Wanna Feel Alive: Almost Unique

Released: 20th December 2020

Almost Unique dropped another single last month called “Wanna Feel Alive”. This track was a lot of fun to create, and there were some interesting challenges to face.

As per usual, I was sent an acoustic guitar/vocal demo, and as soon as I listened to it I knew I wanted quite small sounding drums, but bigger sounds as the song went on. I achieved this by using one Battery kit through more or less the whole song, then in the second chorus I added a second Battery kit, and for the last chorus I added some acoustic drums from Abbey Road Modern Drummer. The tom fill that joins the different sections of the song together also came from Abbey Road Modern Drummer, with heavy treatment from flanging.

Next came the piano intro, played with Alecia’s Keys, which I then continued to use throughout the song. This was quickly followed by two bass layers from Sylenth1, and then a pad from FM8. I then happened to be flicking through and messing around with some other sounds from FM8 and stumbled across the stab sound, which also features throughout the whole song.

To help lift the chorus’s and add some variation I played the same part on two different synths, one being Sylenth1 (I like that one, can you tell?) and the other was Xpand!2. They’re very similar sounding, so playing the same part on both and panning them out and adding some pingpong delay provided a nice touch to the chorus’s.

This done, I added some smaller parts, like the messed up brass stabs that play in the verses and the bridge, which I played using a stock Logic brass sound and heavily manipulating the audio, and a little synth part in the second verse from Massive.

We then ran in to the issue of what to do to make the bridge sound interesting and different from the rest of the song. I decided to try making it completely different sounding, so I kept the pad from the rest of the song, but played a more intricate part on it, almost like a solo, and moved it up an octave. Next I used an 808 bass sound from Arturia’s Analog Lab, and added a new beat using some bigger, harder hitting drums from Polyplex.

To come out of the bridge we used the classic technique of dropping out everything aside from the piano and vocals, and adding the guitar in the second half of this section to give it more of a build up. Of course, Rise And Hit had to be the transition from this section to the final chorus. Just like on “Break The Tie“I added a low octave piano to add some energy, the acoustic guitar played by Liv (Almost Unique) that had played throughout the whole song became stereo as we added a second one, and the final touch was a choir preset created by James Berry, which sounded wonderful and really added something special to the final chorus. Do go Subscribe to James on YouTube and Follow on Twitter

I plan on doing a video on this track as I did with “Break The Tie”, and “Embrace”, so watch out for that!

Listen on YouTube: