J Lloyd says the horns on Jungle’s first album were him doing “mouth trumpet”
“It’s just basically me doing… ‘Boop, boop, boop’ with my mouth.”
Image: Pedro Gomes / Getty Images
The horns on Jungle’s debut album were in fact the work of member J Lloyd’s “mouth trumpet”, says the artist in a surprising revelation.
Speaking on a new episode of Musictech’s My Forever Studio podcast, J Lloyd dives into some of the gear used to record the electronic duo’s eponymous debut album, including a cool fact about the horn sound on the track Busy Earnin’.
“Busy Earnin’ horns is basically a mouth trumpet tracked a million times and tuned to create a little brass section,” the artist tells hosts Chris Barker and Will Betts. “It sounds like someone playing kazoo. It’s just basically me doing… ‘Boop, boop, boop’ with my mouth.”
“Yeah, a lot of the horns are all done just pretending with your mouth and giving it a go and stacking them up.”
“I remember we did a track called ‘Julia’,” he adds. “And we’d heard this Justin Timberlake song, believe it or not, and it had these, really cool chords that we really liked, and we sort of tried to make our own versions of those and stack them up with, um, mouth horns essentially, but it was a secret.”
“We didn’t want anyone to know at that time because we thought it’d be a bit embarrassing, you know.”
Elsewhere in the podcast, we also learn about the plug-in J Llyod describes as “the secret Jungle sauce”, saying “If you want to sound like Jungle, then use that Waves Maserati plug-in. That’s what went on a lot of everything really in a weird way.”
“I didn’t really know what it was back then but essentially, it was saturation, a little bit of compression, and a chorus, mostly based on that Boss classic CE-1 pedal, which we eventually got, but it never ever sounded like the Mazz.”
He continues: “We used to call it “Mazz”, as not to give it away. You know, ‘stick the “Mazz” on it’. We really didn’t want anyone knowing…”
Listen to the rest of the My Forever Studio podcast episodes on MusicTech.
