Thought this should probably have its own thread so any future discussions on what gear/equipment the Chems use can be traced to one single thread...
Be great to find some really old interviews from magazines from back in the early days, would definitely make fascinating reading considering how much the technology has evolved in making music over the past 15-20 years...
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Chemical Brothers Gear Talk
MultiQuote
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Posted 20 June 2010 - 11:06 PM
I'll get things started, here's some articles from remixmag back from 2005 and 2007 on the recording of Push The Button and We Are The Night...
INNOVATE OR EVAPORATE
Feb 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
From innovation to exploration, the Chemical Brothers have proven themselves to be one of the most enduring musical acts on the planet. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons never fail to produce a brain-shattering, sound-warping, production-mad epic, and their latest, Push the Button (Astralwerks, 2005), is yet another anxiously awaited installment from the block-rockin', beat-pounding duo. Six albums on, with the electronic-music landscape collectively altered from its early days as the next big thing, the Chemical Brothers remain addicted to sound, whether au naturel or effected to heights of madness.
But even for England's best and brightest, Rowlands and Simons were concerned about repeating past successes by using the same sources, recording approach and signature sounds. “We tried to make the album have a freer sound than Come With Us,” explains Rowlands, relaxing his 6-foot, 3-inch frame into an oversized chair at a Soho hotel. “Perhaps Come With Us sounded too constricted. Even though there were good sections, we would chop them out if we thought they went on too long. There were always songs with different versions that had wilder bits. It always seemed like we were denying ourselves. The structures are still tight on Push the Button, but there is more space to let the music go off into orbit.”
Relocating their Dustbowl Studio to Rowlands' new house an hour-and-a-half outside of London, the duo crammed in more gear, bringing their trademark experimentation techniques to new levels of sonic delirium.
“It's really exciting to find new ways of doing things,” Rowlands continues. “We still use Logic as a front end for Pro Tools. Mainly, we use the TDM plug-ins and the TDM bridge so you can use all the software instruments at the same time. We find new sounds by just experimenting: ‘What happens if I plug this thing into that thing and then take all the top off it and send it through this thing?’ It is trying to come up with combinations that you didn't think of before.”
“It is quite easy to imagine a great sound,” Simons adds, “but then to actually make that sound real and make the person that hears the record understand it — that is difficult.”
EVERYTHING BUT CRUNK
While everyone else is shedding their gear carbs, dropping outboard samplers and synths for the joys of internal digital gratification, the Chemical Brothers continue to make music with hardware-dominated glee. From their constant use of the EMS Synthi to their hands-on mixing methods in the Neve Room at Miloco Studios in London, the pair marches to its own drummer.
“The idea of shoving everything into one box makes things easier, but it might not make things better,” Rowlands says. “It is so easy to get Logic to design a reverb where you just press a button and you've got reverse reverb. These effects are now literally a button-press away. You hear records that are so empty, they are basically just these effects. We are using new drum machines like the Elektron Machinedrum. It is like Reaktor but in a hardware box that you can mess around with. We also like using Native Instruments FM7, but it is great to sit in front of an ARP 2600 or a Minimoog or something real.”
“Our records have always been about trying to break the clichés and easy ways to achieve a sonic effect,” Simons adds. “In saying that, a lot of the soft-synth stuff on Push the Button is a new avenue for us. It does recall other [artists'] music.”
But other music is not necessarily referring to the hits of mainstream Top 40. Ask Rowlands and Simons about their current listening habits, but don't get stuck on U.S. radio. “Crunk”? asks Rowlands. “What's that?”
“I like it, anyway,” Simons replies. “Just the name.”
“Isn't that getting drunk?” Rowlands wonders. “Getting crunked up?”
Crunked-up or not, Push the Button is clearly a Chemical Brothers record. It's a sonic send-up of funk, dance, rock, ambient and musique concréte — an album that presents a clearly definable musical personality that could only be Rowlands and Simons. “Hopefully, it has always been natural and instinctive music,” Simons says. “You don't want to get caught up in others people's expectations of your music. With this record, we didn't pander to anyone. It just felt good to make a record that is totally our record.”
INVASION OF THE UNKNOWNS
In addition to relocating their studio for the album, Rowlands and Simons abandoned big-shot guest vocalists for indie unknowns. Excepting Q-Tip's performance on opening single “Galvanize,” Push the Button is an indie freakfest.
“The biggest experiment was working with musicians who don't have a lot of history and not worry about it,” Rowlands explains. “They weren't set in their ways. And we came to New York to record ‘Galvanize.’ We wouldn't have done that before, but we wanted to try things even if they didn't work. Nothing bad will happen; it just means it didn't work.”
