As a final question, Size is asked whether he feels that, given his Jamaican ancestry, drum & bass is his way of developing his reggae roots and pushing them into the 21st century. His reply is adamant. "No way! I'm not trying to push anything apart from maybe that I'd like to contribute to something. All I'm doing is just trying to give myself musical fulfillment. I love rolling sets of drums, whether in reggae or jazz or hip-hop. I love bass lines. I love acoustic guitar. I love melodies. I love some classical stuff. I love music. I'm a musicalist. I love the amalgamation of different types of music gelling together."
Showing posts with label interview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interview. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Daft Punk Interview (October 2001)
Oct 1, 2001 12:00 PM, by Bryan ReesmanGear List:Daft Punk steadfastly refuses to obey conventional rules of dance music. Unlike so much of the homogenized club fodder today, their music is carefully thought out and sculpted. They prefer to sample themselves rather than routinely sample the music of others, and they take time recording their albums, as evidenced by the four-year gap between their debut Homework and their sophomore effort, Discovery, a CD that took more than two years to create. And while the lads could be considered gearheads, they are not consumed by the technical process of constructing their music; rather, they mesh the worlds of analog and digital sounds into an eclectic, tongue-in-cheek blend.
Listening to Discovery, it is obvious that this French group appreciates '70s funk and disco, but by the production techniques they employ, and the interweaving of other genres, such as rock and '80s pop, the end product could only come from the current decade. The CD is a kind of retro-futurist manifesto. “A mix between the past and the future, maybe the present,” offers Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, on the phone from the Paris studio he shares with bandmate Thomas Bangalter. One tune exemplifying such an aural amalgamation is the instrumental “Aerodynamic,” a track that builds off a funky groove, breaks for some metallic, two-hand tapping on electric guitar, then fuses both approaches together before segueing into a spacier electronic ending. Somehow, it all works.
Discovery is an evolutionary leap forward from Homework. Whereas Daft Punk's debut worked off of minimal elements, repeating certain loops and musical phrases over 10-minute cycles, the duo's new album takes myriad ideas and crams them into three- and four-minute nuggets — except the closing track, a 10-minute piece called “Too Long” that serves as an in-joke for ardent fans.
“Every track has been worked really precisely, every track is a mixture of many different experiments and tricks,” remarks de Homem-Christo. “It was much more complicated making this than Homework. It was really like jewelry work, working precisely; so many different production techniques even in one track.”
The individual moods of the songs vary as well. “One More Time” is a perky party tune featuring Vocoded male vocals from Romanthony. “Superheroes” sounds like a house variation on classic “Tangerine Dream,” featuring a dreamy montage of looped vocals. On the mellower side, “Something About Us” explores a languid jazz/R&B vibe, while the interlude “Nightvision” offers a tranquil ambient experience enhanced by the gentle heartbeat rhythm of a muted kick drum. Ultimately, each composition is a world of its own.
A surprising and refreshing revelation about Daft Punk is that they play and sample their own instruments; there are live keyboards, guitar and bass involved. Many of those parts are then sampled and resampled, but de Homem-Christo estimates that half of the sampled material on Discovery was actually played live originally. “I play more guitar usually,” he says, “and Thomas plays more keyboards and bass.” But they both play all three instruments. “There's no ego involved. We don't argue about who's playing what. You can get the sound of a guitar with a keyboard, or the opposite. We don't really care about who's doing what as long as it's well-done. At the same time, when you use samples, you don't have this problem. When you use a sampler, nobody plays on it, so the problem of the ego of the musician is not really there. For everything that we do, no matter how you get to the results, the important thing is the result.”
Discovery includes only four outside samples — not much for a contemporary dance record. “Around this, we play all the instruments, which are mainly vintage keyboards and guitars, so it's a mixture of a few samples and us playing around it. We don't always use the original sounds of the keyboards or the guitars, because we put on so many effects or distortions so that sometimes you think it's a guitar but maybe it's not.”
The duo uses many different samplers, preferring warm-sounding analog gear, including a Roland S-760, an Ensoniq ASR X, a Roland MPC and an E-mu SP-1200 drum machine. They use individual pieces of gear, depending upon what they can lend to a track. “To get homogeneity, we put a sample on a sample, or we play guitar and keyboard parts and try to sample and resample to get a homogenic sound,” explains de Homem-Christo. “It's really easy to sample something but really hard to find a good sample.”
The French twosome also like to alter their original source material to create something new, whether it's a synth or a guitar. “We don't use too much of the original sound of the instruments; it's really more about how we put effects on it after that,” he explains. “It's not like we're making a track and saying, ‘Oh yes, I need a Flying V on this one.’ We take a guitar we have [usually a Fender Stratocaster] and then try to make it sound different with the effects.”
The key principle that de Homem-Christo repeatedly invokes in discussing Daft Punk's compositional approach is bricolage, a French term referring to the art of taking found materials (in this case, found sounds) and incorporating them into something new. “Sometimes we use an instrument in a way that it was never created for,” he explains. “Some people might say, ‘You're doing something wrong using this effect like that,’ but we always try to do different tricks and techniques that are maybe a little bit wild for usual sound engineers. But by experimenting with some crazy ideas, you find some crazy sounds.”
To get those sounds, the pair uses many vintage keyboards, including Korg, Roland and Moog gear from the '70s. “We use the big ones that were used in the '70s, like the Juno. It depends on how you use it — if you put a distortion effect on a Juno, you can't tell it's a Juno.” Their main synths include a TR-909, TR-808, Juno-106, ARP Odyssey, E-mu 3 and AMS Phasers.
In at least one instance on Discovery, Daft Punk used a vintage keyboard to evoke a specific artist from another era. “On ‘Digital Love,’ you get this Supertramp vibe on the bridge,” remarks de Homem-Christo. “We didn't sample Supertramp, but we had the original Wurlitzer piano they used, so we thought it would be more fun to have the original instrument and mess around with it. We use mainly vintage synthesizers, like older electric pianos like the Rhodes, Wurlitzer, Clavinet. We didn't use the Clavinet on Discovery, but I usually use it in my studio.” Effects units the duo used include a DP-4 and an Eventide Ultra-Harmonizer.
By experimenting with some crazy ideas, you find some crazy sounds.
— Guy-Manuel de Homem-ChristoAn important influence on Daft Punk's music is FM radio compression. The sound of compressed music over the airwaves has beguiled the duo since their early years, particularly the sonic attack in a powerful car stereo system, that “big sound and enormous voice.” De Homem-Christo observes that “on some other projects, we noticed that what we liked the best was the compression, so we began to learn how to use the compression and got into compressors and how to use them. Some people like the really good sound of a guitar, and we really like the sound of compression in general. That's one of the biggest loves we have in music-making, especially the U.S. FM radio sounds where the compression is making everything. Sometimes you like it so much that you're really disappointed when you buy the CD.”
In their own music, Daft Punk uses a number of different compressors. “We have a really small compressor, the Alesis 3630, which is $300. That's the main one we used on Homework and Discovery. The one we used the most is one of the cheapest ones on the market. It's really funny; it's the bricolage thing. Sometimes you don't have to have the most expensive equipment to make good music.” To further his point, de Homem-Christo reveals that an early Daft Punk single (a pre-Homework release) was created simply using an Akai S01 sampler, an Alesis MicroVerb 3 sound processor, an Alesis MMT-8 sequencer and a Mini-Moog synth. “It sounded great to us,” he says.
