Electronic DJ and producer Ninajirachi has opened up about her production process and her love for including elements of the “human voice” in songs.

The 25-year-old musician speaks in the latest MusicTech digital cover, where she takes us through her new full-length release, girl EDM – disc 1, and the creative philosophies that underpin her work.

• READ MORE: “In high school, I was making songs on my laptop that sounded fully professional”: Ninajirachi on the democratisation of music technology

Explaining her process, Nina says that she’s all about treating her vocals with a light touch: “It sounds really basic, but I love to use delay in interesting ways. Having the delay kind of pitch bend and then resampling that can often yield really interesting results,” she explains. “I also love to fully reverb out vocals and resample that.”

“I find having some element of vocal in every song makes it feel more familiar,” she adds. “Everyone likes to hear the human voice — even if it’s a vocal chop or just a texture.”

As a songwriter, Nina constantly draws inspiration from the world around her, capturing snippets of everyday life to infuse into her music.

“I’m voice memo-ing all the time,” she says. “I like to be surprised by stuff that I hear just going about my day. It’s so much fun.”

The musician also enjoys sampling her own tracks and breathing new life into familiar sounds. A prime example is Ninacamina, a collaboration with British-American producer Izzy Camina, which samples Tiankeng, an ambient cut from her 2022 release Second Nature. This track itself samples a snippet from a YouTube documentary about China’s Xiaozhai Tiankeng sinkhole.

“Sampling is so fun, because samples are so frequency rich,” she says. “You kind of put a whole song in one little bit of audio. And by doing that from my own discography, I also avoid any copyright problems.”

Also in the chat, Ninajirachi talks about her disappointing encounter with AI music generators in the studio, saying “we didn’t get anything good.”

The post “Everyone likes to hear the human voice – even if it’s a vocal chop or just a texture”: Why Ninajirachi loves experimenting with vocal elements in songs appeared first on MusicTech.