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ASK YOUR FRIENDS – SINCE ’06

​ ASK YOUR FRIENDS – SINCE ’06 Subscribe and turn on notifications for daily uploads Listen Now: http://selectedbase.lnk.to/since06 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOWe4Yfs8CI&list=PLp8iASaiMbWoqjTU6JrKc70mp8Iiar-g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ZfaF4-fDs&list=PLp8iASaiMbWoqjTU6JrKc70mp8Iiar-g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TPyl6NrrHE&list=PLp8iASaiMbWoqjTU6JrKc70mp8Iiar-g8 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp8iASaiMbWoqjTU6JrKc70mp8Iiar-g8 Join my Telegram https://MrRevillz.lnk.to/Telegram Join my Instagram channel https://MrRevillz.lnk.to/Instagram Join my WhatsApp channel https://MrRevillz.lnk.to/Whatsapp Follow MrRevillz http://youtube.com/mrrevillz https://www.instagram.com/mrrevillz_ https://www.soundcloud.com/mrrevillz https://www.facebook.com/MrRevillz https://twitter.com/MrRevillz https://www.tiktok.com/@mrrevillz https://www.snapchat.com/add/mrrevillz https://t.me/MrRevillzYT Follow ASK YOUR FRIENDS https://www.instagram.com/askyourfriends_ https://open.spotify.com/artist/4NnFcjLPmbYq2OTAFPVDC0 Discover Our Playlists: https://MrRevillz.lnk.to/Playlists Chill House: https://MrRevillz.lnk.to/ChillHouse Deep House: https://MrRevillz.lnk.to/DeepHouse House Music: https://MrRevillz.lnk.to/HouseMusic Summer Mix: https://MrRevillz.lnk.to/SummerMix Tropical House: https://MrRevillz.lnk.to/TropicalHouse Have a question or just want to reach out? Drop it in the comments or contact me: info@MrRevillz.com http://lnkfi.re/mrrevillz

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Creator Marketing Is Growing Up

Jennifer Quigley-Jones is presenting on what programmatic marketers need to know about creators at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference in New York City on September 28-29. If you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, you can secure your seat here. A decade ago, most influencer marketing agencies were only buying ads in one place: Instagram. Which meant […]

The post Creator Marketing Is Growing Up appeared first on AdExchanger.

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Mike Taylor: “Too much Analysis Causes Paralysis”

Attack Mag - Q&A - Feature Images Mike Taylor

Mike Taylor’s vocals and creative ideas have shaped some of dance music’s biggest records. With “LOVE.”, he puts his own artistry back at the centre. We sat him down for our regular round of questions, some about the music, some not.

Mike Taylor made his name behind other artists’ biggest moments, most notably his Gold-certified feature on Unlike Pluto’s “Everything Black”. With “LOVE.”, his first solo single since, he steps forward on his own terms. We caught up with him to talk house music’s lineage, Philadelphia roots and what happens off the decks.

What’s your greatest fear?

Running out of time. Not the money version of that, the living version. I don’t want to get to the end and realise I took the small things for granted.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Overthinking. Too much analysis causes paralysis. I can talk myself out of something good by inventing a problem that was never there.

If you weren’t making or playing music, what would you be doing?

Special effects. I fell in love with Rick Baker’s work on the “Thriller” video as a kid and wanted to do prosthetics for film. If not that, anthropology. Why people do what they do has always fascinated me.

What was your most embarrassing moment?

An audition for a play in Philly. I can perform for thousands of people no problem, but put me in a small room and ask me to speak, and I lock up. I got so flustered I literally could not see the words on the page.

What would your superpower be?

Storm. Control of the elements. People think weather, but think about minerals, the ocean, everything buried in the earth we can’t reach. You could feed people with that.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?

The ozone layer. Put the planet back the way we found it. We talk about extinction like it’s dinosaurs and things we never met, but we’re losing things right now that we watched disappear in real time. Clean air, ice, coral, whole species. If I get one wish, I’m not spending it on a mammoth. I’m spending it on the Earth being healthy again.