Given the complexity of their music in terms of sonic construction, does the Daft duo keep logs of everything that they do? “We remember most of the parts, but sometimes we don't remember exactly what effects were on it,” admits de Homem-Christo. “Knowing that each track you get so much different stuff in it, it's hard to remember. Sometimes you get real nice stuff by random or mistake. It's a combination of mistakes and things done on purpose.” Ironically, this emphasis on the sonic “bottom line” almost makes de Homem-Christo and his partner sound like businessmen, but the warmth of their music says otherwise.
When it comes to recording and mixing their music, Daft Punk utilizes a modest setup. “We never have gone to a big studio to do anything,” says de Homem-Christo. “We have a small Mackie 12-channel mixer, and everything is done there by bricolage.” They use Logic Audio on an iMac DV, and they record to a Sony DAT, direct into the iMac or Revox A77/B77 analog recorder, depending upon the sound they want. But even de Homem-Christo admits that he does not like to explain the band's technical process too in-depth. He does not want to give away too much. A good magician never reveals his secrets.
emu orbit sound module
juno 106 synth
tr909
tr808
ensoniq dp/4
arp synth
minimoog
alesis 3630 comp
revox tape
eventide DSP7000_ultra_harmonizer
The Big Score (Amon Tobin Interview April 2007)
Forget everything you may have heard about the principles of field recording, tape editing and musique concrète that supposedly went into the making of Amon Tobin's latest album. Although the Montreal-based DJ and producer did spend the better part of a year collecting snippets of environmental sounds and live musical performances — making this the first time he'd even touched a microphone in more than a decade of making records — this was no Matmos or Robin Rimbaud project, where the sound library would become the sole basis of an album. As Tobin describes it, he was going for something completely different.
“This was all about transforming sound,” he says in earnest. “It was about changing a sound from its origins to try to make it into something new. It's no different, really, from what I've done in the past — it's just that this time, some of the sounds came from places like a foley room or from field recordings, as well as vinyl. Vinyl still plays a big part in this record. Although I'm interested in a lot of the history of musique concrète, I really just wanted to make good tunes. That was the main objective.”
Going back to his debut Adventures in Foam (Ninebar, 1996 — released under his Cujo alias), Tobin has gradually carved out a niche for himself as an aggressively elastic beatmaker with a keen ear for melody. The musician's sensibility that he brings to DJ culture has not only changed the face of
These influences are just part of the fuel behind Foley Room (Ninja Tune, 2007), which finds Tobin pushing himself toward a more intimate exploration of the essence of sampling — that is, the creation and manipulation of original sound sources — with an emphasis on extreme signal processing and a feel for harmonic structure. The album's title, of course, is a nod to the art of foley sound effects done for film — and there is definitely a filmic mood to much of the music here — but as Tobin points out, this is first and foremost an album of finished songs, and from the get-go, it plays that way. With guest appearances from the Kronos Quartet, drummer Stefan Schneider (Belle Orchestre), cellist Norsola Johnson (Godspeed You Black Emperor!), sound designer and pianist Patrick Watson, bassist Sage Reynolds, harpist Sarah Page and more, Foley Room undulates with a constantly shifting interplay of rhythms, hummable melodies and otherworldly tonalities. And sometimes, you can dance to it.
“I definitely wanted the music to stand up on its own as melodically and rhythmically strong,” Tobin observes, “without it relying on some kind of ‘concept’ or school of thinking. It's funny in a way because I find that my previous stuff is far more conceptually rigid than this record. Throughout five albums, I made things in a really specific way — 100 percent from vinyl — where every single sound existed in a previous musical composition of one sort or another but was transformed and made into a new track. That to me is a constant, and I'm still very interested in that.”
ROLL TAPE
Ideas for the first stage of recording for Foley Room began taking shape in 2005 while Tobin was on tour to support Chaos Theory (Ninja Tune, 2005), which he had recorded in collaboration with UbiSoft Entertainment for the company's Splinter Cell 3 video game. “It just sprung out of nerd-dom, really,” Tobin recalls with a laugh. “I'd been talking to my soundman Vid Cousins for a while about getting very tiny sounds and trying to make them into big, epic sounds. We're just into sounds in general, and I wanted to see what musical things could be drawn out of recorded noises.”
Tobin soon got his hands on a Nagra IV-S portable reel-to-reel tape deck — the latter-day descendant of the ever-reliable and rugged unit that has been used for decades on remote film shoots to capture ambient sound and dialog while on location. Supplementing that with a pair of high-definition microphones by Earthworks Audio, Tobin and Cousins were ready to dive in, criss-crossing the country on a quest to amass as many animal and machine-made sounds as they could get in roughly a nine-month period.
The journey also included stops at several different studios, including the Kronos Quartet's studio loft in
“I sat in the middle of the four of them with headphones and the handheld mics,” he explains, citing the near-total lack of handling noise from the Earthworks pair, “and what was delicious about it was that I could hold the mics out, and if I wanted more cello or less viola, I could just move my hands and have the balance I wanted. It was as if I was turning faders on the desk. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to record that way [laughs], but one of the nice things about making this record was that I entered it with no knowledge of how you're meant to record things. I just did what felt right at the time, and I'm sure I made some mistakes that ended up being useful for me in later stages.”
DRUMS FOR DAYS
Naturally, percussion and drums comprised an essential ingredient in the making of Foley Room, just as they have for the bulk of Tobin's recorded output. Most of the drum elements were tracked with Stefan Schneider at Planet Studio in Montreal — again, primarily using the Earthworks/Nagra setup, along with several overhead mics — and later dumped into Cubase for chopping and sequencing at his home studio (see sidebar, “Visions of a Beatsmith”). One of the more stripped-down, syncopated and yet strangely busy examples is the aptly named “Kitchen Sink” — a throwback of sorts to Tobin's more overt drum 'n' bass concoctions, but with a sophisticated organic feel that recalls Photek's classic “Ni Ten Ichi Ryu” at a slower tempo.
“I had this idea of trying to make quite a liquid song by actually taking parts of the drum kit and submerging them to see if we could bend the sounds by hitting them in different areas,” Tobin says. “So Stef took his kit apart and put bits of it in these vats of water that we had in the studio. We were just dipping cymbals, and he was striking them at different points of submersion, or he'd float these little metal bowls on the surface of the water, and if you struck them with metal sticks, you'd get that lovely bending sound — like when you're doing the dishes.”
Schneider's drums — as sampled and sequenced by Tobin — get another treatment entirely in “Ever Falling.” Propelled by a Brian Wilson-esque vocal melody that churns in a murky staccato (an effect created by manually nudging the original taped vocal on the Nagra), the song gets a psychedelic jolt from the layers of shimmery aftereffects that seem to chase after the individual drums that make up the main rhythm.
“That was a combination of using noise reduction and EQ,” Tobin explains. “Some noise-reduction plug-ins [such as Sonic Foundry's DirectX, which has a Keep Residual feature] allow you to look at the dirt you're taking off a track; I just took that garbled noise from the drum track and ran it through the GRM Tools EQ plug-in, which seems to add a harmonic content when you adjust the different faders. I was left with this really metallic, liquid-y plastic type of sound; I mixed that with the original drum sound and balanced it out so that the drums have this strange sheen to them.”
The processing goes even further in “The Killer's Vanilla,” which features a long freestyle drum break that was meticulously programmed. “It's a mixture of three different kits,” Tobin says. “One of them was recorded with [live drum 'n' bass specialist] Kevin Sawka in
“What I wanted to do with that drum pattern was to accentuate the melody,” Tobin continues. “There's really a lot of suggested melody in drums that people don't always realize. When you combine that with what's actually going on in the tune, sometimes you can get some really interesting accents to happen.”
