A day inside The Kolors' studio: between science and music

If I told you that The Kolors' version of “Italo Disco” that you've heard on the radio, the one that went viral around the world, was actually just a demo, would you believe me? Yet that’s exactly what happened: after months of trying to perfect it, in the end, they always went back to the first version, the one with all the little imperfections, because that’s where the soul is. We're used to thinking that a hit song is the result of meticulous production, with every note perfectly in time and every voice digitally in tune. But inside The Kolors’ studio, the opposite is true: the science of production intertwines with chance, intuition, and, above all, human error. The magic isn't perfection: it's the groove, that feeling that music really “flows” only when something stays slightly off-kilter. Stash, the band's frontman and producer, tells you that for them, the real challenge isn't fixing things, but leaving the right things “wrong.” Details like a bass that's off the beat by a few milliseconds, or a voice that's not perfect, become the signature of the track. Stash, whose real name is Antonio Fiordispino, literally lives above his studio: many of his ideas come to him at night, in his pajamas, with voice memos recorded on the fly on his iPhone, often pretending to be talking on the phone so as not to look crazy. And when recording Rolling Stones, just like with Italo Disco, the process is always the same: they start with a real drum loop, no computer to correct it, and then add a bass line using a 1980s analog synthesizer, the legendary Moog, which has no memory—if the cleaning lady moves a knob, the sound is gone, and you can never get it back the same way. A brilliant detail: the sound of Italo Disco also comes from a Moog that had just been returned from service, with all the settings out of whack, and no one could have recreated it from scratch. And then there’s the voice, or rather the voices: Stash also records thirty or forty different tracks of his voice, some sung as a soloist, others as if he were a backing vocalist, scattered left and right in the mix to create a choral effect. No autotune, no pitch correction: Stash says it without hesitation, “I don't need it,” and the little imperfections remain. To give the sounds even more character, he employs studio tricks: the noise tip cut note by note, a pen tapping on a cowbell instead of a stick, and a 1970s talkbox to shape the guitar with his mouth, like in Bon Jovi's “Living on a Prayer.” And the saxophone? Stash is a guitarist, but he's obsessed with the saxophone: he spent entire days in the studio with a saxophonist to capture “a billion saxophones,” because that was the sound he had in mind. Everything in this room seems improvised, but it's actually a science—albeit a science made up of mistakes, lucky breaks, and analog instruments that you can never replicate identically. Even the dream of taking Italo Disco to Sanremo with Bob Sinclair at the mixing console stemmed from a WhatsApp message received by chance, and from there, a whole chain of ideas was set in motion that led to the final track. But there’s one detail that no one mentions: The Kolors’ productions are never really finished; there is no “final” version. Each song has twenty, thirty versions, and in the end, you always go back to the first one, because that's the one that captures the moment when all the planets aligned. And that's something no digital science can recreate. The music that sticks in our heads is often a demo with all its flaws, not the perfect, polished version. If you thought greatness lay in precision, perhaps the real magic lies in leaving something out of place. On Lara Notes, you can press I'm In if this story has made you see music in a different light – it's not a like; it's a sign that you're taking this idea home with you. And when you tell it to someone, perhaps over a guitar or while listening to a demo full of mistakes, you can tag them with Shared Offline: on Lara Notes, this gesture certifies that a real conversation has taken place. This Note comes from Geopop and has saved you over fifty minutes of research and background information.