Studio Case Studies 2 - Losing It (Odd Mob's Evil Edit)

Ayo! Yep, its finally that time of the trimester again to for me to stop procrastinating and finally do yet another track teardown/case study for ya'll! This time around I figured I'd analyse a new edit by one of my biggest inspirations for DJing and Producing in the Brisbane scene - Odd Mob!

The 'Oddities' symbol for all of Odd Mob's

bootlegs and edits: the octopus...

Basic track information

Name: Fisher - Losing it (Odd Mob Evil Edit)

Label: None (self-released)

Format: File, Mp3, wav, 320kbps

Country: Australia

Release Date: 22nd November, 2018

Genre: Electronic - Deep/Dark/Tech House

BPM: 126 Key: Fm

Time Signature: 4/4

Fisher's Original Mix: (click link)

https://soundcloud.com/fish-tales/fisher-losing-it

Odd Mobs Evil Edit: (click link)

https://soundcloud.com/odditiespacks/losing-it-odd-mob-evil-edit

Background information

'Losing It' is a deep/tech house track published by Fisher and Produced by Chris Lake. This track has since been remixed, bootlegged, edited and mashed up by a large number of DJ's and Producers around the world. However, an edit that stood out in Australia particularly was this Evil edit by a Brisbane based Producer known as Odd Mob. However, as it is with most edits of original mixes, this edit was not anywhere near as successful as the original mix. Although this was not the original goal of this edit as it was created entirely for fun and as a joke. With this being said though, this edit still flips the mood of the song entirely from being groovy and smooth to being way darker and scarier, displaying Odd Mob's original sound and seriously pleasing his followers as he has recently begun to take his music in a new direction.

Track Structure

When compared to the original song, this edit is very similar as large chunks of the original mix are embedded in this track. However, the second build-up is nowhere near as long as Odd Mob has deliberately shortened it to create a long pre-beat delay to his second drop in this instance. As you can see, the waveform of this track is rather large and the master on this track is slightly muddy, this was done on purpose though as most of Odd Mob's tracks have that slightly grundgy sound to them. The master for Fisher's Original mix is also rather similar, just not as dark in the more low-end heavy sections.

Critical Analysis

differences between the original mix

key

When listening to Odd Mob's Edit and the original mix side by side a very distinct difference in key is obvious. After analysing both tracks using my 'Mixed In Key 8' software, I came to find that the original mix is based in G minor whilst Odd Mob's Evil Edit was produced 2 keys deeper in F minor, thus explaining why it feels darker and deeper than the original.

Vocal manipulation + Additional samples

Unlike the original mix's basic repetitive use of the same vocal sample, Odd Mob has taken it upon himself to spice it up with chopping and tuning of the vocals as well as adding his own breath and laugh samples in the build-ups to create tension in the darker atmosphere he created. The use of these techniques and additional samples seriously emphasised the evil aspect of this track and made this edit unique in comparison to other genre specific edits. In addition to the additional vocal samples, Odd Mob also used his own drum samples and created his own synths for the track, turning this edit more into a bootleg rather than a simple chop and change edit.

Synthesis

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm about to change these case studies up a little bit as I'm about to attempt to recreate (or at least get close enough to) the sounds Odd Mob used in this edit in terms of synthesis!

Pluck

Being a Deep/G/Bass house producer myself, dark plucks are nothing new to me, so this one was rather easy to pick out. However, it would seem that the overall sound for this synth was layered with octaves and other saw wave variants as there is very minimal distortion towards the saw waves used in this from distortion plug-ins/effects. I have attached the serum patch below for anyone who is interested in recreating/using it!

Basic Dark Pluck Serum Patch by Levels

And my relatively lazy/shit job at processing... :P

Wave Lead

For anyone confused on the name of this one, its basically the big ol grundgy thing that starts the drop :P. This was also not too hard to make as, surprise surprise! More saw waves! Hey, look, us bassy boi's can't help that detuned and manipulated saw waves sound SiK BrAh. This one basically uses two saw waves, one tuned down one octave and the other by 2 with heavy low pass filtering on both. This filter is then manipulated by the first envelope causing it to rapidly open upon activation. This combined with a bit of Diode 2 distortion and unison voicing on the waves in serum makes for quite the nice lead... Very cheeky Odd Mob.

Dark Synth Wave Lead by Levels

MORE DISTORTION....

Besides these two main synths, there really aren't many others. A lot of the synthesis manipulation in this track is done by automating the cutoff frequencies on the filters to progressively open and close to build tension where needed in the track. However, there is one other sneaky little synth I'd like to mention that I wasn't (entirely) successful in recreating and that's a tiny little synth that occurs on certain off beats. From what I can understand, its a very heavily filtered saw wave blend with a fair bit of resonance and reverb...

To wrap up

Overall, this is a brilliant little edit of a track that has been made out to be one of the biggest banger memes of 2018. I've learnt a hell of a lot from recreating these sounds and they even just appear in some of my new tracks coming up! It's actually been rather fun analysing this track and I look forward to bumping it hard in my club sets at Aviary Fridays! Until next time!

Levels :)