.

We shift to the next series of pre-chorus chords, which are held for two beats at a time; Am, F/A, G, C. We land on a chord F, which is held for six beats, with two further beats shifting to a chord of G, before the sequence is repeated.

Much like the structure to the verse, many of the chords are ‘pushed’, using further anacrusis.

There is an obvious similarity between the pre-chorus bridge chords, and the chorus, with the repeated use of Am, Dm, G and C, with the first and third chords being pushed, leaving the second and fourth chords to land on the third beat of each bar.

At the very end of the chorus structure, which repeats to enforce the hook, we land on an eventual chord of Fm for a full two bars, before heading back to the verse.

There is something incredibly endearing about the music underpinning this song; the shift between the key of the verse and chorus is substantial, modulating by an interval known as a tritone, (AKA the ‘Devil’s Interval’!)

It's an unrelated harmonic shift, and under normal circumstances, one that would make us feel uncomfortable, but it is handled so seamlessly in this context, you barely notice the switch.

If you have ever taken the time to look this song up in video form, you will doubtless have stumbled across the bizarre visual accompaniment, featuring all sorts of wildlife, alongside a less-than-happy Mark Hollis.

As a form of protest against lip-syncing, the band decided to create a video which could be played as an accompaniment to just about any music track in existence.

Directed by Tim Pope, the video made use of existing material from the BBC wildlife documentary Life on Earth, as well as new footage of Hollis standing in front of animals at London Zoo.

Animated composite overlays included ‘virtual’ tape over Hollis’s mouth, as well as squiggly lines and even animated sperm. EMI insisted that a second video was made, in which the band mimed very badly, intentionally highlighting the banality of the process!

John Oates has reiterated a claim made by his former bandmate Daryl Hall that Michael Jackson took the groove from their 1981 hit I Can’t Go For That and used it as the template for his own Billie Jean, which was released a year later.

Speaking in a new episode of the Rock & Roll High School podcast, Oates says: “[Michael] came to one of our shows in LA and he said he liked to dance to it in front of his mirror in his bedroom. You can hear, he obviously wanted to do something like that for Billie Jean and he did his own version of that groove.”

This comes after Hall said something similar to Mix way back in 2006. “No question about it,” he noted of I Can’t Go For That’s influence on Billie Jean. “Michael Jackson once said directly to me that he hoped I didn’t mind that he copped that groove. That’s OK; it’s something we all do. [Eddie] Van Halen told me that he copied the synth part from Kiss On My List and used it in Jump. I don’t have a problem with that at all.”

Hall repeated the claim in 2018 in an interview with The Guardian, adding that the conversation took place during the We Are The World recording session.

“I got talking to Michael Jackson and he said: “I hope you don’t mind. I stole the groove from I Can’t Go for That for my song Billie Jean,’” Hall remembered. “I told him: ‘Oh Michael, what do I care? You did it very differently.’”

“I can’t say I’d ever noticed but he was quite insistent. Of course, I went away and listened to Billie Jean. And sure enough, it was our groove.

Discussing the origins of that groove in the Mix interview, Hall said: “Remember the old Roland CompuRhythm box? I turned to the Rock and Roll 1 preset, sat down at a Korg organ that happened to be lying there and started to play this bassline that was coming to me.”

This classic pop moment could easily have been lost, though, had it not been for a quick-thinking engineer who must have realised that Hall was onto something.

“It’s the old recording studio story: The engineer heard what I was doing and turned on the tape machine,” Hall confirmed. “Good thing, because I’m the kind of person who will come up with an idea and forget it. The chords came together in about 10 minutes, and then I heard a guitar riff, which I asked John, who was sitting in the booth, to play.”

Sadly, Hall and Oates’ relationship now appears to be broken beyond repair, with the two men trading barbs in the press after Hall took legal action against Oates in a bid to prevent him from selling his share of the duo’s publishing rights. This case has seemingly now been settled, but there’s no sense that it will lead to a reconciliation.

Discussing the situation in his Rock & Roll High School episode, though, Oates suggests that he’s trying to stay positive about it all.

“It’s always bittersweet when a relationship falls by the wayside, of course. But look at the legacy that Daryl and I leave behind. We left a musical legacy that very few people could match. You know what, that’s pretty good in a lifetime I would say.”

Whether you’re a bedroom beatmaker or a top-tier songwriter, you’ve probably experienced writer’s block at some point. Inspiration is a finite resource, and it’s not always there when you need it most, so it helps to have a few time-tested techniques in your back pocket to get things moving when you’re stuck in a creative rut.

That’s the idea behind Session Cards, a new venture from Tommy Rush, a songwriter and producer with credits on music from The Weeknd, Madonna and Travis Scott.

Pitched as a “hit-making system” that promises to “change how you write records”, Session Cards is a pack of 144 cards, each one displaying a different “session move”, a strategy that’s intended to help you move through a creative impasse and send you on your way towards finishing a track. "I spent my entire career searching for this, and it didn't exist, so I built it for myself," Rush says.

Organized into 11 categories, the cards offer advice tailored to a variety of creative contexts, intended to solve common problems that arise during a studio session. Categories like Chorus, Melody and Lyrics are targeted at specific stages of the songwriting process, while the Rescue cards act as an “emergency kit” for when “the session is dying”.

The Lyrics card previewed on Session Cards’ website, for example, offers up a suggestion for when “the song has too many ideas”. “Finish: This song is about ____,” the card reads. “Every line must support that sentence. If a line doesn’t support it, cut it.”

Another card titled Motif Recycle provides a solution for when “the song feels like separate parts”: “Steal a tiny melody fragment from the chorus. Hide it earlier (intro, verse, background). Bring it back louder later. The listener won’t know why the song feels like ‘one piece’ – but they’ll feel it.”

If this all sounds rather familiar, then that’s because Brian Eno had a similar idea all the way back in 1975. Eno’s Oblique Strategies are a pack of creative suggestions designed to help artists break through mental roadblocks and approach their work from a new angle. (They’re also a third of the price.)

