NATIVE SKETCHES
02 // Throwing Shade
I made this sketch using a selection of presets in Massive: 1991, Astral Saw, and Slightly 5th. Some are quite bassy whilst others are more focused in the top end, with a kind of ethereal pad-like sound. The idea was to create a piece with lots of space in it by utilizing a wide frequency range, emphasized further by track panning. For each synth sound I adjusted the filters in Massive. By adjusting the cutoff and resonance, you can create nuanced changes in the sound and feel which helps to give a fluid, ever-shifting character to the music.
To make the whole piece sound together and even 'bigger', I added the built-in reverb to each Massive synth, then I worked on the track panning. The low bassline synth is panned to centre, and each layer of sound above that is panned wider as it gets higher, with the highest sounds panned hard to the right and left.
Biography
London-based Throwing Shade, aka Nabihah Iqbal, is a rising producer and NTS radio host with a master’s degree from Cambridge and a black belt in karate. This extraordinary background is reflected in her patchworks of peripheral pop, the first of which debuted on Kassem Mosse’s Ominira imprint in 2013.