Oliver and the Not-so-secret Sound of Modern Pop

Dua Lipa, Adele, Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, SZA, Justin Timberlake, The Weeknd, Burna Boy and Kylie Minogue are just some of the artists who've tapped into Vaughn Oliver's peerless 'Power Tools'

Through his ‘Power Tools’ packs on Splice, Vaughn Oliver’s samples and loops quietly became the defining sound of some of the biggest pop records of the past decade. Artists like Dua Lipa, Adele, Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, SZA, Justin Timberlake, The Weeknd, Burna Boy and Kylie Minogue – to name a few – have tapped into the Tools since the first pack was released in 2018. 

From his early days as a hip-hop DJ, one-half of the blog-house era duo Oliver to sample diety and in-demand producer working with Britney Spears, Kim Petras and Nicki Minaj, I wanted to speak to Vaughn about his approach to creating those packs, his feelings about hearing his sounds on the records of global superstars, hiding in plain sight and the power of taste. 

Vaughn Oliver in his LA studio

Can I have some more?

Hello! It’s been a long time since I’ve sent a Future Filter, but instead of boring you with the long list of reasons why, I’ll just say that a whole heap of projects have taken over my life and unfortunately Substack took a backseat. As a result, I’ve paused paid subscriptions (thank you to everyone who subscribed!). However, I still intend to send them as regularly as I can, but as I couldn’t commit to the schedule that I originally communicated I thought it was only fair to turn payments off. 

For this newsletter though, I’m going back to my roots. I was a fan of Oliver’s remixes for years in the peak blog house era and had also been following Splice since its launch, so when his pack first arrived I was all over it. Neither of us though, had any idea of the impact ‘Power Tools’ would have. I’ve always been fascinated by that impact and the evolving perception of ‘sample packs’ more widely over the past decade.

The packs themselves, if you haven’t heard them, are thick, punchy, airy, bright and powerful. Oliver’s engineering is almost instantly identifiable for its sheer weight and energy. I’ve always been in awe of Oliver’s ability to achieve a punchy, heavily compressed sound while maintaining sharp and impactful transients – one is often sacrificed for the other – while his ability to modernise throwback production techniques and traits, maintaining their aesthetic but dragging them into the 21st century is just as impressive. 

Who sampled?

Splice has played a huge role in the perception of sample packs more widely. There was a time when an artist creating a sample pack may have signalled the end of their career or they were filled with unused and unwanted sounds from the depth of an artist's hard drive. Rarely the producer’s best sounds. Now, creating a Splice pack is as much a badge of honour as a record release, and artists strive to impress their producer peers and by proxy their fans. Oliver and his ‘Power Tools’ were genuinely instrumental in that transition. 

You could of course argue that Splice’s success is a reflection of the bottomless chasm of content that is music in 2024. Artists feel pressure to constantly release to fight through the noise and appease the algorithm, and as a result, are turning to high-quality sample packs to fill the gap where time and patience once lived. Though that’s not exactly Splice’s fault.

Regardless of how you feel about the health of the music industry in 2024, none of it detracts from Oliver’s talent and impact as a producer, engineer and artist. But don’t take my word for it; the sound of his packs is laced across (tens of) billions of streams from the biggest artists in the world.

I wanted to know, does it bother him when he hears his samples on records and receives no credit? Does he feel it's lazy when a producer lifts one of his loops verbatim? How does he create sounds that are both ‘his’, but also neutral enough to be transferable to anyone who might want to use them in their ownmusic? 

I sat down with him to discuss the impact of those packs, his production techniques, why samples can still be ‘punk’ and – of course – the impact of generative AI. 

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Power User

FF: Let’s start with how you got into making music and producing. 

Vaughn Oliver: “I started as a DJ – I didn’t play any instruments. Over the years I got more into production. I started on Fruity Loops making beats and eventually moved to LA where I started the group Oliver, which was myself and Oliver Goldstein. We did the artist thing for a while, the festival circuit and all that stuff, but it reached the point where I didn’t want to tour any more. 

