Making Nasty's jump-up inspired piano intro

To make the perfect piano intro, Kissy uses a separate project with several layered instruments

01 >

Kissy is upfront about the inspiration for Nasty: “I actually ripped this idea off from one of my favourite Aphrodite tunes called Hoochie... don’t tell anyone!” He recreates the piano session in a separate project to the main track. “When I put piano layers or something like I think it’s a bit quicker to do it in a separate session.”

02 >

The Hoochie piano part (itself a sample of the much-sampled piano lick from Isaac Hayes’ Ike’s Mood I) is replayed by Kissy in a new project, with the musclebound muso using layered piano instruments (including piano patches from Image-Line Morphine and IK Multimedia Miroslav Philharmonik) on different octaves to get a full sound.

03 >

The piano parts are heavily processed before they’re bounced, to the point where Kissy’s CPU is struggling. “I’ve got a lot of mastering on each layer, which means my computer is constantly in danger of crashing,” Kissy uses IK Multimedia Classik Studio Reverb to apply a short hall reverb to the Miroslav Philharmonik layers.

04 >

The piano part is bounced to a single stereo track and imported into the main project, and Kissy uses a send to apply light doubling and vinyl distortion effects. The level of the vinyl distortion send is automated so that it rises and falls over the course of the track’s intro.