Producing Samples
FNZ’s aim is to deliver loops that are as finished as possible, needing only drums and vocals, and a final mix, to result in a releasable track. “We’re not just looping a sample,” says Mulé, “we’re flipping it, and finding the best parts, chopping and arranging that, and we drag the sample over different tracks for different treatments. We add music and other things on top and we’re doing a lot of processing and a ton of EQ’ing as well, because sometimes when we flip old stuff from the ’70s or ’80s, when we start pitching and manipulating it, all these different frequencies start popping up.
“Sound selection is the most important thing, especially when we’re sampling obscure ’70s, ’80s or ’90s songs. When we use the Prophet or are going through our VST or Kontakt libraries, it’s about having the ear to pick the right sound to lay over the top. You want the sound to blend, and not to stick out like a sore thumb. We may add a missing frequency, like a bass or keyboard for low end. You either play along with the bass in the sample or do something different. Sometimes we pick sounds that are from the era of the sample. Arturia Analog Lab is great for retro sounds, for example.
“In fact, it could be any sound, because we usually degrade the sound, using plug‑ins, like the Aberrant DSP Digitalis Digital Wasteland plug‑in. Sometimes we throw on a plug‑in that can take out drums, to get a wishy‑washy effect as the transients are smoothed. Sometimes we take out the drums altogether, or we’ll extract vocals. Drum removal plug‑ins or AI can create annoying artefacts and take away the clarity or purity of the sound, so we tend to edit drums out manually, replacing them with bits from elsewhere in the song or stretching the audio to fill the gap. It can get pretty surgical!”
“The aim often is to make it sound retro and current at the same time,” adds De Boni. “Sometimes we’ll have a sample that is kind of soft, and we’ll put a really hard 808 hitting under it for contrast. We just mess around. We try not to think about it too much from a technical perspective. I’m always making fun of Mike because he’ll put five EQs in a row, things that traditionally people wouldn’t do. But if it sounds good, why not? Whatever it takes to get the idea to work.”
Drop The Drums
The resulting projects are notably minimalist, usually containing fewer than 10 tracks. De Boni: “It’s something that we learned a long time ago. When we first started producing and making beats, we had a million tracks, with tons of layers. Over the years we’ve learned to do a lot less and be more minimal. Every sound and every track that’s in our sessions is doing something. We learned not to complicate things. When we find a sample we like, we’ll add what we feel it needs, but we don’t want to overproduce it.”
The final step of FNZ’s process is adding drums. However, they then take them off again. De Boni: “Everyone’s got their own idea of when something’s finished and ready to send out. But for us, we always test with our own drums. If it sounds like the full finished production with the drums, then we know it’s ready. We then mute the drums, and bounce the session down. Another advantage of testing it with drums is that it will sometimes highlight timing errors that you might not hear with a metronome.
“Also, just before we bounce something down, we’ll throw Waves SoundShifter on at the end on the master, and start pitching the track around, to find the perfect key. We can work on something for two hours in a certain key, and right at the end when we put the drums on to test it, we may change the key at the last minute. We may change the key three semitones down or up, or whatever, and then bang, that’s the perfect key. It’d done.”
Zac De Boni: Giving space for other producers to do their thing doubles the chances of it getting placed, because our network combines with someone else’s network.
Removing the drums is as much a business decision as a musical one. “A lot of that is to do with networking,” notes De Boni. “If we send another producer something that already has drums, they have nothing left to do on it, and they’re not going to want to play it for Future or whoever it is. They want to do their part. Giving space for other producers to do their thing doubles the chances of it getting placed, because our network combines with someone else’s network. They’re moving the beat around. We’re moving the beat around. Their publisher is moving it around, and our publisher is moving around. Also, we like to hear other producer’s takes on our loops. Drums may be their strong point, whereas our focus is more on the music. So it’s a team effort.
“We’ll typically send a producer 15 to 20 loops in one pack, mostly sample‑based. We sent 80 to Vinylz for Drake because we were trying to put in as much as we could. You never know which one might be the one. The producers are inspired by what we send them and add the drums, either with the artist in the studio or in their own time, and then give the beat to the artist. They don’t usually play the beat to the artist until it’s completed. There are exceptions, like Kanye, one of the greatest artists of all time who is also a producer — he’ll want to hear just the sample loops. Because when there’s drums on a sample, it can dictate too much where the song is going to go.”
“We’re almost OCD when it comes to sending samples out or playing something to someone,” concludes Mulé. “We want everything to sound great. We don’t want anything to jump out crazy loud or any high end that’s going to screech everyone’s ears. We always pay attention to detail and make sure something is EQ’ed right and it’s got the right compression or processing. We try to get it as good as we possibly can, to where it makes the next person’s part easier, and inspires them to take what we have done further.”
