Point Blank’s Weekly Tutorial: Benediction Deconstructed

Welcome back to Point Blank’s weekly spot here on MusicTech – this week Ski Oakenfull breaks down Hot Natured’s Benediction and shows you how the track was put together…

The majority of my deconstructions have been made using Ableton Live, so with the recent release of Logic Pro X, I was excited to see how I could use its new features to help break down this track by Hot Natured and Ali Love. I particularly love the new iPad control app which amongst other things, allowed me to shoot to the different sections of the arrangement once I had set up region markers. I’m also enjoying the new Retro Synth which I used to recreate the main Synth Chord stab sound.

‘Benediction’ uses the easiest of scales, A Natural Minor, and is made up of three main sections, each with a different chord sequence. Interestingly the Chorus starts on the ‘iv’ chord (D Minor) and features a rising progression which really reminded me of another track. I eventually realised it was ‘Spirits In The Material World’ by The Police, which is also in A Minor and starts on the same Dm chord in the Chorus.

This song demonstrates really well the use triads in a diatonic scale which allow us to define chords built on each degree of the scale using roman numerals (ie. i , ii , III , iv , v etc). From this we can write out any chord progression. See if you can work these out with all three sections of this Hot Natured track.

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