How are Session Cards different, you ask? “Where Oblique Strategies offer a philosophy, Session Cards give you the exact move a platinum producer would make right now,” the website reads. “Oblique Strategies are abstract suggestions for any creative field. Session Cards are specific, executable moves built for music production and songwriting on professional records.”

While Session Cards may well have some reasonable advice to offer songwriters and producers, we can’t help but feel a twinge of skepticism when judging their usefulness against their optimistic price point: a pack of Session Cards will set you back $149, and that’s a 25% discount on the price they’ll go up to after “Edition 001” sells out.

The Session Cards website justifies their exorbitant price by pointing to the fact that studio time can cost anywhere from $50 to $500 an hour, reminding us that “one dead session” could waste more than the price of a pack: “Pull a card, the whole room pivots, and the deck pays for itself in minutes,” it says, reassuring us that the cards come in a “premium rigid display box” and have a “studio-grade finish” that “holds up in actual sessions”.

“This is information I would have given anything to have when I was starting out,” Rush says. “I was going to keep it private forever. The producers and writers I work with saw me use it and wouldn't let it go. Eventually enough of them convinced me it should be in every room. It's the cheat code.”

While we’re inclined to take anything that promises to offer the “cheat code” to writing hit songs with a substantial pinch of salt, Session Cards is an intriguing concept, and much like Eno's Oblique Strategies, they could provide a helpful nudge in the right direction when you're feeling creatively stalled. Whether that nudge is worth $149 is up to you.

Find out more on the Session Cards website.

Kids with perfect pitch are having a moment. A week after Jay-Z casually dropped into conversation that his daughter, Blue Ivy, has it, Jennifer Hudson has been speaking to viral 8-year-old musician Lake Anthony about his note identification talent.

In fact, it seems that Lake is something of a musical prodigy. Inspired by Charlie Puth – more on him in a moment – he’s been entertaining social media users with his guide to making a beat using chopped up samples from the phrase ‘water please’ (among many other videos), and he’s been playing drums since the age of 4 and singing since he was 5.

Lake also has synesthesia, which means he’s able to ‘hear’ colours – Pharrell Williams is also blessed with this gift – but it’s his perfect pitching that Hudson was most interested in when she had him on her chat show. “I can identify any note,” Lake told her. “Like, somebody can play a note. I'll say what it is or you can ask me what a note is and I'll sing it.”

Which brings us to Charlie Puth, who also has perfect pitch. So, what would little Lake ask him if he met him?

“I would probably say, I would do a perfect pitch battle with you,” he said. “And then I would also say, ‘If I win that perfect pitch battle, I get to open for you and if you win, you get to open for me.’” The lad’s got some confidence, for sure.

You can probably guess what happened next. Yep, out came Charlie Puth to take up the challenge. First up, he played a selection of chords on the piano, all of which Lake identified correctly. Next, the roles were reversed, and Puth was able to name all the chords that Lake played.

So, who won? It felt like an honourable draw, but we’re guessing that Puth would be happy to give the flowers to his young challenger in this case. Expect to see him opening a Puth show soon, and then ruling the musical world in about 10 years time.

Puth is in the midst of promoting his new album, Whatever’s Clever!, which features the combined talents of yacht rock legends Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins on one song. He also talked to Hudson about his popular YouTube channel, which serves as a useful education resource for anyone who wants to learn more about music and production.

“I want to inspire people to open up their phone and open up GarageBand and make that song that they have in their head that they're being told that they can't make,” says Puth.

Finalising the last few bars of a project or adding those all-important finishing touches to a mixdown can be an intimidating prospect for all of us, from those at the beginning of their journey into music production to artists with hundreds of releases under their belt.

The question of when exactly to wrap it up when you’re building a track is one that’s puzzled artists of all stripes, from bedroom beatmakers to hit producers, and each one has different methods for knowing how to make this crucial decision effectively.

We’ve spoken to more than a few experienced music-makers over the years, asking each artist how they conclude their creative process and decide when a track is well and truly finished. Here’s what they had to say…

1. Anthony Naples

“I read this in something Kieran [Four Tet] said in an interview. He said that what makes him a producer is that he can decide when something's done. I feel like that was really ingrained in me early on. Just because you might think, this is too simple, or this doesn't look the way that other people's music looks on the screen… but it's like, no, just listen to it! Does it sound like a piece of music or not? Okay, if it does, then it's done. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that.”

2. Kelly Lee Owens

“Although I’ll often towards the end go on very deep in terms of automation, and nudging things around, I know the place I’m trying to get to. I know when to say when, and that’s usually when the flow is right, when I can listen back and not need to change anything. I think that comes with a trusting of self.”

3. Hermitude

”When you listen back and you’re scrounging for ideas to put in it, you’re done. If I can’t hear anything, time to let go. Completing is usually the hardest bit, but it’s a nice vibe not to try and over-cook things. When things are a bit rough around the edges, it’s more interesting for the listener, rather than a fully-polished piece. People like to hear your humanness.”

4. Christian Smith

"So much time is wasted by producers that have tons of half-finished productions. At the end of the day, one finished song is better than 100 half finished! I have often been in situations where I've been listening to the same loop for over 10 hours and ended up not knowing if the track is good enough.

"One way I usually overcome this is by making the song all in one session and mixing it down the next day. If it passes the 'day after' test, it's usually good to go, and mixing down tracks with fresh ears is obviously the way to do it.”

5. Lone

“The track is finished when I can listen to it without wanting to change anything. I often fall into the trap of finishing a track, exporting it and thinking I'm done with it only to then listen back the next day and realise there's slight tweaks needed - or sometimes whole changes! I guess I'm quite an impatient person so I always want to finish the track and move on to something new. There's something about catching a vibe quickly and then moving on which has always appealed to me.”

