Sleepy & Boo have been a mainstay in Brooklyn’s vibrant underground scene for over a decade, and for good reason.
Their deep, dreamy, hypnotic and pulsating energy that they bring, not only to their productions, but also to their DJ sets have captivated a global audience with their underground sound.
What started with their production debut back in 2015 has quickly grown into an impressive body of work including chart-topping releases on many well-know labels.
The latest release, ‘Lucent,’ dropped on May 6th on David Hohme’s Where The Heart Is Records and is a driving, progressive heater that fits perfectly into darker nightclubs and summertime-day parties alike.
Purchase Your Copy Of Lucent Here
The husband-and-wife duo dive DEEP into the processes that brought this track to life, quickly turning into one of the lengthiest and most high-value How It Was Made features in Magnetic History.
See other How It Was Made features.
We also used our Novation Peak synth on “Lucent” as well, this was key to adding some of the different synth leads that fluctuate throughout the track. Peak is another one of our studio favorites, a very flexible 8-voice polysynth that has some great effects and modulation options.
Really good for leads and deep pad sounds as well. With the Peak, there’s no built-in keyboard, so we like to connect the TORAIZ SQUID sequencer to it. The SQUID is awesome for helping you get started on a track, we use it to build basslines, synth sequences, arpeggios.
Buy The Novation Peak Synth Here
It has a number of modes you can work with to come up with ideas and quickly move them along. It’s got a chord mode which works great with the Peak to come up with some really lush sounds.
We’re always trying to envision how a track will sound on the dance floor when it’s being played out, and what kind of scenario would a DJ play it. Is this track something for the peak hours of a party, is it better to build the groove of the party, like a warm-up vibe?
And once we get a better feel of where the track is going, we start to add elements that complement appropriately.
We’re definitely big fans of dub music and how it’s been incorporated into house and techno – so sharp chord stabs that get drenched in echo and reverb is something that we use for character in our tracks, it really helps build a hypnotic groove.
Sound design is important for this kind of vibe, so we do a lot of mixing on our Pioneer HRM-7 headphones, and those provide a real accurate way to refine delays and panning.
Check out Magnetic’s Full Review of the Pioneer HMR-7 Headphones
We split our drums into three Ableton groups – kicks and lowend, hats, and percussion. Each one of those groups we adjust accordingly to the vibe of the track. We spend a lot of time finding the right samples that will work together.
We have a library of “tried and true” samples that have become part of our drum palette, but we’re always on the lookout for something new; Now we’re getting more into creating our own drum sounds – we have the Behringer RD-9 and RD-8MK2, which are both really cool replicas of the classic Roland drum machines. And we’re starting to do our own field recordings and process those sounds into percussion.
For “Lucent” we ran different processing chains on each individual drum sound – saturation, filter, EQ, delay, overdrive – it all depends on what we think is needed to help the elements stand out in the mix. On each group we adjust the EQ so there’s no unnecessary low end finding its way in the mix. With the hats group, we use Ableton’s Drum Buss to tame some of the highs, and add a little color and crunch.
For percussion, UAD’s Teletronix LA-2A Legacy is a classic compressor that really warms things up nicely without overdoing it. We use the UAD Apollo Twin X sound card as our audio interface, and all those vintage plugins can add so much color and character.
Reference monitors are important for making sure tracks sound good. We use the Pioneer VM-80s in our room and they are really useful for dialing in the mix levels and balancing everything.
They are very accurate for playback, and we like to use the four DSP presets on the lows and highs to hear how our tracks are coming together in different monitoring scenarios.
DJing in New York is a great experience because nightlife here is so varied and diverse, every time you play somewhere it’s a new adventure.
We like to make music that speaks to all different kinds of people. We’re definitely drawn to memorable chord progressions in our tracks, there’s something really powerful about chords coming together throughout a track to tell a bit of a story; that was what we were striving to do with “Lucent”.
We love sharing music with people and we want our own tracks to reflect that as well. One thing we’ve learned from DJing is that every part of the set can convey emotion, not just the obvious things like lyrics or melodies. We love sharing music with people and we want our own tracks to reflect that as well. One thing we’ve learned from DJing is that every part of the set can convey emotion, not just the obvious things like lyrics or melodies.
So a lot of our tracks build on that concept through adding and subtracting layers, and using that interplay to push the energy.
The takeaway is that a great night on the dancefloor, the highs and lows of a set, is the emotional experience that people really connect with.
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Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