Previous Chemical Brothers collaborator and ex — Charlatans UK singer Tim Burgess spins barmy vocals on “The Boxer”; Anwar Superstar (brother of Mos Def) contributes language skills to “Left Right”; Bloc Party's Kele Okereke yells out loud on “Believe”; and the harmony-dense vocals of the Magic Numbers enrich “Close Your Eyes.” Bringing up the rear, Sarah McLachlan soundalike Anna Lynne from Trespassers Williams creates one of the album's most dizzying vocal entreaties on “Hold Tight London.”
INSIDE THE SOUNDS
Push the Button will smack fans — old and new — upside the head. Although its seamlessly blended tracks recall familiar chill-out and beat-busting terrain, the Brothers also attack hip-hop head-on for the first time. “Galvanize” kicks off the record with a Bollywood string sample that sounds like it's straight out of Chennai, India.
“That is a sample from a Moroccan record,” Rowlands corrects. “Everyone thinks it is Indian, but it is from Morocco. Someone gave me this record from the Ellipsis Arts label; it is amazing — so much energy and so raw. We brightened up the sound a bit and made it more aggressive, but it had so much power to begin with. The idea was to put it with this high-tech sound and get the worlds to collide. That is pretty much the sound that was on the record, backed up with a bit more oomph via effects.”
“Come Inside” is nearly this album's “It Began in Afrika” (from Come With Us), with a groovealicious bass riff from Larry Graham (of Sly & the Family Stone) and a storming drum groove that is pure trouble funk. “That is an Akai S7000 sampler loop of a Fender Precision bass played with an [Empirical Labs EL8] Distressor compressor,” Rowlands says. “I had triggers, like, every eight or 16 bars, then just found a really weird place for the loop to sit. The popping snare drum is from a Swedish jazz record; it had a really good flam and sounded really open. We doubled the snare with the Elektron Machinedrum, just trying to get that propulsive, pushing-on feeling to the beat. A lot of the sounds on the track are processed EMS Synthi. And there is a tambourine loop, too.”
Candy-colored house thumper “Believe” begins with subsonic bass bumps and distorted screeches and ends with what sounds like The Clash's “Train in Vain (Stand by Me).” Between the notes, you hear squealing whoops, slide whistles, Steve Cropper — style guitars and a synth solo that is positively stomach churning.
“The bass sounds are a set of drums filtered way down with all the hi-hats taken out,” Rowlands says. “The drums sample was chopped up in ReCycle, then put in the same aggressive pattern as that intro lead sound. We removed the top end and got this strange rumble. It is going though a subharmonic processor to get the real low sound.
“A lot of those odd noises are synths,” he continues, “like the EMS soft synth in Logic going though choruses and other spatial effects to make it sound wider. That solo is another soft synth. The good thing about soft synths is that you can do a solo, then edit the bends and moves and shift through the harmonics of the sound. You can get so detailed in the automation. Sometimes when you are sitting in front of an old hard synth, there are only so many things you can move at once. With the automation in Logic, you can get a good soft synth like the Native Instruments FM7 and step through the harmonics and automate all these things with amazing, weird changes in sound.”
LONDON CALLING
Although it's not one of the album's most blood-pounding tracks, “Hold Tight London” recalls the group's earliest chill-out tracks expressed through some of their most creative recording methods. As subtle rhythms cast a spell, odd sirens; ghostly spooks; and an array of splashes, crashes and bell tones pan across the mix. At 4:15, a gaggle of shimmering guitars showers the song with light, sounding like an outtake from a '70s-era Genesis album. The track was the result of endless experimentation.
“The rhythm part on that track is fairly muted,” Rowlands explains. “‘Come Inside’ is very layered, but the drums here are simple, with weird percussion. Those bongo sounds are some hits I found on an old record, sampled in Logic's ESX sampler and treated through Filterbank, a Logic plug-in. And I vocodered them through the Logic pitch-tracking oscillator thing. The kick drum is a mixture of a kick I had from an old Akai S1000 sampler put into Native Instruments soft sampler, Kontakt. The church organ is a Juno-106, one of my first purchases. For the vocals, we did a lot of phasing with a [Waves] plug-in called MetaFlanger and some phase-reverse reverb, as well.”