“In and around that time Splice was kind of a new thing, and I jumped at the opportunity [to make a pack]. Now, high-quality samples are very easy to get, but back then there wasn’t much out there. You had to collect, record, save, and organise your own. There’d be an open clap on an old disco record and you’d have to sample it manually and save it somewhere. I was always collecting samples and was always very organised so it was a natural pairing to do the Splice project.” 

Is there a big difference between creating something for yourself as an artist, and creating something that feels usable to a large swathe of producers? Do you have to strip out identity to an extent? 

“You have to think about both. I’d get frustrated by other packs because maybe they’d have this really great drum loop, but there was too much going on – reverb in the snare, the kick had hats over it, etc, so you couldn’t really use it. I always thought ‘What would I want to see in a sample pack?’ I’d want the full loop, but also the individual clean parts and everything looped perfectly. The recent packs I’ve been doing called Decades are a bit more focused because they have a specific sound for each pack. 

“For ‘Power Tools’, I would just make stuff. Sometimes you’re working on a bassline thing, and you throw a delay on it and it’s like ‘Oh nice’ and then I’d bounce it out. So it’s kind of an open creative process. They could take six months to a year to make because I’m also a very active producer, so it’s hard to find time to do both.”

Vaughn’s first ‘Power Tools’ pack was released on Splice in 2018

Do you ever create a loop that’s originally intended for Splice, but then you think ‘Actually I’m keeping this for myself’? 

“Yeah, absolutely. That’s happened many times for sure. That’s kinda the fun of it. You’re creating stuff with nothing in mind, it’s just free flow, and then you’re like ‘Oh this is kinda cool’ and I’ll send it to another producer friend to see if they can make a song from it.”

Is there an element of more freedom in the sense that you’re creating very specific sounds for a very specific purpose rather than writing a song that you might be emotionally tied to? 

“Absolutely. 100%. You’re allowed to experiment in ways you probably wouldn’t do if you were trying to make tracks or beats for others to write to. You can get really experimental. I’ll have these sessions where I’ll have a crazy chain of FX and sounds and randomisation, and record 10 minutes of it. And there might be one cool sound or one cool loop. When I work on pop records, I can’t really do that. You’re in a room with writers and I have to deliver something quickly to get a song started. [Creating the sample packs] is a great creative outlet for sure.” 

Were you surprised by the initial success of ‘Power Tools’? It was kind of the early days of Splice, and that was one of the first big successful packs right? 

“I knew it would do well, and there were a lot of people who were excited about it, but I’d no idea it would completely take over. Even to this day, that first pack is still charting – I think it’s like number seven or eight on the Splice chart and [it came out] in 2018. I was blown away by it.” 

Do you remember the first time you recognised one of your sounds or loops on a record? 

“I don’t remember the first time. A lot of the time it’s harder to recognise when it’s just drum one-shots. I’ve made hundreds, probably thousands of them, so, I wouldn’t recognise any of them now. But the more distinct loops or synth presets I definitely recognise. I have a playlist of stuff that I’ve caught. There’s one that’s a disco drum loop that’s used on a bunch of records. The Dua Lipa one was probably the first big track [to use it] – Ian Kirkpatrick produced that and he was always a big supporter of the packs. 

“When I listen to the record, it sounds like he replaced some of the sounds, but the fill is still in there. ‘Say So’ Doja Cat had a bunch of my sounds in it. For some reason that one drum loop was on a bunch of big pop records.” 

Does it make a difference to you when you hear a loop of yours in its entirety on a big record? Where it hasn’t been changed at all? 

“Not at all – I may have had a different attitude a long time ago but now I’m like ‘That’s cool – that’s what it’s for’. You can get as creative as you want, or you can just use it. A lot of producers are big-picture producers – they’re thinking about the song and the impact it’s going to have. So if this is a great drum loop, why not just use it? Other producers feel like every sound has to be created from scratch or they don’t feel like they own it. None of those are wrong, they’re just different ways of doing it. 

“I come from a hip-hop background, which would just be like ‘Hey here’s a James Brown loop, that’s super funky, just use it’. It doesn’t make it less great because it was taken from another record and it was ‘easy’ to make.”

