Earlier this year we attended the first-ever London Music Conference at Fabric London. Whilst there, our Head of Education and Development, Ski Oakenfull, treated the event-goers to a live deconstruction of Todd Terje’s excellent track, ‘Inspector Norse’, breaking down the production techniques, music theory, sound design and more. If you’d like to learn more about producing, mixing, mastering and releasing tracks just like this one, check out our line of courses.
‘Inspector Norse’ was released back in 2012 on the producer’s own imprint Olson / Smalltown Supersound and features on his It’s The Arps EP as well as his full-length offering, It’s Album Time. The track fuses addictive head-nodding basslines with a rich jumble of cosmic synth stabs and melodies and to date has amassed over 19 million video views on YouTube alone. A fun fact about ‘Inspector Norse’ is that it was created entirely using an ARP 2600 – a vintage synth that Korg recently revamped for 2020. Without further ado, jump into the live deconstruction below and if you want to get your hands on the MIDI files from the project, Ski has kindly put together a downloadable pack which can be yours for the price of your email. Download it here.
To kick off the deconstruction Ski gives a little intro to the tools he is going to use to breakdown the track: Ableton Live, Push 2 and an M32 keyboard from Native Instruments. First up Ski begins by programming the beat to lay the foundations for the rest of the track. Next up, after discussing the song’s key signature and music theory, he punches in the bassline using Arturia’s own soft-synth version of the ARP2600. Ski polishes off the deconstruction by adding in the chords, arps and melodies with a little help from our very own, Risa T.
These deconstructions are a tool we use frequently to teach elements of composition and arrangement but to get the full picture we recommend you study with us. The most comprehensive study we offer is our flagship degree programme, the BA (Hons) in Music Production and Sound Engineering (also available online). We’ve also recently launched a brand new degree – the BA (Hons) in Music Production and DJ Practice. Get in touch to find out more.
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