David Hohme’s personal imprint, Where The Heart Is Records, has been seeing a steady string of quality tracksover the past year and is quickly earning it’s place as one of the best curated, indie-sized labels in the world of progressive and organic house.
This expert curation is shown in full force with its latest release, a single titled ROMA by Luciano Elvira. The track is a soft, delicate groover that is complimented by enchanting vocals that drift over the top of it all.
It’s one of the rare tracks that fits perfectly into both casual listening sets (as exemplified on one of David Hohme’s many live Twitch streams over the past few months) and it is in the packed clubs where Gai Barone and D-Nox have been heavily rinsing this track as well over the past months.
While this genre of music often appears simple, it often is packed with nuace and emotion which is not so easy to extract from the record. It takes patience and a measured hand to get started, and a few expert tricks to bring a track like ROMA over the finish line.
How It’s Made: Luciano Elvira ‘ROMA’
In this case, I work with many of my libraries at the same time, I don’t have a particular favorite but I usually use many from samplemarket, loopmasters, among other package stores.
Tip From The Editor: If you’re looking to pull drum samples from a wide range of catalogues and libraries, Splice is an excellent tool for the job. They let you cherry pick the best sounds from many different packs, letting you create your own custom library that nobody else but you has access too!
When receiving the vocals, I tried to give it more brightness and color with adjustments in a parametric EQ. Parametric EQs let you get really surgical with your EQ moves, which vocals need a lot of if you really want to get them just right.
Vocal resonant frequencies can be hard to identify, but make the track sound terrible if not dealt with. So parametric EQs are a go-to tool
After that, I use reverb to make the vocal take sound more alive, full, and present. Before I added the reverb to the vocal, it was sounding harsh, dull and lifeless. But the reverb helped it sound more alive and present.
Finally some tweaks in a process called Soundgoodizer and voila.
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