Nice and Soft and Smooth

Credits

Vocals: Mixer Jaëxx
Mastering: Mixer Jaëxx
Copyright: Mixer Jaëxx, U.S. Copyright Office, 2014

Production: Mixer Jaëxx
Album: MIDI Controlled Addiction

Creation

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Nice and Soft and Smooth was a lot of fun to create. It got its start from the flute melody. The flute melody originally started as the synth. I wanted to come up with a compliment to the synth and thought a flute would be good.

To see if the flute should share part of the synth’s melody, I copied a portion of the synth’s melody for the flute. It sounded completely wrong from what I envisioned it to sound… wrong in the best possible way that is. It gave it this awesome chilled attitude. Just fantastic.

So I decided to use the synth’s melody for the flute. I did a 180° by making the synth sound the new supporting melody.

For the drums, I was close to 86ing them from the song completely. I had worked really hard on creating this live-programmed, swinging drum arrangement… done with my Kong virtual drum machine and my Korg KontrolPad drum pad. It sounded great by itself and it even sounded great with the synth. But bring that flute into the mix and it just didn’t sound right.

So I muted the drums and set out creating a more predictable beat using my virtual drum machine Redrum. Thankfully it worked with the flute… but only in short bursts. The drums just couldn’t play for long before I started feeling something wasn’t right. Other people liked it but, if it ain’t right for me, there’s usually a good reason.

Game over, I’m literally about 10 seconds away from putting the song into digital storage. But then I accidentally played both drums at the same time. By alternating both drums throughout the song, they actually fixed the sour groove that was happening during the song.

One last interesting thing to note; in the intro of the song, you hear me say “Hey I’m Jaëxx… so how you want this sound?” One of the reasons why I do that was so that people could hear how to pronounce my name. This voice intro is the reason Nice and Soft and Smooth is the first song on my debut album.

Studio Video In 4K Resolution

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Nice and Soft and Smooth (MJ’s Ivory Melt Remix)

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