Bruno Mars | Finesse (Change Request ReVision)
For this ReVision, I took on a rather contemporary song that was written as an homage to the greats of a previous music production generation. This particular era of contemporary popular music saw these influential producers coming into the vocation of record production just as many revolutionary new tools, instruments, and technologies were emerging.
This era of technological experimentation and the cross-genre artists that graduated from it would go on to create some of the most influential popular music of all time—simultaneously expanding the sonic palette of the modern music dialect—through the heavy use of drum machines and synthesizers.
Bruno Mar’s “Finesse" is directly inspired from the “New Jack Swing" sound—birthed with Janet Jackson's "Nasty”(Produced by Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis)—pioneered by Teddy Riley, whose rise to fame excreted such dominance over the popular sound of American Black Music, that there really wasn’t an artist in the categories of Hip-Hop, Rap, and R&B who wasn’t at least attempting to capitalize on the confluence.
Off his 2016 album, ‘24K Magic’—produced by Shampoo Press & Curl (Bruno Mars, Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine) and The Stereotypes (Jonathan Yip, Ray Romulus, Jeremy Reeves, Ray Charles McCullough II)—Bruno Mars' track places a fat Model D bassline front and center on top of the highly swung drum programming.
I employed all the standard instrumentation that would be found in the production studios of this genre era, centered around Roland’s TR-808, JX-3P, and from the rackmount and tabletop synth units like the Roland XV-3080, JV-880, and JV-1080.
