Funk Grooves

Oli Bell from Groove Criminals details how he put together a funk platter that matters…

“On the synth side we rinsed both the Moog Grandmother and Mother 32 for those classic synth bass tones. The clavinet and organs were taken from a mixture of softsynths and our old, trusty E-mu Classic Keys. These were then run through the hardware wahs and vintage Dynacord for some rotary speaker flavour with the added bonus of its slightly crunchy preamp circuit. We sped up and slowed the rotor effect manually on the fly for some extra character.

“Bass and drums were all sampled from our stockpile of authentic multi samples and past sessions, then processed through secret sauce effects chains. The beats come from a large bank of MIDI files we have collated, played by a drummer on an electronic kit from which we saved the performance as MIDI data. Most of the percussive elements were played live or sampled, then programmed.”