6. Mafro

“A track is finished once I can listen through it without getting bored. There are only so many arrangements that work, so if you’re not sure just reference another song you like. If you are adding things and they are either unnoticeable or making the song worse, that is a sign you’re probably done.”

7. Haider

“The saying ‘art is never finished, only abandoned’ is ever so true, especially in the age of computer music where you can constantly revise and re-edit things. In the past it’s been really difficult for me to know when a track is finished as I can get stuck in the mindset of ‘just one more element’ forever. It’s for this reason I tend to bounce my tracks off people whose opinions I really trust to listen to a track and tell me if they feel it sounds finished or not.”

8. Mason Maynard

“I never really know when a track is finished as most of the time I’m trying to expand and make it as best I can. But for me I feel like they ‘get away’ – I may play them out and if the reaction is good then I can live with letting that one go.”

9. Claude Vonstroke

“For me it’s finished when I start adding things that do not affect the quality. At this point I usually turn the other direction and mute a few tracks to see if I can actually subtract some things. It’s always good to do subtraction exercises as well as addition exercises… ask yourself, what do you really need to be in there?”

10. Noga Erez

“It's the big question. My answer at the moment is: ‘deadline’! Our nature is to continue trying to perfect a song; that can go on forever. It’s because, really, finishing something creative is always about cutting a process in the flash. We think we can do better but at some point we just do different. Even if you don’t have people setting deadlines for you, setting them for yourself is important. It makes the process itself better too. Knowing something had an ending puts everything in perspective.”

11. Objekt

“Once I’m past the sketching stage and throwing ideas at the canvas I’ll always open up the bounce from the last session, listen to it – ideally in iTunes, make notes and timestamp whatever needs changing. That could be something as major as getting rid of a whole section to a new bassline or something minor like there’s a little bit too much frequency on the snare.

“Once I have half a page of notes on what I want to change, I’ll go into the DAW project and be pretty strict about only changing the stuff I’ve written down. Once that’s done, I’ll bounce another copy and start the whole process again until I get to a point where the notes are essentially negligible. Then I know the track is done.”

12. Morcheeba

“The point when I want to top myself is usually a good indicator that the track is finished. It is best not to overwork things; it’s either good or it isn’t.”

Having Beyoncé and Jay-Z as parents, there was always a pretty good chance that the couple’s eldest daughter, Blue Ivy, would have some kind of musical ability, and that would seem to be the case.

In an interview with British GQ, Jay-Z has revealed that as well as being a singer, actress and dancer, 14-year-old Blue Ivy has also been developing her piano chops.

“Blue is a crazy pianist, but she won’t let us get her a teacher,” he says. “She doesn’t want it to be a job.”

There’s more, though: “She has perfect pitch,” says Jay-Z. “If she hears a song, she’ll be like, ‘Play it again,’ and then she’ll teach herself.”

The ability to be able to identify or sing any note without reference is a rare gift; it’s estimated that only around one in 10,000 people have it. While some consider it to be a learnable skill in young children, and you can teach yourself ‘relative pitch’ via ear training, perfect pitch is generally viewed as something that you either have or you don’t.

Jay-Z certainly seems to believe that, when it comes to identifying songs by ear, his daughter has an innate gift – “That’s just talent, she doesn’t work at that,” he says – but he also praises the work ethic and determination that led to her playing a starring dancing role on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour.

“She worked at this, and it makes me proud that she fought for something that she really wanted to do,” he says. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to get her off that stage now.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Jay-Z discussed the partnership that his company, Roc Nation, has with the NFL to produce the Super Bowl Halftime Show. He reflected in particular on the 2025 performance from Kendrick Lamar, and the pride he took in him being the first solo rap headliner.

He also praises Lamar’s decision to take a risk: “He could have made it a little easier on himself. The artistic choice to play the new album was brave in front of that big of an audience.”

“I had high respect for him already,” he continues, “but, like, even more my respect was like, ‘He’s really about what he says he’s about.’”

Inevitably, Jay-Z was also asked about the ongoing rap feud between Lamar and Drake, which culminated in Lamar’s hugely successful 2024 diss track, Not Like Us. While accepting that battling is part of hip-hop culture, he suggests that the time may have come to park the public squabbling.

“We love the excitement and I love the sparring, but in this day and age, there’s so much negative stuff that comes with it that you almost wish it didn’t happen,” he argues. “Now, people that like Kendrick hate Drake, no matter what he makes. It’s like an attack on his character. I don’t know if I love that. I don’t know if it’s helpful to our growth where the fallout lands, especially on social media.”

Countless electronic musicians suffer from getting stuck in a loop – endlessly starting ideas but never seeing them through. Today, we’re here to help you break free of writer’s block and finish more projects than ever before.

For all of their flexibility and power, our modern, computer-centred studio environments can often work to hinder productivity as much as drive it. The sheer scope and choice can be overwhelming.

We have access to millions of potential sounds, software recreations of practically any piece of gear you can think of, an unlimited well of samples and sources of inspiration – all of which can be endlessly edited, saved in multiple reworked versions, recalled instantly. It’s easy to get overloaded with choices and information; and that’s before we even consider the distracting peril that comes from constantly being connected to the internet and social media.

These are just some of the factors that can result in the infamous ‘writer’s block’. It’s not a condition that exclusively affects music makers, but it can hinder us – particularly solo producers – in some specific and unique ways. Symptoms include overworking a simple musical idea into an overblown mess, abandoning projects that are 80-90% finished to start something new, or cold sweats and sleepless nights at the mere prospect of turning an eight-bar loop into a six-minute record.

Some musicians are lucky enough to only experience these struggles on occasion, whereas for others it becomes an endless cycle, preventing them from completing anything musically worthwhile. How can we train ourselves to break out of this loop and become the sort of artist that naturally develops unfinished sketches into full-blown releases? How can we develop a workflow that lets us naturally turn our basic ideas into satisfying arrangements?

In this article, we’re going to take a look at some of the problems preventing you from finishing music and discuss strategies to help overcome them.