[quote align=right text=”I’d rather be slow and be myself”]

What was the last lie that you told?

Some small excuse about why I was late to something. Nothing heavier than that. I’m annoyingly honest to my own detriment most of the time.

Must visit record store or studio?

Tower Records. I want the ritual back, standing at the listening station discovering something with no algorithm involved. Studio would be Electric Lady or Motown.

How do you like to finish your sets?

A palate cleanser. A left turn that catches you off guard but still connects, usually something tied to what’s happening in the world or in culture that week. Never random for the sake of random.

If not yourself, who would you most like to be?

Little Richard, to see the world through his eyes. He’s one of the most significant figures in pop music ever and people still underrate it. No Little Richard, no James Brown, no Prince, no Beatles. Living, I’d say Neil deGrasse Tyson or Angela Davis. I want to know what it feels like inside a mind like that.

When’s the last time you changed your mind about something significant?

About a week ago. I was travelling through Europe and had to pivot on a bunch of decisions. It happens constantly. I’ve pulled entire songs on a gut feeling.

What sparks your creativity?

Everything, and I know how that sounds. But I’ve never been able to sit in one lane. I sew, I make my own patterns from scratch, and it’s become the thing that keeps me calm more than anything else. I shoot photos. I cook. I love mixology, building a cocktail from nothing.

I came up around film, and I co-directed this video with my best friend. When your toolbag is that big, everything becomes fuel, because I don’t need to write a song to get the feeling out. I can take a picture or make a jacket or cook dinner and it’s the same muscle, different part of the body.

Who’s the next name everyone should know?

Kaleena Zanders. She’s in my new video, and she’s a powerhouse. Parson James too. A lot of people know him from the Kygo record, but he’s a serious artist in his own right.

Favourite sportsperson ever?

Allen Iverson. Jordan is the GOAT, that’s just fact. But I’m from Philly. What AI meant to that city and to the culture, you had to be there.

What’s been your best moment in a club or studio?

I made a song called “Colors” and set an intention in the room for exactly how I wanted it to live in the world. Years later it got placed in a show and they used it precisely that way.

As a writer you can say you want people to feel something, but that doesn’t mean they will. That was confirmation. In a club it’s the night the crowd decides to come with you and you can stop playing the safe records.

Who taught or helped you the most?

I’m a product of community and tribe. Every step of this has been someone handing me their wisdom, so I won’t name names because I’d leave out fifty. I was the kid in the studio asking what does this knob do, and I still am.

Worst job you’ve ever had?

I danced for a high-end event company. Weddings, sweet sixteens, bar and bat mitzvahs. All the b boys and b girls I came up with did it for money, and honestly a lot of those nights were fun. But at times you got treated like the help in a way that felt dehumanising. It wasn’t every gig. It wasn’t most of them. But the nights you felt it, you really felt it.

[quote align=right text=”My heart is in soul music and always will be”]

Which track do you wish you’d made?

“Freetime” by Kenna. One of my favorite songs ever made. Funny enough there’s a whole chapter about Kenna in Gladwell’s Blink, about how nobody could categorize him and the industry froze. I relate to that more than I’d like to.

What’s the worst track or set you’ve ever done?

I didn’t play badly, but I’ve never been more stressed behind the decks. My roommate had swapped his laptop charger for mine without telling me. Smaller machine, different wattage. I took it to a gig and it trickled just enough to keep me alive without actually charging. Five hour set. My laptop sat at two or three percent for the last stretch of the night and never dropped, but I spent hours convinced the whole thing was about to go black mid-song. The crowd had no idea. I aged a year.

How do you organize your music collection for your sets?

Obsessively. I’m a true open format DJ, I play everything, and that only works if the library is built for it. I’m in Serato and I’m deep in smart crates, genres, subgenres, categories inside categories. It’s an insane system.

The reason is simple. Unless I’m doing a festival where it’s more of an artist set, I’d say 98% of the time I’m reading the crowd in real time. You can’t do that if you’re hunting. The organization is what buys me the freedom to be spontaneous and actually enjoy myself while I do it.

