Animesh Raval

I arrived at Sculpted Music around 10am to start work on a remix of Stars with producer Jimmy Napes. When you haven’t worked with someone before, there’s always the initial element of trepidation at the birth of a project, but while Jimmy miked up the drum kit, I broke out my Rachmaninov on the baby grand and that pretty much was the ice broken and introductions done.

Today was all about exploration and experimentation. Stars is such a great song and to give it the best possible chance of success I wanted to created something current and relevant pulling myself out of my comfort zone. With Jimmy’s background in acoustics and breakbeat I knew we certainly wouldn’t be coming out with anything “safe” and this suits me just fine. I’d really advocate spending time exploring different sounds with different producers!

We got a lot done today and I think we can feel really pleased with what we accomplished. I say “we” but it was mostly Jimmy trying out different grooves on the drums and trying out all sorts of bass sounds and synths. Hopefully I did play my part too! I laid down piano, vocals and BVs which, if I do say so myself, are sounding HUGE! Jimmy’s got a great ear for BVs so thanks to his direction we’ve got some lovely stuff.

The highlight of the day was definitely watching Jimmy at work: a lovely guy, very humble and unassuming, clearly passionate about music. Seeing him groove to the music was inspiring and reminded me why I love writing and making music.

All in all a great day. It’s so good to be back in the saddle…now bring on tomorrow!