Why is it so hard to finish a track?

There are certain conditions specific to electronic music-making that can make writer’s block a particular problem. To understand why, it’s important to consider that the act of making music has changed dramatically over recent decades.

Back in the earlier days of recorded music – and still commonplace throughout a lot of rock and pop – multiple professionals would be involved in the creative process, each focusing on a specific role.

The artist(s) themselves would channel all of their efforts into writing the song, a studio engineer would be responsible for tracking, someone else might mix the separate tracks together, and a final person would master the record and deliver the finished product. Potentially all overseen by one or more ‘executive’ producers. Each individual could fully concentrate on their assigned task without deviation, whether it be creative or technical.

For a lot of modern music-makers, these separate roles have now merged into one. Solitary individuals try to tackle each part of the music-making process within the same studio session, working on every element of a track from writing through to sound design, mixing, arrangements, mastering and even the artwork and logistics of a release.

There’s an undeniable freedom to all of this, and it certainly allows many creative artists to shine in a way that could well be throttled out of them by the traditional world of major studios and record labels, but this jack-of-all-trades approach can mean that we’re constantly interrupting the creative side of our brain (responsible for generating ideas, composing, jamming and arranging) by allowing the logical/technical side of our consciousness to take over.

To overcome this conflict, be aware of your own habits and divide sessions into focused ‘jobs’: for example, if you’re creatively jamming and composing, don’t try to EQ and compress each sound there and then. Likewise, set aside a dedicated mix session once creative tasks are complete. Compartmentalise sessions and you’ll be able to reach the frame of mind needed for that task.

The challenge of solo creativity comes down to more than simply getting distracted, though. A creative process that involves multiple people also allows us to respond to ideas in a way that’s hard to do by yourself. It’s far easier to bounce ideas between two or more people than it is to endlessly work on them by yourself. That’s why, aside from the tactics we’ll examine below, collaboration with other creatives remains a great way to boost your musical output.

A certain amount of discipline is key too. Set yourself a target of a set number of hours in the studio, then do everything you can to finish a track in that time; focus upon speed and the ‘big picture’ broad strokes; switch off from any technical aspect (mixing, synth design etc) and keep the momentum going as you race towards the finishing line. The goal is to reach a zen-like state of mind where the track pretty much writes itself – something that only comes through practice and discipline.

5 rules to help you finish more tracks

Regularly finishing creative projects takes self-discipline. Try following these workflow rules to help motivate yourself.

1. Don't abandon anything

If you reach an impasse with a project and can’t get it over the finish line, don’t simply delete your work. Make sure to save your in-progress projects – and label them clearly – so you can return to them later.

It’s amazing how returning to something a few days, weeks or even months later can allow you to see it from a fresh angle. Better still, bounce out individual elements from the project, such as beat loops, chords or riffs, so that they can be used as later ammo.

2. Don't hoard half-finished ideas

Perhaps contrary to that last tip, don’t get into the habit of simply filing away every project and ending up with a hard drive stuffed with an ever-growing stack of half-finished tracks. Enforce a hard limit on how many projects you allow yourself to have on the go at any one time.

For example, set a maximum of ten projects you’re allowed to keep, and when you reach this limit, force yourself to adapt or finish an existing idea before you’re allowed to start anything new.

3. Set deadlines

Most of us find we work quicker and more efficiently if working towards a deadline. This can make it much easier to finish a track when working towards, say, a delivery date set out by a record label.

Even if you’re working independently though, try enforcing deadlines on yourself. Create tracks specifically for a gig or DJ booking, or aim to finish a track every week or month. Be realistic though; deadlines can be great, but equally can have a negative effect on your outlook if you repeatedly miss them.

4. Remix yourself

Starting from an existing finished project and rearranging it is often a lot easier than creating something new. Try starting with a track you’ve previously finished and using it as a basis for your next track.

Somewhat counterintuitively, this can actually be a great way to prevent yourself repeating ideas. The rule you need to set here is that your new track must be completely different from your starting project, thereby forcing you to up-end your previous sounds and track elements.

5. Stick to the plan

It can be easy to get distracted by a new idea halfway through making a track and end up completely changing the feel of your original idea. This could create something great, but also result in losing something good just because it no longer feels fresh.

Avoid this by devising a plan of what you want your track to be before you start, for example ‘130bpm percussive techno tool’, ‘beatless synth jam’, ‘peak time DnB’. Stick to this original aim, filing any new ideas that arise along the way to one side for a later date.

3 strategies for creating finished arrangements

Learning how to flesh out tracks is key to becoming the sort of musician who finishes every idea. Most electronic musicians have experienced getting ‘stuck in the loop’; creating simple 16- or 32-bar phrases, but then losing motivation when it comes to turning these into full length arrangements.

Working quickly is crucial. Rather than listening to one looped section for hours, getting even just a rough arrangement down can help overcome one of the major hurdles in the track finishing process

1. Start arranging early

Make a habit of sketching out an arrangement early on in your creative process. As soon as you have a few fundamental building blocks – for example, a chord progression and basic beat – duplicate these across your timeline to create the foundations of a full track. Delete elements as necessary to designate an intro, outro and breakdowns. Break your arrangement up into 8-bar sections and colour code or label these for easy delineation.

Your aim now is to change the energy of your track in some way each time you reach a new section. As a rule of thumb, there are three ways to do this: add an element, remove an element or change an existing sound – for example, changing the instrument used to play your lead melody, or moving part of your bassline up or down an octave.

Knowing when to add and when to take something away is a matter of personal preference. The classic method, in dance music at least, is to build energy by adding new elements up to the breakdown. However, there’s no reason not to try inverting expectations or making multiple changes at once.

2. Finding the hook

One important step when it comes to developing a track lies in establishing what element provides the focal point, aka the hook, of your track.