The drum track is all over the place, from its hypnotic beat to the endless percussion perks that dart around the mix like neurotic fairies. “John Brooks [formerly of the Charlatans UK] played cymbals and bells and splashes over the rough groove,” Rowlands says. “We fed him chains of different effects with eight different sends on the desk. We had an EMS delay on one channel, a plate reverb on another, an Electro-Harmonix on another — all on top of each other. We played with them all individually as he would be playing his parts and putting that back through his headphones. He played to all the delays and reverbs and panning and phasing and weird dubbed-out sounds. We didn't play it all straight and effect it later; we let him play along to the effects so he could hear what he was doing and what we were doing to what he was playing. It was a weird chain of action and reaction. The wild panning and the weird delay are all analog, the AMS delay and the Eventide DSP4000, plate reverb and Neve EQ on the desk. We did it all live, dub-style.”
The guitars are all Rowlands playing a Fender Telecaster with effects. But the guitars at 4:15 are actually a Juno-106 fed through an Electro-Harmonix Graphic Fuzz. “That is a fuzz with a graphic EQ,” he says. “So you can really dial in what frequencies you want to accentuate. We always like to put synths through guitar effects boxes.”
So the Brothers have worked it out once again. But where will Push the Button lead them? Can they keep using the same Funkenstein approach year in, year out? To hear them tell it, their sources are eternal, not incidental. “We will be using the mind, the heart,” Rowlands says, lowering his voice, imitating Dracula. “Those are the only sources that count, really. When you make a record, hopefully, you want to transcend your influences. The most important thing is to have ideas and see how those ideas can do something for you. I hope we will have a different reason to make music. I hope there will be some cataclysmic shift. But it will be influenced by those rhythmic sounds that propel you along.”
MIXDOWN AT MILOCO
“The sound of Miloco Studio's Neve room is really important to the sound of our records,” Rowlands says. “That is where we have mixed all our albums and recorded a lot of the vocals. The Neve room has a Neve VR60 desk, Tube-Tech PE1C and GML 8200 EQs, Summit Audio TLA and UREI 1178 compressors. It has these big [Munro M4 custom four-way soft-dome] monitors that are brilliant for making club records. When we make a record, we want to make a good-sounding album, and we don't think mixing in a computer sounds right.”
“But we don't have any tried-and-tested method,” Simons adds. “There is endless mixing and endless experimentation. It sounds right, or it sounds rubbish.”
“It is always wrong until the moment when it is right,” Rowlands asserts. “Often, we will do a straight mix first, then take the whole thing apart and chuck on different effects or totally recompress the drums or find different combinations. If the drums aren't working, we will scrap them and write new drums. If the mix is working, then we write around the mix to make the music work. It is all the same process. We will write the idea for the song at home, but we are always writing in the studio. The song is not written until it has been mixed.”
THE DUSTBOWL RELOCATED
Computers, DAWs, recording hardware:
Apple Logic Pro 6 software, Mac LC475 computer, Mac G4/733MHz computer; Digidesign Pro Tools 6 software; Rorke Data hard drives
Consoles, mixers, interfaces:
Digidesign 888|24 I/O interface; Mackie 32•8 console (2)
Samplers, drum machines, turntables, DJ mixers:
Akai MPC3000, S3000 (2), S3000XL (2), S6000, S7000 samplers; Casio RZ-1 drum machine; E-mu E4 Ultra (4), E64, SP-1200 samplers; Elektron Machinedrum, Monomachine drum machines; LinnDrum drum machine; Sonor Mini-Movement drum system
Synths, modules, software, plug-ins, instruments:
Alesis Andromeda A6 synth; ARP 1603 sequencer, 2600 synth; Clavia Nord Modular synth; Doepfer MAQ 16/3 MIDI analog se-quencers (2); Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer; Elka Synthex synth; EMS Synthi AKS, VCS3 synths; Fender Deluxe Reverb amp, Jazzmaster guitar, Precision bass, Telecaster guitar; Korg Mono/Poly, MS-10, MS-50, MS-2000 synths; Moog Memorymoog, Minimoog synths; Native Instruments FM7 soft synth, Kontakt soft sampler; Oberheim Xpander synths (2); Octave Cat, Kitten synths; Parker MIDI Fly guitar; Roland Juno-106, Jupiter-6, Jupiter-8, SH-101 synths; Vox Phantom XII 12-string guitar
Mics, mic preamps, EQs, compressors, effects:
EMS Synthi Hi-Fli analog effects unit; Electro-Harmonix Graphic Fuzz effects unit; Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor; Eventide DSP4000, H3000 Ultra-Harmonizers; Ibanez Analog Delay; TC Electronic FireworX, M5000 multi-effects processors
Monitors:
Dynaudio ABES subwoofer, M2 speakers; Genelec 1031As; Yamaha NS-10s
Mixdown:
Miloco Studios, the Neve Room www.milomusic.co.uk
[http://emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/remix_innovate_evaporate/]
INNOVATE OR EVAPORATE
Feb 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
From innovation to exploration, the Chemical Brothers have proven themselves to be one of the most enduring musical acts on the planet. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons never fail to produce a brain-shattering, sound-warping, production-mad epic, and their latest, Push the Button (Astralwerks, 2005), is yet another anxiously awaited installment from the block-rockin', beat-pounding duo. Six albums on, with the electronic-music landscape collectively altered from its early days as the next big thing, the Chemical Brothers remain addicted to sound, whether au naturel or effected to heights of madness.
