THE TRACK
Document One
Hands Up
Elevate Audio, 2021
VIDEO ON FILESILO
Kicking off their careers as purveyors of dirty dubstep on labels like Buygore and Never Say Die, Joe Froud and Matt King AKA Document One have turned their attention to slamming dancefloor DnB in recent years. We caught up with the Oxford-based duo to find out how they created their no-nonsense, filthy roller Hands Up in Ableton Live.
You seem very keen on using MIDI in the video, programming kick and snare one-shots on the same channel and using the MIDI-triggered Duck plugin for sidechain-style effects. Are all your projects created this way?
MK: “Yeah, and I think it’s down to simplicity: we like to keep things easy to understand and having the drums on just the one MIDI channel, for us at least, makes it simple. We work remotely quite a lot, and we’ve found these sort of formulas that work quite well between us, especially when you get near the closing stages. We try to get into the same room to mix down the tune, but if we can’t, with the way we work at least we know where the project is headed.” JF: “It’s only really the MIDI that’s linked in that case, all the audio is processed separately on separate channels within the drum rack.”