Tonight I’m having a listen to Roar by Katy Perry . What hooks me about this song is the energy and strength of empowerment communicated through the arrangement which echoes the message of the lyrics. This is a really incredible song on many levels, resuscitation and as usual for me I’m having a peek behind the curtain as I best I can with my engineer/producer ear. Listen along through Apple Music.

The first impact of the song gives us three staples which maintain pretty much throughout: the shuffled march of the kick/snare pattern, emergency the eighth note regular ‘chink chink chink chink’ top end, and the heavily pre-fader reverbed “hey” on the upbeat of beat 4. In the second measure of this pattern we get a solid drop of most everything on beat 4 to build up the anticipation for the vocal/bass.

Breaking these sounds down a bit, the ‘chink chink chink’ is a layer of at least two sounds, one heavily reverbed with a high pass filter which sounds like it could be the chirp/whistle of a B3 type organ panned just right, and the lower part of the chord is an interval of a 5th, still high pitch, panned just left and almost no reverb by comparison. They play together so in our little orchestra it hits as one instrumental part. Now, one thing that’s cool Continue reading Roar →