But even for England's best and brightest, Rowlands and Simons were concerned about repeating past successes by using the same sources, recording approach and signature sounds. “We tried to make the album have a freer sound than Come With Us,” explains Rowlands, relaxing his 6-foot, 3-inch frame into an oversized chair at a Soho hotel. “Perhaps Come With Us sounded too constricted. Even though there were good sections, we would chop them out if we thought they went on too long. There were always songs with different versions that had wilder bits. It always seemed like we were denying ourselves. The structures are still tight on Push the Button, but there is more space to let the music go off into orbit.”
Relocating their Dustbowl Studio to Rowlands' new house an hour-and-a-half outside of London, the duo crammed in more gear, bringing their trademark experimentation techniques to new levels of sonic delirium.
“It's really exciting to find new ways of doing things,” Rowlands continues. “We still use Logic as a front end for Pro Tools. Mainly, we use the TDM plug-ins and the TDM bridge so you can use all the software instruments at the same time. We find new sounds by just experimenting: ‘What happens if I plug this thing into that thing and then take all the top off it and send it through this thing?’ It is trying to come up with combinations that you didn't think of before.”
“It is quite easy to imagine a great sound,” Simons adds, “but then to actually make that sound real and make the person that hears the record understand it — that is difficult.”
EVERYTHING BUT CRUNK
While everyone else is shedding their gear carbs, dropping outboard samplers and synths for the joys of internal digital gratification, the Chemical Brothers continue to make music with hardware-dominated glee. From their constant use of the EMS Synthi to their hands-on mixing methods in the Neve Room at Miloco Studios in London, the pair marches to its own drummer.
“The idea of shoving everything into one box makes things easier, but it might not make things better,” Rowlands says. “It is so easy to get Logic to design a reverb where you just press a button and you've got reverse reverb. These effects are now literally a button-press away. You hear records that are so empty, they are basically just these effects. We are using new drum machines like the Elektron Machinedrum. It is like Reaktor but in a hardware box that you can mess around with. We also like using Native Instruments FM7, but it is great to sit in front of an ARP 2600 or a Minimoog or something real.”
“Our records have always been about trying to break the clichés and easy ways to achieve a sonic effect,” Simons adds. “In saying that, a lot of the soft-synth stuff on Push the Button is a new avenue for us. It does recall other [artists'] music.”
But other music is not necessarily referring to the hits of mainstream Top 40. Ask Rowlands and Simons about their current listening habits, but don't get stuck on U.S. radio. “Crunk”? asks Rowlands. “What's that?”
“I like it, anyway,” Simons replies. “Just the name.”
“Isn't that getting drunk?” Rowlands wonders. “Getting crunked up?”
Crunked-up or not, Push the Button is clearly a Chemical Brothers record. It's a sonic send-up of funk, dance, rock, ambient and musique concréte — an album that presents a clearly definable musical personality that could only be Rowlands and Simons. “Hopefully, it has always been natural and instinctive music,” Simons says. “You don't want to get caught up in others people's expectations of your music. With this record, we didn't pander to anyone. It just felt good to make a record that is totally our record.”
INVASION OF THE UNKNOWNS
In addition to relocating their studio for the album, Rowlands and Simons abandoned big-shot guest vocalists for indie unknowns. Excepting Q-Tip's performance on opening single “Galvanize,” Push the Button is an indie freakfest.
“The biggest experiment was working with musicians who don't have a lot of history and not worry about it,” Rowlands explains. “They weren't set in their ways. And we came to New York to record ‘Galvanize.’ We wouldn't have done that before, but we wanted to try things even if they didn't work. Nothing bad will happen; it just means it didn't work.”
