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.