This should be the most distinctive element of your composition. In a pop or rock song this would usually be the lead vocal, but when it comes to electronic or instrument music, the hook could be any number of things, from a lead synth riff to a bassline or even, at the more percussive or experimental ends of dance music, a particular percussion sound or rhythmic pattern.

Whatever genre you’re working in, however, you should be able to identify a specific focal point for your track (even the most ambient music is likely to put a specific sound or texture to the fore above others).

The reason it’s important to identify this focal element is it will inform a lot of your decisions when it comes to arranging. For instance, your hook will likely be something you want to build up to, meaning you may choose to remove it from your track’s intro and breakdowns.

It will also provide the basis from which to create elements like counter melodies. For example, if you have a descending synth riff as your lead hook, try creating a counter melody that ascends through the same scale, with a rhythm that works around, rather than on top of, your lead line. Introducing this in the background after two or four repetitions of your lead will help add depth and keep your lead hook fresh.

3. Transitions and automation

Following the steps above will allow you to turn your ideas into a basic arrangement, but the result will likely sound rather static and abrupt – like a collection of loops strung together, as opposed to a finished composition. The key to changing this lies in creating dynamic movement both within and between sections.

The easiest way to do this is by using transition FX. These are things like white noise sweeps, pitched risers, crashes or reversed cymbals – elements that can be placed at the start or end of a loop in order to create a pull-in or release to signify the change in your track.

When it comes to sketching out arrangements, it can be handy to have a stock of these ready to go; creating FX from scratch can be a fiddly process that will slow you down when you’re trying to get your track laid out.

Even if you’re just using placeholder FX that you plan to replace when it comes to applying finishing touches, having some sort of transition in place will go a long way towards giving your arrangement the correct ‘feel’, and could help inspire what elements need to be added or removed for the next section.

Try using a dedicated studio session to create your own pack of custom transitions, or simply reach for one of the countless ready-made sample packs available, like this one from SampleRadar.

An equally essential technique for introducing movement to an arrangement is through automation of sound parameters and effects. The most obvious example of this is by automating the cutoff point of a low-pass filter to make a lead, bassline or chord progression brighter as a track builds.

Realistically though, there’s an endless list of parameters that can be adjusted to change the tone of a track and build dynamic tension, such as a synth’s pulse width, or the decay time of a reverb or rate of an LFO. Even subtle sonic changes through simple modulation will do a lot to keep listeners hooked.

For quick arranging, try setting up a few effect returns with some extreme effects that can help create builds, breakdowns and transitions. In-your-face reverbs or delays are great for this, as are multi-effect tools like Cableguys ShaperBox or SugarBytes Effectrix.

4 quick tips

1. Commit early

Commit early: bounce plugins or external instruments down as audio as soon as you’re happy, to avoid endless tinkering and reworking. If you need to make changes later, get creative with effects or editing.

2. Get hands-on

Get hands-on with the automation process by mapping key parameters to your favourite MIDI controller and performing changes in real time.

3. Use reference tracks

Use reference tracks for creating arrangements. Load a release you’re a fan of into your DAW and make a note of where builds, breakdowns and significant changes occur.

4. Small changes add up

Instead of transition FX, signify changes in your tracks with edits to the current pattern. Try cutting out the kick drum for a bar before the change, or creating snare rolls that ramp up in pitch and/or timing.

6 tips for completing mixdowns

Once creative hurdles have been overcome and you’ve conquered the arrangement, it’s time to turn those sketched out ideas into a finished track. But the process of mixing a track and fine-tuning sounds can often be as daunting as creating the track itself. Reduce the pain and effort required to mix your next track with these time-saving tips...

1. Don't be afraid to outsource

Before we get into the practical mixing tips, let’s get one basic point out of the way first: if you’re really struggling to mix a track, there’s no shame in getting someone else to do it for you. There’s a longstanding and misguided stigma within electronic music that in order to be a ‘real’ producer you need to handle every part of your track creation from end-to-end.

The truth, however, is that even amongst professionals, not every musician’s skillset includes both the creative and technical sides of making music. A lot of talented and successful electronic musicians make use of a third party for mixing and mastering their tracks. Rather than being a concession, there are actually a lot of benefits to having a second set of ears working on your creation. Often somebody coming to your track ‘fresh’ will be able to pick out issues or suggest ideas that you’ve missed through overfamiliarity with it.

Obviously, getting a professional to mix your tracks comes with a cost, which is a factor that could understandably put many independent musicians off the idea. There are potential ways around this though; try connecting with other, similarly minded musicians and organising a ‘track swap’ where you each offer mixing advice and support.

2. Reference!

One of the quickest and most effective ways to make mixing decisions is to reference your work against well-produced commercial releases that you like. It’s one of the best ways to understand how pros achieve sonic consistency, and set yourself a benchmark to work towards when writing and mixing club music.

Gather a pool of reference tracks, load them into your latest mix project, then flick between your mix and the reference tracks, comparing as you go.

As referencing is such an accepted technique nowadays, you may want to make the process more convenient by investing in a dedicated ‘mix comparison’ plugin such as Sample Magic’s Magic AB, Mastering The Mix’s Reference or iZotope's Tonal Balance Control 2. Once loaded on your master bus, these plugins allow you to load in multiple songs, set up loop points, then A/B between your DAW audio and said tracks with the click of a button.

3. Set up preset chains

Most DAWs let the user combine and save effect patches in some form, as with Live’s Effect Racks or Logic’s Channel Strip presets. Use these to create and save combinations of effects that you can apply to any use cases that crop up regularly in your tracks, such as drum busses, auxiliary effects or master processing.

If you’re not sure where to start, there are plenty of preset chains that can be downloaded online, both for free and commercially; and your DAW itself likely has some decent presets too. Be aware that these sorts of effects are very context dependent, so don’t expect a single ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution right off the shelf.

4. Three-reverb technique

It can often be a struggle to balance multiple spatial effects in a mix, often leading to the whole thing feeling washed out or muddy. An efficient way to balance reverbs, favoured by some pro engineers, is to use a combination of just three reverb types set up as return effects, each aimed at different-sized spaces or reverb styles.

