The Making of the AHEE Animals EP and Sample Pack
AHEE is back with a fresh take on Glitch Hop with his new Animals EP on iLL.Gates’ Producer Dojo label. These 4 new tracks range from heavy neuro bass inspired dance floor bangers like “10 Foot Tarantula” & “Jungle Dragon Beat” to 7 minute Clozee-esqe melodic journeys like “Night Monkey.” A wild mixture of wiggly bass lines and psychedelic soundscapes will be sure to entertain your body, mind, & spirit. I enjoyed catching up with AHEE to learn more on how he created this heavy hitting Glitch Hop Safari.
Chris, congratulations on the release of the Animals EP. How much time did it take for you to complete the EP in full and what is the story behind the Animals EP?
Thanks & Wassup Aliens! Some of the songs for Animals EP started back in 2018 and others I made at the beginning of the Pandemic in 2020. The name Animals didn’t really come to me until the very end after we had chosen what beasts of songs to release. I was coming up with these fun names for the tracks and then it all just clicked together, they’re all Animals!!
Do you have a favorite song on the EP and why?
I love them all! But I’ve played out Jungle Dragon Beat & Night Monkey a lot before Covid and they smashed live! I used to make a mashup of those two as the opener to my shows at the end of 2019. The other 2 I haven’t played out yet.
What are some of your favorite approaches for quickly getting a great idea down in the DAW? Do you like to start with Drums, melodies, chords or some other technique?
I have a few ways of starting.
One way is described in my YouTube Tutorial: “How To Make Any Beat Ever,” where I take a beat I love, I start to recreate it, then deviate and create my own thing with it.
Another way is that I just have sessions where I try to make a sound I haven’t heard before and then something in that process will inspire the creation of a song.
With Remixes I love to find my own music direction under someone else’s vocals or melodic ideas and just run with it!
You are a prolific producer and I am curious about how you manage the massive quantity of songs that you have created. For example, how do you go about choosing all of the songs that end up on your release list? Do you create songs with an Album or EP collection in mind or do you just freely create and decide on the groupings after the fact?
I’m just constantly creating with different project ideas in mind, so I come up with the collections after the fact for sure. I’ve made over 73 albums at this point in my life! So I’m just on this creativity train and they keep coming out and see which ones land together publicly or disappear into the unreleased realms of my hard drives.
Congratulations on getting 1 million streams on Spotify in 2020! Can you share some lessons that you have learned along the way about growing your audience?
Thanks! I read the Soundcloud Bible some years ago and it has this chart in there where you release singles/eps in waves, so each release compounds on the next, and just reading through that pdf helped me get a sense of what he witnessed on the rise of San Holo. I take that advice, modify it and apply it to Spotify.
Also I feel like I’ve improved my production quality a lot recently and that certainly helps the most probably.
Tell us about your new AHEE Animals EP Sample Pack available in the Producer DJ marketplace.
At the time of this interview, I am going thru those projects and rendering out the sounds into samples for y’all to use in your own beats! I hope you enjoy them! I think it’s totally worth it to get those fun bass womps, wubs, & wiggles!
What are your top 5 favorite VST’s at the moment?
Xfer Serum, Fabfilter Pro L2, iZotope Ozone, oeksound Soothe 2, Matt Tytel’s Vital
What can we expect from AHEE in 2021?
Some more big music releases, YouTube Tutorials, and also a new “Music News” series on my YouTube. The first episode is about the “Biggest Update to Music Technology in Decades?!”(MIDI 2.0/Serum2.0).
Is there anything else that you would like to share with us?
I also have my Magic Ableton Racks & Templates in the ProducerDJ Marketplace if you haven’t checked those out already! I use them all the time! Peace Aliens!
-AHEE
Stream/Download the AHEE Animals EP here.