Recommend a film.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, directed by Tamra Davis. She was his friend, so the interview footage in it is unlike anything else that exists on him. It’s incredible.

Recommend a book.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, or The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Not light, but both worth your time.

Favourite internet clip of all time, music or otherwise?

Two, and I can quote both. One is Little Richard in a Jimi Hendrix documentary, sitting at a piano insisting Hendrix was already a star when he got him, then pivoting to Sly, everybody is a star, some people just haven’t been pulled up yet.

The other is a James Brown interview on CNN from 1988 where he is in another dimension entirely, and somewhere in the middle of answering a question he just goes “I feel good, JAM.” Not as a bit. As the answer. Jordan Peele did a remake of it years later and I started cackling, because I genuinely thought I was the only person on earth who found that clip as funny as I do. Turns out I was on Peele’s wavelength the whole time.

Who or what deserves more credit?

Black American contribution to culture, full stop, because it comes wrapped in erasure. Stay just in music: Black artists have been foundational to essentially every popular genre. House and techno were created by Black, brown and queer people in Chicago, Detroit and New York, and somehow we’re not the face of it.

That’s the pattern. We create it, then we don’t get to participate in the success of it. We’re never at the top of the food chain in the thing we built. And it’s so effective that I’ve had my own people tell me I make white people music. Same erasure happened with rock and roll. Same with punk. It’s ridiculous, and it keeps working.

What gets too much hype?

The exact inverse of my last answer. I’ll be respectful and leave it there. You can do the math.

What can’t you stop doing?

Doing things that fill me up. I say it that way because there’s a version of this career that’s already laid out for you, and it would make my life easier. I’m not interested in pandering to get there. It’s probably cost me time and visibility, because I don’t play the political game the way you’re supposed to in order to move up fast. I’d rather be slow and be myself.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

I don’t feel guilty about anything I take pleasure in, so I’ll give you the fun fact instead. I sew. I make clothes and draft my own patterns. I don’t want to be a designer and I don’t have a line. I do it because it calms me all the way down, and then I wear them.

What’s your biggest frustration in the music world?

The industry acts like there can only be one. If you’re a Black artist or a queer artist or sitting at any intersection, you get measured against whoever the system thinks is closest to you. I say that tongue in cheek, because usually we sound nothing alike. But people latch onto the one or two things that make us similar, which are always surface level and basic, and refuse to see everything that makes us different.

I want us to get to be as nuanced as everybody else. House in particular is full of Women, Black artists and Queer artists who don’t get shine, and when they finally do they get lumped into a category instead of being treated as individual artists with individual sounds. We don’t do that to everyone. I’d just like the same room to be specific.

Favourite label and why?

Philadelphia International Records, hands down. Not just because I’m from Philly, but because of the sound they cultivated. Motown second. My heart is in soul music and always will be, and those two labels are where that lives.

What’s the hardest thing about making or playing music?

Being told to pick a lane. I make what fills my cup at the pace I’m inspired, and my whole career I’ve been encouraged not to work that way. Pick one thing, do that thing, that’s how you win.

It’s worse now because everything is algorithm driven. The algorithm rewards the audience you built in one genre, so the pressure to stay put is baked into the machinery. Even now, releasing electronic music under my name, I know there’s a version of this where I make something else in two years and get told I can’t. The music part I love. The industry part is harder to navigate. But the game is the game, and I’m ready to rock.

Find Mike Taylor: Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, and Apple.

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Making LCD Soundsystem-Style Drones

Build a sound inpired by the pumping harmonic drone from LCD Soundsystem’s Someone Great with u-he’s Diva, then put it to work across several genres.

If you’ve followed some of the recent Synth Secrets you’ll know that we love versatile patches. In other words, sounds that – with just minimal tweaks to the envelope or notes – can be used for a range of different genres or parts in an arrangement.

Another great example of this can be found in LCD Soundsystem’s classic, Someone Great. Right from the start it features a rich, pumping, harmonic drone. That sound alone would be worth dissecting, but once you do, you quickly discover a load of other uses for it in your tracks.