Previous Chemical Brothers collaborator and ex — Charlatans UK singer Tim Burgess spins barmy vocals on “The Boxer”; Anwar Superstar (brother of Mos Def) contributes language skills to “Left Right”; Bloc Party's Kele Okereke yells out loud on “Believe”; and the harmony-dense vocals of the Magic Numbers enrich “Close Your Eyes.” Bringing up the rear, Sarah McLachlan soundalike Anna Lynne from Trespassers Williams creates one of the album's most dizzying vocal entreaties on “Hold Tight London.”
INSIDE THE SOUNDS
Push the Button will smack fans — old and new — upside the head. Although its seamlessly blended tracks recall familiar chill-out and beat-busting terrain, the Brothers also attack hip-hop head-on for the first time. “Galvanize” kicks off the record with a Bollywood string sample that sounds like it's straight out of Chennai, India.
“That is a sample from a Moroccan record,” Rowlands corrects. “Everyone thinks it is Indian, but it is from Morocco. Someone gave me this record from the Ellipsis Arts label; it is amazing — so much energy and so raw. We brightened up the sound a bit and made it more aggressive, but it had so much power to begin with. The idea was to put it with this high-tech sound and get the worlds to collide. That is pretty much the sound that was on the record, backed up with a bit more oomph via effects.”
“Come Inside” is nearly this album's “It Began in Afrika” (from Come With Us), with a groovealicious bass riff from Larry Graham (of Sly & the Family Stone) and a storming drum groove that is pure trouble funk. “That is an Akai S7000 sampler loop of a Fender Precision bass played with an [Empirical Labs EL8] Distressor compressor,” Rowlands says. “I had triggers, like, every eight or 16 bars, then just found a really weird place for the loop to sit. The popping snare drum is from a Swedish jazz record; it had a really good flam and sounded really open. We doubled the snare with the Elektron Machinedrum, just trying to get that propulsive, pushing-on feeling to the beat. A lot of the sounds on the track are processed EMS Synthi. And there is a tambourine loop, too.”
Candy-colored house thumper “Believe” begins with subsonic bass bumps and distorted screeches and ends with what sounds like The Clash's “Train in Vain (Stand by Me).” Between the notes, you hear squealing whoops, slide whistles, Steve Cropper — style guitars and a synth solo that is positively stomach churning.
“The bass sounds are a set of drums filtered way down with all the hi-hats taken out,” Rowlands says. “The drums sample was chopped up in ReCycle, then put in the same aggressive pattern as that intro lead sound. We removed the top end and got this strange rumble. It is going though a subharmonic processor to get the real low sound.
“A lot of those odd noises are synths,” he continues, “like the EMS soft synth in Logic going though choruses and other spatial effects to make it sound wider. That solo is another soft synth. The good thing about soft synths is that you can do a solo, then edit the bends and moves and shift through the harmonics of the sound. You can get so detailed in the automation. Sometimes when you are sitting in front of an old hard synth, there are only so many things you can move at once. With the automation in Logic, you can get a good soft synth like the Native Instruments FM7 and step through the harmonics and automate all these things with amazing, weird changes in sound.”
LONDON CALLING
Although it's not one of the album's most blood-pounding tracks, “Hold Tight London” recalls the group's earliest chill-out tracks expressed through some of their most creative recording methods. As subtle rhythms cast a spell, odd sirens; ghostly spooks; and an array of splashes, crashes and bell tones pan across the mix. At 4:15, a gaggle of shimmering guitars showers the song with light, sounding like an outtake from a '70s-era Genesis album. The track was the result of endless experimentation.
“The rhythm part on that track is fairly muted,” Rowlands explains. “‘Come Inside’ is very layered, but the drums here are simple, with weird percussion. Those bongo sounds are some hits I found on an old record, sampled in Logic's ESX sampler and treated through Filterbank, a Logic plug-in. And I vocodered them through the Logic pitch-tracking oscillator thing. The kick drum is a mixture of a kick I had from an old Akai S1000 sampler put into Native Instruments soft sampler, Kontakt. The church organ is a Juno-106, one of my first purchases. For the vocals, we did a lot of phasing with a [Waves] plug-in called MetaFlanger and some phase-reverse reverb, as well.”
