Watch Take A Daytrip create new hit material on Kontrol MK3 MIDI keyboards

Watch GRAMMY-nominated production duo Take A DayTrip use the new Kontrol S61 and S88 midi keyboards to craft a song from scratch.

Known for their work with Lil Nas X, Kid Cudi, Juice WRLD, Dua Lipa, and more, Take A DayTrip shares an up-close look at their creative process. Watch as they utilize key features of the Kontrol S61 keyboard including polyphonic aftertouch, direct Kontakt integration, and more to bring their sonic vision to life.

Denzel and David build their song with the Kontrol S61 starting with the sounds of Analog Dreams and Hypha for their melodic chord progression. Then they add percussion elements with ARP 2600, leads with Diva and Hypha, effects processing with Guitar Rig, and their bass line with Diva—all utilizing the new features in the Kontrol S61 that make music creation easier than ever.

Discover the magic that happens when talent meets technology and bring your music to life with the new Kontrol S-Series keyboards.

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How Take A Daytrip started:

“Some of the artists that we’ve worked with are Lil Nas X, Shea West, Juice WRLD, Dua Lipa, Miley Cyrus, Travis Scott, Kid Cudi. The first thing that we ever did that really gave us the opportunity where there was a song where we’re like, “Okay, like, we can actually do this,” was “Mo Bamba” with Sheck Wes.

From that point moving forward, that was kind of like a rocket ship pushed us forward through our whole musical careers.

“Mo Bamba” was a special one for us because it taught us that when we’re creating, it’s not about trying to make something that someone else likes, but when we get together, when we do something that we just love, even when we did that, we weren’t thinking, “Oh, millions of people are going to dance to this every night.” No, we want to dance to this every night. We want to go crazy to this.

Since then, we’ve just been doing things that we like the most. Lil Nas X has been our biggest collaborator to date that we’ve created such a great relationship with, and still are having so much fun making music with them.”

On breaking ground in the music industry:

“For us, our whole journey in music—being two black men coming into the music world, it’s always been about trying to always get in the rooms that we find that people like us are underrepresented in. Every door that we’ve been able to knock down, we try to bring a couple of people along with us. We want to see the world through music. We want to make the world feel smaller through music.

We treat sometimes music like it’s a history lesson where, you know, we’ll travel to someplace and get to know people, get to know their experiences, get to know how they’ve interacted with this music over generations, and try to give our perspective too.”

On the Kontrol S-Series MK3:

“This is really the first MIDI keyboard that we’ve been able to use that allows us to scroll and go through sounds and manipulate sounds much in the same way of a lot of our keyboards.

I think that’s one of the coolest things with this keyboard is a lot of the flexibility and control that we have within our creation process on just analog keyboards and since so much of that also exists on this, where we don’t have to really interface with the computer at all. I think that’s probably the thing that I’m most excited about.

…The thing with this keyboard that is exciting to us is that it seems more fun for us, for our process. Like that’s always what has led to the best music for us when we think back that “oh that session where that song came out, we actually were just having the best time ever,” that’s what we do. We just like playing on keyboards, and we could go for hours without having to stop or really think about anything else other than the stuff that we’re playing. This keyboard allows us to do that in many different ways without having to go back to the computer and change the sound and look for this. Or the computer crashes or something slows down and you get distracted by something.

You get to just look at the keyboard and really have fun with it.”

On polyphonic aftertouch:

“It’s cool to have both hands be able to pitch bends even individual notes. For example, a chord where the second one I was hitting a C and a G, and the G, I like bent a little bit more than I did the C. So it’s giving me also more flexibility just off of the individual notes, whereas usually when I’m using a pitch band, it’s affecting all the notes.”

Make your own music with Kontrol Series MK3

Now that you’ve watched Take A Daytrip create a hit using the new Kontrol MK3 MIDI keyboards, it’s time to get started on your next production. Check out the latest features in the Kontrol S-Series keyboards and start bringing your music to life.

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