‘Lovin On Me’ took Jack Harlow’s global success to new heights.Photo: Cian Moore
Jack Harlow’s smash hit ‘Lovin On Me’ is the perfect marriage of old‑school sample manipulation and 21st Century laptop production.
Jack Harlow’s ‘Lovin On Me’ topped charts in the US, the UK and many other countries. It was written and produced by Sean Momberger, with drums and 808 added by Ozan Yildirim (aka Oz) and Nik Frascona (aka Nik D). Nickie Jon Pabón recorded Harlow’s vocals, added some writing touches, and mixed.
“I’ve been in the music industry for nearly nine years, and it’s beyond my wildest dreams,” enthuses Momberger. “This kept charging up the charts. It’s been pretty surreal. Over the last nine years I’ve worked with big acts like Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj, and people love it when you make a track, but when a track goes big like this, it’s amazing how many new people you get to collaborate with.”
Originally from Gainesville, Florida, Momberger moved to Los Angeles in 2014. When he first got into beatmaking, in 2003, he predominantly used hardware, but today he works with Ableton and mostly Pro Tools in his home studio in a bedroom in his house in LA. He says that he makes 60 percent of his music all by himself, while the other 40 percent is made with others in the room.
“When I was in high school I Googled ‘What gear do music industry people use?’ and obviously Pro Tools came up, so I got an MBox, and worked with all the hardware. Then I got a bunch of VSTs, and made beats almost entirely in Pro Tools. A few years ago I also started using Ableton, mainly for programming drums, because Pro Tools does not have a good step sequencer. I prefer to start melodies in Pro Tools, because it’s so open, it’s like a blank canvas. I use Native Instruments Kontakt, and tons of Spectrasonics instruments, particularly Omnisphere.
“I run Pro Tools and Ableton on my MacBook. My MIDI controller is an Akai MPK Mini. It’s cheap, but gets the job done. My soundcard is the [UA] Apollo Twin, which is amazing, and my monitors are the Yamaha HS8s. I have a Neumann TLM102 mic for when singers come in, and use a Sennheiser headphone for the vocalist, at which point I put on a set of Beats Pro, But I prefer to work on speakers. The MacBook speakers are so good, I sometimes make music just using them when I’m in a hotel room.”
The Art Of Sampling
It was on this basic equipment that Momberger laid the foundations for what was to become ‘Lovin On Me’, working entirely in Pro Tools. It began with a sample, which he says is a common way of working for him. “I’d say I’m 50/50 between starting with a sample, or with something I’ve written myself. In the latter case I just riff on my Akai MPK Mini, using different sounds and effects, and try to develop a melody that’s pop. ‘Hit My Line’ [a track from Chris Brown’s 2022 album Breezy] is an example of a song that I wrote like that. I just pluck around on the keyboard till I hear something I like. I simply go with the flow and with what inspires me.
The germ of ‘Loving On Me’ was a sample that Sean Momberger discovered and fitted to a beat and bass line.
“I also like starting with samples, because I am more into rap and hip‑hop, and love bringing back old sounds. That’s kind of how I made my mark. A lot of my music sounds not quite mainstream. Instead it has a little grit and nostalgia to it. This goes back to the late ’70, ’80s and even early ’90s when everything in rap was sampled. I don’t even think they cleared samples back then.
“When you take a well‑known sample, it might catch people’s ears faster. An example is when I sampled the Blondie track ‘Heart Of Glass’ for Nicki Minaj’s song ‘My Life’ [from Minaj’s 2023 album Pink Friday 2]. I made that with Don Cannon, and we sped it up, and Nicki killed that one. But I think people value it more when a sample is more obscure, because if it’s not new to them, they just think you remade something. It’s cool when you use an unknown sample, and people have to go back to listen to a song they never heard before.”
Speed Merchant
In June 2023, Momberger says, “I found this old R&B song from Detroit from 1995, ‘Whatever (Bass Soliloquy)’ by Cadillac Dale. I loved the vocal phrase, ‘I don’t like no whips and chains.’ It reminded me of a house/R&B type vocal. So I imported it into Pro Tools, chopped it up manually, looped it, and sped it up from 94 to 98 bpm, using Serato Pitch ’n Time. The sample became more of an earworm when I sped it up. It was super catchy.
Sean Momberger: Speeding up a sample definitely makes it more fun and commercial.
“Speeding up a sample definitely makes it more fun and commercial. In general I prefer fast music over slow music so I tend to push the tempo. Also, in West Coast rap, bass lines are really important. Producers like Mike Mosley, back in the day, and DJ Mustard, have strong bass lines, and catchy vocal chops, and things are up‑tempo.
“Then I put a bunch of Avid stock plug‑ins on the sample. The sample has a bass line, but it’s a little wonky, so I EQed all the low end out with the Avid AIR Kill plug‑in, and then I pulled up an ARP Odyssey sound in Spectrasonics’ Trillian plug‑in and played in a similar but bouncier bass line. I also added some AIR Chorus, for more width and to brighten it up, the AIR Filter Gate and AIR Delay for some more bounce, and the AIR Reverb.
“The idea kind of wrote itself. In rap and hip‑hop I think of a sample as a snake charmer. It’s super hypnotising. In other genres you want different sections to come in, you want it growing, you want a beautiful composition. Rap is more loop‑based. So if you have a super‑powerful sample loop and tagline like the ‘whips and chains’, it’s super compelling.
“I then exported what I had done, and sent it to Oz. A month later he and Nik added drums and an 808, and upped the tempo even more, I think to 105bpm. I had added some drums, but they were a little more open, closer to R&B. It wasn’t until Oz and Nic put this up‑tempo bounce on it that the track really popped. They get all the credit for making it fun and upbeat. Oz then sent the track to Jack Harlow. Jack went crazy over it, and told us not to send it to anyone else, and added his lyrics, which relate to the original sample. When I sent it to Oz, I wasn’t thinking that Jack was going to get on this. It was just, ‘This is a really cool idea, let me put it in our Dropbox folder, and let’s see what he can do with it.’”
Infection Control
Jack Harlow’s engineer and mixer Nickie Jon Pabón takes up the story. “The moment the beat came in, Jack fell in love with it. He immediately responded, saying, ‘I’m hopping on this, don’t send it to anyone else.’ It was one of those beats that had the infectiousness that we were looking for at the time. We wanted something up‑tempo and very catchy, and this beat met all the criteria in such a cool way.
Nickie Jon Pabón is Jack Harlow’s full‑time engineer.
“The sample sounds iconic, but it’s actually not well‑known. Even though it gives the feeling of being nostalgic, it’s the first time most people will have heard it, and this made it a cool creative moment. Jack initially listened to it on his phone, and I think he instantly knew where he wanted the vocal to sit, and this became the foundation of how we approached the track, both in terms of writing and mixing. You continually make an effort to enhance things, but we were always making sure that it remained connected to the original feel of when Jack first heard it.”
According to Pabón, they had approached Harlow’s previous worldwide number one, ‘First Class’, which is based on a sample of Fergie’s well‑known 2006 song ‘Glamorous’, with the same attitude. “Even in that case, we were pretty firm on being innovative sonically and not being too attached to the original. When you strip a piece of audio from something that people will instantly recognise, it’s also about how you manipulate that sample. Once the beat comes to us and vocals are laid, it’s up to us to create a sound world for it, and it might actually benefit us if it sounds completely different to the original. With both ‘First Class’ and ‘Lovin On Me’, the mission was to create something that hadn’t been done before.”
Go Anywhere
Nickie Jon Pabón has been Jack Harlow’s engineer and mixer since the two met in 2018 at Means Street Studios in Atlanta. The two have been almost inseparable since, with Pabón travelling with the rapper while he is on tour, helping him with his stage performances and recording new tracks. Their collaboration yielded a Grammy nomination for Lil Nas X’s song ‘Industry Baby’ (with Jack Harlow), and Pabón has also worked with the likes of Cardi B, Playboi Carti, Lil Durk, and The‑Dream.
Pabón travels with the most minimal of setups. “I have a mobile studio that we take pretty much everywhere. It provides me with the continuity to work anywhere. We may open up a session in his hotel suite on the road to start a song, and then go back to Louisville, Kentucky, where Jack is from, and finish the song there. When we’re working and editing songs in different places, we don’t have to worry about it sounding different. We can work in big studios or we can work in hotel rooms.
“My mobile setup is always the same: my M1 laptop, Apollo Twin soundcard, and Audeze MM‑500 headphones, which I mix on. Don Cannon lent us his Neumann TLM103 microphone, which sounds really good. I think Lil Uzi Vert was using it before us. We wanted a microphone that could withstand international travel, and while the Telefunken ELA M251 and Neumann U47 sound great, they are too cumbersome to carry around with you. I can just throw the TLM103 into my carry‑on luggage.
“I also have an [API] Lunchbox, with a Shadow Hills pre, a Neve compressor and the Pultec EQP‑1A, which is my recording chain. Plus I travel with two Audio Technica ATH‑M50x headphones, one for each of us, for when I’m recording Jack. The Audeze are open‑backed, so I don’t use them for recording. I also have a Little Labs headphone amp, which powers the headphones. The sound from the Little Labs is slightly different to when I plug my headphones straight into the Apollo, and I toggle back and forth, to refresh my palate, and as a reference, to see how the mix is translating. But I prefer using the Little Labs.
