Four Tet has explained how he made Looking At Your Pager, and it’s giving producers a surprise.
Speaking on the Tape Notes Podcast, the musician – real name Kieran Hebden – reveals that he made the 2022 song in bed with only 14 tracks, and it took him about ten minutes. He shared the track through his side-project KH, and it’s amassed over six million streams on Spotify.
However, he begins, “Very, very little work went into it. It just came together, it sounded good, and people ask me about it all the time… these are the sounds I chose in this quick moment.”
“I don’t really use any hardware or any instruments when I’m writing music – it’s always just me and the laptop,” he continues. “90% of the listening and mixing and everything for the music I make these days is on laptop speakers.”
Hebden started forming the track simply by getting an a capella from his sample library and putting it into Ableton – the vocals are from a track by the 2000s R&B group 3LW, and he looped a snippet of the vocals and layered it underneath the sample.
He then took a drum loop produced with the Arturia DrumBrute drum machine from his library and a bassline via Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere, his favourite synth plugin and found a dubstep-inspired preset in its library. Yep, that’s pretty much it.
“Ideally, you’re doing as little as possible,” he summarises. “I pretty much never want to put a compressor on anything. If I have to put a compressor on something, it’s to deal with a problem, usually. I want everything to be as dynamic and open and natural as possible… I’m still thinking about [Nick Drake’s] Pink Moon when I’m mixing one of my club records!”
In the comments, people are reacting with surprise. “No panning. 14 tracks. Kind of insane given we live in an age of endless possibilities,” says one, with another saying, “I love how it’s clearly more about making the music and being in the groove rather than focusing on sound designing and creating every little sound! I feel like because our DAWs are so complex and technical that we sometimes forget we are making music and instead get bogged down tweaking every little thing just because we ‘think’ that’s how the pros do it. Very refreshing to see this legend break down such an iconic tune!”
Another simply says, “Proof that sound selection is everything, thanks Kieran, fucking legend.”
Hebden says that he’s a big fan of presets too, explaining, “I pretty much only use presets on things. I’ll get the melody I want, I’ll get it up and running… and I’ll just cycle through loads of them one after the other until I find one that’s quite nice.”
Check out the rest of the interview here:
