Multi-talented singer/producer ROBY’s musical journey began in 2013 when he spent hours experimenting with loops in an online DAW. By 2021, ROBY was receiving praise from electronic legend Deadmau5, who described his music as “soundtrack fire.” He later joined The Tabula Rasa Record Company, an underground label home to artists and collaborators like RamonPang, Kelbin, and Kinoteki.
“mayday” is the second song off ROBY’s forthcoming debut album ‘through the mud‘ and offers a mesmerizing, melodic, and deep house experience. The track opens with ethereal ambiance that build into a hypnotic groove. His voice hits right through to the heart, conveying a sense of urgency and longing while hypnotic melodies are intricately woven with lush, atmospheric textures. We wanted to pick his brain about what tools he uses in the studio, his plugins to create his unique sound, and so much more.
Let’s unpack this a bit further in the latest iteration of How It Was Made: ROBY – “mayday”
Chiral by Fors
Chiral is a synth that reminds me of a Max for Live version of Serum. It’s super easy to create unique waveform shapes and warm synth sounds. The Dirt feature is really nice and has a tone to its distortion. Space is also a very beautiful sounding reverb. I highly recommend picking it up.
Chiral is the synth that plays the main melody. I have different instances of it running during the breaks too with different tones, too. If you copy the settings of the synth in the screenshot, you can pretty faithfully recreate the lead melody.
If you’re chasing that “chill house” sound, I think Chiral is very worth trying. I used it in multiple tracks off of my album, including the opener, kaleidoscopes. The envelope is really helpful for those kinds of sounds. I automated it every 4 or 8 bars so that the decay would decrease.
Nectar 3 by iZotope
Nectar 3 is the auto-tune/vocal mixing plugin that I use on every single track. It’s intuitive and pretty easy to use. I love the built-in de-esser and EQ, they make vocal mixing a lot easier. Sometimes I use Nectar for more stylized effects, like shifting the formant, or adding flanger or chorus to my voice.
Digitalis by Aberrant DSP
Digitalis is an effects plugin that makes it super easy to make your audio sound old and degraded. It works really nicely on synths and the sequencer makes it easy to make cool rhythms using the effects presets. You can also draw in your own shapes for the plugin to use and it distorts/degrades audio that way. The built-in corruption and formant shifters are really cool to mess around with too.
I used Digitalis in mayday for some of the background elements and synths. It’s a good way to get some texture into your tracks super easily.
I feel like if you’re trying to make samples or your voice or really anything sound aged, this is the way to do it. Lossy is also kind of similar, but I haven’t actually used it myself.
Fresh Air by Slate Digital
Fresh Air is really, really great. It has one job: Breathes new life into anything you put it on. It never works for me without an Internet connection but that can be forgiven. It’s just really great. Makes vocals and synths pop so much more. Great to put on a group of vocals and just listen as they all shine so much more. I love Fresh Air.
My vocals are already pretty bright, but Fresh Air just gives a whole new to life to them that an EQ just can’t. Putting them at the end of a chain will sound great. Trust.