SOUND COLLISIONS
When it came to crafting melodies from the many snippets of performances — as well as pairing instruments with their environmental “counterparts” (such as the surf guitars and buzzing wasps in “Esther's”) — Tobin went all-out with his manipulation regimen. Most of that took place in Cubase, but sometimes it even meant returning to the Nagra to manually flange or pitch-shift the original source material. Since aliasing and unwanted artifacts make digital pitch shifting a tough pill to swallow when a sound is dropping several octaves, the analog flexibility of the Nagra became yet another function to be exploited.
“What's funny is my particular Nagra is a bit of a dodgy unit,” Tobin quips, “so sometimes you can even just switch the thing off, and something cool will happen. I used it all the way through ‘Big Furry Head’ — there's kind of a chuuung! sound there that's just the Nagra being switched on and off. I thought it was a really wicked sci-fi noise, so we kept it.”
“Big Furry Head” swivels, of course, on the recorded growls of live tigers which, when layered over the buzzing synths, plucked harp and eastern-sounding percussive elements of the song, transmit a fittingly Serengeti-ish atmosphere. “They have this quality in their roar that I can only describe as a breaking up in the high end,” Tobin says. “I mixed that with synths to try to create a new synth sub sound. It turned out to make quite a colorful picture in the end, but for sure, it's just about trying to make links between these different sounds and seeing what happens when you put them together.”
“Straight Psyche” presents another mash-up of seemingly disparate sounds in order to craft a new one, but in this case, the source signals were both from played instruments. By grabbing a Hammond B3 organ and a vibraphone and wrenching them into the same temporal space, Tobin conjures yet another otherworldly mood that seems to emerge from the ether of an alien spaghetti western set in the distant future.
“There are these really beautiful harmonics from the vibraphone that just seem to get picked up by the
Citing his original mission of trusting his instincts by attempting to combine sounds that share similar sonic qualities but might have very different origins, Tobin again points to “Esther's” — part of which was recorded with John Usher (an expert at capturing close-miked insect sounds) at
“I was thinking of the buzzing sound of the surf guitars in that song,” Tobin says, “so the obvious sound to try out was a bunch of wasps buzzing in a jar. Then maybe you mix those together with a motorbike revving its engine — so you get the fast strumming of the guitars picked up by the bike, with the wasps suggesting another crazy guitar sound — and suddenly you've got something that really gels.”
KEEPING IT IN THE ROOM
Much like a movie editor faced with the task of assembling hundreds of live-action and visual-effects shots and then merging them into a cohesive whole, Tobin has clearly gone the extra creative mile with Foley Room. As a testament to the lengths that analog sound sources can be stretched, stitched and stomped on in a digital world, this is one album that can find as much appreciation among the old-school electronic avant-garde — represented by such august organizations as France's Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), who invited Tobin to perform last year at the prestigious Presences Electronique festival — as it can among the hungry young mavericks still clawing their way up through the club scene, where Tobin still DJs on a regular basis.
“The performance at GRM was showcasing Foley Room as a bit of a work in progress at the time,” Tobin explains. “It was played over 47 speakers in the performance space at Radio
Tobin is also quick to point out that this album, perhaps more than any other he's done to date, is strictly a studio affair — and thus impossible to present live. “That's been the trouble all the way through since day one,” he says somewhat ruefully. “I've been fortunate though because I've been received very generously from people with my DJ sets. I mean, I feel like the option is there. I could do the whole thing on Ableton or a couple of laptops, but I think of live shows as something that should be worth seeing at the very least. As much as I can appreciate the way different people work, for me personally, I don't find much enthusiasm for a laptop set. It just seems really boring to me.”
Although his fans may not be seeing him onstage with a live band any time soon, Tobin is certainly keeping busy in the studio. A new collaboration with the Dutch drum 'n' bass trio Noisia is already in the can, while a down-low project with Doubleclick called Two Fingers is expected to jump off at any moment in 2007. And of course, he still has to make the transition to the mind-blowing expanses of Cubase 4.
“I really didn't want to try anything too new and untested when I was making this record,” Tobin confers, “because frankly, I needed things to work. But Cubase 4 sounds pretty wicked, and I can't wait to try it out. If it's anything like what the transition was from VST to SX, then I know it will be inspiring.”
VISIONS OF A BEATSMITH
When Amon Tobin relocated from the
Tobin has experienced a reawakening, of sorts, to the advantages of analog gear — a conversion that was brought on, in part, by adjusting his ears to the plethora of analog sounds and performances he'd collected on the Nagra tape machine. Once those and other vinyl sources were transferred to Cubase for digital editing and mutating, Tobin felt he had to maintain the “roundness” of the mix by putting an analog-effects chain in place after the music had gone through the digital realm.
“There are some incredible software emulations of compressors and reverbs now,” he concedes, “but I haven't really found any two that can do what the Chandler TG1 and the Manley Massive Passive can do. With the Manley, you can push things without them hurting you in the same way a digital EQ sometimes does. I'm using the digital plug-ins more for extreme EQing or very surgical parametric stuff. For the main EQ that I'd apply very slightly to a whole track — or if I just want to brighten an entire sound — I'd rather use the Manley. I think I've found more faith in analog gear than I had in the past, so really this album ended up being a mixture of analog and digital processing.”
INSIDE THE FOLEY ROOM
Computer, DAW, recording hardware
Apogee Rosetta 200 and DA-16X converters
Apple Mac G5/dual 2 GHz computer
Nagra IV-S portable ¼-inch tape recorder
Steinberg Cubase SX3 software
Mixer, control surface
JazzMutant Lemur
Samplers, turntables, DJ mixer
Native Instruments Kontakt software sampler
Numark HDX turntables (live)
Rane TTM 56 Performance DJ Mixer
Roland VariOS sampler/synth
Technics SL-1210 turntable (studio)
Synths, software, plug-ins
Audio Ease Altiverb reverb plug-in
Clavia Nord Electro and Nord Lead synths
GRM Tools ST (Spectral Transform) plug-in package (featuring Contrast, Equalize, Freq Warp and Shift)
Native Instruments Reaktor 5 software
Roland V-Synth
Waves IR-1 V2 convolution reverb plug-in
Zebra 2.1 soft synth (designed by Urs Heckmann)
Mics, EQ, compressors, effects
API 2500 discrete 2-channel stereo bus compressor
Chandler Limited TG1 compressor
Earthworks Audio QTC50 high-definition microphones (matched pair)
Manley Labs Massive Passive EQ
Mutronics Mutator stereo filter
TC Electronic FireworX multi-effects processor
Monitors
Klein + Hummel O 500C digital active monitors
Amon Tobin Interview (Sound on Sound April 2003)
If you don't think the sampler can be a musical instrument, you haven't been listening to the music of Amon Tobin!
Simon Young
While the sampler has become a staple ingredient of most studios, few people can claim to have exploited it to quite such extreme levels as Amon Tobin. His current album, Out From Out Where, is his fourth on Ninja Tune, all of which were made entirely with just a sampler, a few effects, an ever-growing record collection and not a single real instrument in sight. He has developed a unique, idiosyncratic voice that embraces such diverse styles as drum & bass, hip-hop, jazz, Latin, film soundtracks, electronica and downright mad sonic experimentation. The result is a dizzying kaleidoscope of sounds, all tied together by a sexual undercurrent that has made his music a favourite on the American strip-club circuit!
From Brazil To Brighton
Having spent most of his early life in Brazil, Amon moved with his family to Britain when he was 10, eventually settling in Brighton, where he began his hip-hop experiments in the early '90s. He released his first album Adventures In Foam on Ninebar Records back in 1996 under the Cujo moniker, but Ninebar's dubious business sense meant Amon wasn't making any money. Fortunately, two artists on Ninja Tune, Funki Porcini and DJ Food, picked up on a couple of Amon's EPs, and so began his fruitful career with Ninja, the label set up by electronic/hip-hop pioneers, Coldcut.
