Never (Ever Ever) Gonna Give You Up/Rick Astley - Circuit Tracks Extended Version

This is an extended version of the track released earlier this week to allow explanation as to how the track was created. If you’ve seen the other version probably little new here unless you’re interested in the track breakdown.

Originally a huge global hit in 1987 this track by Rick Astley went on to have a second life as the unwitting participant in the internet phenomenon, “rickroll”. Created by the production team of Stock, Aitken and Waterman it utilised the sounds and structure of late-Hi Energy/early-house to produce a crossover hit. Colonel Abrams “Trapped” is acknowledged as an influence by Mike Stock and it’s worth listening to both side-by-side to see the similarities. It was produced using the archetypical equipment of the time, Linn 9000, DX7 and Roland Juno 106 (with a sprinkling of Fairlight). The same production team are responsible for numerous other hits including Dead Or Alive, Bananarama etc. etc.

It's second life as the slightly ironic ‘rickroll’ hit is commonly quoted as starting in 2007 on 4Chan, but there are many examples on the internet of people quoted earlier similar prank uses of the song. There are some fascinating articles on the whole ‘meme’ aspect of this work but Wikipaedia is as good a place as any to start.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickr...
How many of the billions of views and listens to the various online versions of the song are as a result of pranks, and how many are genuine fans is impossible to quantify? Either way it seemed a natural choice to cover as a fun, surprise track to celebrate for my subscribers and I do have a soft spot for this piece of pure pop.

There are too many tracks to fit in everything that was played on the record but I was able to simplify it all down to enough to fit it onto the Novation Circuit Tracks and Rhythm playing together. All the synthesiser sounds were created on the Tracks and a couple of the sounds were then sampled into the Circuit Rhythm to increase the polyphony. The two parallel machines are mixed internally and what you hear was recorded straight from the machine’s audio out without any extra synths or audio processing. See below for more details.

I regretted the choice of the song a few times when it wasn’t working out, but in the end it turned out better than I could have hoped. I hope you enjoy this track too and join my subscribers for future songs. As ever I’m open to suggestions for future songs, particularly for surprises like this for the 400-sub mark!

Stay tuned!

More details for synth nerds

I set myself the goal of creating all the sounds on the Tracks even if they were going to be played back as samples.

The biggest challenge this time had to be the brass synth. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone do ‘brass’ sounds as such on the Tracks so I’ll try and knock together a video soon showing how I did this. On the original the ‘brass’ is very distinctively synthetic (I thought Juno) but sources say they came from a Fairlight) and a key part of the composition. I think I got close, though the effects on the Tracks help.

Many of the percussion samples are from the Roland 727 drum machine (the ‘latin’ one) and some Linn samples. I found some Simmons SDS samples online (those hexagonal drum pads every band had in the 80’s) for the tom-drum rolls.

The whole song overall is too long to fit into the pattern memory of either of the Circuits so I concentrated on shoehorning at least up to the chorus. Previously I’ve been able to squeeze more in by slowing down patterns and using the unquantized recording to fit more notes in but this wouldn’t work here as I needed the extra resolution to fit in 16th notes. Luckily I got just enough in to do the chorus and as you see the final section will happily loop forever if I let it! (I wickedly did think of doing a 60 minute version…….)

Apparently the original stems used to be available online but I couldn’t find a source that still works (let me know if you know different ;) ). To work out the track I uploaded an mp3 into Logic and used the inbuilt AI stem-splitting function. I was greatly helped also by a score by Musescore user, Wafflefly21 YT ( could be @wafflefly2155 ?) with a very clear arrangement. The vocals I used on the finished track are a bit ‘soft’ and mushy from one of the artificially separated stems but they work in the track for now.

Listen to the end of the video for isolated tracks so you can hear each of the elements.

Track breakdown
BPM=114bpm, 50% swing.

Tracks
Synth 1- Synth electric piano patch (polyphonic)
Synth 2 -Synth ‘brass’ patch (polyphonic)
Drum 1 – Simmons SDS tom samples (untuned)
Rhythm
Track 1 – Linn bass drum and 909 open hat
Track 2 – 727 bongo & conga
Track 3 – Linn LM1 cabasa
Track 4 – Linn HiHat
Track 5 – 707 snare
Track 6 – ‘Rick’ vocal edited stems
Track 7 – mono ‘string’ sample from Circuit Tracks
Track 8 – mono Dx7-like bass sample from Circuit Tracks

Leave a comment if you have any questions and thanks for watching!