LAYERS: Breaking Down "Love Gun" By Loose Screwz

I’m a sucker for a sci-fi themed album. Some of my all-time favorite records like Deltron 3030 and Hive’s Devious Methods interpret the literary genre using appropriately epic, mysterious, occasionally gloomy production. It’s the perfect backdrop for a space adventure, or a thrill ride through the cosmos.

Art has always had a fascination with images of the possible future, but a relatively new phenomenon in this rapidly accelerating age of technology is a fascination with what we used to think the future would look like—what our science fiction predictions of the past said about the time we live in now. Snippets of sound from the times when we couldn’t have guessed the advent of the touchscreen have an endearing quality that can give music a retro feel, and say what you will about retro feels, they can be pretty awesome.

LooseScrewz is a producer from St. Louis, one of the few members of a production scene in its very early stages. Nevertheless, his album 20,000 Years From Tomorrow is a meticulously crafted record that incorporates themes of early space travel, and the cosmic curiosity that went with it, into the modern trends of beat production. When listening to the record for the first time, one track jumped out at me. “Love Gun” fits the album in terms of its sound, but its content evades the larger theme of the album. It is a love song, and a sad one at that, trapped amidst tales of galactic peril and space discovery, just as any good love song should be. From Loose Screwz:

It was a song I wrote a couple of years ago. It is a metaphor for music, as well as an ode to a very special lady. It’s about falling in love and realizing it and not being able to do anything about it.

Heavy. Let’s traverse the various loopy layers of “Love Gun,” like so many rings around Saturn.

Drums
A loop I found searching the net for creative commons stuff. I did some chops here and there and added some compression.

Synth & Bass
The synth and the bass were two sounds I found in Garageband. Added delay and dub on the synth and a slight delay on the bass.

Chorus
I layered these vocals over and over. I detuned one layer to be baritone and pushed the pitch up on another one. It gives it a Parliament-esque aqua boogie feel.

Bridge vox & Guitar
Turned the pitch up on these to and added a wah effect to it to get that underwater feel it has. The guitar is a MIDI guitar layer with a real guitar layer on top.

2nd move Vox
Just ran the lead thru a distortion filter to give it some grit. The background harmonies are layer up and I did the same process as on the chorus with detuning certain takes.

2nd move Guitar & Synth
I had my buddy play a guitar solo at the end and it was too short for my liking, so I copied it and reversed it and added it to the end of the original solo. Then I added a synth line out of my barely-working Triton LE. I found another cool sound and added stabs to fill it out.

Put it all together and here’s what you get. “Love Gun” by Loose Screwz.

Previously: LAYERS: Cracking The Code Of The Host’s “Internet Archaeology”

@ImYourKid