Earlier this year was the first-ever London Music Conference at Fabric London. During the event, Point Blank’s Head of Education & Development, Ski Oakenfull, performed a live deconstruction of Todd Terje’s excellent track, "Inspector Norse," breaking down the production techniques, music theory, sound design and more. If you’d like to learn more about producing, mixing, mastering and releasing tracks just like this one, check out their line of courses.
"Inspector Norse" was released back in 2012 on the producer’s own imprint Olson / Smalltown Supersound and features on his It’s The Arps EP as well as his full-length offering, It’s Album Time. A fun fact about "Inspector Norse" is that it was created entirely using an ARP 2600 – a vintage synth that Korg recently revamped for 2020. Now, jump into the deconstruction and if you want to get your hands on the MIDI files from the project, Ski has kindly put together a downloadable pack which can be yours for the price of your email. Download it here.
To kick off the deconstruction Ski gives a little intro to the tools he is going to use to break down the track: Ableton Live, Push 2 and an M32 keyboard from Native Instruments. First up Ski begins by programming the beat to lay the foundations for the rest of the track. Next up, after discussing the song’s key signature and music theory, he punches in the bassline using Arturia’s own soft-synth version of the ARP2600. Ski polishes off the deconstruction by adding in the chords, arps and melodies with a little help from PB’s Risa T.
