Wehbba Fake

Drumcode 2017

Brazilian bombshell Wehbba (aka Rodolfo Wehbba) has been steadily rising up the ranks of techno royalty over his decade-long career, with releases on Tronic, Soma and Suara along the way. Most recently he’s appeared on Adam Beyer’s ubiquitous Drumcode with his trippy, ominous Fake which can be found on the compilation A-Sides Volume 6. FM caught up with Rodolfo in his Barcelona studio to find out how he created his Drumcode debut.

How did Fake come about?

“It came out of nowhere. I was just watching TV, and because I have the luxury of having a home studio. I was able to just run in there and get started! I had the idea of making this really harsh lead sound that wouldn’t change note or anything. Once I got that sound, the inspiration for everything else came really quickly; there wasn’t a bassline or anything, just drums full-on all the time and the lead sound. Then I did the polishing touches… it was kind of a fast track to write, but very slow to treat later. The post-production was long!”

Why was the post-production process so time-consuming?

“It took a long time because I was just kind of ‘brushing’ the ideas in; I was just taking them as they came. I had the idea of the lead recorded, but I didn’t know if it was sounding as good as it should. Then I recorded the drums, just doing everything super-fast. As the ideas came I was just recording, recording and recording. I didn’t really care about how the stuff sounded while it was being recorded. So making it fit together later was a big challenge, and it took almost like a year to get the sound to where I wanted it to be!”

How long did the actual composition process take?

“A couple of hours – like three hours?”

Amazing. What challenges did you face in the post-production?

“The first challenge was to get the lead sound to work on different sorts of systems, because it was too wide. It was tricky to manage it,