It reminds me of Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ drum loop, which became a very iconic intro, and it’s just a sample from Garageband that was on every single person’s MacBook. 

“It’s a great drum loop! I think it’s actually cooler when I hear tracks like that. Swizz Beats has a bunch of songs where it’s just a keyboard preset on a workstation, and on Clipse ‘Grindin’ [produced] by The Neptunes – the drum sounds they use are on the [Korg] Triton and its just sounds from four keys in a straight row. That to me is kinda cooler – it’s kinda punk. Anyone coulda done it, but they didn’t. And that’s cool to me.” 

Let’s talk about production. What’s interesting about your packs is that there’s a lot of space between sounds – but each sound fills the frequency spectrum. They’re quite sparse but powerful. Can you talk through your approach to drum processing? Your transients always feel very considered. Is it all layering, or is it heavy processing on one sound? 

“It’s a bit of both, it’s changed over the years as plugins have gotten so good, especially with regards to drum programming. I used to do a lot of layering – if I had a kick and thought ‘This is good but the attack isn’t right,’ I’d layer another sound that had a transient I liked and compress them together and EQ till it was right. But now there are so many great plugins for doing that stuff. I’m a bit more surgical now with sound design, whereas before it was just throwing things together. 

“There’s a plugin I use called [Excite Audio] Vision 4x that lets you see the full frequency spectrum, stereo width and it has an oscilloscope – that all helps for the sounds to translate on any system. My process has always been, just keep going till I have the sound I had in my head, or when it’s hitting the right way. And there’s a million ways to get there.” 

What’s your go-to for collecting drum sounds? Do you have a big drum machine collection or is it mostly acoustic recordings? 

“There’s no set way I do things – sometimes I’ll start with some old drum machine sounds and process the crap out of them. Other times I record stuff. Now you can make a kick drum out of anything – you could just hit a table really hard and pitch it down. There’s a plugin called KNOCK, and there’s a built-in Ableton Drum Buss that’ll add a sub, so you can sculpt and process it from there. Others are generated in synths from scratch like [Xfer Records] Serum. It’s different every time – I let the creative flow take me where it’s gonna take me.”

Excite Audio’s Vision 4x plugin, created by Noisia

Your grooves are very much a big part of the Oliver sound, with lots of heavily swung loops. How do you approach drum programming? Is it all MIDI or are you manually shifting audio on the timeline? 

“I always end up in audio. Even if I’m recording MIDI drums, I’ll bounce it down to audio so I can see exactly where everything’s lining up. Especially on drum transients. If you have a clap that hits right on the snare, it’s gonna sound way different if it’s a millisecond before the snare. It completely changes the way it sounds. 

“I do a lot of generative stuff in Ableton too – I’ll set up a bunch of drum tracks with 100s of foley sounds, transient sounds, mid-range thumpy sounds, and I’ll run those through a buss and they’re all be randomly pitching and triggering different sounds and I’ll let that run for 10 minutes. I prefer to be the listener – if you’re in Serum and being really hands-on, it’s hard to actually listen to what you’re doing.”

“A lot of producers are big-picture producers – they’re thinking about the song and the impact it’s going to have. Other producers feel like every sound has to be created from scratch or they don’t feel like they own it. None of those are wrong, they’re just different ways of doing it.”

What should we expect from the Noughties Decades Pack? Neptunes, Timbaland etc? 

“There were so many eras in the early ’00s, there was Timbaland and Neptunes, there was the beginning of the French electro influence, Ed Banger sound, that was really influential. The pop electro sound was really big. I usually do a bunch of research and figure out what was popping and start making some loops. That sound is really coming back too.”

Everything has a twenty-year cycle. 

“Yeah of course. I guess ’80s is the one sound that seems to stick around, and ’70s too. I’m a huge fan of disco and when I did those first loops, I think some of those inspired that wave in some way. I don’t wanna take credit for the whole thing but I think even that Dua Lipa song, would that have happened if I hadn’t made those drum sounds? I dunno, maybe.”

Disco is a funny one – it’s so musical and has such complexity that it translates across eras. Disco was also innovative at the time from an engineering perspective. 

