What immediately catches my ear on this Bad Bunny smash hit (from his 2026 Grammy Album Of The Year Debí Tirar Más Fotos) is the variety of featured delay and reverb effects. I liked the interplay between the two main delay spins, for instance. The first appears at 0:25 (after the word “van”), 0:30 (“dan), 0:32 (“dan”), and then again later at 2:40 (“choco”), and features a tempo-related quarter-note delay time with heavy filtering to favour a low-midrange region around 500Hz. The second, at 0:49 (“oy”) and 1:05 (“esparatá”), by contrast adopts a resolutely unsynced delay time of around 280ms and a filter profile that gives it a brighter tone centred roughly an octave higher around 1-2kHz. Without this variety of tempo relation and echo tone, I think the delay-spin concept might have felt a bit threadbare by the end of the song, so it’s a very efficient way of getting extra value out of a single fundamental production trick. I was also impressed at the musical sensitivity behind the decision not to put the tempo-related delay spin on the word “volver” at 0:34, where there’s just as much room for one as there was after the previous “van” and “dan” phrase-endings, because doing so leaves a kind of unresolved-expectation ‘gap’ that’s beautifully filled by the return of the song’s opening electric piano-style melodic riff.
And, speaking of that riff, it also provides one of my favourite reverb effects in this production: an understated, cloudy-toned effect tail that nonetheless provides a subtle rhythmic ‘bounce’ that really lifts the part. I’d guess that this has been achieved either by preceding the reverb with an eighth-note delay, but it might also simply be an equivalent reverb predelay of around 250ms. The main lead-vocal reverb is also noteworthy for its comparative brightness, such that it becomes more of an overt feature of the vocal sound. Despite its brightness, though, it’s in no way ‘hissy’ and doesn’t ricochet off the consonants in the way the bright reverbs of the 80s often did, so I’m assuming that there’s some heavy de-essing on the reverb send in this case. And, again, the musical ‘value’ of this effect is boosted, this time by virtue of effect-level changes such as the abrupt reverb-tail cut-off at 0:48, the (less common) dramatic reverb-level riser at 1:38-1:41, and the contrast between the wetter, more expansive sound of the lead vocal’s primary reverb, and the drier, more naturalistic ambience presentation during the group-vocal section at 1:41-1:54.
A third good example of maximising the value of standard-issue effects can be heard on the words “Debí darte más beso’ y abrazo’ las veces que pude” at 1:27-1:31. Here the clearly off-kilter tuning becomes a deliberately attention-grabbing feature, given how heavily Auto-Tune (or its ilk) is clearly being used throughout the production as a whole. Yet again, the producers are making hay with the idea of creating contrast between two different uses of the same effect.
A couple of technical decisions are worth considering besides all this. The first is the heavily clipped master (even on my hi-res Qobuz FLAC), where the drum hits regularly deliver flat tops well over 100 samples wide. However, the moderate amount of low-bass energy within both the drums and the bass means that these periods of clipping remain well-contained perceptually within the drum hits, where the distortion artefacts are then kind of ‘hidden in plain sight’ amongst the groove’s other lo-fi percussion elements. So while I’m sure there are plenty of mastering engineers who’d suck (or maybe even grind!) their teeth about the clipping on principle, I have to say that I think it’s been quite elegantly handled here.
And the other interesting decision is the abrupt edit that ends the song without warning, rather awkwardly just catching the initial ‘snick’ of some new percussion hit. Mind you, I’m not trying to say that this ending should have been smoothly faded, because anything unexpected like this has an inherently ear-catching quality in itself. What’s interesting to me, though, is that there feels like something of a parallel between this ending and the sudden lead-vocal mute at 2:49, where the word “foto” is truncated to just “f-”, again a move that creates surprise by virtue of a sudden halt mid-flow.
Oh, and one final little thing to flag about the lead vocal track: the vocal plosive ‘pop’ on “por” at 2:12. In practice, most unwanted plosives can be tamed with careful region-specific high-pass filtering, since they’re typically just a huge low-frequency level spike. If you don’t do this early enough in the processing chain, though, there’s a danger that the powerful low frequencies will trigger distortion in your pre-filter processing (or by overloading the recording media itself), and that this distortion will then remain audible despite subsequent high-pass filtering. And I wonder whether that might be what’s happened in this case, where you can clearly hear the syllable popping, even though there’s no low-frequency spike to speak of. To be fair, though, some strong plosive wind-blasts can also generate significant turbulence noise in addition to their low-frequency components, so that might also be what we’re hearing here.