Wavey VIP Mix in Pro Tools

From in-car ideation to mastering prep, Cliq dissect their first track as a group

The origin of Wavey 00.10

Like Cliq itself, Wavey came to be through circumstance. Robin tells the tale: “Wavey’s actually the first record that Max and I put together. It started off as a bassline with some drums, and then it sat on our hard drive for a month or two – we didn’t really know what to do with it. We were driving to a friend’s party in Croydon with a couple of other friends, and we played the track in the car, and a friend of mine started humming out a little melody, which ended up becoming the chorus of Wavey – ‘Get lit, get drunk, get high, get wavey’. So props out to Herbie Crichlow on that one!

“About a month after that, we went to one of these music industry party event things, and bumped into Alika. It was the first time we’d ever met her, and her energy was really nice – we really liked her. Within about five minutes of talking to her, we sent her the instrumental of Wavey, and she put the verses down and came up with a different chorus. When we got it back, we were like, ‘OK, this record’s definitely got some legs’. We were here in the studio and we rang up Herbie out of the blue, just for a catchup conversation, and he was like, ‘What about what we did in the car?’. So he voice-noted it and sent it over to us, we put it on the record, and everything gelled and made sense. We called Alika, got her straight down to the studio, did the record, sent it off to the management, and Wavey was born.”

The kick drum 06.45

As is often the case in house, Wavey started as a four-square kick drum. The pair eschew MIDI triggering in this department for discrete audio clips, as Max explains. “Not many people use samples to play back all the sounds, but we put it straight into the session itself, so each kick is actually played from audio, straight out of the Pro Tools session. It sounds tighter: you can literally go in on the sample here and it’s very, very tight. Playing from MIDI has its own little swing, which in some cases – especially with kicks – is not great. The kick is always very tight on playback as audio straight from Pro Tools.

“A few years back you were combining three or four kicks to create one good kick, and that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. We have maybe four or five kicks that we go back to and use regularly, as they just sound good.”