Making Evolution’s musical elements

Michael creates a bed of processed samples in Logic Pro and uses Omnisphere and Kontakt to add a soaring chord progression

01 > “The most interesting part of this record for me was building up the musical elements,” begins Michael. “I wanted a musical bed to write to, so I found this Rhodes sample, then resampled it after cutting it together and looped it. I wanted it to be a deep, epic thing that was quite full.”

02 > Michael layers up the resampled Rhodes bed with some more toppy electric piano. “This has a nice bit of grit to it which I like – it sounds like it’s overlapping itself and making some mistakes. Everything these days is too perfect! A lot of the best music in the world has so many good mistakes in it, especially when it comes to old house records.”

03 > Next Michael adds strings courtesy of Spectrasonics Omnisphere, specifically the Adagio Transparent Strings Warm patch. As the main string part develops and gets bigger, it’s layered with a low-string part on a separate track. The main string part is run through Soundtoys’ Little Plate, but this isn’t present on the low string. “I didn’t want it to cloud the bottom end,” explains Michael.

04 > The piano that’s used in the track is provided by the Kontakt library Una Corda.

“You can hear the hammer on it, which is a bit different from your typical Alicia Keys plugin or whatever,” Michael enthuses. This is then run through Soundtoys’ EchoBoy to add delay.

05 > All these channels are then bussed together.

“I see this music as one element; especially in a house record, I want to control them all, and I want them to gel. I wanted them to fit into a particular space, and have the bass and percussion taking over.”

Michael begins work on the bus processing by slightly saturating it with Soundtoys’ Decapitator.

06 He then compresses the signal with Waves H-Comp and adds reverb via Little Plate, followed by Waves MondoMod’s DoppelMover patch.

“It’s not something I normally use, it’s just modulating the sound a bit and giving everything a natural width. I wanted the strings to sound like a proper orchestral section.”