Someone else to pick up on Amon's sound was maverick satirist Chris Morris. Morris had frequently plundered the Ninja back catalogue, including Amon's work, to provide a suitably warped backdrop to the twisted sketches on his Blue Jam Radio 1 shows. This led to a collaboration, where Amon cut up the voices from a Morris sketch and turned them into melodies on the track 'Bad Sex'. This certainly raised his profile in the UK, but he enjoys even greater succes in both Europe and the States, where his last album Supermodified outsold the likes of Massive Attack and Björk.
Studio Tan
Released in October 2002, Out From Out Where was some 18 months in the making, the work being particularly intensive in the last six months. Amon is something of a night owl when it comes to writing his material, working through the small hours to put a track together in one block. "I'll start in mid-afternoon and work through to the next day. Usually by then, I'll have got the arrangement. Then I'll pull it apart, work on the production and mix it over the course of the next two or three weeks. I might change the arrangement, but usually most of it's done in one go in a couple of days. Even though it's laborious, it's also quick if you know what you're doing. I've also got more confident, so I won't be spending 1000 hours looking for the exact right snare. If something actually works, I'll use it, but if I'm slightly uncertain about it, I'll throw it away until I find something I'm completely certain about.
Amon Tobin's Montreal studio is based around a Mackie D8b desk, an Apple Mac running Cubase VST, and enormous quantities of records...
"When I first started, I used to throw out a lot, but maybe because I've now got more control of my sounds, now the music is closer to the original idea I had in the beginning. Before I'd find a sound and just put it with another sound to see what happens. Sometimes it would lead somewhere and sometimes it wouldn't, whereas now that random element is somewhat tapered, so the ratio has improved, but I might throw away maybe one in four tracks." Photos: Shane Ward.
Does the writing process begin with a basic loop or sound, or does he try to realise a strong preconceived idea in his head? "It's a bit of both. When I first started, it was much more finding a sound that inspired me to find more sounds to go with it. Now I find it a lot more satisfying if I have a framework to work inside or a goal to achieve with the music, and then try to find the sounds to fit in there, manipulating them until they do. It doesn't always work like that, so I still stumble across sounds that make me think 'Oh, I know exactly what would work with that,' and off I go." But does he have definite sounds in his head that he tries to recreate? "Oh definitely, mainly different types of beats, but also bass sounds or more abstract ideas of the types of noises I want. Sometimes I'll have an idea for a melody and that gets really tricky; for example, I'll find three or four saxes that have the right notes, so I'll try and piece them all together."
Needing Treatment
Amon has a pragmatic and highly effective way of dealing with the discrepancies between the tone and production of the samples. "It's amazing what you can do with filters; I look at it as being a bit like watercolours, when you've got various different blotches and then you use a wash to bring it all together. I also use a lot of effects in my stuff for that reason — it's not particularly because I love delays and reverbs or whatever. Processing is the answer. I'll take a lot of samples to make a melody, then process it with one type of filter or modulation effect, re-record it, cut it up, and by then it will sound like one sample — but sometimes if it doesn't, it can be really interesting anyway."
Filters and EQ also play a big part in isolating specific sounds or instruments within a sample. "You can take out an entire frequency that holds an instrument, so that you can no longer hear it, or you can hear it in such a background way that it becomes an interesting subliminal part. Unfortunately that means it can sometimes sound really harsh, because the EQ has to be so extreme. Some people have even said it's a characteristic of my sound. I love that — here's something I f**ked up, and someone relishes that!
When you do as much sampling as Amon Tobin, the Akai S6000's detachable front panel comes in very handy.
"Something that I'm aiming for, but I don't always pull off, is to have a mix where the different melodies, drums and bass are all sitting in their own frequency realms, so things can stand out. You can also do a lot with stereo, where if I want something to stand out, I'll make it mono and then put it somewhere in the stereo field where there's not much going on. All these things cause their own problems, like phasing problems, but I'm sure eventually experience will win with this one and it can be mastered, but it's obviously going to take a long time because I'm using so many different sources. I've had up to about 80 different samples in a tune, so it's a lot of sounds and some of them will only happen once." 
Perhaps more than half of those samples make up his incredibly complicated beats, which frequently incorporate sounds that quite evidently are not conventional or electronic percussion. "I got really into taking a sound that has nothing to do with a beat, and incorporating it into a loop to give that snare a completely different characteristic, just by virtue of it being melded with something else."
It also works the other way, so Amon creates melodies or bass lines by manipulating unpitched sources. "'Proper Hoodage' has a bass sound that is from the percussion, which I treated with formant filters, which can create chords out of sounds. I mixed that with various plug-ins to try and create a note as opposed to a percussion hit. When I sampled it back in, it synchronised so well, because the bass sound was made out of the percussion so it fitted with it perfectly."
"I feel like it was made for me. It's been sold as a convenience tool, so you don't need to bring your records with you any more, you can just bring a laptop. But I bring my own decks when I DJ, because I want that control and I don't want to use someone else's equipment, so it's no more convenient for me. But it helps me to make a much more personal set, because I don't have to make dubplates any more. So my one-off versions of tracks that I used to have to make to DJ with, I can do instantly now. I can really experiment with how they mix with something else, or I can record single elements of tracks and play them over something else, so it becomes much more of a live tool. That's what it's all about for me; I don't think there is any point in going to see someone play live who's just playing his own records, you can do that at home. I think it's really important to make something that's happening at that time, and it might go wrong as well, so you've got the precarious tension that creates." Unfortunately, as Amon has learnt to his cost, the rather domestic-looking Final Scratch interface has been a source of some of those problems. "I've had a couple of shows where it's crashed outright. USB is just not reliable enough, the thing should be Firewire. Also, the timecode records warp, and when you get fluff on the needle, they react in a totally different way to analogue records. The warping causes exaggerated speeding up and slowing down of the waveform that actually makes it impossible to mix, let alone listen to! I'm still going to stick with it, because the potential is so good, and you're bound to get these problems with new equipment." Another problem Amon has faced in the live arena is the inadequacy of some PAs, which struggled to cope with the huge sonic range of his music. "That's been a massive problem, especially in Europe. Sometimes you're up against things you just can't control, like the law in France, where you've got a 105db limit. It's so frustrating, because it doesn't have to be blasting all the time, but it's meant to be a full-body experience, you're meant to feel the bass. I find it really hard to control an atmosphere with those constrictions. If you've got a top-notch sound system, you don't need to go that loud for that to happen, everything is detailed and clear. But if as in most cases on this tour in Europe the sound system wasn't quite up to scratch, and you've got this low dB limit, it made it very hard to feel confident that I was doing what I wanted to do." Amon is unequivocal when it comes to saying which he prefers, studio or live. "It's two different things, but I definitely prefer being in the studio if I had to choose between the two. Going out DJing started off as a necessity to promote a new record, but now it has become something that I do enjoy doing, just not all the time so consequently I don't play that much. It's a priority for me to go and create."
Playing Live When Amon plays out, he doesn't use his studio equipment, but instead DJs his material with conventional record decks and some cutting-edge DJ technology, namely Stanton Magnetics' Final Scratch software, running on a PC laptop. It plays WAV files, which are triggered by a special timecode disc that plays on conventional decks. The idea is that you can store all your tracks on hard drive instead of lugging around flightcases of records, while (in theory anyway) the timecode disc enables you to perform all your usual DJ tricks of slipping, scratching, vari-speeding and so on.
