Pascal Gabriel is a Belgian-born musician based in London and Paris. He co-wrote and co-produced songs for Marina Diamandis's debut album, The Family Jewels.
Work with Marina[]
In July 2010, Pascal told Propeller Head:[1]
❝ How did you work with Marina? Were you often together to work or did you work on your own?
All of the work was together with Marina. It was a proper joint effort! In addition to be a talented singer she's also hyper-creative, incredibly talented, and really great fun to be with in the studio. It was a real blast and a great creative ride to work with her.
Girls and Shampain were written and recorded in my London studio. Marina came to my bigger studio which is in the South of France where we wrote Rootless and Sinful together. Later on, she returned to my studio in France for some overdubs, tweaks, and mixing sessions.
Can you let us in on the creative process? How did the tracks come together and how do you take the early seed of an idea and get it from that raw stage to a proper production?
Sure, usually Marina would have a piano bit that she had done on Garage Band and we would use that as our starting point. The process of constructing a song came from first deconstructing her early inspired "noodlings." We would take an idea, cut it up, and then assemble different parts of it into a song.
Once we had piano, we created bass and drums. I usually started from a Redrum set and a bass combinator patch. All the patches came from my Melophobia ReFill. Once I had the foundation I would load Thor patches from the ReFill and tweak further.
Once I was happy and all the tweaking was done, I bounced the Reason parts down as audio files and moved them over to Logic for mixing internally there. However, I'm going to start experimenting with Record this summer to see if that does it for me! ❞
The Family Jewels[]
| Title | Co-Wri. | Prod. | Additional |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Family Jewels era | |||
| Shampain | ✓ | ✓ | programmer, synths |
| Girls | ✓ | ✓ | mixer, programmer, engineer, all instruments |
| Rootless | ✓ | ✓ | mixer, all instruments |
| Sinful (Outtake) | ✓ | ✓ | non-album track |