Sigala builds a perfect pop-house chorus

UK producer Bruce Fielding (aka Sigala) has had a hand in some of the biggest pop records of recent years, including his Ella Eyre collab Came Here For Love, which he broke down for us back in 2017. The track is a masterclass in electronic pop songwriting so, naturally, a killer chorus is key to its success.

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Songcraft is of paramount importance to Bruce, and the music theory behind Came Here For Love’s chorus is more than an afterthought. “The chorus is all in the same key as the verse and some of the chords are the same, but the order is different and it starts on F#m which is the first chord of the scale,” he reveals. 02 >

“When you play the song, that’s the chord that feels like it wants to go,” Bruce continues. “So when the chorus comes in you feel the release. In the verse, the chord comes in the middle of the progression and there’s not much focus on it, and that’s a little musical trick a lot of people do.” 03 >

The chorus also acts as the buildup to the drop. “I do that in pretty much every one of my tracks,” Bruce reveals. “The piano sound is two layers. The first is Toontrack EZkeys which is just on the grand piano setting, and I’ve used some compression, Waves V-EQ4, a load of widening because the other piano I’m using is very mono. Then there’s the Waves H-Delay, on a wide ping-pong setting.” 04 >

“I tried to highlight a melody in the chords by turning up the velocity of particular notes to maximum,” adds Bruce. “The other sound is probably more important, it’s the Korg M1 House Piano patch. I’ll take the hall reverb off and add my own reverb, and there’s quite a lot of processing on here.” 05 >

“It’s quite heavily compressed,” notes Bruce. “We’ve got the Waves CLA-3A; the V-EQ boosting the high-end stuff and cutting everything below 82Hz. Then we’ve got Pro Tools EQ boosting the mid, high-mid stuff, which is usually where the energy is in the piano. Then there’s the OTT which is crushing it a little bit more.”

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Next comes Native Instrument’s Transient Master. “I wanted the piano to cut through, so I boosted the Attack so it’s really punchy. Then there’s another EQ boosting the low and high-mid stuff, the H-Delay again. This piano is completely mono so I widened it again. Then another EQ to filter the piano before the drop. Then Nicky Romero Kickstart at the drop, and finally oeksound Soothe.”