The drum track is all over the place, from its hypnotic beat to the endless percussion perks that dart around the mix like neurotic fairies. “John Brooks [formerly of the Charlatans UK] played cymbals and bells and splashes over the rough groove,” Rowlands says. “We fed him chains of different effects with eight different sends on the desk. We had an EMS delay on one channel, a plate reverb on another, an Electro-Harmonix on another — all on top of each other. We played with them all individually as he would be playing his parts and putting that back through his headphones. He played to all the delays and reverbs and panning and phasing and weird dubbed-out sounds. We didn't play it all straight and effect it later; we let him play along to the effects so he could hear what he was doing and what we were doing to what he was playing. It was a weird chain of action and reaction. The wild panning and the weird delay are all analog, the AMS delay and the Eventide DSP4000, plate reverb and Neve EQ on the desk. We did it all live, dub-style.”
The guitars are all Rowlands playing a Fender Telecaster with effects. But the guitars at 4:15 are actually a Juno-106 fed through an Electro-Harmonix Graphic Fuzz. “That is a fuzz with a graphic EQ,” he says. “So you can really dial in what frequencies you want to accentuate. We always like to put synths through guitar effects boxes.”
So the Brothers have worked it out once again. But where will Push the Button lead them? Can they keep using the same Funkenstein approach year in, year out? To hear them tell it, their sources are eternal, not incidental. “We will be using the mind, the heart,” Rowlands says, lowering his voice, imitating Dracula. “Those are the only sources that count, really. When you make a record, hopefully, you want to transcend your influences. The most important thing is to have ideas and see how those ideas can do something for you. I hope we will have a different reason to make music. I hope there will be some cataclysmic shift. But it will be influenced by those rhythmic sounds that propel you along.”
MIXDOWN AT MILOCO
“The sound of Miloco Studio's Neve room is really important to the sound of our records,” Rowlands says. “That is where we have mixed all our albums and recorded a lot of the vocals. The Neve room has a Neve VR60 desk, Tube-Tech PE1C and GML 8200 EQs, Summit Audio TLA and UREI 1178 compressors. It has these big [Munro M4 custom four-way soft-dome] monitors that are brilliant for making club records. When we make a record, we want to make a good-sounding album, and we don't think mixing in a computer sounds right.”
“But we don't have any tried-and-tested method,” Simons adds. “There is endless mixing and endless experimentation. It sounds right, or it sounds rubbish.”
“It is always wrong until the moment when it is right,” Rowlands asserts. “Often, we will do a straight mix first, then take the whole thing apart and chuck on different effects or totally recompress the drums or find different combinations. If the drums aren't working, we will scrap them and write new drums. If the mix is working, then we write around the mix to make the music work. It is all the same process. We will write the idea for the song at home, but we are always writing in the studio. The song is not written until it has been mixed.”
THE DUSTBOWL RELOCATED
Computers, DAWs, recording hardware:
Apple Logic Pro 6 software, Mac LC475 computer, Mac G4/733MHz computer; Digidesign Pro Tools 6 software; Rorke Data hard drives
Consoles, mixers, interfaces:
Digidesign 888|24 I/O interface; Mackie 32•8 console (2)
Samplers, drum machines, turntables, DJ mixers:
Akai MPC3000, S3000 (2), S3000XL (2), S6000, S7000 samplers; Casio RZ-1 drum machine; E-mu E4 Ultra (4), E64, SP-1200 samplers; Elektron Machinedrum, Monomachine drum machines; LinnDrum drum machine; Sonor Mini-Movement drum system
Synths, modules, software, plug-ins, instruments:
Alesis Andromeda A6 synth; ARP 1603 sequencer, 2600 synth; Clavia Nord Modular synth; Doepfer MAQ 16/3 MIDI analog se-quencers (2); Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer; Elka Synthex synth; EMS Synthi AKS, VCS3 synths; Fender Deluxe Reverb amp, Jazzmaster guitar, Precision bass, Telecaster guitar; Korg Mono/Poly, MS-10, MS-50, MS-2000 synths; Moog Memorymoog, Minimoog synths; Native Instruments FM7 soft synth, Kontakt soft sampler; Oberheim Xpander synths (2); Octave Cat, Kitten synths; Parker MIDI Fly guitar; Roland Juno-106, Jupiter-6, Jupiter-8, SH-101 synths; Vox Phantom XII 12-string guitar
Mics, mic preamps, EQs, compressors, effects:
EMS Synthi Hi-Fli analog effects unit; Electro-Harmonix Graphic Fuzz effects unit; Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor; Eventide DSP4000, H3000 Ultra-Harmonizers; Ibanez Analog Delay; TC Electronic FireworX, M5000 multi-effects processors
Monitors:
Dynaudio ABES subwoofer, M2 speakers; Genelec 1031As; Yamaha NS-10s
Mixdown:
Miloco Studios, the Neve Room www.milomusic.co.uk
[http://emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/remix_innovate_evaporate/]
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Posted 20 June 2010 - 11:09 PM
NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM
Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
The Chemical Brothers talk with Remix about their vintage-synth collection and recording their album We Are the Night.
