Frank Ocean is considered one of the best artists of the 2010s. He started out by making some money on neighborhood chores that was later spent paying rent for a studio where he started composing and producing music. From 2005 he began to write songs for artists such as Justin Bieber, Beyoncé or Pharrel Williams, and he joined the hip-hop collective Odd Future in 2009. By then, he had met Tyler, The Creator and found his kindred spirit in Odd Future collective and its DIY sensibility. ‍

Blonde (stylized as blond on the album cover) is his second studio album, released on August 20, 2016, a few days after their visual album Endless.

Whereas Channel Orange showed off an expansive eclecticism, this album contracts at nearly every turn. Its spareness suggests a person in a small apartment with only a keyboard and a guitar and thoughts for company. The stories Frank tells here find solace in sorrow.

“RIP Trayvon, he looks just like me” he sings on Nikes, the opening track from Blonde. In the song’s video, Frank holds up a framed photo of the 17-year-old martyr, the boy’s sad eyes tucked inside a hoodie, a teenager shot to death on the night of February 26, 2012.

It’s also the most overtly political statement Frank makes across the entire record. And Nikes is hardly a call to arms. The song is a woozy, faded, screwed-down odyssey, replete with helium warble and dewy third eye, and it’s actually one of the album’s most propulsive tracks.

This is the song that I wanted to deconstruct, even though it may be one of the simplest and most minimalist on the album. You can see here the remake video, and below I will comment on how I have achieved that characteristic pitched sound that Frank Ocean applies to his voice in this song, as well as all the instrumentation step by step.

The song has a linear structure of 4 chords in loop:

VOCALS

This time I am going to start by explaining the processing of the voice, being the main element in this song. The timbre of the voice can be reminiscent of the sound that is produced when we breathe a helium balloon. To achieve that artificial high pitched timbre, I have used a fairly popular speech processing plugin called AutoTune Pro 8 from Antares.

Currently, most contemporary artists use autotune on vocals. We can hear how it is used appreciably in trap or reggaeton music, turning the autotune into one of the engines and characteristic colors of these genres. However, it is also used in a subtle way in a lot of pop songs that you have probably listened to, going unnoticed and slightly correcting some tuning errors.

This plugin is very easy to use. With the Retune-Speed ​​value you adjust the speed in milliseconds it will take to correct your voice if it is out of tune. If the value is very low, it will have a somewhat robotic and artificial effect, while the higher it is, the more natural these pitch corrections will be.

With the value of Flex-Tune you adjust the amount of deviation you want to allow with respect to the perfect tuning. If the value is 0, the voice will be processed to be perfectly in tune, while if you increase the value, there will be small variations on the pitch that will make it more imperfect but more natural.

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Now, for these two parameters to work well, the program has to know what scale of notes you are going to work on. To do this you have to know what scale we are working on. The first step is to identify all the notes that appear in the voice you are singing, and once you have them, identify which scale it corresponds to. The voice of this song is in Major scale (the most common) because the interval of its notes follows the pattern of TTSTTTS (Tone-Tone-Semitone-Tone-Tone-Tone-Semitone), and this scale begins at the Eb note, therefore it is Eb Major, which also corresponds to the first chord of the song, as shown above.

In addition to the Major scale, it is also possible that the scale is Minor (or others). If you don't know the scale, you can use the Chromatic scale that will support all notes, but the effect of the autotune will be much more diluted than with the Major scale. This may be confusing at first, so I recommend taking a look at some theory online to get the basics about scales, since it would be very extensive to explain it here.

Once the scale is selected, we can change the value of Input Type top left, depending on whether the voice is Soprano (female), tenor, or low Male, depending on your voice range. Finally, in the Formant option we can change the pitch of the voice, making it from more low or throaty, to sharper and artificial like an animated cartoon. To control this, play with the Throat value.

I have run this vocals through a number of effects. The most notable are those of the Slate Digital series: an FG-800 microphone simulator to give it a touch of warmth, an EQ to sharpen the voice in treble and control the bass, a compressor to give it more body, and then I used the FabFilter Pro DS to control the incidence in treble caused by pronouncing the "s" letters and not squeaking. I added 2 return channels with reverb for this voice, one with ValhallaVintageVerb and one with Slate Digital's VerbSuite.

Note that unlike other previous songs, I have only used a single voice track in this song, without additional tracks in unison or in stereo, to achieve a more uniform result and a feeling of closeness of the voice.

Below you can listen to the processed voice alone:

Vocals

DRUMS

The drums on this track are straightforward, where the true character they offer emerges based on their basic production through delays and reverbs.

The most important thing is to find some kick and snare samples that closely resemble the original. Afterwards, both the snare and kick are delayed with a short repeat in sync with the song's tempo. The cabinet also carries a ValhallaVintageVerb reverb. And voilà!

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Drums

SYNTHS

There are basically 2 synths on this track, one quite close to the sound of an organ, and a bass-synth. For the organ, I used the Arturia VST B-3, which recreates the legendary Hammond B3 organs.

The sound of this organ is fundamentally modulated by the Drawbars, which I will delve into below.

Every sound or note is made up of a fundamental and harmonics. The fundamental can be considered as the "root" of the sound and harmonics are higher frequencies you can hear, which add some shape to the sound.

The drawbars let you shape your organ sound by mixing the fundamental and harmonics.

B-3 has 9 drawbars for each virtual keyboard (upper and lower), and 2 bass pedal drawbars for a total of 20. The 9 drawbards for the upper keyboard are located on the left, and the 9 drawbars for the lower keyboard are located on the right, with the 2 bass pedal drawbars located in the middle. Pulling a drawbar out will increase the volume of that tonewheel in steps starting at zero (no sound) all the way to 8 (full volume). Each set of nine drawbars is organised in asdending fashion, such that the bars on the left control lower tones and the ones on the right control higher tones.

Think of the leftmost two (brown) drawbars as “sub” tones, the middle four as “foundation” tones in the midrange, and the three to the furthest right as “brilliance”, controlling higher frequencies.

Due to the fact that each drawbar has nine positions there are literally millions of possible combinations of settings and sounds and this is what makes tonewheel organs so flexible, capable of everything from subtle, minimal tones to very complex, rich and powerful sounds. Part of the skill of being an organ player is in mastering the drawbars, manipulating them in real time to change the sound dynamically during a performance.

Let's go back to the song. Starting from the Jazz Organ preset, I have modified some values of the drawbars until I obtained a similar sound. This combination is represented in the first image of this section. I have added a simple reverb, and an EQ to eliminate the bass and not compete with the frequencies of the bass-synth. In addition, I have added a sidechain compressor to reduce the volume of this organ each time the kick is played to create a "pumping" effect. Below you can hear the difference without any effect, and with all the effects that I have added (the difference in bass freq will be heard better with headphones). Do you appreciate that drop in volume in the places where the kick should go?

Organ without effects

Organ with effects

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Lastly, the synth bass was made with the TAL-U-NO, recreation of the Roland Juno 60. I have recreated the sound with the following configuration. I have turned up the MOD parameter and set the rate to Sync ⅛ to create that ripple that the original song has. I have also added a slight sidechain to this bass with the kick drum, like the organ. You can listen to it below.

Synth bass

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That was it! Remember that you can download all the presets with the sounds of the synthesizers through my Patreon. Don't forget to watch the video of this remake on youtube and subscribe for the next article!

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