Remaking Sleepyhead to Learn Why It's So Good

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]This is Sleepy Head by Passion Pit.

[00:00:11]It's a really interesting song and in some ways it's kind of built like a collage. But what makes it so good?

[00:00:18]Well, I don't know. So, I'm going to recreate it from scratch to try and find out. We're going to look at things like composition, sound design, songwriting.

[00:00:25]Basically, anything that I think makes this song what it is. But we're going to keep it fun. It's not going to be crazy technical. And I'm going to try to do it in a way that anyone can understand whether or not you make music. But to start off this song, we've got a journey all the way back to 1960.

[00:00:40]>> Now it's jazz. The place is roaring. All beautiful girls in there.

[00:00:43]>> This is the voice of Jack Carowak. He's an author. He's a poet. He's basically just a a very cool guy. And around 24 seconds into this sample, something interesting happens. He's wailing beer caps of bottles and jamming at the cash register. And everything is going to the beat.

[00:01:00]>> It's the beat.

[00:01:00]>> Oh, hold on a second.

[00:01:02]>> And everything is going to the beat.

[00:01:03]>> All right. So, that is the first sample that we're going to be using in this song. And everything is going to the beat.

[00:01:09]>> And then I'm going to take it and pitch it up three semmit tones here. Pitched up. It sounds like this.

[00:01:15]>> And everything is going to the beat. And everything is going to the beat.

[00:01:18]>> And we're still missing one thing in this intro section. And that is going to be this other sample. I'll tell you where this comes from in a second, but for now, we're just going to grab this section right here in orange.

[00:01:35]>> And I'm going to actually take the first half and move it to the back end and just sort of glue the two together. So, it sounds like this.

[00:01:46]And then I'm going to grab this beginning part that we have and I'm going to copy it over and paste it back at the back end so it repeats. And if we listen to it all the way through, it doesn't really sound good.

[00:02:01]>> But if we take this whole thing and reverse it and add it in with our Jack Carowak sample, we get this.

[00:02:08]>> And everything is going to the beat. And everything is going to the beat. And everything is going.

[00:02:17]>> And then we're going to jump right into this nice loose kick drum. It's a very natural sounding kick, but I do suspect it's a sample just because a lot of things involved in this song are samples. And we're going to take this kick drum and add these claps. And as far as drums go, the last thing that we really need is this little bell sample.

[00:02:38]This is a sample from the TR707, I think. So, I'm going to take this sample and I'm just going to repeat it over and over again. And I'm I'm pretty sure that this sample repeats throughout the entire song. And I think it adds to this sort of quality of like this softness or this sweetness. But this is the bells with the rest of the drums.

[00:03:02]Yeah. And the next thing we're going to add is this sample. So I guess it's time to talk about where this comes from. And this sample comes from an artist Mario Hera who is actually singing like an old Irish folk song. So the internet lore that this sample was saying please unicorn eat tacos with me uh is absolutely not true. This song is just completely in a different language. I mean it's in Irish and the song is called Oro Mavadin.

[00:03:33]Oro Mavadin.

[00:03:37]Um, and when we start to listen to this song, it immediately sounds pretty familiar. Oh, okay. That's all we need.

[00:03:46]It's that's literally all the parts of the song. They're in like the first 20 seconds. So, we're going to grab that one piece, not the first thing we heard, but this later section.

[00:03:58]>> Ooh. And we're just going to stop it right there. That's all we need. So, if we cut this part out and we pitch it up six semmitones, we get this.

[00:04:07]And then this is going to repeat like every two bars during this section of the song. But at the end, something interesting happens. It starts to increase the energy by having more repeats happen to let you know that something else is about to happen.

[00:04:22]Things are about to change and the song is really about to pop off. But we're not there yet. We will be soon. So, if we listen to what we have so far, I mean, it's not going to sound great, but you'll hear it does start to sound like the sleepy head that we know and love.

[00:04:44]So, in counterpoint to this sample that they're using of Mario Hera, Michael Angelos, who from what I could tell, he's basically like the the main guy in Passion Pit. So, he samples his own voice in counterpoint to the Mario Hara sample. And it it's this nice balance of they're both samples. One of them is from, you know, years ago. When did that come out? 1958, guys. It's 1958. And then the Michael sample is like a contemporary sampling of just his own voice. So, we're going to try to um we're going to try to make that happen here.