“Instead of sitting in a bedroom with three keyboards and a sampler, we were sitting in a studio with 30 keyboards,” says the Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands.
On their sixth album, We Are the Night (Astralwerks, 2007), the Chemical Brothers delve deep into the world of ancient '70s- and '80s-era synths, making all their squiggly sounds and technical challenges a part of the joy of music making. The London duo of Rowlands and Ed Simons has always worked it out with classic sounds, but We Are the Night finds the Brothers exploring some of the oldest synths imaginable, such as the ARP 2600, Roland System 700, EMS Synthi AKS and VCS3, Moog Minimoog, and the rare Dutch-made synth, the Synton Syrinx, and its more recent sibling, the Synton Fenix.
“We've always used those synths,” the easygoing Rowlands recalls. “But this time we really got into the combination of those wild synths and a computer and Logic, doing very long sweeps of playing with those synths and editing the results easily on a computer. Back in the old days, we would have a synth running and sample it into the Akai [samplers] and then create a segment like that. But now we have the freedom of having it all in the computer; we can do a long 20-minute jam playing around with the synths and then edit the highlights and use it in a track. If anything, it's a coming of age — the precision of the computer with the unreliable and unrepeatable nature of synthesizers. It's a dream combo.”
We Are the Night changes course from the Chems' 2005 treatise, Push the Button (Astralwerks). Where that album gloried in massive funk beats 'n' breaks, We Are the Night clings closer to four-on-the-floor terrain. Where Push the Button produced a stadiumlike soundfield, We Are the Night reflects the mind of a nocturnal DJ. We Are the Night eschews the globetrotting DJ ethic in favor of a purer experience: the club as nest, sanctuary, and altar — a virtual home away from home.
“I was really surprised,” Rowlands says. “People were around when we mastered the album, and they were just dancing the whole time. It's only right at the end of the record that there is any moment that lets up. It just pushes you all the way to the end. A lot of this record seems to jump straight at you as being music that's going to make a room full of people dance. We have always been a dance band, but in this case there is less jerkiness to it. There is a nice psychedelic pulse.”
“Hedonism and abandonment have always been themes of what we do,” the at-times-persnickety Simons adds. “That is what is good about being in a club and getting completely absorbed in music and the headspace that creates. It's an escape from whatever reality you are in. That's the joy of psychedelic music. There are lots of different albums we could have made after two years of being in the studio. This is the one we felt like giving to the world at this moment.”
While admitting that they no longer hit the clubs like they did in the '90s, Simons claims that the experience has stuck with them, that they don't need to maintain residencies or work the tables at local one-offs to stay connected.
“That feeling of how a record can fill a room with sound, how a beat can affect people, how little nuances in music work, how one sound can take over — that is not something that you need to experience every Friday night,” he says. “That is something you know and think. The studio we use helps; it's the Neve Room at Miloco Studios. It has these amazing monitors. They are whacking good monitors, a combination between Dynaudio tweeters and ATC drivers. We insist on going there; it is integral to re-create that club experience. We have been to more expensive studios, but nothing quite matches them.”
Beyond the Miloco Studios' monitors and tried-and-true Chems gear like the Culture Vulture, SSL AWS900+, EMS Synthi Hi-Fli Analog effects unit and various Akai samplers, the sound of We Are the Night is all about the synths. Without further ado, Rowlands and Simons divulge the ins-and-outs of their synth collection.
ARP 2600
“We have the normal black-and-white 2600,” Rowlands explains, “not the really rare one, the Blue Meanie. All the modules inside that one are sealed in plastic. The ARP 2600 is a synth that you can play, and something good just seems to happen. It's quite simple, yet inspirational. Synths like the Minimoog and the ARP 2600 were successful because they were simple, but you could achieve quite complicated things with them. It was the days of improvements over the big modular systems, which could seem incomprehensible. With those, it would take 10 minutes to get a normal lead sound, but with the 2600, you can touch just a few things, and you will be playing and having fun. Sometimes in the studio you want that difficult challenge of making a sound, and you want to spend three hours. Other times you just want to have an idea and then do it. The ARP and the Minimoog are those machines. They want you to touch them. The 2600 has one of the best distortion sounds; the preamp in it has a setting where you can choose the distortion from times 10 to times 100 to times 1,000 on the input. Anything that offers you 1,000 times the input — whoo! You do hear a big difference.”