Tasty Organic Sources
Evidently, Amon's sampling methods are a far cry from simply lifting melodies and breaks wholesale from old jazz masters. "In the past, I've taken massive chunks of things, but as time has gone by, for my own integrity and for obvious legal reasons, I have moved away from that. It's a slightly dubious area for anyone using samplers, but fortunately it's never caught up with me. Either the samples have been obscure and uninteresting enough for people not to worry about, or the manipulation has been so extreme that people don't recognise them anyway."
Amon undoubtedly has an attention to detail that ensures his programming is utterly transparent. His tunes have a live, organic quality that belies their programmed origin, helped by choosing highly idiosyncratic and energetic sample sources. "It's what I'm attracted to really, sounds that have those qualities. It's always changing, I used to go strictly into jazz record sections, then I deviated into easy listening and soundtracks. I can't really go into the composers I like, 'cos they're the ones that I sample!" he jokes.
"Recently I've come across a whole load of Bollywood soundtracks, which have been amazing because they've got this notion of what Western music sounds like that is just as skewed as Hollywood's notion of Eastern music. I'm quite fascinated by the misunderstanding that creates something new. If you listen to Martin Denny and all that easy-listening stuff from the '50s and '60s, their idea of Hawaiian or Eastern music was so far off from reality, but by virtue of that, it created a new sound. It goes the other way with Bollywood, where they'll have this idea of what disco, funk or soul is, and it's just totally mad! Bollywood movies are hard, because every song starts the same with an incredible, massive introduction, and then this really piercing, squeaky voice will come in. You have to sit through all that, before you get these really amazing, lush sounds, which are really beautifully produced. I'm also getting more into electronic sounds, but from the '70s. Their notion of future electronic sounds is just great. I started to appreciate emulations of real strings done really well by experimental processes. They've got a unique quality to them which isn't real strings but isn't those horrible 1990s pads." 
Despite Amon's obvious enthusiasm for his sounds, their source is ultimately not that important to him. "It's so random really, but it's more about where they're going rather than where they're from. I think you can take a sound from almost anywhere and make it relevant to your track."
"I also love programming drums with MIDI and I've never understood how people can programme drums with audio. I did a collaboration with Steinski and he was using Pro Tools. We had this big break and I instantly wanted to chop it up, assign different MIDI notes and make a beat, but I was amazed at how he could just cut slivers of the waveform and drag them around, which is just insane and totally beyond me!" With the ever-increasing power and ubiquity of DAWs, more and more people transfer their MIDI-generated sounds on to audio tracks if only to curtail the endless flexibility that MIDI offers, but having too much choice doesn't bother Amon. "I know sometimes it's a bit dazzling when you sit there and think 'I could do anything, but what the hell do I do?' But I come at it from a different point of view, where I have a specific thing I want to do and I'll take whatever options are available to realise that." Recently he has been experimenting with Steinberg's Halion VST soft sampler. "I think it's awesome. The Akai is great because you have so much control and there are so many things you can do within a program, but you do always have to set up a program and key groups within the program, and so on. It's really laborious and it really f**ks with your creative flow. It is music after all, even though we're doing it with computers, and there is some soul we're trying to keep alive, so anything that makes the process more transparent is good as far as I'm concerned. Halion offers that really well; you can just grab a waveform and put it on a key. If you want it to cover more keys, you just stretch it. "I like things that are user-friendly and intuitive, and I've never been an advocate of that elitist attitude that if you don't know about the latest or most complicated bit of kit, you can't cut it. That's bollocks! What's important is your ideas and being able to get them out as effectively as possible. People who are fascinated by the interface are interested in a different thing to me, but it's not going to help them come up with great music." Amon also uses a TC Fireworx multi-effects, which contrary to conventional wisdom, he doesn't place on an aux buss on his mixer, as he explains. "I don't like to have effects running in real time in the final mix, I like to have the sound already recorded with the effects in my arrangement. I suppose it's having the control of say, the modulation sweep peaking at an exact point and I know every time the sample is triggered, it'll be at that point." Software compression plays a big part in the beefiness of many of his sounds, though he leaves any overall compression to the mastering house. "If I was to try to polish off the track and then go to master, it would just be done again and it would sound too f**ked. I have done that in the past, which is why some things sound too f**ked, because they've been compressed and compressed again. It's all things that you pick up as you go. Compression is not so much about volume, but the way volume is perceived — something sounds louder even though it isn't. But sometimes it's nice if it gets abused as well, I quite enjoy the pumping effect that you get when you over-compress. I think some of the software ones are great — when I want it to flat-line, they're good for abusing the parameters. "I'd like to experiment with some serious hardware compression, but it's always a priority with me to maintain the momentum we were talking about. I'm not a tech-head and I don't want to lose myself in valves and pretty lights. There's so much bullshit surrounding equipment. I'd much rather listen to some badly produced wicked tune over some crystal-clear ambient nonsense produced on a Neve desk."
Amon's Gear Amon's studio setup is based around a Mackie D8b digital desk and an Akai S6000 sampler triggered by Cubase VST on a Mac. Amon chooses to trigger all his samples via MIDI from VST, rather than building up audio tracks. "I do use the audio side of VST: a lot of my samples will have gone through several layers of plug-ins before they get to the MIDI stage. But when I'm programming, I really like the versatility you have over each note with MIDI — I know you can do similar things with audio, but up till now, I found I've just had a bit more control with MIDI. All the controllers you have are so powerful in MIDI, you can do cheeky things like assign velocity to filters. It's just how I first got into working; my first sampler was an Akai S01 and there wasn't any hard disk recording, so how much control you had over the MIDI determined how much control you had over the audio.
Isolation Vs Collaboration
Amon usually works in total isolation, from the initial idea right through to overseeing the mastering, but does he feel limited by not having anyone to bounce ideas off or to tell him when to stop? "I think you win and you lose. I don't have the reassurance of someone saying 'Yes, that's really good,' or saying it's no good, or whatever, but then I have total control. I've never really thought of myself as a control freak, but I guess I must be because the idea of anyone having any say in what I do is totally unacceptable! I do accept other people's ideas and when I've collaborated, I've learnt so much, especially technical stuff. But I know that if it came to the bottom line and I said something doesn't work and they say it does, I'd just say 'It's not going in and that's that,' so working with other people is probably not my way of doing things."
Amon's outboard gear, from top: Roland VP9000 Variphrase processor, MOTU 828 interface, TC Electronic Fireworx multi-effects, Mutronics Mutator compressor, Akai S6000 sampler and Tascam DA20 MkII DAT.
However, a desire to work alone isn't the reason why he always uses samples and never live musicians or real instruments. "I like using sounds that have existed in a different musical context before. It's not musique concrète or found sounds and I won't use session musicians or sample CDs. I find sample CDs of, say, a session drummer really flat, because they don't have any real musical context. The energy that I'm after is may be in the middle of some one-off recording that happened in a special time at some festival, where the drummer was just going off and there is that bit of energy that you just take. You can extend it or rearrange it, but the energy's still there. That's always what's fascinated me about samples and what I can't get out of session musicians or sample CDs. It's not that I'm against it; it's a perfectly valid way to work, but just not one that appeals to me. I don't think I can get anything that isn't already on vinyl, so why use a session guy when I can use the sax player or the drummer? Why settle for second-best?" 
The fruits of one of his rare collaborations can be heard on 'Verbal', which is the first single from the album. The mad cut-up vocals are those of MC Decimal, a mystery MC whose true identity Amon refuses to reveal. "He's far too mysterious and it would ruin the mystery! Prefuse 73 did something similar with cutting up vocals and it was inspired by that, really. It was a way to try to make a percussion sound out of the vocals. The idea was to not just have snippets of vocals dotted about the track, but to have it as the main focus. It's a whole rhyme where there aren't any words, because they never finish. I chopped up all the different parts of the words and put them in different sequences to try and make my own flow, so that it sounded like a rhyme but it wasn't."
