CREATING SOUNDS OF TOKYO-TO FUTURE PART 14: CHAINSAW FUNK

Album art by Ethan Redd

“CHAINSAW FUNK”

Audio Track Count: 68

Favorite Sound: The guitar riff at 1:46 and onwards

Cutting-Room Floor: Nothing–this song sounds like a cartoon suitcase with a tie sticking out of it, absolutely everything got stuffed in here

Inspirations: Drum n’ bass, Jersey club music, funk, the manga Chainsaw Man

Forgive me if I’ve said differently in my other blog post entries, because I’ve taken months off between the first eight and the last eight–but “Chainsaw Funk” is my favorite song on the album. Over a year from its release, I’m sure of that now. This is the song that shaped what I’d be doing on this year I lose my mind. You can hear the echoes of it in songs from that album like “cmon”, “magic loop”, “cold rock it” and even “dream smooth” to an extent with the chirpy vocals. It’s not really often that you make one song on an album that proves to be a bridge to your next ideas. I wish it always went as smoothly as that, because “Chainsaw Funk” really set me up for something special.

But enough about that other album, we’re back in 2020 and I am yet again listening to the first 90 seconds of a song over and over again, figuring out where to take it. Ever since I started working in video games, my brain will pack it up 90 seconds into a song’s structure. Time for the loop! Call it done! No, no, we still have to be here for at least three minutes total, so let’s get out of it. Listen all the way up to 1:45 or so–can you hear where my brain threw in the towel, where I threw in some new elements to get out of the loop? But I’ve never been a fan of the intro-verse-hook-verse-hook stuff anyway, so maybe part of my style is being stuck there every time and having to try something wild.

I start this song with a number of weird, ear-catching elements instantly–a frenetic breakbeat with what sounds like Alvin and The Chipmunks robbing a bank over it. Interplay between a juicy synth stab and a sampled horn hit that sounds like it barged into the room by accident. Then the full beat driven by a big chunky metal snare and a whip sound effect and a melody driven by a saxophone riff that’s being transposed in pitch within an inch of its life. I have days where I sit down knowing exactly what I want to do, but I also have days where I had too much sugar and I make frantic gumbo songs, throwing in all kinds of disparate elements. Sometimes it’s trash and sometimes it’s the beginning of my favorite song on the album.

The section between 0:52 and 1:39 was actually made live on a stream, one of probably less than a dozen appearances of mine making music on my Twitch channel. I think that by that point everyone who watched them knew I was tinkering around with another Jet Set album, and it was always a crowd pleaser to work on one of the songs live.

The way I make music live is a lot different from the way I do it on my own time. I tend to work a lot faster and toss things together in the “gumbo song” style, in an effort to keep viewers entertained. Part of me is aware that they’d be entertained no matter what I’d do, but more importantly, the perfectionist part of me knows that I am fucking up and being boring and bad and I need to stop immediately or be better. It’s a pretty sweaty affair, making music fast. I’m sure I would eventually get used to streaming and feel less pressure if I did it more, but I didn’t… do it more. So we may never know.

The streaming sprint lent itself to the energy of “Chainsaw Funk”, though, and after that session I had my 90-ish second chunk that ends off in a breakdown that keeps the march of the song up with a kickdrum (1:16 - 1:39). I think it’s one of my favorite breakdowns I’ve made, because it still feels so active and energetic despite technically being a respite from the rest of the track. The twinkling plucks, vocal sample (“you still think those sounds mean something?”) and brief sampled strings all felt like the perfect amount of seasoning on the new section, but I didn’t know whether to just launch back into the beat or do something new.

Who am I kidding? This is “Chainsaw Funk” we’re talking about, and it was going to have to be something new. I would come into the project file and bang my head against that 1 minute 40 second mark for several days, squeezing out the brief misdirection of breakbeat bits and Mellotron brass at one point but still not knowing what the next full section was. After listening over the entire song enough, I decided I wanted most of the first section to continue, but with a few elements switched out for variety.

I added the fuzzy wah guitar lead, which was a super vivacious and inspiring element, and built the rest of the section around that in the center. The twinkling plucks from the breakdown are in the right ear playing the chords, there was a new growly distorted bassline and the left ear had the saturated Mellotron choir lead. That’s probably my other favorite sound from this one. The Soundtoys Decapitator plugin can give so much extra substance to vocals.

I let the guitar continue to lead me through the section and ended up with a really satisfying change at 2:10 where I felt all the instruments were going on a journey together. Some vocal stabs and the sax from earlier join at 2:22, and the song briefly squashes itself into a fakeout ending with electric piano and roaring reverb guitar. I knew that when everything came back, it needed to be absolutely huge, so I brought back the lead synth from earlier and a string section and had them join the new 2nd section instruments in one of my most harmonious and wide finales, I think. This was after I had made the last part of “I Wanna Kno”, and the surprise string section worked so well there that I used it over here too. I really like taking the tools that most people have for dramatic scoring and using them to enhance dnb/breakbeat productions.

I mentioned online earlier in 2022 that the manga Chainsaw Man was the reason this song got its title, and it was at the last minute. I had just finished reading the first part of the manga around the time I was mixing this, and it still didn’t have a set name at that point. I read Chainsaw Man with a lot of high-energy music as my background listening, and with how pumped up I was from the quality of the manga and how well my song had turned out, I said “why not? This has Chainsaw Man energy”.

This song was also really inspired by the energy, if not the literal sounds, of Jersey club music. Even though it has more of a syncopated drum n’ bass rhythm, the way the bass drum keeps pounding on the “1” through the breakdown and the small funny sound snippets that cut in (the whip, vox and whistling sample) are inspired by the incredible momentum of Jersey club. It’s impossible to not get your molecules a little excited listening to that sound.

“Chainsaw Funk” is my favorite song on Sounds Of Tokyo-To Future not just because it felt like a glimpse into the literal future sound I’d be working with, but because it’s perfectly emblematic of what I strived for on this album. It’s more polished, more bold and dynamic, arranged around strong memorable leading melodies instead of riding on the strength of samples alone–and best of all, it doesn’t sound like Jet Set Radio but it feels like Jet Set Radio and fits, which is what I always strive for when working in this style. I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of the production of “Chainsaw Funk”!

Above: Full view of the “Chainsaw Funk” 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.