r/mgmt • u/Admirable-Collar8912 • 15d ago
Can someone explain Indie Rokker’s production?
I really adore the dark atmospheric production and want to make songs like it, it’s so good
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u/AlphonseTheDragon 15d ago edited 15d ago
Late 70’s/early 80s post punk goth wave kinda stuff, like joy division for example. Lots and lots of reverb, saturation, 16th notes, bright guitars and gritty synths
Adding it reminds me a lot of interpol too
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u/MountainsDripWine 14d ago
Compositionally, I suspect it was inspired by Pink Frost by The Chills, which they included on Late Night Tales. The similarity in the bassline, beat, and vocal delivery seems more than coincidental to me.
Production-wise, I think the thing doing the most work for the vibe is the sparseness of the arrangement that gives space for the reverb on the bass, drums, and vocals. It sounds like the bass is possibly two tracks: one with a pretty extreme low pass filter and low-mixed reverb (giving it the feel of subdued bass heard from outside a venue) and one that is focused on its midrange frequencies, with a digital fuzz, high feedback delay, and a filter that is sweeping subtly to make it rise in and out of the mix. I believe that second track is also pitched up an octave. To make the bassline clearer, there is also a dry, subtle overdriven guitar chugging the progression, panned to the right ear. It’s important to have that one be very dry and direct so that it doesn’t compete with the heavy effects on the bass tracks. Its purpose is to give clarity to the rhythm of the bass that would otherwise be drowned out by its effects, and you can mostly only hear this track’s upper mid frequencies.
The drums are mostly panned to the center, with a light reverb that pans out a bit more, and the kick occupies a frequency range higher than the bass. So the bassline is felt more in the lower end and the wider part of the stereo image while the drums are slightly higher and in the center. The drums are also compressed and slightly overdriven, probably with a more heavily distorted bus mixed in low behind the clean tracks.
The vocals are multitracked with a subtle reverb. When it gets to the chorus, a softly sung falsetto is multitracked along with it (possibly two slightly panned R, two slightly panned L). The main vocal also has a low-mixed bus run through fuzz.
Most of the change that gradually develops in the arrangement happens in the higher frequencies. At the beginning, it’s just one synthesizer that plays around the rhythm of everything else. But it still exists closer to the mid-range frequency-wise and has reverb, making it still feel subdued. It’s intentionally as the song progresses that more happens in the highs. Dry, overdriven guitars come in the second verse, alternating between higher arpeggiated notes and notes played in reverse (alternating between left and right ears, panned hard). But at that point they’re still only popping in and out, and playing around the main rhythm.
It’s not until the end that the higher frequencies all come in, with a one-chord rhythm guitar drone, tambourine (which does the most work widening the arrangement for this part), and high synths creating a wall of sound as the vocal performance increases in energy. (The chirpy/flutey synth I think is a sine with intense vibrato and a longish attack ramp. Love that sound.) What makes it so effective is that they withhold high frequencies for the majority of the song, then throw them all at you together at the end. They actually do that quite often.
So… subdued distorted bass, driving drumbeat, soft multitracked vocals with falsetto doubling, and subtle high synth and guitar parts traveling between the wider parts of the stereo image. Most importantly, don’t crowd the arrangement/mix where the reverb sits.
I hope this is helpful!
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u/Plastic_Nezerto 15d ago
It's so cool, that they needed to specify "Cool Song No2" on the third album, because everyone was thinking of Indie Rokkers when they heard "MGMT's Cool Song"