“I also carry the IK Multimedia iLoud Micro Monitors, because they allow Jack to listen to the beat in the room, and they’re not too loud, so we can record and not disturb the surroundings. We do a fair share of sessions in hotel rooms, and Jack’s management and I are on the same page in the sense that when they’re going to a book a hotel, we ask for pictures of their suites, and if I see carpets and drapes and not a lot of marble flooring, I know it’s somewhere we can work. Sometimes I have to put up some towels or blankets, but in general recording in hotel rooms is not much of a problem if you know what it looks like ahead of time.
“The difference between various hotels rooms is easier to deal with than the difference between using one studio’s gear, and then going to another studio, with completely different gear, and trying to replicate the sound. That can be a headache at times. So also when we are in a studio, we run everything through my mobile gear. If there’s an SSL board, I’ll have them route my system to a channel, and I’ll listen to the studio monitors for an additional reference. We tend to use studios when we’re working with producers and need more room.”
Hooks Up
When Harlow and Pabón received the beat for ‘Lovin On Me’ in July 2023, they were in a private recording studio in the countryside near Nashville. “We started the hook there and then finished the verses in Louisville. That hook came super quickly, we recorded it the day he got the beat, but the verses took more work. I think he wanted to really be precise with them, and it took a little bit more time for him and I to nail it.
“Every song Jack does is different, but in general he likes to write to the beat as it’s playing. He’ll rehearse it as he’s writing, so by the time he goes into the booth, many of his songs end up being first takes. We do edits on a case‑by‑case basis, but for the most part the main skeleton of the song is laid down in the first five minutes of him being in the booth. Then he comes out and listens to it, and will adjust things if necessary.
“There are times where he punches lines individually, and there are times where he might lay stuff down 10 to 15 times, and between him and I we pick the best takes between different words and phrases in different takes. I’ve always preferred the artist to do a bunch of takes that are just feel‑based, and then go into editing mode once there is enough material to work with, instead of trying to do a take so precise that you lose the performance and feel. When he sings, and he has a great singing voice, it’s a different process and we like to experiment with stacks on his vocals, effects, etc. But for the most part, his songs are all first takes.”
Mixing
Rap music seems gradually to be moving away from specialist mix engineers, and ‘Lovin On Me’ is the first big hit by Harlow for which Pabón did the entire final mix. “Tracking and mixing run into each other in my process. When I’m in the studio with Jack, I want to give him the liberty to shape the song sonically exactly like he envisions it. That process happens throughout us working on the song. While writing the song on the first day I’m tweaking plug‑ins as I go. Even when I’m using the same chain for a while, I still go in and play with the settings. The next day we’ll have fresh ears, and then we may make some more changes. By the time it’s ready to mix, he might still have feedback, and I’ll incorporate that into what by then is a recording‑mix hybrid session.
By modern standards, the final Pro Tools session for ‘Lovin On Me’ is unusually compact.
“I’ve always been involved with Jack’s mixes, from early on. When Leslie Brathwaite or Jaycen Joshua were doing the final mixes, I bounced out vocal mixes. And Teezio [Patrizio Pigliapoco] and I mixed ‘First Class’ together, sitting next to each other. It’s a good thing to be collaborative, and it has enhanced my skills. Come Home The Kids Miss You [Harlow’s second album, 2022], was the first album on which I worked on mixes by myself.
“I prefer to start to start my mixes on the Audeze headphones, with the headphone amp, because that’s where I get the bulk of my balance and creative ideas done. After that I can use any set of speakers, though I tend to take them with a grain of salt because I am constantly on the move and never get to used to a room enough to know what is real in the mix and what isn’t. I do try to get other reference points, like the Audio‑Technica headphones, the iPhone, AirPods, any studio monitors, car stereos and so on, but the Audeze is the most important to me for shaping detail.”
Stealth Reverb
Pabón’s mix session of ‘Lovin On Me’ consists of 15 tracks for the beat, 11 vocal tracks, several group aux tracks, seven aux effects tracks, an ‘EFX’ sub, a mix bus and a main mix track. There are just a handful of plug‑ins on the beat tracks, but the hook and verse aux tracks are heavily loaded.
“We made a couple of arrangement moves with the instruments. Jack gives his feedback on what he wants out of the beat as he’s creating, and in this case there’s an edit in the last four bars of each verse, in which we muted parts in Pro Tools. The plug‑ins on the beat are me putting some last touches on the sample, just light polishing. I enhanced the 808 and the bass with the Little Labs Voice Of God for more definition. I also beefed up the kick with Mike Dean’s Gain Station plug‑in, and Transient Designer, to get more separation. The 808 is constantly there and the kick comes in at the top of every ‘one’. So I gave the kick some more character and definition.
The UAD Little Labs Voice Of God plug‑in was used to add depth to the bass line and 808.