[00:05:23]Okay. So, this one is sounding pretty good here.

[00:05:27]So, if I take that sample and drop it into a sampler, now I can play that sample on my keyboard, but he's not hitting all these different notes. He's really only just hitting one note here, whatever that note happens to be. I'm going to add a couple effects to this sound. And the main thing is going to be there's a couple like little harmonies involved. So one of them is an octave down and the other one is four semmit tones up.

[00:06:05]So if we play them all together we get this which is a little bit just has a little bit more interest to it. And I think it it fills out more space so the sound isn't so thin on its own.

[00:06:35]You know, I was thinking the song didn't have enough bells, so let's add like several more. First, we've got this nice little run here that comes in about halfway through the intro.

[00:06:44]Later on in the intro, we have this little bell section.

[00:06:49]You can hear those are weird notes, but I think it's because in reality, it's that first hit delayed out and pitching down as the feedback is playing out. And then we've got this one other little bell line, but it's still very empty. We need something to fill in all the spaces in between these samples. So, of course, we're going to introduce some harmony in the form of synthesizers.

[00:07:17]And the sounds for the main chords used in this song are kind of strange, honestly. So, my first sound is just a sort of buzzy square wave synthesizer.

[00:07:29]It's like a little bit wavy. It's a little bit chorusy. And I'm going to layer that with a digital bell sound.

[00:07:37]The bell sound adds like this nice high like buzziness. And the lower synthesizer just adds more so like body.

[00:07:44]And I'm not gonna lie to you, I was really scared for a while when I was working on like this section because I thought to myself, "This sounds terrible. This is this is so bad and it's my fault." But I worked on it more and more and more and the more I thought about it, the more I was like, "This part doesn't even sound that good in the original song." That's the point of this section. This is supposed to sound weird because it makes you curious and it makes you want it to like resolve this weird tension that it's created. It's almost like getting you familiar with like, hey, this isn't going to be like a lot of the other songs that you listen to. You know, this is different. And this song is very different. So, the intro is kind of weird, but it serves an important purpose.

[00:08:35]Heat. Heat.

[00:08:52]Whoa. Whoa. Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren't we? Here. But what was going on in that second part that made it work? That made it sound good. Now, first of all, we're going to bring in a cons a consistent clap with these drums.

[00:09:05]So, it's not throwing you off balance as much as the beginning was. And beyond that, we've really got all the same instrumentation from the first intro part, but the Mario Hera sample that we've been using is going to extend itself out to be a little bit more like fulfilling in a way and also just playing more of the sample. All I have to do is take it and just let it play for longer. And I it sounds like this.

[00:09:37]But of course, we're missing something foundational, and that is going to be the bass. This big, fat, kind of nasty bass.

[00:09:49]And I'm going to layer it with this sort of buzzier, higher pitched bass sound.

[00:09:56]This is the thing that allows you to know what the bass is playing even when you can't hear the real deep depth of the bass. And the pattern that these notes are playing is really pretty simple. And it it repeats four times.

[00:10:28]The bass really does make the chords make sense. It like makes everything make sense. And then we move on to the first verse and the kick drum drops out leaving us with only these claps. But that's not the only percussion that we have going on because you remember this bell sample little thing?

[00:10:48]Well, we're going to take this sample and cut it up so that it's basically hitting twice as often as it was in the intro.

[00:10:57]Right now, we've got like a little bit of a bounce going on. It It's kind of groovy in a nice way. But these are not the only bells that we have going on in this section of the song. The instrumentation or specifically like some of the ambiance leans into like a a more like sweet territory, like this sweetness and like this prettiness. And a lot of that has to do with these ambient bells going on.

[00:11:31]It's just ambience. It's just like pure vibes. You know what I mean? Pure pretty pretty vibes. And then we're going to pull in our next Mario Harris sample.

[00:11:39]And it's actually going to be the section before the part that we've been using so far.