“Absolutely; it’s a very simple, effective groove, but there are so many ways to decorate it and fill in the blank spaces. The musicality of the stuff that was done in the ’70s and ’80s is pretty unmatched in many ways. Yesterday I was listening to Earth, Wind and Fire and I thought ‘I don’t know if this kind of music will be made again.’ Insane arrangements, every musician playing their parts incredibly. [Music has] changed a lot, but in some ways it’s lost something too.” 

Isn’t it true though that things like Splice allow people to leapfrog learning an instrument or learning to engineer because there are so many perfectly polished sounds ready to be used? 

“It’s that, but also if you want to release a record now, produce it, write it, literally do all the stuff. It’s really easy. I could make something now and have it on Spotify by the end of the day. Whereas back in the day, you had to be a great musician to even get studio time, and when you did it was very expensive and you had to hire an engineer, you had to pay for the tape to record it. The access was very limited, so you had to be good. Now you can just be anybody and put things out.

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword – it’s great that people don’t have to jump through hoops to release music but at the same time maybe the quality suffers, and it’s over-saturated a little.” 

“Ultimately what keeps producers and engineers relevant is their taste and their ear. You can have AI make a million drum sounds, but to have the taste to say: ‘That’s the right sound for this’, that’s always gonna be important. Taste is always the number one thing.”

How do we make sure people continue to know and respect the technical processes behind how to make a great kick drum when the engineering role feels like the one that’s been sidelined the most as budgets have been decimated? 

“Yeah, I wonder, especially with all this AI stuff happening. Will that even be important in five to ten years? Maybe not. Ultimately what keeps producers and engineers relevant is their taste and their ear. You can have AI or whatever make a million drum sounds, but to have the taste to say: ‘That’s the right sound for this’, that’s always gonna be important. Taste is always the number one thing.” 

I think that’s right – if you look at streaming platforms, Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, TIDAL, whatever, they’re essentially selling the same product, the same catalogue. The differentiator, and what I would argue is the product, is the curation. The playlists. How the platform ‘knows’ your taste, and you see that reflected back at you through algorithmic recommendations. It doesn’t matter if there are 100,000 tracks uploaded every day because you’re not seeing them anyway. 

I could see a situation where you create an Oliver Sample Pack AI model, trained on your own samples, like 1,000 kick drums you’ve made, 1,000 snares, 1,000 basslines and loops, and it learned what your sound is on a very micro level, and users can just use that model instead of your packs to generate more specific sounds they need, but always with your aesthetic. Do you think that might be the future of sample packs? 

“It could be, or it might just be we don’t need sample packs anymore at all, and it’ll be built into your DAW and you just type ’80s sounding snare’ and it generates 100 of them. And then you pick one you like and say ‘Make five more like this’ and so on. It’ll probably be like that.

“An algorithm based on your previous work that you can license and sell, that’s very probable too. I’m not opposed to that either. If it’s gonna happen anyway, why not own it and license it yourself, rather than it be out there for free? It’s my life’s work – it goes back to when I was learning how to DJ. It’s an accumulation of so many thousands of hours of listening to music, collecting sounds, and tinkering around.

“I was always into digging for records which I still do constantly so having those references to call in and knowing what sounds work on a certain record, in what context. That’s really valuable.” 

That’s something that a lot of people in tech don’t really understand, who don’t come from the creative arts. They don’t understand the emotional process, muscle memory, taste training, the mind’s ear, and all the things that make up programming a drum loop. Some of those things you’re not even aware of, you’re just in a creative flow. That has so much value and arguably has more value than the output itself. 

“It’s interesting too that sample packs kind of evolved so much, especially in the last 10 years. Back in the day, it was kind of looked down upon. As a producer, you were very protective of your sound, and to share the sounds you used in your music was unheard of. I had the opposite approach – I wanted to give the public my best sounds, rather than just give some sounds and keep the good stuff for myself. It’s a freeing experience giving away your best stuff because it’s like ‘What do I have left?’ It forces you to move on and make new stuff, better stuff.”  

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