My main musical inspirations for this track were mainly Lofi Hip Hop of course, ,the main menu themes from Rogue Company Seasons 2 and 3 and its map "Vice", Buena Vista Social Club, the Dexter OST, Retrowave/Synthwave and a little bit of C418  for the synth stuff as always.


I created as much original content and palettes of sound as I could for this song, I used Kontakt sample libraries to create my own "quality" samples that I could destroy and process, such as orchestral strings playing fast spiccato notes, traditional cuban percussion, the trumpets, piano, flutes (although they don't sound like flutes no more) and the japanese Koto. The vocal samples were grabbed from my saxophone recording session and heavily processed afterwards. 

There's a few cool concepts I used to write and develop this song, although I've listen to Buena Vista Social Club my whole life I did more research on traditional cuban percussion and what parts they play in a song. I decided to keep the Congas and Bongos as they were the instruments that standed out the most in an already busy mix, the shakers are also traditional cuban shakers instead of the orchestral ones that I usually use. In order to understand how they all work together in a mix I studied in depth JC Losada's masterclass on mixing latin percussion.

Once I had the main idea of the song I knew the hardest part was about to come, I had written a few melodic sketches using samples but they weren't going to do it, so I went onto Musiversal and booked a session with the amazing saxophone player Yuri Villar. We managed to record almost everything I had written and his performance was just incredibly perfect, I even ended up using a few takes were he messed up the timings a bit as they gave the song such a natural and organic feeling, perfect to contrast all the other synthetic and artificial elements of it.

A good balance and conversation between the more artificial elements and the organic ones and listening how they come together was something I truly put a lot of time and effort when writing and producing this track , so that's how we get to the synths, nothing too crazy going on, for the intro pad I used 2 customized presets from Rigid Audio's Felicity layered with my own synth presets built from scratch when I was learning sound synthesis a while ago. These work perfectly as ambient, through out the song you can hear a super high and bright synth that works almost as a transitional element between sections, it mimics the way neon lights and signs feel at night, especially in such city, environment and overall mood. And finally to wrap all the synths up a granular plucked synth reminiscent of synthwave and retrowave that was meant to double the saxophone during the most intense parts but ended up working quite well on its own.

Vice

Klazmos

Best Friends Forever?

Anemoia

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Alonso Urmeneta

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