4 walls (feat. The Living Room Horns)

Robin Clabby, Jay Webb, and Jason Mingledorff augment The New Mastersounds’ first quarantine single “4 Walls” with a world-class horn section. With musicians adapting to remote recording and production practices in lieu of live performances, Clabby approached Webb to assemble a remote horn section to fill out the recently released “4 Walls” single. Upon hearing it, Webb was immediately taken back to early 70s horn sections of Jackson 5 and James Brown and was able to extract ideas quickly. Webb took note of accents already present in the drum and rhythm guitar parts and used that as a basis for extended horn phrases. Rather than notate charts, he recorded a lead line and filled out harmonies using stacked trumpet parts and sent the recording to Clabby and Mingledorff to interchange on their respective instruments. The section rose to the challenge of keeping articulations tight and matching tones from afar with a goal of making the arrangement sound just as though they were recording in a room together. Both the track and the accompanying video highlight a “reverse engineering” approach to matching both the audio and visual elements of the original tune. “4 Walls (with horns)” is a testament of both grit and technology as the eight collaborators span across two continents, three countries, and seven cities.