Since he completed the album, Amon's been working on a string of further collaborations, with Bonobo, P Love, Steinski and a possible forthcoming one with Kid Koala. He hasn't been idle with his solo material either, though inevitably for someone who moulds such an eclectic mix of sounds into such idiosyncratic music, he struggles to categorise the results. "I've been making some R&B-influenced stuff; it's more like A&B, anger and blues, like really dirty beats but chopped up in a different way to straightforward hip-hop. Downbeat but almost upbeat at the same time! But I have only done two tunes since the album, so I need to do a few more before I announce a new direction."
Whatever the results, there's no doubt that they'll be worth checking out.
Published in SOS April 2003
Dust Brother's Interview (Sound on Sound May 2005)
The Dust Brothers
Sampling, Remixing & The Boat Studio
The Dust Brothers changed the course of record production with a new approach to sampling. In their first ever in-depth technical interview, John King and Mike Simpson explain their unique way of making records and open the doors of their remarkable LA studio, The Boat.
 Photos: Mr Bonzai The Dust Brothers: John King (left) and Mike Simpson. |
In 1989, the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique single-handedly redefined a whole musical generation's approach to sampling. The musical masterminds behind the album were the Dust Brothers, two hitherto unknown college whiz kids who had created the musical backings from collages of their favourite recordings. Paul's Boutique was awash with innovation — it reputedly featured the first recorded instance of intentionally added vinyl crackling noises — and it turned the Dust Brothers into the Godfathers of sampling.
Since then, Mike Simpson and John King's career has taken in a diverse succession of projects including Technotronic's Trip On This (1990), the Rolling Stones' Bridges To Babylon (1997), Hanson's Middle Of Nowhere (1997), Santana's Supernatural (1999), Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory (2000) and Tenacious D's eponymous album (2002). As a staff producer for Dreamworks, Simpson also produced Eels' Beautiful Freak (1996). Perhaps the most influential and artistically successful of all, however, was Beck's 1996 album Odelay. Simpson and King later contributed to the same artist's Midnite Vultures (1999), and their relationship continues to this day with the brand-new Guero, which appears to set them on course for another round of limelight-hogging in 2005.
Meanwhile, the Brothers have also been developing a state-of-the-art recording studio. The Boat was opened for commercial use in 2003; based around a vintage Neve 8028 desk from 1969 and a Pro Tools HD3 system, it has become one of Los Angeles's most happening studios (see boxes).
"My musical background came from collecting records," recalls Mike Simpson, "and sort of studying the sounds and arrangements and the way they were recorded. I grew up in New York listening to black music, and I was there for that famous summer in the mid-1970s when hip-hop started. When I moved out to California in 1978 there was no hip-hop or rapping culture here, so I lived on cassettes sent to me by friends. In 1986 I enrolled in a local community college, where I did a class in electronic music. That was my first opportunity to really do computer sequencing and work seriously with samplers. I'd been doing a college radio show since 1983, during which I played hip-hop music, and I began playing the music I was putting together in class on the radio show. I met John in 1985, and he joined me in putting on the show and putting together tapes."
King and Simpson's hip-hop radio show caught the ear of rapper Tone-Loc. He had just signed to the newly formed record company Delicious Vinyl, who in turn were busy setting up their own studio. Tone-Loc and Delicious Vinyl invited Simpson and King to help out producing records and setting up the company's studio. When their name was about to appear on a record sleeve for the first time, on a single by Young MC, the duo decided on the name the Dust Brothers. Reputedly it's a reference to angel dust, the drug, but this turns out to be only an aspect of the truth."King and Simpson are pretty common names," explains the latter, "and we decided that we'd better come up with a cool name. At the time we were bringing back music that no-one was listening to any more, so we wanted the name to be an anachronistic reference to things of the past. While we were working for Delicious Vinyl, many people had been describing our music as 'dusted,' and that's where we took the name from. The state of hip-hop was pretty minimal at the time, and we were doing these very textural, tripped-out, almost hallucinogenic remixes of things. Angel dust was just an additional whacked-out reference that also fitted with what we were doing."
During these first years in the recording studio, the Dust Brothers were predominantly engaged in dusting down, or perhaps dusting up, old favourite records, and giving them new leases of life. They applied their sampling skills with considerable success on Tone Loc's Loc'd After Dark (1989) and Young MC's Stone Cold Rhymin' (1989). Then they hit upon a project that became the landmark Paul's Boutique. Did the duo actually set out to change the music industry, or did they just stumble into prominence? The latter, claims Simpson, with estimable modesty.
 The Boat's impressive list of outboard equipment includes a mouth-watering array of vintage mics, preamps and compressors. |
"Sampling was just a hobby for us. It was just something we did for fun while we were in college. John was destined to become a genius computer programmer, and I was going to enrol in law school. We never had any intention of making records. I didn't even know what record producers did at the time. In the course of doing samples for Delicious Vinyl Records, every once in a while we put something together that seemed just too dense and too busy and too crazy for a rapper to rap on, and we put these tracks aside as instrumental Dust Brothers tracks. Then the Beastie Boys wandered into the studio, and heard one of these tracks, and they loved it. That's how the album got started.
"Up until that point in hip-hop, people had been using samples very sparsely and minimally. If anything, they would use one sample in a song and take a drum loop and that would be the foundation. But what we were doing was making entire songs out of samples taken from various different sources. On Paul's Boutique everything was a collage. There was one track on which the Beastie Boys played some instruments, but apart from that everything was made of samples. But we never had a grand vision of trying to make groundbreaking music. We just enjoyed making music in a way that was an extension of our DJing, combining two or three songs, but with greater accuracy than you could do with turntables."
The significance of Paul's Boutique is illustrated by a web site (www.moire.com/beastieboys/samples) on which fans have collaborated in spotting all the samples on the album. For the track 'Shake Your Rump' alone the web site lists samples taken from records by Sugarhill Gang, Funky 4+1, James Brown and Afrika Bambaataa, Bob Marley, Paul Humphrey, Led Zeppelin, Harvey Scales, Rose Royce, Ronnie Laws, Foxy and Alphonse Mouzon. ("I think they got all of them," says Simpson.) Yet most of the samples used on Paul's Boutique were cleared, easily and affordably, something that Simpson says would be "unthinkable" in today's litigious music industry. The album will, therefore, always be unique.
In the early 1990s, with anti-sampling legislation and attitudes tightening, the Dust Brothers were mainly busy remixing, while cutting their teeth on engineering, composing and producing. Their increasing fame offered them lots of opportunities to apply these skills, but Simpson admits that they spent several years climbing a steep learning curve.
"It was tough. People asked us why our stuff from the late 1980s sounded so good, and we said that it simply was because the original recordings that we sampled sounded so good. After Paul's Boutique we signed a publishing deal that gave us some money to live, and we took the opportunity to buy a house and build a home studio. We spent three or four years there learning how to record and engineer stuff. Paul's Boutique and Odelay were sort of the crowning achievements, but there were a lot less great records in between."
| The Boat The Boat, in Silverlake, Los Angeles, was built in 1941 for live radio broadcast. The Dust Brothers acquired it in 1997 and proceeded to completely renovate it. The building looks like a boat — hence its name — and its striking architecture makes it a Silverlake landmark. A quick look at the lengthy equipment list reveals the old-meets-new philosophy behind the place. On the new side there's the Pro Tools Accel system and Pro Control console, Ableton Live software, and a list of Pro Tools plug-ins so long you can't even begin to shake a stick at them. At the same time, pride of place goes to the 1969 56-input Neve 8028 desk, with 1073 and 1066 modules and four built-in Neve 2254A compressors. There's also a vintage analogue MCI JH114 16/24-track tape recorder, and an astonishing amount of vintage and/or valve outboard gear and microphones. The list is far too long to reproduce here, but is available on the studio web site at www.theboatstudio.com.
