How to create Donna Summer 'I feel love' bassline and pad sounds in DRC
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It’s difficult to know where to start with a track so famous, so influential, one with legendary status which provided a defining moment in the history of dance music. Giorgio Moroder’s modular Moog masterpiece, with a little help from Donna Summer of course, ‘I feel love’ pioneered the concept of electronic dance music, with David Bowie proclaiming it to be ‘the sound of the future’.
Back in 1977’s summer of disco, synthesizers were a very different beast than today’s offerings, requiring much care and attention in order to succeed at taming them. The big issue was of course tuning, so much so that Moroder recorded just 8 to 10 bars at a time before checking the tuning on each section.
The bassline riff was actually thanks in part, to some random experimentation by a sound engineer working with Giorgio, who added a delay to the sound, which led to the double note style riff we know and love today.
Not only responsible for the iconic bass line, Incredibly the Moog was used to create all of the track’s percussion sounds too (apart from the kick). If you browse through the factory library of DRC presets, you will find some similar percussion patches in there too!
Fortunately you won’t have any such tuning issues with DRC - although you can of course emulate the pitch drift if you want an authentic sound!
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Team Imaginando