And it’s all the cooler for the fact that the sound itself is just a single sawtooth wave playing the right notes with a bit of modulation. Plus, critically, EQing / filtering.

It sounds like this…

Want to follow along? Grab the Diva trial here.

Step 1

The simpler the patch, the more important it is to pick the right sound source, and for this we want rich, analogue vibes. So let’s start, as we so often do, by loading Diva and selecting a blank ‘init’ patch. Now load a Dual VCO and Analogue Env for envelopes 1 and 2. And set the BPM to 112. It’s a bit more of a sedate pace than the original but that lets us focus more clearly on the effect of the modulations.

Step 2

Now we need the right notes and it turns out there’s a fifth or fourth note interval thing happening here: a dyad (two note chord) using G and D. Why fourth or fifth? Because we’ve actually got three D notes (D2, D3, D4) playing with the G3 sitting squarely between two of them, so it depends which D we consider the root note! As for length, set them just shy of a quarter note.

Step 3

Getting back to Diva, disable Oscillator 1, leave oscillator 2 on the default sawtooth wave, tune oscillator two up an octave (that’s the number 4 setting on the knob) and rotate the VCO 1 / VCO 2 blend fully clockwise to VCO 2 only. Raise the Cutoff up to 108 and dial the Emphasis to 15.5. Listening to it now, we’re actually pretty close already.

Step 4

We want some control of the note velocities to shape the tone of the patch. First set the velocity of the D2 note to full and the remaining three to 103. Next map velocity to control the volume of the notes in the VCA section by selecting Velocity as a modulator from the dropdown and then dialling up the modulation amount to maximum. Now our sound is a bit richer and has more bite. 

Step 5

There’s one critical tonal element missing: EQ filtering. To better match the target patch cut a notch around four bands: 150Hz, 300Hz, 600Hz, and 1.2kHz. Notice two things about those frequencies: 1. Each is double the previous, therefore one octave up from the last. 2. They’re all hovering just around the frequency of the note D. So by cutting the root frequencies of those D notes, we’re emphasising that G. 

Step 6

Let’s add pumping with envelopes and modulation… and we need a kick to judge the timing. Load a big, 909-style kick drum into a new channel now and let it play. On Env 1 set Attack to around 49 which instantly adds pump. Listening carefully to how they change the groove, set Decay 75, then set a slightly longer release tail of 29. And raise the VCA volume to full to bring the volume back up.

Step 7

Now you can complement the amp envelope pumping with a little filter envelope action too. First dial the Env 2 filter modulation to fully +. Then go to Env 2 and, listening closely as you adjust, set the following: Attack 68 and Decay 49, and Sustain 0. Notice how we’ve both emphasised the pump and added more bite and tonal interest to the sound?

Step 7 result:

Step 7 result with LCD beat.mp3:

Step 8

To really match LCD’s original track we need a little bit of processing. Add Diva’s Plate 1 reverb with the Size set to maximum and the pre-delay dialled up halfway. The long pre-delay is because sound takes time to cover distance in real spaces, so if you make a sound in a large room there’s an audible gap before the sound is reflected off the boundaries and returns to your ears as reverb. 

Step 9

We can add some sidechain compression pumping too, using the kick channel as the trigger. This plays nicely with the envelope-controlled pumping we already have. And last but not least, add tape drive saturation for vibes. Add this after the sidechain pumping because tape saturation harmonics increase with stronger signals, so the sidechain pumping creates more harmonics on the louder part of the pump!

Step 10

We said from the start this is a versatile sound and we meant it. Both of these below examples are the exact same drone patch, just with a more percussive envelope shape. 

Big Belgian Snog Trumpet.h2p:

Big Trumpet.h2p:

Get a free trial of u-he Diva here.

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Snapchat Now Lets You Turn Chats Into Songs with AI

Snapchat announces a suite of new AI-powered tools for Lens+ subscribers, including creating songs out of your chats. Since the launch of Snapchat’s Lens+ premium subscription model last year, the company has stepped it up with even more exclusive Lenses and other immersive AR experiences to keep its paid Snapchatters satisfied. Now, the company is […]