Kill Frenzy is one of the most exciting young producers working in tech house today. He tells us the story behind the making of his body-shaking anthem ‘Make That Booty Clap.’
It was late 2011 and I was living in the centre of Brussels, studying film at the Rits School of Arts. Whenever I was out of class I spent my time indoors, behind my computer playing Counter Strike, listening to music and making music.
For a solid few months I was trying to come up with something new – something different from all the generic garbage I heard everywhere. I wanted to make something like the old ghetto house music that inspired me, but updated for present day.
I used to make really fast juke and ghetto house when I was younger, but at this point I had started to drift towards slower house and techno. It was around this time that I discovered the Dirtybird label, and became a huge fan. They were doing things no one else was doing. It was so inspiring that I wanted to somehow combine my love of ghetto house with the weird, unique sound of Dirtybird.
Finally, I come up with the simplest beat I have ever made. It was funny how something so simple sounded better than almost everything I had made before. “I think I’ve got something,” I yelled to my roommate Senne. He rushed over and I played him the track but I was so excited I didn’t even wait for his response.
The beat I had was made purely from 808 sounds. It had a kick, bass, clap, hi hat and some toms. That was it! All the effects and extra sounds you hear are just those samples processed with some stock reverb and saturator plugins in Ableton.
So, I only work in Ableton. I used to make everything on an MPC1000 but as soon as somebody showed me the functionality of Ableton I never looked back. The things you can do with it are endless, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes having too many choices can make things even harder. I have wasted so much time by having too much choice or adding too many things. I fall into this trap a lot by just adding and adding to songs.
But those old ghetto house DJs couldn’t do that. They just had 5 or 6 tracks to record with and here I am using close to 60! I had this in mind when I was working on ‘Make That Booty Clap.’ I wanted this track to take things back to basics. It has no fancy production going on. It’s all about the way the samples and drums are placed.
So I’m working on the track and it’s in the pocket, the groove is right, it’s funky. But it still needed a vocal to make it special. So I went through my music collection looking for something I could use as a placeholder. I wasn’t planning on keeping it on the track, but just for it to give me a feel for what I should use in the end.
I found something, quickly chopped it up, fitted it into the beat and hit play:
“MAKE MAKE MAKE THAT BOOTY CLAP!”
Oh, wow! I had goosebumps. DJ Funk’s vocal just sounded amazing on there. I put it on a loop and kept listening to it over and over to the point where I found it impossible to take the vocal out. How in the world was I going to find anything else like that? I decided to leave it for a while and take a break.
When I came back to the track I extended the loop to the point where it was 3 minutes long. I didn’t really know where I would go from there but I knew I wanted to keep it simple and avoid any unnecessary filler. That would be the easy way out, and it would sound lame. I thought back to a song I had make a few years prior called “Ghetto Booty,” where I slowed down the bpm right in the middle of the song, just like Lil’ Louis did on “French Kiss.” I tried it out, automating the bpm on the main channel and it just worked perfectly. Now it almost sounded like a hip hop beat!
Next I added some ping pong delay to some of the toms to create a slowed down flanger effect. Things were really flowing. After that I copy-and-pasted the first part of the song right after the slowdown. Finally, I added a classic RZ1 hi hat to the song with a 909 ride behind it to give it more of a fast pass feeling. And that was it!
I think it’s done now, I thought to myself. I hope I still like it in the morning.