Jonas Blue: I like using other things.
J Dilla.
Boy Wonda.
Mike Will.
All that kind of stuff and putting into my
genre of music.
[ music ]
The  initial thing that I started out with on this
for sure was the marimba sound.
Let’s have a quick look at that.
I started with melody so that would have just
been me playing it.
Again, I come from this weird way of working.
I actually play everything and I don’t use
the piano roll for anything.
I had this idea of it kind just smoothly building
and to have these defined sections.
This is all kind of basic percussion sounds.
If we have a quick look,
And then you add some finger snaps to that.
And a big, big dance kick.
And those were kind of the backbone of the
track.
You mix that with the melody like I said
and you have the intro to the track there.
I had this idea that the chorus--again generally
quite different for a dance track--the chorus
is generally on the beat, everyone is kind
of grooving, I wanted to go for the opposite.
I wanted everything to die out.
The first thing I would have done, definitely
for this section would have been the piano.
Which is this
Second thing was the synth lead and
it’s kind of very Jonas Blue, synth lead sounds
I tend to use it on a lot of stuff.
So you mix that with the piano,
The first thing I got sent over from JP was
the chorus
The great thing that JP did was that he didn’t
fight my synth lead, he went with my melody
and made it work and that was so important
for this song.
So if you have a listen to those few things
now together it sounds quite magical.
You can’t leave people waiting there for
too long, people are now focused on the song
and what it’s about, next thing is rhythm.
So if we have a look at the drums, I think
specifically we have 808 snares, four four clap.
And again, if you listen to the fills on this
That would have come from my inspirations
from people like Mike Will and that whole
kind of Mike Dean.
With hats and snares.
If we listen to all that together,
I was actually going backwards and forwards
with this for a while, thinking where it could go.
Because again I knew that I really needed to have those three defined sections.
You have this really cool smooth intro.
You got the big epic piano chorus with this
amazing song on top of it.
The next thing was how can we make this a
little bit dirty and working the clubs.
If I break down this section quickly, we have
the amazing chant from JP which is this
and then you mix that with some really kind
of raspy, heavy brass sound
The very kind of afro beat influence which
was so prominent at this point
808 hats,
So you get this kind of whole mixture of musical
influences here.
There are three very different sections.
It’s just about then repeating that and
progressing it in the song.
People weren’t sure on the drop because
it was so different.
They felt it should be more like the smooth
kind of piano, that wasn’t the idea I had
for making this record.
I had a very clear vision that it needed to
be three defined sections.
And if you think back to the
sixties and seventies of all this kind afrobeat
music, they weren't’ playing sweet melodies
on the piano.
It was all about the drums and the bass and
the grooves and how they can get these chants
across.
That was the influence and I’m glad I stuck
with it cause it turned out great.