[00:11:48]And that's it. I mean, we take that, cut it out, and basically just repeat it over and over again.

[00:12:03]And it's sounding very nice, but it's a little bit empty. And that's because we don't have any harmonic content. We don't have any chords, basically. And we're actually going to use some different sounds than we've seen so far.

[00:12:15]So, our first sound is going to be this flute.

[00:12:21]This sound sits further in the background. It's not like super prominent, but on top of this sound, we're going to layer another sound that's a little bit more full and fills out the frequency spectrum a little bit more.

[00:12:36]All right. So, this is a synthesizer. I mean, it's a pretty simple sound.

[00:12:40]Honestly, it's just a sound. It's called Cassandra pad. So, shout out to Cassandra for uh making the pad, I guess. And this is going to play the same notes as the flute. But before we play this in, there is one more thing that we're going to add.

[00:12:55]It's this really high tone. It's just one note holding out. And it's not something that you really hear in the song. It's more like something that you feel. It just adds this element of consistency over top of the changes which creates like attention.

[00:13:38]and you didn't even realize that you missed the kick drum until it comes back in. But the reason it hits so hard is because it wasn't there for long enough for you to get used to it not being there. But it only works because there's also no bass going on in this section.

[00:13:51]So the next step is going to be the vocals. And this is a very particular type of vocal. He's in the range right between which like when he go up here and then you start to go up and then it's like right when your voice transitions from low to high and it takes a lot of control and a lot of like technical ability to be able to sing like he's singing. So I want to show a little live performance that Passion Pit did. It seems to be in like the pretty early days of Passion Pit.

[00:14:26]for the lion and all the nights against your impressive to hear like the power that he has behind his voice when he's hitting like these really high notes.

[00:14:49]But I don't know if you noticed, there is a difference between this live performance, how the voice sounds and how it sounds on the album version of the song. So there is some like vocal production trickery going on to make the album version sound a lot more full and a little bit less like thin. And just as a side note before we get into like really recording these vocals, some of you people that have been here for a little bit know that I am a little vocally challenged, but I'm just going to try to get it. I'm just going to try to go up high and hit these notes. I'll try to do it like powerfully like he does. And I'm just going to warn you, it's going to get a little mouse mouse mody a little bit. So, >> it was like fire around the brimids.

[00:15:42]>> All right. It It's a little rough. It's true. and it does still sound thin like the live performance did. And the way that we're going to address this problem is to not double the vocal, but triple the vocal. So tripling the vocal in this case basically means singing the same thing three times. And I'm going to take one of those takes and put it on the left side like this.

[00:16:06]>> It was like fire around the brim. And I'm going to take another one, put on the right side. It was like fire around the brim.

[00:16:15]>> And then the final one and the best vocal take will be right in the middle.

[00:16:19]>> IT WAS LIKE FIRE AROUND THE BRIM.

[00:16:22]>> They blend together. So you're not really hearing any individual vocal as much as you're hearing the summation of all three at the same time. So it really does make it so that you don't have to be singing things perfectly. So we might as well just listen to this full verse.

[00:16:40]But first of all, I want to take a second to look at the lyrics cuz lyrics are important in a song. And this one is interesting. So, this is like really heavy on imagery. And the imagery is like really powerful. And it feels like the imagery packs this emotional weight behind it. But I don't know about you, I have no idea what this means at all.

[00:17:02]>> No one knows what it means, but it's provocative.

[00:17:05]>> No, it's not.

[00:17:06]>> GETS THE PEOPLE GOING.

[00:17:08]>> THAT'S ENOUGH. So let's give it let's give this full verse. So let's give this first verse a listen.

[00:17:25]Stars right through the dark sp.

[00:17:50]So, we just had this big opening of like the harmonies come in and the bass comes in and the song expands, but then right after it expands, it all contracts back down to be even smaller than it was before. With just this sample playing, it almost is like a trick because it's taking everything away right before a really big release in the next big part of this song. And that is going to be the So, we're going to start off with our same kick we've been using.

[00:18:28]That's not right.

[00:18:31]You know what? I don't think this keyboard's even working.