The classic approach is to use short, medium and long reverbs, typically with decay times of around <1s, 1-2s and >2s respectively. It works well to mix up reverb types too; algorithmic room reverbs work well for short verbs, plates are great for mid-sized sounds, and hall reverbs for the longer effects. Send each element of the mix to these by differing amounts to create space.

5. EQ is your friend

There’s a minefield of potential EQ mistakes that can really affect the sound of your overall mix. One common one is overzealous use of high/low-pass filtering on individual channels within a mix. Typically, it’s desirable to use high/low-pass filters for removing unwanted frequencies, freeing up headroom within the mix and increasing clarity of individual elements.

This can be a great technique if applied carefully using gentle filters; however, many digital EQ plugins offer much steeper filter types which can potentially make the individual elements of the mix sound too separate. A good rule of thumb would be to use 12dB/oct or 18dB/oct filters for high/low-pass work as this setting will offer you the best compromise between removing unwanted frequencies and retaining a cohesive, musical sound.

Paying careful attention to what frequency the filters are applied at is also crucial – filtering out too many low frequencies from individual elements can lead to a thin-sounding mix for example, while overdoing the low-pass filtering can remove too much air resulting in an overly dull sound.

A great tip is to solo the channel you’re filtering and listen carefully to how the filters affect the sound before seeing how the filtered channel sounds in the context of the whole mix. If the overall sound is subsequently affected more than you’d like, try backing off the filters a touch.

Try using our frequency map, pictured above, to get a sense of where each element should sit on the frequency spectrum.

6. Visualise it

If you’re not blessed with monitoring that accurately reproduces low sub bass or shimmering high frequencies, a frequency analyser such as Voxengo’s excellent (and free!) SPAN will allow you to cross-reference the sound coming from the speakers with a visual indication of what your low/high-pass filters are doing.

AI-powered transcription software is on the rise: just a few months ago, we reported on the launch of Songscription, a platform that promises to convert any audio file into sheet music, tab or MIDI, with disappointingly mixed results.

The latest company to make a move into the field is Klang.io, an AI-focused music software brand based out of Karlsruhe, Germany. Last week, Klang.io launched Transcription Studio, a suite of AI music tools built for transcribing multi-instrument recordings.

Transcription Studio accepts audio files, microphone input and links from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, and its creators claim that it can detect and separate multiple instruments in any recording before analyzing these to produce an accurate transcription.

Transcriptions can be cleaned up in the software's Notation Editor before being exported in PDF or MusicXML formats as sheet music, GuitarPro files for guitar tablature, or MIDI to bring over to your DAW.

Transcription Studio is equipped with multiple modes targeted towards different purposes: Universal Mode is designed to cover a range of instrumentation that includes vocals, piano and guitar, and Single Instrument mode is built to produce detailed transcriptions of solo recordings.

Classic Mode is geared towards orchestral instruments like strings and woodwinds, while Rock Mode – still currently in beta – is aimed at bands hoping to transcribe complex, electric guitar-heavy arrangements.

Klang.io also offers a VST3/AU plugin that the company says is capable of detecting up to eight different instruments within a mixed audio recording and generating separate unquantized MIDI files for each.

While most of the major DAWs offer some level of audio-to-MIDI functionality, Klang.io's multi-instrument conversion – if it does what it says on the tin – could be a step above the capabilities offered by software like Ableton Live and Logic Pro.

“Transcription is an essential skill in music that, until recently, has only been accessible to those with traditional musical training,” Klang.io founder and CEO Sebastian Murgul said in a press release.

“Klang.io’s mission from the beginning has been to create AI-powered tools that can unlock this process for everyone, and provide a streamlined access point for music makers or performers of any educational background or genre to use it to learn, communicate, and collaborate more effectively.”

Klang.io's AI tools are available on a subscription basis: for $8.49/month billed annually or $19.99/month billed monthly, you get access to both the Transcription Plugin and Transcription Studio in your browser. You can also test Transcription Studio out for free on recordings of up to 20 seconds with no registration required.

Find out more on Klang.io's website.

As modern classics go, 2016's 24K Magic, the title track of Bruno Mars' third studio album, is a solid entry in the canon, made all the more surprising by its heavy cribbing from funk and classic 80s musical stylings.

The song is a sum of parts, the result of the efforts of songwriters and producers Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine and production quartet The Stereotypes, as well as Mr. Mars himself, of course.

Written during the flush of success following the release of 2014’s monster-hit Uptown Funk, Mars was honest about the commercial drives which lay behind the making of this track when interviewed by NME. "We wrote 24K Magic when Uptown Funk was No 1. So if you hear the same spirit in that song, that's why. I'd say that it was always in the back of my mind when we were doing it. It was to get me to this record. It's a bridge."

Production team The Stereotypes recalled that, for the initial sessions for 24K Magic, Mars clearly spelled out the feeling he was trying to capture. “He was like, 'Guys, I want to dance,’” The Stereotypes’ Jonathan Yip told Billboard. “[He said] ‘I want it to feel like when I was back in school at a school dance. You know, in the club these days, people aren’t dancing anymore. They’re in their VIP booths with bottles, and they’re standing against the wall, or just looking at the DJ. What about times when we would be with and with a girl, or a guy and a guy, or a girl or whatever, and they’re dancing together? And not just sitting back just drinking. I want that feeling back.' It immediately excited us because we were like, 'Yeah, I remember those times - those times were awesome.'"

24k Magic is a relatively simple song in arrangement-terms, allowing the groove to shine through. As Bruno wanted, the music wills the listener to dance.

To our ears, the rhythm track feels multi-layered, with live and electronic elements implying a total 80s-reverence.

There is a heavy presence from a LinnDrum (or at least samples that bear a significant resemblance). We’ll return to the intro later, in favour of the first main section that we hear - the chorus.

