A lot of how we compose and produce our music
is actually just jamming and improvising and
feeding off of each other's energy.
When we go into the recording studio to work
on our album, we're tracking with the gloves.
It's not just something that we put on when
we perform, it's like "Hey, we gotta make
a song, let's record the parts, and let's
put that human expression into it, and ship
that out to you guys".
One of the goals that we had with this song
was to kinda create this feeling of "swelling",
and having the whole track sort of "breathe".
The way the song opens up is with this bass
note that, kind of swells from nowhere, it
kind of starts low, and it grows in aggressiveness
and in energy.
There's a filter that's on the bass that's
kind of adding this, low-pass effect, or a
"muffle" effect, and there's also a kind of
pulse to the bass, there's like a rhythm that
you hear.
I'm opening a filter by—essentially, I control
that by how open my hand is, so when I'm doing
this bass swell, I open my hand, to let that
filter out, and also let in some of the higher
frequencies.
And then, I'm also modulating the depth of
this pulse, by moving my hand from left to
right.
While I'm controlling that bass, at the same
time, I'm also fading in this drum track.
So there's several layers to the drum, and
I can fade them in by, moving my right hand
up, and each finger actually controls a different
layer of the sound, and there's kind of three
layers.
So, as I'm going vertically, I'm, essentially
literally stacking these drums up.
So I bring in a kick with one finger, and
then I bring in a snare with another finger,
and then once those are fully faded in, I
start going to the next layer, and my hand
keeps going higher and higher.
This is happening throughout the whole first
verse, all kind of ramping up towards the
drop.
And this is something that is sort of a unique
sound that we really wanted to capture—is
this smooth fading in of different drum layers.
A lot of the time you hear like, things just
kind of ramp up from one energy level, right
to the other.
We wanted to have this track be a little bit
more, fluid, and have this feeling of swelling.
So the way we usually divide up our songs
is Mike controls the bass line, and I usually
play a lead melody on top of it.
When we design our leads, as a vocalist, I
try to actually create sounds that I can control
as intimately as I can control my voice—like
being able to control the volume, and the
pitch, being able to do pitch bends, vibrato,
and being able to add things in like the amount
of reverb, and the amount of distortion, and
all sorts of parameters about the energy of
the sound, was really important.
The way I control the lead is, basically I
have different notes on my fingertips.
One fingertip will be one note, and then another
one will be another, so I kinda have the scale
on my fingertips, so that I can access a lot
of notes very rapidly.
I can control volume of the sound, by raising
and lowering my hands, but I can also do things
like reverb, like I mentioned, where I control
the amount of echo in the sound, by moving
my hand forward or backwards from my body.
I actually have continuous control of pitch
with this lead, so while I have the note on
my fingertips, I actually control the pitch
bend, away from that note, with the way that
I orient my hands, so I can actually pitch
down and pitch up.
This allows me to do some really cool things
like at the beginning of this video, what
I do is I start from this really quiet sound,
and then I kind of pitch up.
So a lot of things are happening at the same
time—I'm making the pitch go up, I'm also
making the volume go up, I'm also changing
the amount of reverb in the sound, all at
the same time, which is this really cool thing
that we're able to do because of our instruments.
A lot of this song is actually, more about
the expression and the tone quality, than
even the notes themselves, where like most
songs are driven by the melody.
For example, in one phrase of the song, I'm
actually, literally, just holding one note,
and just sustaining it, and opening and closing
it, and we thought that was something really
cool, that we hadn't really heard before.
The next section of the song is this build
that happens.
The build is really where we take this swelling
idea, and really take it to the extreme.
We kind of had this idea of building it all
the way to the point where it just turns into
this super noisy wall of sound.
And as far as the composition of this build,
there's a lot of things we do to add tension.
As this whole build is happening, there's
more drums that are coming in, I'm layering
in extra layers—there's this kick that comes
in, that's kinda like a house music rhythm,
where it's like, just a kick on every quarter
note.
The bass is kind of doing some interesting
things where, we go from an E to an F, which
is a note that's not in the E minor scale—this
kind of dissonant second interval, and it
creates a cool texture.
Really the key to this build, and the coolest
part, is actually just like the very end of
it, where I'm doing this really long pitch
bend, basically from just below the tonic.
And then we have this effect that we kind
of call the "Big Bang", and that actually
brings in a bunch of different effects—so
it brings in things like an amp, a filter
delay, a hyper and a dimension, and also a
filter on top of that.
We thought it just like literally destroys
the entire track, and turns it into white
noise, and I bring that in by kind of just
shifting the difference in the depth, between
my hands.
And the cool thing about the "Big Bang" is,
it sounds like you actually took that original
sound, and you somehow spread it across the
entire frequency spectrum.
So we have this really flowing verse, and
we really wanted to create a lot of contrast
between the verse and the chorus.
So when the drop hits, it changes completely
from, you know, this flowy, swelling thing,
into this very staccato, sharp, choppy thing,
where basically I'm just triggering a bunch
of samples, and while Mike is playing the
same instrument, during this section, I'm
actually playing a different instrument.
And that's kind of an important concept to
the way that we designed our control scheme,
and the way that our gloves control music,
is that we actually are able to have different
instruments, different virtual instruments.
For us it's very similar to somebody who plays
like a violin and a guitar—you know it's
like you have a guitar, and then you can put
that down and pick up a violin—it's the
same thing for us when we switch instruments,
it's like the space around us changes.
When we switch to the drop, you have this
kind of, this drum loop that has some funky
hi-hat patterns to it, and it's layered with
a sub as well, and that's kind of the foundation
that the whole drop is based on.
And then, to kind of make the chorus a little
bit more full, we also added these arps, as
well as, this kind of sound that we've nicknamed
a "wolf" sound, because it's like a vocal
hit that has this pitch slide in it—like
an "ar-hooo!"—it basically sounds like a
wolf howl—yeah like a pitch-bended up sound.
In the second verse, we wanted to have a verse
that had a little bit more energy, given that
we've basically built up all this energy in
the song, with the first build and with the
drop.
We bring in a different drum pattern than
we had in the first verse—where in the first
verse, the drums are very straight, this you
have a little bit more syncopation, and you
have some interesting kick patterns happening,
and the bass isn't just modulating a single
note, the bass plays a certain chord progression.
I kind of reflect that in the melody—the
melody is a little bit more catchy, more interesting.
There's still a lot of modulation with the
lead, but the second verse is probably more
about the notes actually, than the modulation.
I have a pentatonic scale on my fingers, and
that's kind of how I discovered some of these
melodies, is really just going down and up
the scale, and a lot of these melodies are
literally just a descending pentatonic scale
for like four notes, and we switch between
what note we start on.
What we really want people to understand is,
the gloves are our musical tools.
We really built and created our own tools,
that really allowed us to dig deep into controlling
these electronic sounds.
The gloves are really integral to, not just
how we perform the music, but how we compose
the music.
In the song "Awakening", there's literally
nothing that we're not controlling.
Every single element—down to the notes,
down to triggering these drum loops, down
to playing the arps and the chords, and the
modulations—it's all being done in real
time, through our motions and gestures.
Hope you guys enjoyed this video—if you
liked it, definitely give us a thumbs up,
and subscribe, hit that notification icon,
so that you'll be the first to hear when we
put out new music.
And, make sure to stay tuned, because we're
gonna have an album coming out this summer,
and we're definitely gonna be doing more break-downs
like this, for more songs, and songs that
we have coming out later, so stay tuned.