[00:18:41]That's better. So, we've got the same kick and the clap that we've been using this whole time, but the energy is a little bit higher because this clap is going to hit the double a little more often, like this.

[00:19:02]And at the end of this section, we're going to bring in a a whole new drum sound. Wow. It's this like the really distorted snare and it does this little drum fill at the end.

[00:19:15]And then we're going to bring back the synthesizers that we had in the intro section, the like buzzy bell sounds, you know.

[00:19:31]And I'm pretty sure that these chords are just a variation of the same chords that we were using in the intro section because we're going to take the bass from that intro section and just lay that down just as it is.

[00:19:51]And we're going to go back again to draw from the intro section. We're sort of tying everything together here if you can't tell. And we're going to grab our vocal chop. remember.

[00:20:02]But this time we're not only going to use the one note, we're going to use two notes. This is just the original one that I sang. And we're going to get this high guy in there, too.

[00:20:13]And that is going to sound like this.

[00:20:25]And before we get to the star of the show, we only have one more thing to add, and it only comes in in the second half of this section. It's a guitar.

[00:20:33]So, we've got this pretty harsh distorted sound, but we're just going to play one note at a time, and we're going to go way up on the neck up here.

[00:20:42]And the pattern slowed down looks like this.

[00:20:51]I don't know why, but this pattern to me is like it's like a tongue twister for your fingers. And it is going really fast in the song. So, I guess we'll just try our best to lay it down.

[00:21:22]But I think we're forgetting something.

[00:21:25]The lead synthesizer. We're going to start off with a simple saw to wave.

[00:21:30]And then I'm just going to bring in another saw to wave an octave above it.

[00:21:36]You can hear they're kind of like fighting against each other in like a very pleasant way. But the main thing that we need to get the character of this synthesizer right is actually going to be glide. If you don't know what glide is, it basically makes a note slide into the next note you hit rather than it just being a hard cut off. So this is without glide.

[00:21:59]And then if we turn glide on and just turn it all the way up just to see what it does. This is with all the glide we can handle.

[00:22:11]I I recognize that's a little extreme.

[00:22:12]So, we're just going to pull it back to be this nice sort of snappy glide.

[00:22:19]Then we can get this cool sort of bouncy rhythm effect by pretty much holding out one note and then hitting other notes.

[00:22:29]And I'll play this lead on its own first and then bring in the rest of our instrumentation.

[00:22:51]And then we go straight into verse two.

[00:22:53]And I'm going to start blowing through this stuff because it's really a very simple structure and it's a very simple song once you have all the pieces in place. We tie it all back in at the end of the verse with our classic sleepy head pseudo chorus sort of motif thing back into the drop chorus thing. And we end off with this beautiful little outro where it's just the sample and a lot of our bells playing. It's like an exhale in a way where after all this high energy that drop chorus thing you go sound is an illusion kind of. You might go to your local concert hall to see Yo-Yo Ma play his amazing cello and you feel like you're listening to a cello in a room. And in a way, you are, but I mean really what you're hearing is just sound pressure differentials moving through the air. But if we take it a step further and you look up Yoyo Ma on your little Spotify or your little Apple Music and listen and think that you're listening to him playing his $2.5 million cello in a room, but really you're listening to a sound file. You're listening to data. It's like ones and zeros. So all that to say that digital music is already an abstraction of the real thing. But what's interesting about this song, the way Passion Pit approaches making music and sampling, is that it doesn't try to hide the fact that it's all digital stuff, it's all ones and zeros and waveforms. It actually like puts that on display and uses it to its advantage in a way. It's like really refreshing because it's feels like Passion Pit is taking the format which is like digital music creation and it's making it part of the art. It really is like a a slight of hand trick where they say, "Look at this over here. We got these cool samples and I'm sampling my own voice and whatnot, but you're as you're looking at this hand, the other hand is actually coming in with this masterful understanding of musical tension and release." In a way, it's like a master painter making a painting where the canvas is part of the painting. The painting is not on the canvas. it is like incorporated into it in a way. So that's my take on Sleepy Head and I'm curious to hear your thoughts in the comments. But thank you for watching and you know you might want to watch this video. I mean looks like a pretty good video.