The snare plays a 2 and 4 backbeat (at a tempo of around 107BPM) while the kick emphasises beats 1 and 3, crucially with a ‘skippy’ element that intersects with the bass line.

It’s as punchy as it gets, but there is a classic little musical feature which draws upon the funk influence. At the beginning of each two-bar groove, the first beat employs a kick and elongated open hi-hat for the entire beat.

This has the effect of making us wait for beat 2, before the smack of the snare and the hi-hat closing and continuing its subdivision.

There is some very extensive use of claps too, and even additional drum elements, laid a little further back in the mix, with obligatory drum fills and even the use of some interesting percussion.

The Flexatone is a vaguely comedic instrument, that in this setting is used a little like a cymbal crash. It's identifiable as a metallic rising sound on the first beat of certain sections of the song.

The main constituent components providing the backbone for the song’s harmony are a monophonic synth bass coupled with a huge synth brass patch.

In tune with the producer’s wishes, there is a certain simplicity to the harmonic makeup, but one that is incredibly impactful, thanks to the attack of the synth brass. Being heavily influenced by jazz funk, the harmonies include many chord extensions, which are often repeated or subtly altered.

The first two chords of the chorus are Fm11 and Bbm7(9), which could also be described as Cm7/F and Bbm9, depending on whether you’re a guitarist or keyboard player.

These chords are then repeated, with a chord-per-bar for 6 bars, but at the tail end of the 6th bar, there’s an interesting turnaround; on beats 3 and 4, we hear chords of Dbmaj7 and C7+ or C7alt, which this is where the 5th of the chord is raised by a semitone, so the note G becomes G#.

This raise is a very popular tactic for creating tension, and one that was continually used by Stevie Wonder as a turnaround for that very reason.

A video emerged of Bruno Mars working in his studio, using a couple of classic stalwart synthesizers when making this track.

Firstly, the bassline has all the hallmarks of a Minimoog, although Bruno can be seen playing this on a Moog Voyager, which is just a more up-to-date version.

In the same video, he can be seen playing the synth brass chords on a Roland Juno 106, which also makes perfect sense, being a particularly popular vintage synth for so many artists. If you are trying to recreate this sound in software, look at using a single oscillator-per-voice, and add a healthy dose of chorus, to mimic the architecture of the 106.

Another synth element that we can hear is a short and plucky synth arpeggio, which was also probably created using the 106, with delay, to give the effect of fading out with each outing.

24K Magic is a genre-juggling, hybrid of a song, which also incorporates rap-adjacent themes, thanks to its spoken lyrical content. These lyrics bestow the virtues of opulence and partying.

The high life is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it certainly struck a chord with billions of listeners who lapped up the lavish ideals. It’s also a song about impressing the opposite sex. Again, Mars was highly conscious of this when putting together the song.

“For me, 95 per cent of music is about love. That’s why cavemen were hitting stones to get everybody around the fire and get them feeling sexy,” Mars told NME. “It’s exactly the same principle, the same thing: just get people on the dancefloor, get the girls smiling.”

One highly recognisable element was created using a device called a talkbox, something which is easily confused with a vocoder, which is a different technology.

Not for the faint hearted, talkbox performance requires a degree of knowledge and preparation, as well as a fairly considerable dose of musicality.

To create the talkbox sound, you need a synthesizer to create a tone, a talkbox/pedal (which is in essence a speaker with a plastic tube attached) and a human performer!

By placing the tube to the side of the performer’s mouth, the synth sound is beamed directly in to the players mouth. Here it can be shaped and modulated by the performer, much like a filter on a synth, which includes imprinting words and lyrics on the synth sound. The performance becomes acoustic in nature, requiring the eventual capture via a microphone for either live or recorded performance.

The most notable talkbox performer of our generation had to be Roger Troutman, formerly of the band Zapp.

He made numerous, notable appearances alongside artists such as 2Pac, Dr. Dre and even Scritti Politti. The technology behind his own identifiable sound (or talkbox-of-tricks) was a closely guarded secret during his lifetime, but after his death in 1999, his trademark setup was revealed

His synthesizer of choice was initially a Minimoog, but he migrated to the now vintage Yamaha FM synth, called the DX100. Supplied only with miniature keys, the harsh digital tone of the synth was perfect for the talkbox, so much so, it remains the absolute instrument of choice in talkbox circles.

Byron Chambers (aka Mr Talkbox) is the artist behind the 24K introduction, as well as the various lead and backing harmonies that can be heard throughout. According to Chambers, he has a wardrobe full of DX100 synths (essentially backup instruments) which he used alongside a MXR M222 talkbox pedal.

The coupling of an exceptionally lush talkbox texture with very rich harmony and free-flowing tempo, creates the backdrop for the introduction.

The intro chords are directly associated to the chorus, but taking us on more of a harmonic journey. We start with a chord of Fm9, passing through Abmaj7/C, Dbmaj7, and Gm7b5, before we finally land on the dominant chord of C7#9.

All of this, with the improvised obbligato talkbox line over the top, before we hear a drum break that takes us into the first chorus.

Even as we hear the refrain ’24 Carat’ in a bridge-form toward the end of the song, there are further simple-but-effective devices at play.

A halftime feel plays across the main beats of the bar, displacing the listener’s expectation of where beat one resides. It’s juxtaposed by numerous interruptions from bass glides and flexatones again, all the time playing on the same harmonic devices and similar chords.

There is no doubt that if you look at the constituent components of this song, in terms of harmony and groove, the core elements could be regarded as relatively simplistic. Herein lies the genius, because the hooks are so strong. It’s this simplicity that lets the groove shine through.

