How Ya Been initially took shape when I began to experiment with some drum sounds I liked. This progressed into the drum beat in the second portion of the song. However, upon listening to what I had at first, I felt that the melody itself could be taken in a far different direction than the one i had taken it. Following this hunch, I began to expand that same sound in a completely different way, building more and more and looking for vocal samples to fill the gaps and I found myself with the first portion of the track. I loved both segments so much because of how different their moods are despite using the same sound, so I decided to keep them both, and I love the product. The track opens with just a very dry bass. This bass is TAL-Togu Audio Line’s Tal BassLine 101. This plugin has a load of presets that are all amazing bass sounds, but for the making of this piece I chose a very simple sound that would set the tone for the song. This was the Solid Base Bass preset, which I paired with an Ableton’s Slapback effect to add density to the bass. The chord stabs that come in are not what I had initially produced for this song. The base chords were the same, but the plugin I had used was different. For those first chords you hear, the sound was initially a preset in Lounge Lizard EP-4, a plugin by Applied Acoustics Systems, but one day this plugin began to completely stop working for me and so I had to shift the feel of the song to something else. I was worried it would take me a long time to find something good enough to replace the sound I had grown to love in this song, but when I was exploring some of my presets in LUXONIX’s Purity, I came across a very full yet space-like synth that worked well with the chords I had made. I put a high-pass filter on the preset and it was a sound I had felt fit for replacing the original idea. Below that synth, there is another pad within purity that is just droning throughout the intro to the song to add some space, which is a preset within Purity called PD Eternal Pad. I put XLN Audio’s RC-20 Retro Color on this pad, giving it more wobble and distortion to give it a more distant vintage feel. Keeping with the Purity sounds I use in the song, I developed my one Arp sound that begins playing at the same time as the Synth melody that I had also come up with and made within Purity. These two sounds come in at the same time and hit you with a wave of space, almost giving you a floaty sensation before getting thrown into the first portion of the track. This new portion sets a completely different tone for the song making it much more of a headbanger than the space filled intro. It retains the synth melody, but now with a different atmosphere. Also a preset within Purity, BL Glass Bell comes in with an Auto Pan so your ear is constantly chasing this icy bell. While retaining the main hits from the previously heard arpeggio, I included more notes interspersed in the spaces between the former arp to fill the gaps and create more rhythm for this portion. The drums are all laid out by me using an assortment of sounds from packs, along with a cowbell pattern from a BYNX drum kit. For the vocals of the song, I pulled a sample from a song’s intro and reversed the audio to create this falling cheer sound that leads back into the title lyrics of the track. This portion also previously included a DNB sample in both ears, but later on in the development of the song I felt it crowded the rest of the sounds too much. Once the second half of the song begins, you immediately get hit with an 808. This is an 808 from a bank of sounds that I put inside of a sampler. The initial 808 felt sort of lacking in mid range to me so when the drums get introduced, I duplicated the 808 and made it quieter while also putting a harsh saturation on it with FabFilter’s Saturn 2. This gives it far more punch without making it sound completely different. The synth from the intro returns along with the arp to go back to that space-like feel and the new drums all introduced were the initial set of drums I previously mentioned. For the last measures of the song, I bring back the cowbell loop and some of the sweeping sounds from the first part to make a sort of hybrid to close out the track.