Deconstructed — ZHU “Faded”
Taking a closer look at one of my favorite tracks by electronic music artist Steven Zhu.
“Faded” by ZHU was released in early 2014 on an album titled “The Nightday”. The track was a big hit for ZHU and launched him onto the national stage reaching the top of the electronic charts in the United States.
What I like about this song in particular is how simple it is but how well all of the elements works together to build a groovy dance track.
Faded is one of the songs that really got me into electronic music many years ago.. and because it’s had such an influence on me, I wanted to take it apart and see a little bit of what it looked like from a technical standpoint.
For this breakdown I’ll be covering the arrangement and looking into a bit about how the track was laid out in terms of progression over time and I’ll cover a bit of the drum techniques and layouts. Next will come the Baseline and Synths which we’ll take a bit of a melodic look at to see how they interact with the song in a very basic manner.
Song Notes
Key — Am |BPM — 125 | Time — 03:43
Arrangement
At the top of the below photo, I’ve chopped up the original track and color coded each of the parts. I found that there were about three unique parts that were repeated throughout the track with slight variations on each repetition of the part.
The track can be seen as having about three unique parts.
Drums
This track uses a simple 4 on the floor heavy kick pattern that carries the groove throughout much of the track. This is enhanced in by some scattered percussion and hats falling on the “and” in the second half of the grooves.
Bassline
This bass sound is a plucky synth bass with an acid like sound mixed in, check out a long winded serum tutorial on youtube. The notes of the bassline bounce around I chord of the key which is Am 1st inv. The clip repeats as shown below for 7 bars, in the 8th the A notes are dropped to the E and the last two notes are dropped.
Synths
The synth patch is a plucked saw sound that has the filter modulated by a envelope using a short attack, and decay, with the sustain set at 0. This is then hit with generous amounts of reverb and delay to give the sound a bit more space.
The notes of the synth line (above) fall commonly with many of the notes in the vocal line (below). This gives the impression that they’re playing with each other a bit and borrowing motifs while not playing the same exact notes. I can imagine that during the writing phase, one of the lines was written as a core motif and then the other was developed as a way of expanding on that core concept. The synth patch changes in amplitude and filter position throughout the song giving it a more dynamic feel. This is one of the few elements that really changes throughout, I think this is what keeps the track interesting without becoming stale and repetitive.
Vocals
“Baby, I’m wasted…” “Baby, I’m faded”
The vocals are simple and repetitive which in part makes the track very memorable and catchy. They follow a melodic line that seems to be a riff on the synth line from above.
Conclusion
This track is built with simple melodic motifs over a rhythmic bassline, punchy kicks, plucky synths, and smooth minimal lyrics. One takeaways for me was the refreshing use of less to achieve more.
Willis
February 2019
