CREATING SOUNDS OF TOKYO-TO FUTURE PART 7: "LUV 2 LUV"
Album art by Ethan Redd
“LUV 2 LUV”
Audio Track Count: 67
Favorite Sound: The chopped-up guitar sample in the breakdown
Cutting-Room Floor: Not much; a more complicated part for the synth bass in the last section of the song?
Inspirations: Jet Set Radio Future, straight up!
That’s right, we’re seven blog entries into this Jet Set Radio-inspired album and this is the first song where the game’s music was my only reference. From the melody-carrying funk guitar to the driving synth bassline to the overactive drums and intense up-front vocal chopping, I wanted this song to feel like a “traditional” Jet Set Radio Future track. Not that the series really has only one sound, but there are enough common elements across many songs to point at something and say “that’s Jet Set”.
One of my favorite things about working in this style is the challenge of finding a concept you can work a lot of vocal samples into, like I did with “Break” with the intro track or “Love” here. It’s something I think we all enjoy about the soundtracks; it’s why “Understand, understand” has become a rallying cry for the Jet Set Radio fanbase. The examples from the games’ soundtracks are numerous: there’s “Fly” (“Fly Like A Butterfly), “Love” and “Free” (“The Concept Of Love”, “I Love Love You”), “Funky” (“Funky Dealer”) and vocal samples regarding the “Future” repeated across the sequel’s soundtrack as well.
The fun is finding a concept that’s ubiquitous within the range of what people record for commercial vocal samples. Musical terms are obviously going to be super popular (Feel, beat, bass, rhythm, groove, instrument names, or literally just the word “music”), as are references to love and affirmative commands (“let’s go”, “come on”) but there’s also “break”, recorded due to its status as a ubiquitous hip-hop word. Scratch/beat breakdowns, breakbeats and breakdancing, it’s everywhere. “Break” is fun because it’s a pretty flexible word as far as concepts go.
While I’m talking about vocal samples, I should mention that I very nearly downplayed the presence of the central “I do love my baby” sample in this song. The intense patterns like the one present at 0:35 made me wonder if it was too chirpy and annoying and needed to be toned back. I started this song on a stream, and I often make creative decisions on streams that I wouldn’t normally make. I feel a lot of pressure to create new elements quickly on streams, and this leads to rushing something into existence that never would have survived under careful examination in normal solitary studio time.
That can be a good thing and a bad thing! It’s nice to work so quickly, but a lot of stream beats end up feeling like chaff due to their rushed and under-polished progress. However, thankfully the intense vocal chops survived because I saw strong initial support when posting clips of this song and figured it would be fine! I’m one of those people who can passively listen to lyrical music and not get distracted (I’m listening to R&B while writing this) but for a lot of people, a vocal element attracts the most attention. For this reason, I try to be really careful to not overwhelm my songs with the level of vocals.
Even more about vocals: did you notice I recorded a few for this track? The “and one and two and three and four” from 1:05 is me, as are the sung vocals during the breakdown at 1:43 and the spoken bit at 2:20. Commercial vocal samples for music are a finite resource–eventually everything that’s out there will have been used by someone (even the worst vocal samples I could find). It’s a boon to have something fully original to work with. For this album and my future work, including the next thing which I’m working on right now, I’ve become much less hesitant to get on the mic myself and make some original vocal samples to fill things out. These were all very in-the-moment, recorded at my desk in the midst of production. I’m really happy I followed the impulse.
The first 90 seconds of “LUV 2 LUV” are, to me, all killer no filler. From the excitement of building layers to the moment where everything resets with the “yeah” sample at 0:51, to the bouncing between the main beat and the beatboxes at 1:18. It’s firing on all cylinders for me, until we hit 1:29 and the draft file I’m listening to on my phone of this promising song I’ve got cooking up in the summer of 2020 is over. Ah shit, what do I do next? It’s in moments like this that I wonder if I’ve been trained by game composing to make really strong music, but only in 90-second segments. A lot of the drafts I hold onto forever for my album tracks are near 90 seconds. I got so fucking stuck at this part, and the more I listened to how good what I had was, the more intimidated I got at what was going to follow it. I’m not going back into the main section again, I’m not going out like a punk. This is a Sequel Album. You can’t show weakness.