"I love collecting gear and have a ridiculous collection of outboard and microphones and instruments," John King fills in. "After I collected all the gear I could handle, I kept finding more, and that's how I started acquiring what we have at The Boat. The old gear has the aspect of a vintage car. It's beautiful, it's historic, there's a definite nostalgia to it." Yet nostalgia is not the Dust Brothers' driving force. Their bottom line is that analogue, vintage and valve gear still sounds better than even HD digital. What they aim to do with The Boat is marry the convenience and functionality of digital with the superior sonic qualities of analogue. "The new Pro Tools HD system sounds a lot better than the old system," opines Simpson. "But there's still a huge gap between analogue and digital. HD digital still lacks a certain emotion. The late 1960s and early 1970s probably saw the pinnacle in sound reproduction. The imaging and dynamics are just so much better. Also, I'm sort of a bass junkie. I like it when you can really feel the low end, and with those late-'60s and early-'70s records was the last time you really felt that, at least in the rock and soul stuff. Now everything is so thin and brittle, it makes me cringe when I hear snare and kick drums. Obviously the centrepiece of the studio is the wonderful Neve console. It's such a nice-sounding board. Being able to record and pump channels back through the console really makes a huge difference." The Boat also sports an impressive array of monitors: Urei 813C, plus Genelec 1031A, Yamaha NS10, Westlake Audio BBSM6 and 10, JBL 4408A, Tannoy AMS 10A and Auratone 2B monitors. All this combines to make it the ultimate mix environment, according to John King. "One thing is that the mixes we did here sounded fantastic everywhere else. I really trust the room and the monitoring, especially the Urei main monitors, which are great. The only thing we've mixed so far at The Boat is Beck's new album and I'm so happy with how that came out. We didn't really use much outboard during the mix, because it was already sounding so great. We used the SSL compressor pretty much on every mix. If nothing else it's a security blanket, and it lets you adjust the levels nicely as the mix is going back into Pro Tools." |
The Benefits Of Sampling
The Dust Brothers' house was in Silverlake, Los Angeles. They created their studio in a spare bedroom and, pushing the angel dust reference, called it PCP Labs. The studio existed from 1991 to 2001, and sported a 24-channel Soundcraft Spirit desk. "We loved this board," says Simpson. "We tracked a lot of great songs through this board, including all the songs from Odelay." PCP was split into two control rooms in 1996, with two Yamaha 02Rs in King's room and a 64-input Amek Einstein in Simpson's section.
Despite the legal issues, substantial elements of the Dust Brothers' college-era collage approach to music continued to survive, and with Beck's Odelay they finally found the perfect marriage between this and their newly acquired engineering and production skills. Beck's attitude and way of working gave them a perspective on an additional reason why previous efforts had met with such variable success. The Dust Brothers found that musicians who were not familiar with the new technology often approached recording in a manner that was at odds with their way of working.
"We sometimes would record musicians the way you would traditionally record a live band, and then add samples," Simpson explains. "Not very successfully, I would say. Because for some of the more traditional musicians we worked with, the idea of sampling was sort of foreign, and they wanted to play things right. But we don't necessarily want you to play things right, we want you to play things cool. You play over a groove until you have a good bar, and then we take that bar and loop it. I always say that our best music comes from mistakes that happen. You're trying to do one thing, and then someone makes a mistake and that mistake ends up being the hook of the song, the coolest part of the song.
"Beck really understood the benefits of sampling from the beginning, and he understood all along what our goal was. It's a different mindset for a musician, and Beck really got that. He's totally uninhibited, and not necessarily trying to play it right. He's just trying to play it with attitude and flavour. That makes it easy for us, and it's why we have had such great success in working with him. He really understands the medium and what we do, and hand-delivers us these great out-of-control performances that leave us with tracks that we can draw all these great loops from."
Old Methods, New Tools
Guero is Beck's eighth studio album, and as on Odelay, Simpson and King worked on almost all of the album's songs. "Beck wanted to do more of a contemporary R&B record," says Simpson. "To me it picks up where Odelay left off. There's a little bit of everything: there are some rock songs, some great hip-hop songs, some great blues-inspired songs, some 1980s dance-inspired songs, and so on. It's a melting pot of all the types of songs Beck loves. Sometimes there will be a few genres within one song. But some songs that were more rock were left off because they didn't fit the mould.
"The way it started was that we had worked with Beck on some songs for Midnite Vultures, and we finished off only two in time to make the record. There were six other songs that were pretty well developed, sometimes only needing Beck to finish his vocals and some sprucing up here and there. Beck loved those songs, and wanted to revisit them. So we pulled them up and took some of them apart and reconstructed them. Pretty much the moment we came into the studio and heard the stuff, the feeling was 'Yeah, let's do new stuff too.' We began this the way we did with Odelay, pulling up loops or samples, pulling out records, saying 'Oh yeah, I want to do a song that sounds like that.' But whereas Paul's Boutique was made from samples, a lot of Odelay and the new record is more based on sound than on the samples themselves. We were after the sound and the vibe more than anything else.
 The main live area at The Boat. Miked up at the front is a Fender Rhodes Suitcase piano. |
"Our [non-record] samples come from years of tracking. Everything we ever tried or worked on, apart from the Stones' material, which we were forced to turn over, ended up on hard disk. When making backups we would pull out all the beats and other samples and put those on a separate drive. At one point we had one of our employees compile all the samples from throughout our history, and we now have one sample library called Dust Beats, containing all the beats in one folder, and there's a folder with bass grooves, and guitar grooves, and so on. Using Ableton Live you can so effectively scroll through these sample libraries, and see whether they fit."
John King agrees that "the creative process in making the new album was very similar to the making of Odelay," adding, "it was about Mike, Beck and me in a room, having fun, coming up with ideas, then embellishing and finishing them." Yet King quickly goes on to elaborate on the dissimilarities. "The major difference is that we're doing everything with Pro Tools now. For Odelay we used Studio Vision software and Digidesign hardware, with a two-channel interface, so we could only record or play back one or two tracks of live audio at the same time. I had to take everything that we did and convert it into samples that then could be played back with the Samplecell card, and make MIDI notes that corresponded with wherever I wanted the samples to happen. But for the new album we had many inputs and outputs and as many tracks as we wanted. We don't even use a sampler any more, because there are so many tracks. And so we got to layer more vocals and instruments, using multiple mics on instruments, which we couldn't do before.
"For this new album we began songs written from scratch in Ableton Live, running with Pro Tools. I love Ableton. It's a quick way for me to get the ball rolling, and quickly make ideas happen that Beck likes and then plays over. I get that going and then I set up microphones, like the SM57 combined with Neumann 47 or 47 FET for electric guitars — I tend to use 47s on almost everything — sometimes a Royer 122 ribbon mic, using an LA3A compressor, and a 47 with Royer for acoustic guitars, and so on.
