Have you ever wondered what happens before a song becomes the hit of the summer? To find out, we entered The Kolors’ studios to see how their latest Rolling Stones song came to life and what we found tells much more than a simple recording session, from the instruments used to the birth of the Italo Disco song of the summer.
The creation of a song by The Kolors almost always starts from a rhythmic loop, a legacy of their DNA jam sessions. Percussion is then added to a drum base which gives the piece a reggae or afro feel. But there is one technical detail that truly distinguishes their productions: the deliberate search for imperfection. In an age dominated by computers, Stash prefers to record synthesizers in audio rather than MIDI format. The difference is that with MIDI, incorrect notes can be corrected and aligned perfectly with the time grid, but this process eliminates the naturalness of the performance. True groove arises when the musician plays following the rhythm of the heartbeat rather than that of the computer.
For bass and electronic sounds, the band makes extensive use of iconic analog instruments such as the Moog Prodigy, a synthesizer from the 80s that generates sound through electrical impulses and physical oscillators without internal memories, without the possibility of saving settings. Another key tool in their arsenal is the Talk Box, a historic effect made famous by Bon Jovi, often confused with modern autotune. In reality, autotune is software that corrects the intonation of the voice, while the Talk Box is acoustic physics. The sound generated by the electric guitar is conveyed into a small tube that the singer holds in his mouth: by modulating the shape of the mouth and making the air vibrate, the sound of the guitar is “shaped” by making it literally speak, without emitting any sound from the throat.
Stash has confirmed that it does not use pitch correction for the voices. But then how do their songs sound so full and choral? The answer lies in the stacks, the vocal overdubs: for a single song, Stash can record up to 30 or 40 different vocal tracks. Some replicate the main melody, others harmonize on higher or lower notes, and everything is distributed spatially to create an enveloping effect. A fundamental trick is to sing the double voices with different interpretative intentions: if the same phrase is re-sung in an identical way, an annoying metallic effect called flangerwhile by varying the expression you get the warmth of a real choir.
The studio visit also reserved an extraordinary anecdote about Italo Disco, the hit that consecrated The Kolors. The version we heard on the radio all summer is, in reality, the very first demo of the song. The band spent months trying to re-record and perfect it, but those small imperfections of the first recording gave it a humanity that was impossible to reproduce.
