Canadian Musician - January / February 2020 | Page 56

it might not be easy to recreate quite the same way on stage. It’s a nice feeling, to be honest, because Featurette is so electronic that I’ve got a lot of options to produce the sounds we make live via the system I’ve set up. CM: Considering Featurette’s fusion of electronic sounds and organic performance, how do you go about coming up with drum sounds and parts during the creation process? JF: The drums are usually the last thing we get to, if you can believe it. I usually like “squishier” drum sounds that can serve as a contrast against drum choices and designs that have short decay and are really tight and small-sounding. I don’t need the drums to fill up a lot of space in the tracks be- cause we’re so synth heavy. For the drums, we’re using ref- erences from a bunch of genres: electronic to EDM, future bass to hip-hop – really trying to push the envelope of what’s happening right now into sounds that are fresh and as for- ward-thinking as we can get. For CRAVE, our first album, I played my acoustic drums in-studio first, chopped them up, and then layered them with electronic drum sounds, but lately, I’ve just been pro- gramming and building drum sounds in-the-box, using a ton of hits, glitches, and effects we’ve accumulated over the span of this project. 56 CANADIAN MUSICIAN CM: Is there anything technical you’ve been working on lately, or that you’d like to start working on in order to further improve your playing? JF: One day, I’d love to spend six months getting my left foot Latin clave happening over all my licks, but that’s been on the shelf for a while now! Playing in Featurette, it’s such a dance between production and writing that that’s been my main focus; if I have to choose between producing and writ- ing or drumming expansion, I’m going to choose the former … But lately, drum-speaking, when I’m playing the set with sampled triggers and kicks, I’ve been working on getting my layering to be more exacting – really focusing on eliminating any micro-flaming between arms and feet when two notes are played. Andrew King is the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Musician.