Astral

Template:Song "Astral" is the eighth track on the Dropped Frames, Vol. 2 instrumental release by Mike Shinoda.

Background

"Astral" is a song by Mike Shinoda made during the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2020, the global pandemic created by the COVID-19 coronavirus caused communities to quarantine at home. During this time, Mike Shinoda decided to start live streaming online and inviting fans to watch him create new instrumental music.

"Astral" was a track made by Mike on May 26, 2020 under the working title "5.26 Elise Collab."^[1]

Mike said, "We have a fun one today. Right now you are hearing the drum stylings of Elise Trouw. She's actually doing this thing called Elise Collab where she puts these things up and random people kind of take them and play over them and use them and mash them up and whatever and she reposts."

Introducing Elise to fans, he explained, "I'm going to let you guys see the clip that Elise made. Elise is a multi-instrumentalist, I think I originally just saw her on Instagram. You know the Instagram feed just gives you stuff, like "Here's something you like"? Instagram has me pegged as somebody who likes to watch drummers, and... I do. Like my feed has a lot of drummers in it, and basketball. Elise's page is what showed up one day, one of her videos way back, who knows how long. And I clicked on a couple of things and I was like, "Damn, she can sing too, and she can play a couple of things, and she can play guitar and she can play bass."

The clip that Mike sampled from Elise is from a May 24, 2020 Instagram post by her where she said, "140 BPM!!!!! I’ve kept you waiting long enough... here is the next beat in the #EliseCollab series // download the wav file from this video in my BIO LINK // Go watch my process for making these videos in the @paistecymbals story (I took over their page today!!!!) // Can’t wait to see what you come up with and don’t forget to tag me so I can watch" ^[2] The file she provided download was titled "5.24.20 drums (140 bpm) .wav" at 1 minute long and was offered for download via Dropbox.^[3]

Making the song, Mike said, "So I brought that in to the computer here. Just went on her page, downloaded the file. It's got four parts but the two pink parts are the same pattern. So there's basically three parts. Now what I decided to do with this one, I threw a couple of plugins in on this. And you're going to hear kind of the shape of this change. The first one is a tape emulator, this emulates the dirtiness of that recording going on to, it's kind of a little more lo-fi tape. Like half inch, quarter inch? So that's a Waves plugin. And after that I was listening and I noticed there's all of this room sound, meaning I could hear the reverb of the room that she's recording in. So I decided to put a gate on that which means whenever it gets quiet it'll shut off the audio. And then just a compressor. And then there's that effected mushroom pusher that I've been using on drums here and there. I really like the punchiness this thing gives it. Here's a little distortion, it's a unique distortion... lots of low end which I love on that. And then last, I put a multiband compressor to kind of take the edge off of the pink section and the blue section in the EQ spectrum. So now it's a pretty thick sounding drum vibe."

Elise posted on social media about the song when it was released, saying, "Excited to be on @m_shinoda ‘s latest release “Dropped Frames Vol. 2”. Mike samples some of my drums and vocals from the #elisecollab on “Astral”. Listen in his bio link and watch his process on his YT channel!"^[4] While she says that some of her vocals were sampled, the vocal sample is actually something Mike found in Maschine to put on the track and is not a vocal from Elise.