Producing Music

Fetty Wap

In 2015 I was doing missionary service in Argentina, and I was very unaware of the cultural trends back home. I had no idea that American rapper Fetty Wap had released his second single, 679, that would peak at #4 on the Billboard hot 100, eventually earning 6x platinum status. I didn't even hear the song until the next year when I got back to the states.

If you've listened to any of Fetty Wap's songs, you may have heard his catchphrase, "1738". I didn't know what that was all about, so I did some googling and found that it is a reference to Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royal Champagne Cognac. It is not uncommon for rappers to reference high-end liqour like Patron or Chandon in their songs.

This catchphrase has had significant lasting cultural impact. While researching the phrase, I found reddit posts about Wap's use of 1738 spanning the last 10 years. Here are a few examples:

Why am I telling you about this?

A couple of weeks ago, I shuffled into this song while listening to some 2010's pop music on a run. I came up with the really clever idea of, "What if Fetty Wap had written this song in the year 1738?"

My Dumb Ideas

I come up with dumb ideas like this all the time, and often work to make them into reality. I wrote a post about a meme song I wrote a few years ago, and I have a page of dumb things that didn't quite merit their own blog posts. Since it's been a while since I've done one of these dumb projects, I figured I'd give this a shot.

Making the Song

After listening to 679 roughly 20 times, I was ready to begin. I opened up MuseScore 4, my favorite composing software, and began to recreate the beat with a string ensemble. Synthesized strings sound much more realistic while being plucked, so I scored it with pizzicato strings. I was able to use a mix of Microsoft's default soundfonts and MuseScore's more advanced bowed string synths to create the sound I was looking for. I decided to only do the song through the first chorus. People don't really know the whole song, just the iconic parts. Nobody has a very long attention span these days anyhow.

Because the song is fairly repetitive, I was able to get the basics worked out in one evening, and only had to spend a few more hours tweaking it over the next few days.

If for some reason you want a copy of the score, you can find one here.

Next, I needed a vocal track. I took a copy of the original song and ran it through a program that isolates vocals. It's great that Machine Learning can do a pretty good job of that for us.

Then, I needed to put it all together. I exported the instrument tracks from MuseScore, and imported everything into LMMS, a free DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). There, I was able to mix everything together, figuring out good panning to make the track less flat. I also had to manually add back in the background "hey" shouts because the vocal isolator only took them halfway out, leaving an echo that sounded really bad.

With all that done, all I had to do was export the mixed track.

The Result

Turned out pretty good, huh?