‘Who Do You Love’ is a song by The Chainsmokers featuring 5 Seconds of Summer. The song was also written by Talay Riley, Warren Felder, Trevor Brown, Sean Douglas and William Simmons. This track was released earlier this year though it has been in the making for two years now. It is in the key of E♭ Major with a Tempo of 140.
This track is fairly recent making it easy and hard to find in-depth information on the track. As the majority of this track was produced by The Chainsmokers I researched into the equipment they generally use for their work. They work in Ableton Live for scratch tracks and recording. Their favourite gear are Sonic Academy Kick (to shape drums), reFX Nexus2 (for virtual instrument experimentation), Reveal Sound Spire and Moog Sub Phatty (as go to synths) and Lennar Digital Sylenth 1 (for their usual bass synth). The track also incorporates 5 Seconds of Summer’s instrumentation of a drum kit, as well as The Chainsmokers drum kit, two electric guitars, bass guitar and acoustic guitar as well as all four vocals.
The vocals were the first to be recorded before the track was composed. Even with continuous re-recording of the vocals the first takes were used. The actual producing of the track was dome within the recording session and the stems that 5 Seconds of Summer did were sent to The Chainsmokers to make the arrangement. What was important to me was that the track’s sound change drastically from the scratch which was RnB until 5 Seconds of Summer joined the project and brought in the rock element. Using the production technique that 5 Seconds of Summer learnt from John Feldmann on their first album that worked with the idea that the guitars must connect to the lyrics which they recorded separately before bringing them together with the track once they knew what they wanted from the song. The synths in the track were influenced by the new sound of music that 5 Seconds of Summer were experimenting with leading to this track being pushed back in release until after their last album.
When listening to the track you can hear how effects have been used to merge the sound together. The verses are purely 5 Seconds of Summer and the breakdowns are The Chainsmokers. They use the pre-chorus as a way to transition the styles together. The pre-chorus mainly impacts as the introduction of acoustic guitar with the vocals having large amounts of reverb and layers with slight delay to give width in sound.
This then changes to an extremely mono sound once the electronic hits which matches the rest of the track by sampling the vocals from the pre-chorus.
They play with a synth progression instead of a classic kick or bass sound instead ranging from 22-100Hz and also brings in the high frequencies in the track which is not prominent in the more acoustic parts. When they merge these sounds they also add another synth chord progression with the electronic and acoustic guitar which are all centred whilst the vocals are wide like the pre-chorus.
The arrangement of the track is what makes the other aspects possible by allowing the piece to flow and use drastic cuts in instrumentation to keep the track moving. This manipulation and effects show me that to create a track like this you need to be hyper-aware of what instrumentation will drive the parts of the song and how these will interact with each other.
References
Computer Music. (2014). The Chainsmokers' favourite music software. Music Radar. Retrieved from https://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/the-chainsmokers-favourite-music-software-612047
Key & BPM for Who Do You Love by The Chainsmokers, 5 Seconds of Summer | Tunebat. (2019). Retrieved 21 July 2019, from https://tunebat.com/Info/Who-Do-You-Love-The-Chainsmokers-5-Seconds-of-Summer/11cDEev79fPKi6uJCjUhu8
Zach Sang Show. (2019). 5 Seconds of Summer And The Chainsmokers Talk Who Do You Love & Touring Together [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdHSBSwksAg
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