"I record all that stuff in Pro Tools, and pick out my favourite things and cut and paste and create verses and choruses. Then I see what Beck likes and start some arrangement. We continue to go back and forth with each other until I feel the song is there, at which I hand things over to the studio's Pro Tools assistant, Danny Kalb, who continues to work with Beck on overdubs."On one of the songs, I think it was called 'Emergency Exit', there are all these strange digital artifacts and stretching noises going on that Ableton was making. I think it has some loops that went at half speed. The average person would say 'That sounds horrible, they need to improve their stretching algorithms,' but Beck was like 'Wow, that sounds amazing.' When he says that I just go with it. A lot of the exploratory nature of the work we do with Beck comes from his open-mindedness and eagerness to do new things. The same happened with several effecty plug-ins, like Sound Toys and some of the GRM Tools stuff, which I used for creating crazy, freaky effects. Beck always wanted me to record while I was doing that.
"In terms of the end result, there's more live playing, and it's thicker with sound, but the spirit is similar. One thing Beck remarked on was that we did everything so fast this time. He remembered with Odelay having a lot of time to sit around and write lyrics or melodies, while I was converting playing into samples and thinking about how to make it all work. By the time I was ready for him it seemed like he had a finished song ready to go, and we'd do a first take. But this time he had to sit and listen more to what we were doing, because we would accomplish everything so quickly."
A Little Home Studio
With The Boat being almost constantly booked out, the Dust Brothers can hardly get into their own studio any more, and so both have their own, not-to-be-sniffed at home facilities. Their gear mania doesn't only cover "every keyboard ever made", it also extends to a huge collection of vintage and/or valve outboard gear. Much of it is located at The Boat, but substantial amounts are also in use at their respective home studios.
Simpson's "little home studio setup" contains a full Pro Tools HD3 rig, "with a couple of Neve mic pres and LA2A compressors. Basically all the stuff we have at The Boat, minus the Neve desk. I have probably one third of what The Boat has in terms of outboard gear."
 Some more unusual keyboards in The Boat. The grey instrument at the back is a Mattel Optigan; at the front is a Wurlitzer organ. |
"I have converted one of my two houses into a studio complex," King chips in, "where I have two studios. We moved here six months ago. I've always had a studio in my house, and in the last house I lived in we converted this huge beautiful living room into a huge studio [called The Medina]. I have Pro Tools HD3 at my current house, with Pro Control, so I can mix virtually. I also have various Pultecs, a couple of LA2A compressors, a couple of 1176s, LA4A, RCA BA6A, Neve 1073, 1076, Neve stereo compressor, Neve mastering EQ, Manley massive/passive, Manley DI, Manley mic pres, Telefunken V72, V76, Mastering Labs mic pres, Distressor, the SSL compressor and all the great microphones.
"And we use tons of synthesizers. You name it, we have it. They are all hardware synths. I don't like using soft synths. I like to have knobs. I don't really like presets, I like to be able to tweak things. We have every keyboard ever made. Many of them are in The Boat, but we also have them in storage. I have closets here at home that are stacked floor to ceiling with all kinds of crazy keyboards. We have all kinds of Moogs and I'm a big fan of the whole Korg line of keyboards, so I have Korg polysynths and Monopoly. We mostly bought them via eBay, and few of them are MIDI-fied. They are in their original state. I can play them well enough to get something into a computer and make it sound good."
Despite their avalanche of rare and vintage gear, the Dust Brothers wax most lyrically about Pro Tools and especially Ableton Live, repeatedly saying that they now finally have the equipment at their disposal that they have "always dreamed of". "Because of the way I produce things and create things with samples and loops," states King, "especially Ableton is what I dreamed of back in the mid-1980s, when I was using primitive software with numbers flashing across the screen. I had to program it all and it was just so complicated. I knew that the ability would be there to do what Ableton does, which is that you can work with loops and time-stretching in real time. If I have a beat going or even maybe just a tempo running, I can click on Files in my library and then on Samples, and audition beats or music or guitars or basses or whatever, and they will instantly play back to whatever I'm playing.
 Wurlitzer and Fender Rhodes electric pianos in the main live area. |
"In the past I had to pull the sample up, choose which one might work, trim it, tune it, sync it, and after a long process I could decide whether it really was cool or not. Now I just click and instantly hear things from my library playing in sync with the song. It's exactly what I need, and allows me to focus on the creative aspect and not get distracted by technical things."
"The very first sampler we had was a Roland F10," recalls Simpson, "and then we went with the Akai S900. Those were still mono samplers. Then we dabbled with the SP12, the predecessor of the SP1200, and then we had a Roland S770, which I think was the first stereo sampler. We did all of Paul's Boutique on an Emax HD, which was mono and 12-bit and had a 22kHz sampling rate. So we had plenty of experience of the primitive domain of early sampling: low bit rate and low sampling rate. But we've never been in love with the degraded sound of those early machines, we were always trying to make samples sound better. We had Pro Tools in our heads before it even existed. Since both John and I came from a computer background, we knew what computers were capable of, and we were kind of bombed that the samplers were still so lo-fi or hard to use.
"The sequencer we used on Paul's Boutique was very primitive software called Texture by a guy called Roger Powell. This was when computers still had no user interface, it basically was just a bunch of letters and numbers across a green screen. After that we used this very primitive sync box, the JL Cooper PPS1, that allowed us to sync the computer to tape. We also had an Allen & Heath console with very primitive automation with which you could create mute events. So we basically filled all tracks on a multitrack with loops, and arranged songs by using these automated mute things. It was such a painful process. I remember thinking 'God, why couldn't we just have a timeline across a screen and chunks for each sample and a visual representation for the waveforms across the time line? Why do I have to sit here and type all these numbers and MIDI times?'"
| A Piece Of History John King and Mike Simpson are quite happy to see their old sampling and sequencing gear relegated to the dustbin of history, but they had to go back to their bad old Emax HD for a song called 'Hell Yes' from the new Beck album. "Beck was into a song that I had carried around on a cassette since 1989," King elaborates. "It had been composed on an MPC 60 and the Emax sampler, the same one we used on Paul's Boutique. At the time I had just bought some new records and had pulled a few things and programmed this beat. It was very hip-hop. "Beck and I decided to use it, and started working with it from cassette, while my assistants and I were frantically searching all storage areas for the original disks. When we finally found them I had to contact the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle, because we had donated our Emax sampler to the hip-hop exhibit for its grand opening. They sent the sampler back to us, and I popped in the disk and lo and behold, it worked! We also managed to load the MPC60 disk into Mike's MPC2000, so we were able to get a more pure sound than we had from the cassette, which had a lot of hiss on it and didn't have a lot of dynamics." This might sound like a lot of trouble, but attempting to recreate the original from scratch would have risked losing the magic. "I certainly know better than to try to re-record or recreate things that sound cool," says John King. "Record companies used to do demos, and that's something Mike and I always fought against early in our career. When something sounds great, it's done. You don't want to go back and re-record something that sounds great. The way we recorded with computers in our history, the quality was always good enough. You don't want to repeat golden moments. We always felt like 'We don't do demos, we only do finished product.'" King still has an MPC 3000 and an MPC 4000, and remarks "It's more fun to have pads to bounce than mousing in notes. But to be honest, I rarely use it." "We'll do a bit of MIDI programming," Simpson adds, "usually to augment a loop. We may program in some 808 kicks or snares. We also use Reason sometimes to augment beats." |
Things To Come
So if Ableton Live has finally made the Dust Brothers' dreams come true, what ambitions do they still hold for the future? Above all, it seems, they'd like to do an album as artists in their own right. One of their soundtrack albums, 1999's Fight Club, was released under the Brothers' own name, but John King stresses that "Fight Club is not a Dust Brothers album, it's a Fight Club album. It was music done for a film and not meant to stand alone. We've been working on a Dust Brothers album since 1987, but songs continually get given to artists we work with. And now we're both so busy with things we're working on, and we both have families, and there's life, that it's hard to get round to doing your own thing..." 
Published in SOS May 2005
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