“[Bruno] is the first one at the studio, last one to leave,” said the Stereotypes’ Ray Romulus in an interview with Billboard. “Ultimately all of those decisions were up to him - when it was ready to be released and everything like that. He put in countless hours of work even when we were gone just to make sure it was at the standard he wanted it to be”

When it comes to mixing a track, it’s difficult to insist that we adhere to a rulebook when we all know that, in the creative world of music-making, rules are there to be broken. We can learn a lot from past masters, and as Picasso once said, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

This is particularly applicable at the mix stage, where we decide where to place instruments and vocals in the stereo image.

Whether you are a DAW-user or rely on a hardware mixing desk, you can’t miss the ‘Pan’ pot, which is normally located immediately above each channel fader.

It might surprise you to learn that pan is short for panorama, and is used to dictate where a signal appears in the stereoscopic panorama. (Now you know why we tend to abbreviate the term to just ‘pan’!)

Generally speaking, we still live in a stereo world. The vast majority of us are lucky enough to have two ears, which presents the natural world around us as an ambient 3-dimensional image.

Translate this into production terms, and we are effectively trying to achieve a 3D audio soundstage, albeit with a 2D speaker setting. We do this by using a degree of smoke and mirrors.

The two control elements we have in our toolset are volume, which tends to suggest distance, and panning, which allows us to control the signal left and right in the stereo image.

If you have your stereo speaker system or studio monitors set up correctly, you should get a near-perfect soundstage, where both volume and panning play an intrinsic role. If you are a headphone user, the left/right position becomes even more obvious, as the speakers are in such close proximity to your ears, positioning becomes even more obvious.

We must insert a caveat here, because while most of us continue to work in stereo, there are numerous surround and 360˚ systems also available, and in this regard things work in a slightly different way. So, for now, we’ll focus on the basics, sticking with stereo.

When we first start exploring production techniques, there is a temptation to pan instruments all over the place and apply too much reverb. This will probably not yield the best results.

If you have ever listened to material from the 60s, you may have noticed that some examples of early stereo usage (by the likes of the Beatles, the Doors or even classic jazz albums) are extremely panned.

You might hear a group of instruments, such as drums, bass, and guitar, all grouped together on one side, while the opposite speaker may reproduce vocals or leads.

During the early days of recording, technical restrictions meant that instrumentation would be presented in this way. This hasn’t stopped some bands from replicating the sound in contemporary settings, even though it’s not ideal for headphone listening.

As recording technology became more refined, it became possible to mix across the whole stereo image, placing instruments in specific, less extreme, locations, and we can draw some useful tips from this approach.

The most basic rule of thumb is that the lower the instrument in pitch (frequency), the closer to the centre of the stereo image it should be placed.

Think of your mix as a tree; the main trunk is centred and buried in the ground, providing a solid foundation. These are your bass elements, but as the instruments rise in pitch (guitars, keyboards, horns), they act much like branches, extending out left and right.

For this reason, we generally tend to place the bass drum (kick) and bass instruments, in the very centre of the mix. If you are using a guitar and piano, you might offset these to a left and right 45˚ position.

It's quite likely that they may have complementary parts to play in your track, so splitting them up in this way will sound great in stereo, as well as affording them some space, so that the musical phrases don’t collide.

If you have two guitars and a piano, try placing the guitars left and right, with the piano more toward the centre. A lead vocal is just that, and will want to be fairly central, but there’s nothing to stop backing vocals being panned to provide choral space.

Some contemporary music can get a little chaotic, so if you find yourself with multiple synth parts, a good starting point is to think about where in the stereo image they appear, so that they don't occupy the same area and become less distinct.

Think of each sound or musical phrase as having its own specific point in the overall stereo picture you want to paint, which will allow for more effective sonic separation.

Drums kits operate a little differently, because it’s a unit which contains a number of constituent elements.

Many drum machines or drum plugins will take care of the panning for you, but the basic guidelines suggest that we centre the kick and snare, while placing the hi-hat slightly off-centre. This is often placed to the left, to mirror a conventional drum kit setup, for a right-handed player. The ride cymbal would tend to be panned to the opposite side, with toms (normally three) moving from left to right, for each tom, high to low.

If you are lucky enough to have a real live kit drum recording setup, be aware that we tend to use a stereo pair of overhead microphones, alongside individual microphones for each drum.

It's important to ensure that the panning of the individual signals match up with the imaging of the overhead stereo mics, otherwise your result will sound pretty strange!

Dealing with orchestral instruments can present its challenges too. A useful tip is always to consider where an instrument sits, when it plays within a group. With an ensemble of around 80 players, a full symphony orchestra presents the biggest challenge of all, and also contradicts some of our tried and tested formulas…

Let's consider the string section; from left to right, we hear 1st violins, 2nd violins, violas, cellos and double basses. You will have noticed that the frequency assignment moves from high pitches on the left, to low pitches on the right.

Despite the fact that the basses are not in the centre, it will still sound impressive when panned. If paired with instruments from a band environment, your mix will feel nicely grounded, thanks to our previously mentioned conventions.

It can be very tempting to pan instruments all the way to the left and right, or ‘hard panning’ as it's known.

This can sometimes work well, if double-tracking instruments like guitars and keyboards, but in most scenarios it is just too extreme.

Always be objective - it might sound great, but if it doesn’t, adjust the panning inward slightly, away from the extremities.

As you are effectively using panning to create a mix space, you can create some wonderful effects using panning.

You can try automating panning in your DAW, so that appropriate sounds or instruments move from one side of the stereo image to the other. Alternatively, try placing an instrument to one side of your mix, with effects such as delay or reverb positioned on the opposite side. This can be particularly effective with electronic instrumentation.

Finally, it is always worth checking back your mixes in mono. Professional engineers tend to have a single speaker on hand, so that they can check that the stereo mix condenses and sums down to mono without phasing issues.

You can achieve the same thing in a DAW, by switching your master output to mono.

Despite our love of stereo, there are still lots of radios and phone speakers out there that operate in mono. We’re not predicting that mono will become the new stereo, but you never know - cassettes and vinyl are back, so why not mono?

Here's a more in-depth video guide to panning using Logic Pro as our DAW of choice