On ‘Anyway’ that’s my dad playing the guitar I had the chords and asked him to play them on an acoustic guitar. It sounded great, and different, so I used it. For example, there’s a Masked Wolf track called ‘Star’ for which I grabbed a guitar loop, pitched it down, and added some effects to it. If I do use a sample, and I use Native Instruments’ Kontakt a lot, I try to flip it in such a way that no-one will recognise it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I prefer to make something no-one has ever heard before. I also use sample packs very sparingly, because if you have access to them then so do millions of other producers. So I stay away from loops done by others. When you use loops you have to be careful that someone is not going to ask you for a cut. “For the same reason, I prefer to create my own samples. I love all the sounds that come with the Novation and I like being hands-on with hardware as well. There’s a huge difference between a sine wave from a soft synth like Serum, and a sine wave from an analogue synth where you get flutter and hiss and so on. “Hip-hop beats, on the other hand, need to sound more organic. It’s very on the grid, and perfectly EQd and compressed. I made EDM for years, and in that genre everything needs to be perfect. I wasn’t using analogue gear until I got into hip-hop. The main instrument in my studio is a Novation Summit analogue synth. “My MIDI keyboard is an M-Audio Oxygen 49, and I have a Fender Strat electric guitar. The Arrow allows me to produce while I travel - I like to keep my gear simple and portable.” I have a Rode NT1 mic, a UAD Arrow Thunderbolt 3 interface, Yamaha HS10 monitors, and Audeze LCD headphones – which are probably the best on the market for recording. I run Ableton on it now, but when I made ‘Astronaut’ I was still on FL Studio.
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“The core of my system is a 2018 Macbook Pro with 15-inch screen, Intel Core i9 2.9GHz, and 32GB of RAM. ‘Astronaut in the Ocean’ came into being that way, and is, says Hapi, “the quickest and easiest beat I ever made it took me probably one and a half hours.”īefore elaborating on how he made the beat, Hapi set the scene by describing the environment he made it in. The tracks then find a particular purpose later on. Until his current work with Masked Wolf, which is entirely focused on the rapper’s album, Hapi’s beats have always come into being by messing around in his studio, creating whatever he feels like at the moment. I got totally addicted to making something in the studio that sounds awesome to me and that other people enjoy as well.” I packed up my drum kit, turned my room into a studio, and got into producing electronic music. I went to a music school but dropped out when I was 14. I grew up listening to Dire Straits, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, all that kind of stuff, and then I listened to rap and so on. “I’ve been around music my whole life,” he remembers.
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Hapi was only 17 when he had his first chart success, but he’d been working hard on his skills as a beatmaker and producer for several years before then. His song ‘Anyway’, released under his name in 2017 and featuring Mimoza, went platinum in Australia, while ‘About You’, featuring Laurell, went gold last year. ‘Astronaut in the Ocean’ is not Hapi’s first experience of the big time.
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Then it blew up out of nowhere, and now it’s sitting at a point that we’re very happy with. When the song first came out it did OK for a rapper who didn’t have much of a following, but it wasn’t that great. The success of the song naturally makes him feel on top of the world. The track was made by Melbourne producer Tyron Hapi, who took a break from work on the album he’s currently making with Masked Wolf to discuss how ‘Astronaut in the Ocean’ reached escape velocity. Musically, ‘Astronaut in the Ocean’ is trap with 808s, hi-hats, and echoes of Drake, but it also has a rock feel due to the heavy beat and some filmic electric guitars. The song’s success can, in part, be explained by the fact that, at only 2’ 12” duration, ‘Astronaut in the Ocean’ is a meme song in a similar way as Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ – the first entirely TikTok-driven song. In January 2021 the song was re-released on Elektra and has since gone viral with 380 million streams on Spotify, 165 million YouTube views, and a Top 5 presence in dozens of countries. ‘Astronaut in the Ocean’ by Sydney rapper Masked Wolf was released in June 2019 on Teamwrk Records, got traction on TikTok, became a sleeper hit, and reached 32 million streams on Spotify by the end of 2020. Hot on the heels of The Kid Laroi, there’s another Australian hip-hop success story with global impact. The international success in 2020 of The Kid Laroi (featured in Audio Technology Issue 70) was seen as a global breakthrough that finally put the genre on the world map. Until recently, Australian hip-hop was an underground movement that barely registered outside of the country.