Future ‘Wait For U’
FNZ’s Ableton project for ‘Wait For U’ contains only six elements.
‘Wait For U’, featuring Drake and Tems, was a major, Grammy‑winning hit in 2022. It is based on a sample of a track called ‘Higher’ by singer Tems. Unusually, FNZ sampled a live version performed on Genius, with the singer accompanied by just electric guitar and bass. FNZ’s sample session consists of just six tracks: the sample split out over four tracks, a Moog synth, and a rain sample track.
Zac De Boni explains: “The live version had a better vibe, with better sonics, and her performance is better than in the original. Her vocals are a lot more prominent, because it’s more stripped‑down. I think us sampling a live performance started a trend, because now quite a few people sample live versions!”
Michael Mulé: “We sampled different parts of the song. Because it was live, the first thing we had to do was make sure the sample is in time. You can see the warp marks. Every beat had to land exactly right, so we had the freedom to chop it up freely. We also sped the bpm up quite a bit to 166bpm. Her version is a lot slower.”
De Boni: “The top four tracks in the session are all the sample, and the tracks are colour‑coded, so we can see what’s what. The top track doesn’t have any treatments, apart from compression, because it’s a live performance. The next section is the post hook or the verse section, and we used Soundtoys MicroShift and EchoBoy, Valhalla Reverb, EQ, and the Ableton multiband and Glue compressors. We have the same plug‑ins on the two other sample tracks, with different settings. So it’s pretty simple. It’s more like we’re tidying up the sound, and the MicroShift gives it a nice little phase effect, almost like a flange.
Mulé: “The track called ‘2021 Drake’ contains a Moog sound from Omnisphere that we called ‘Drake Moog’, hence the track name. This was before we started producing with Drake. The preset we used for the bass sound is ‘Moog Modular Big Booty’. We also added some rain to give the track an ambient vibe. You can probably barely hear it in the instrumental, but it adds a nice little touch. The rain sound comes from a sample pack.
“After we had chopped up the sample and added these elements to it, we sent the loop to producer ATL Jacob. We had pitched it up, but he pitched it down again, and added drums. That led to Future getting on it, and obviously Drake later on. We still didn’t know what to expect, but when it was released, it shot straight to number one!”
The Kid Laroi ‘What’s The Move’
The core of ‘What’s The Move’ combined two audio samples with soft synth parts.
‘What’s The Move’ (with Future and BabyDrill) was the final single from the Kid Laroi’s debut album The First Time, both released at the end of 2023. FNZ’s session for this project consisted of two sample tracks, two keyboard tracks, a Moog bass, three Serato sample tracks and an 808 track.
Michael Mulé: “The sample is not actually a sample in the normal sense. Instead we used an audio clip called ‘In My Car’, which is just a choir and a keyboard, that was sent to us by a producer we work with, Mickey de Grand IV from the band Psychic Mirrors. It’s rather jazzy‑sounding, which is the opposite of the final track.”
Zac De Boni: “We treated the clip like a sample. At the top of the session in red are the two tracks with the ‘In My Car’ sample. We sped the clip up from 137 to 138 bpm, pitched it down, chopped it, and then we played some chords and keys over it, to fill it out. The yellow track is the chords in MIDI, and in light pink underneath is the track on which we printed the audio. The sound comes from Output’s Substance. We converted to audio because it gives a clean result, with no overhang in the gaps. We added the Sonic Charge AudioBode plug‑in, with a Swedish ’70s TV reverb, and some EQ. Some of our tracks will have millions of plug‑ins, but these tracks already sounded great.”
“The Bass Moog is from iZotope’s Iris 2,” continues Mulé. “After that is a sample, spread over three pink tracks, using Serato. After we had added keys and a bass, we thought, ‘Oh, this would be crazy if we could add a phrase or vocal somewhere to make it pop, to take it to the next level.’ So we scrolled through all our dance a cappellas. We ended up using three parts of a ’90s house song by Kariya, ‘Let Me Love You Tonight’. We put the a cappella in Serato, and chopped it up into little pieces.
“The main thing we used are the vocals saying, ‘Don’t you feel it too?’, which is track 7. Track 6 is the vocal sample used as a stutter effect, and track 8 is a vocal we turned into a rim shot. The original is very clean, so we added the Soundtoys Decapitator and MicroShift. We wanted to make it sound a little more distorted. Track 9 is a nicely distorted 808, from Ronny J. We have millions of 808s to choose from, and this one sounded perfect. It has a really low distorted vibe to give it that bottom end that we needed.
“When we got in the studio with Laroi we went through a bunch of ideas, and this is one that we played for him. There’s another co‑producer on the song named Dopamine, who added the drums. This was all produced together in the room, also Laroi’s vocals. The only part that was done remotely was by the Parisi brothers, who are in Italy. They did the additional production on the outro and various little things around the song.”