Inside 'Could Be You': Rexxy Builds Everything Around The Bass
Monica Velasquez writes with a bass in her hands. Her process for Rexxy starts with playing melodies on the bass, singing over them, and letting that combination capture whatever emotion she is chasing. Only once the basic structure is in place, verse, chorus, break and the rest, does she open Ableton.
From there she searches for a tempo that feels right, brings in the rough bass and vocals, and builds MIDI drums around her idea. The bass is then re-recorded for a cleaner sound that sits naturally against the tempo. Lyrics follow, then the final vocals, and then the synths, guitar and anything else that helps shape the track.
"Sometimes certain sections don't flow the way I hear them in my head and I'll keep experimenting till it does," she says.
'Could Be You' went through four versions before it was right. The finished song leans on a Fender P-bass and a Dan Electro 59M NOS+ guitar, with a Microkorg vocoder synth and a Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave supplying the synth colour. Vocals went through a Shure SM7dB and an Apollo Twin X into Ableton Live 12 Suite. Velasquez taught herself bass, guitar, synthesisers, songwriting, recording, production and mixing, so each link in that chain is something she learned by doing.
The vocal sound has its own backstory. Jeanette, one of the Spanish-language singers her mother played while Monica was growing up in Lima, later inspired the vocal layering effect she uses in Rexxy. On 'Could Be You' that layering gives the voice its dreamy, hovering quality above the bass.
Production also carries part of the story. The voices at the start are a deliberate device that drops the listener into a karaoke bar, a scene from 'Futura', the concept album and comic the track comes from. It is a small piece of sound design that tells you where you are before a single note is sung.
For Rexxy, the hunt is half the fun. She describes her favourite part of making music as "the process of discovering what the song wants to become." On 'Could Be You', that process produced something warm, cinematic and quietly seductive.
The single is out now, and has been added to Spotify's New Synthpop playlist.
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