The Internet was formed by Syd and Matt Martians coming from their previous band Odd Future, where they share stage with recognized artists like Tyler, the Creator or Frank Ocean. The Internet started as a duo of producers and songwriters: Sydney Bennett, who was Odd Future’s sound engineer and called herself Syd tha Kid (now simply Syd), and the keyboardist Matthew Martin, who called himself Matt Martians.

Their music is a blend of 90’s R&B, hip hop, jazz, funk, and electronic dance music. The jazzy chromatic chords and slinky bass lines of Stevie Wonder’s 1970s solo masterpieces infuse the Internet’s music, along with the bedroom whispers of Janet Jackson and Prince, the smooth funk of the Commodores and Earth, Wind & Fire, and the phased, fuzzed guitar tones of Ernie Isley. So do hip-hop drums and a willingness to tuck all sorts of things into the surreal background of a track: horns, vocal beatboxing, voice mail messages.

The Internet imperceptibly melds hand-played parts with loops and samples; whether or not it actually is, the music feels analog. Even where the drums are looped, the bass lines often drag and pull against the beat, breaking away from vamps to improvise and loosen things up; vocals arrive wherever they want, teasing expectations. Songs might just end with the sound of a tape slowing down, or its simulation. 

The song I'm going to deconstruct is the second cut from the Hive Mind album released in 2018, also released as a single. The drums have been sampled from another band that I will discuss later. After a couple of bars, the bass makes its stellar entrance, being the protagonist of the song, and accompanied by 4 keyboard chords later. You soon realize that the song doesn't need much more instrumentation than these two elements to work, where the voices of Syd and Steve do the rest of the job.

Take a look at my deconstruction video:

The structure of the song is as follows, and also accompanied by an image of the project where you can see the name of the various parts.

‍THE INTERNET: DRUMS‍

The song begins with a sampled beat of one song called “Sing Sing” released in 1978 by the disco-funk band Gad. This beat appears at minute 4:01. 

There are 2 parts in the beat, the first one is used in all the verses of The Internet’s song, and the second, where you can hear that the kick drum become constant, is used in some parts of the song where the intensity rises, marked like “More Drums” tags in my Ableton project (previous image).

Verse drums

Chorus drums

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THE INTERNET: BASS SOUND

The bass is, without any doubt, the hook of the song. Since it is a constantly repeating loop, it becomes mesmerizing.

To process the sound I have tried to recreate a heavy sound in bass and mids EQ with a somewhat muffled tone, without standing out in treble, so that each note sounds soft and fat but not percussive or heavy attacked.

Bass

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SYNTHS PRODUCTION

In this category we find two layers. One of them is a mellow and warm electric piano that blends seamlessly into the mix. With the Arturia Stage-76, recreation of a Fender Rhodes, you can get a good raw material for warm pianos.

Clean Rhodes

Starting from this sound, the next thing is to give it a little color with phaser and even wah-wah to achieve that “pumping” effect that the original has, giving movement to each chord. For this, I have used a rack of effects of the Guitar Rig 5, where I have put some compression to give more packing to each chord, through a recreation of the legendary phaser "Small Stone", and the wah-wah Cry Baby. I have been using these last two pedals in live shows and they worked out really well, worth it.

Rhodes through Guitar Rig

For controlling the wah-wah, I’ve inserted an automation until I got roughly the opening that sounds in the original song. 

Rhodes through Guitar Rig and wah-wah automation

The second keyboard layer appears in the parts called "More drums" (see the image at the beginning of the article about structure). This time it is a standard piano that adds a little more brightness and percussion vibe to each chord in these higher intensity parts. I’ve used  the Arturia's Piano V and the same effects as the electric piano discussed earlier.

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‍THE INTERNET: VOCALS

There are vocals from Steve Lacy and Syd in this song, so i tried to recreate the Steve Lacy's vocals. His vocals have some strong and fast delay, as you would notice in the original song. I recreated that feeling with the following effect chain.

Intro Vocals

In the parts that I consider as the verses, there are some back-vocals singing different lyrics and melody. I applied some auto-panning between left and right as the original song. You can appreciate that panning in the back-vocals if you are listening to it with stereo speakers:

Back-Vocals with stereo panning

At the end of the song, I removed the delay effect to the vocals to make them cleaner and I applied a filter, giving them another feeling.

Outro Vocals with filter

And I think that's all! As you can see, there are not so many elements on this track, but that does not stop it from being a really really good song. I would like to include female Syd's vocals to complete this song. If there is someone interested, do not hesitate to contact me!

Don't forget that you can listen to all the instruments described above in the youtube video at the beginning of this article or by clinking here!

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