“I pretty much only use presets… I'm not doing any sound design type of stuff”: Four Tet goes deep on presets, Ableton and producing one of his biggest tracks in bed on laptop speakers

British electronic artist Kieran Hebden - better known as Four Tet - has gone deep into his music-making process in a two-hour-long interview with the Tape Notes podcast. 

Speaking with Tape Notes' John Kennedy, Hebden discussed the making of Daydream Repeat and Skater, two tracks from his latest album Three. He also gave listeners a fascinating insight into the creative process behind Looking At Your Pager, a club track released under his KH alias in 2022 that's become one of his best-loved songs.

Perhaps the most surprising detail of the conversation is that Hebden produced the majority of the track - which has received over 6 million streams on Spotify to date - in about ten minutes, all while sitting in bed on his laptop. "I don't really use any hardware or any instruments when I'm writing music - it’s always just me and the laptop," he says. "90% of the listening and mixing and everything for the music I make these days is on laptop speakers".

Hebden recalls starting off the track by throwing an acapella from his sample library into Ableton; the vocals are taken from '00s R&B trio 3W's No More (Baby I'ma Do Right). Slowing the sample down from its original 140BPM tempo, he noticed some time-stretching artefacts that he chose to cover up by looping a snippet of the vocal and layering it underneath.

Hebden then added another recording from his sample library, a drum loop produced with the Arturia DrumBrute drum machine, before realizing he had cooked up something special. "This is all happening in the space of three or four minutes... I just knew - I've got something good here, this is really good - but I was like, what's gonna happen here to turn it into something?"

The answer was a "wicked bassline", which came courtesy of Spectrasonics' Omnisphere, which Hebden describes as the "main synth plugin" that he uses for "absolutely everything". Rather than spend hours programming a new patch, though, Hebden opted to scroll through Omnisphere's extensive preset library, before landing on a wobbly dubstep bass preset called Swaggering Around. 

"Very little work went into it - it just came together and sounded good," he says. "It's just one of those wonderful moments where everything just falls into place instantly, without having to do anything."

Elsewhere in the interview, Hebden confirms that he's a big fan of using preset sounds. "I pretty much only use presets on things. I'll get the melody I want, I'll get it up and running... and I'll just cycle through loads of them one after the other until I find one that's quite nice," he says.

"I'll just choose a preset and that'll be it. I'm not doing any sound design type of stuff. I'm not one of those people that's like, 'I'm going to start with a sine wave, and then I'm going to do this, and then do this' - I don't really mess with any fundamental stuff like that, usually because I'm in a rush."

Hebden's minimalist, idea-focused style of music-making extends beyond his choice of sounds to his approach to mixing and effects processing. "I get asked these questions, like: 'what's your plugin chain on this and that'? ... on most of the stuff, there's nothing, there's no plugins on there," he says.

"Ideally, you're doing as little as possible. I pretty much never want to put a compressor on anything. If I have to put a compressor on something, it's to deal with a problem, usually. I want everything to be as dynamic and open and natural as possible [...] I'm still thinking about [Nick Drake's] Pink Moon when I'm mixing one of my club records!"

One of electronic music's most popular artists, Hebden has enjoyed a decades-long career that's seen him earn both critical renown and mainstream popularity. Despite having released his debut album in 1999, Hebden reached household-name status last year after headlining Coachella alongside Fred Again.. and Skrillex. He released his most recent album, Three, in March this year.

Listen to the full Tape Notes interview with Four Tet. 

Watch our 2013 In The Studio video with Four Tet below.

Four Tet In The Studio With Future Music - YouTube

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