Yo, I'm here to walk you through some of the process behind 's "STAY WOKE"!
I've known for quite a while and I've been wanting to work with him for a majority of the time that I've known him. With that being said, I've shown him a lot of what I've worked on, and it never seemed to be something that he could see himself on. I love what "STAY WOKE" came out to be, and it's been a pleasure to work with both
&
....
When I opened up my DAW I was having a pretty good day so far and a majority of my music reflects how I feel that day.
I was presented with an empty screen but it quickly filled. I created a melody using "Sakura" Which looked a little something like this:
(I don't remember what preset or anything as I lost the original midi for the melody, I had this melody sitting on my hard drive for a while) I threw some reverb on it and equalized it, then moved on.
With that in mind I instantly knew this was gonna be a trap beat.
I found some drums that I though sounded nice and beefy and created a four bar loop that looks like this:
I don't typically program my drums like this, I typically use a step sequencer .... But I thought I'd try something new. I really enjoy trying different techniques when producing/beat making.
I ended up using a completely different sounding hi-hat roll for texture, a kick that clips intentionally, a typical trap snare with plenty of reverb, and a 808 sub to fill up some of the low end.
I had the 808 follow the kick pattern and yet do it's own thing at the same time, I didn't want the 808 and the kick to follow each other, but I didn't want the 808 doing anything that would break the flow of the song.
The hi-hats hit every half a beat, while the hi-hat roles come in and out about four and a half beats to catch the ear.....
when it came to the hook, I wanted to keep it very simple, I just make the kicks drop out so it puts more focus on everything else:
And that's where I started to strain my creativity on this beat, so I decided to wrap it up with a fade out:
I went for more of a modern minimalist approach to the mixing, I didn't want anything to be overwhelming, or empty. I made just enough room for vocals:
Here's what the full project file looks like:
That's when I showed it to and he just fell in love with it, he heard it he audibly ooh'ed and said "This shit bangs! You need to send me this." And so I did.
From there it took about three or four days for to fully write and record the song. And since I sent
an unmastered version of the beat, I also exported the stems and sent those. He sent the stems along with his vocal tracks to the audio engineer for this track
.
said "Honestly it took a while.
I went through a lot of concepts; my circle is fucked up and I don't really fuck with a lot of friends like I used to, mainly because they want to do their own thing.
I'm honored to be trending, and all I want to do is bring new artists to the table that could never be heard through the use of this platform."
Be sure to check out the full song on 's profile!
and please join us for our steemit journey to turn this into a platform for artists of all kinds on Discord