Sometimes you have a beat-switch because you have too many ideas, and sometimes you have one because you ran out of ideas. The big beat-switch in this song is the latter. “What if I just made a different track in the middle of this?” This is a cheat code I use a few times on the album. A beat-switch is so impressive by its very nature that people don’t think about the fact that you probably did it because you ran out of ideas. However, I do think the beat switch in “LUV 2 LUV” does link well with the rest of the song and provides an important element to it, besides just plainly being one of my favorite parts of the album.
What happens is, I essentially start making a romantic soul song with a new pack of samples, and chopping the hell out of one guitar sample to my heart’s content. The first 90 seconds of “LUV 2 LUV” are a jumpy electronic track full of proclamations of love in the vocal samples; the following 80 seconds of breakdown is the actual love song. I remember doing my daily walks down the same streets I did before when I was creatively blocked at 1:29, except this time I felt like I was soaring with the new section. One of the feelings I wanted to come from me to listeners of this album was “OK, now let me show you what I can REALLY do”. To me, this is one of those moments–maybe the first one of those moments I had. It was definitely my favorite moment on the album at the time it was made.
As I mentioned in the intro, my favorite sound in the song is the lead guitar in the breakdown. I found so many ways to creatively manipulate this one sound and keep it fresh, and I don’t think I once played the sample the way it was meant to be. My favorite bits are the one with the reversing at 2:03 and the one at 1:40 where I kind of make a new melody with it. I love it when I find an extremely malleable sample that always sounds smooth. My synth solo at 2:08 kind of reminds me of the synth solo from “Pump Up The Love” on the previous album. In retrospect, I think this breakdown is me singing to the album itself. “It’s all about you, all about you baby. I just don’t know how to say goodbye.” Someday, this work would need to be finished. Someday, it would belong to everyone and not just me in the summer of 2020 practically skipping down a street to my new additions.
Working on the ending of “LUV 2 LUV”, I definitely hit the limit of what the human ear could process at one time. I actually have a sample of how it used to be…
I don’t know about you, but from 0:12 to 0:25 of this clip, I feel super overwhelmed and anxious at all the sounds that are trying to happen to me at once. I did a lot of mixing and tinkering–probably 10+ drafts–trying to figure out how to simplify this section without changing how it was written. I drastically cut frequencies from so many sounds, tried so many different ways to mix the bass and turn elements up and down, but the only thing for it was to reduce the amount of notes being played. You’ll be able to hear in the final version how the last section has less synth bass notes and is finally more digestible and less crowded. When I finally came to the conclusion of cutting down the melody, I was honestly so relieved for this part to be working that I didn’t mind scaling back the musicality. Or whatever you call it when you have too many notes and it wasn’t smart.
Well, that’s all I have to say about the production of “LUV 2 LUV”, but I would be remiss if I didn’t include the teaser trailer for the album from Ethan Redd that was set to this song. I had been working on this album for years, knowing it was going to be massive… this animation made it even bigger than I could have imagined. Every piece of art Ethan made for the project felt so official and I’m forever grateful to him for being a part of the impact, style and perception of Sounds Of Tokyo-To Future.
(P.S. I’m currently playing Sonic Adventure for the Redds and getting wise to the Sonic Adventure references that were snuck into this animation)
That’s all for now—I’ll see you back here with a breakdown of “Sound Effects Record No. 27” on March 1! It’s gonna be a special one.
Above: Full view of the “LUV 2 LUV” mixdown in Ableton Live. Most DAW programs arrange music from left to right on the timeline, so the left end is my intro and the right end is my ending, with every sound placed in a linear fashion. The rows of color are audio tracks, and the tighter multicolored bands of audio tracks are collapsed Groups, as you can see on the right.