“I wanted to get a little bit more out of the sample from what Sean had given us, using the SSL Channel Strip 2 plug‑in. I boosted some high end to give it a bit more clarity and definition, and then I ran it through an UAD Studer 800 [tape emulator]. The last plug‑in is the Oeksound Soothe 2, lightly taking care of any harsh frequencies that may have come up with the saturation from the 800.
“The first five or six plug‑ins on the hook and verses aux tracks are from my recording template. Those are plug‑ins that I use while I’m recording him, so it’s the sound that he gets used to while writing and recording. In this case, the first one was the Waves De‑esser, then the FabFilter Pro‑Q3 is doing surgical EQ, followed by the SSL Channel Strip 2, the Waves PuigChild 660, and the Waves RVox. One plug‑in I added during the session was the McDSP MC404, for multiband dynamics.
“The next plug‑ins are final tone shapers: the Soothe 2, the Eiosis AirEQ for some more air, and the last one is a limiter called Limitless by DMG Audio, which is for a final push to get the vocals to cut through. These final three plug‑in are my mix plug‑ins, that I would not normally use for recording.
“The aux effect tracks are also part of my template, and the settings get changed for each. They serve different purposes. The small reverb comes from the Softube TSAR‑1, and is a very tight reverb that gives barely the perception of a room. I like using it in rap, because when recording vocals that are so punchy, it helps me fill in the space in between words without taking up too much actual space in the mix.
“The medium reverb is from the Valhalla Vintage Verb, and is a little bit more audible, and the long reverb is the Avid D‑Verb. I also love using the [Liquidsonics] Seventh Heaven plug‑in for long reverb. You can’t really hear a lot of reverb on this song, so it’s really just how the reverbs are accentuating certain tones within his voice. It’s almost like I’m doing EQ with the reverbs. Jack’s vocals don’t have an atmospheric sound, so most people don’t believe that I have three reverbs on him!”
‘Lovin On Me’ was released on November 10. A week later it debuted at number one in the UK, and another week later it reached the top in the US. Harlow called the song “a new era” in an Instagram post. Its enormous success is also likely to herald a new era in the careers of Momberger and Pabón.
Sean Momberger
“I’m from Gainesville, which is a small town in Florida, not much going on. I took drum lessons and piano lessons while in middle school, but I ended up quitting because I liked sports better. I remained interested in music, and was watching Kanye West, Just Blaze, Mannie Fresh, all these different producers online. It intrigued me, so I started making beats at home. I started out with an Alesis SR‑16 [drum machine], and because I wanted to be like Kanye and saw he had the MPC, I got the smallest one that my mom would get me for Christmas, and started on that.
“Next I got a Fostex MR8 multitrack recorder that I would track my beats into. I also had a little cheap keyboard. After that I upgraded to my first sampler, a Korg ESX and got into sampling. I also got the Akai MPC1000, and that’s when I really got into a whole new sound. Next I got the Roland Fantom X6, which I still have. I was kind of using that when I got Pro Tools. So I was making beats on the Fantom and tracking them into Pro Tools.
“I went into music full‑time, but for the first 10 years, I did not make any money, and one of my brothers believed in me and helped me financially. My first break came in 2014. I had been making music with a producer who ended up working with Iggy Azalea. I was flown out to London, and they were mixing the song ‘Fancy’. They were like ‘Hey, you wanna add something?’ I added five or six things, but only a small synth FX sound ended up on the record. I got some publishing, but was credited only as a keyboardist. The song became huge, and just having my name in the credits by adding a little synth sound really made a difference. A couple years later I got a big cheque from the royalties of the track and I was like ‘Oh, wow.’ Things went from there.
“I don’t think managers and publishers will get you into any rooms that you can’t already get into. They’re going to help connect dots, but it’s your track record that helps to get you into the right rooms. I was more of a slow burner. When I moved out to LA in 2014, I popped into sessions, you meet new people, this guy that knows this guy. After that it was a snowball effect.”
Nickie Jon Pabón
“I was born in the US to two Puerto Rican parents. I’ve explored many different avenues with music and creativity throughout my life. My earliest idols were superstars like Justin Timberlake, Usher and Michael Jackson. As a teenager I picked up the guitar and I spent three or four years dedicated to everything that had to do with the guitar. As I went further, I dabbled with singing and performing, and acting.
“I got into the technical side seven years ago. In 2016, I decided that I wanted to go to SAE, the audio engineering school in Atlanta. After graduating, in 2017, I started working at Means Street Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, owned by Generation Now and Atlantic Records. I started as an intern, worked my way to engineering. I had been recording a little bit of everything there for a year, and then Jack got signed to Generation Now. By then, I was one of the main engineers, and when Jack got to the studio, we started working together, and we haven’t stopped since.”