ELEKTRON MONOMACHINE
“Unlike the other gear, this is a brand-new synth, really,” Rowlands says. The Chems used the Monomachine as well as Elektron's drum-machine cousin, the Machine Drum. “We really love it. It's all over the album. It's actually set up like a drum machine but with proper synthesis. So you're writing a bass line, but if you've grown up programming on something like a Roland TR-808 with the flashing lights, you will be comfortable with the Monomachine. For each step you can tweak so much; there are hundreds of parameters for each step. You can really get into messing around with it. I really like its sound. It's very different from the other synths that we've got. It's digital, and you can make very lovely sorts of things, and it can do very hard, rough things. It's on ‘Saturate’; that track is practically all the Monomachine. You can start playing with the Monomachine straight away. Then you may wonder how you do other things later. [The options] are just different sound sources you can use, different synthesis options that you can use within the Monomachine. I can't remember which ones we used — not the voice modeling program, though. It is digital; it is just different.
“The way you program it, you can automate each step. The first step, you can have it tuned to X tuning. Then you can have the decay down, and you can have the LFO modulating it one way and the distortion pushed right up. For step two, if it is a 16-step sequence, you can have all those parameters set completely different. Then the third step is completely different as well. You can end up with totally mad sequences, something you couldn't physically do on any other sort of machine. And it looks cool, more importantly!”
“We like that company,” Simons adds. “A lot of people are obsessed with making things that have already been made or copying the software. Elektron is trying to do something new with nice, quality hardware. They are really individual-sounding machines.”
EMS VCS3
“Our engineer has that on constantly in our studio,” Simons says. “The VCS3 has its own speaker on it. We might be trying to do a complicated mix or program something, and the EMS is always squeaking in the background. ‘Can't you turn that fucking thing off?!’ This has been going on for 10 years. But it's good.”
“It is a modular synth, and usually with modular synths, you have to know what you are doing,” Rowlands explains. “But because this is the one with the little matrix panel in it, you just get your patch pins, and you can stick the pins in anywhere. It's really good fun in that you don't have to get annoyed. You can be very quickly gratified even if you don't know what you are doing at all. You can put pins in like spelling your name or something, and you'll get the sound of your name.
“The sound that starts ‘We Are the Night,’ that is a classic EMS. It's on all our records really, from the beginning. Even if we are not using the synthesis bit of it, we always use it to put sounds through. It has such a good filter, nice reverb. And on that track and other tracks, we always play the Fender Telecaster through it. Probably the sound of our records is an EMS and an Eventide Harmonizer.”
EMS SYNTHI AKS
“The same synth as the VCS3 but in a briefcase,” Rowlands says. “The AKS has a sequencer built into the lid of the briefcase. It's the coolest synth, just not a big monster one. It's like jet-age synthesis. You can take your briefcase with you, though not on the plane these days. It has built-in speakers as well. So you can be on the move and play with it. It makes all the Doctor Who sounds; it's the late-'60s British synth. It's the maddest sounding — not so good maybe for melodic patterns, though it has done that on our tracks before. It really excels at big, horrible, spiraling, squashy, splurgy sort of noises.”
MOOG MINIMOOG
“The Minimoog conjures a period of time — early house music,” Simons says. “It's warm sounding.”
“It's easy to get something you can play around with on the Minimoog,” Rowlands adds. “On ‘Surrender,’ we had it in the studio, and we hit upon a classic house bass sound; that led to writing the pattern for that song. It's an inspirational machine that makes you want to play it. Some instruments are not as inviting to play, but [with] that one, you just sit in front of it and mess around, and you'll find something and record it.”
ROLAND JUPITER-8
“That machine totally inspired one of the songs on the record,” Rowlands recalls. “The sounds on ‘Burst Generator’ are almost entirely from the Jupiter-8. It has a brilliant arpeggiator in it. If you set the clock for the arpeggiator externally and have your sequence running with it and then set the arpeggio on Random, it can make great sounds. Like we had this good chord sequence, but it sounded a bit normal. Then we played our chords through the arpeggiator set on Random, and it did mad things. It made it sound exciting. Then it was processed quite heavily through some different boxes. It's on ‘Das Spiegel’ quite a lot. You play something into it, and it can sound quite straight. Then you add the Random stepping through, like, four octaves, choosing where it's going to be on its own. With synths that have a Random capability, you get things that you wouldn't expect.”
ROLAND SYSTEM 700
“That is not really on the album,” Rowlands says with a laugh. “I just wanted to see if you could get one! [Remix rented some of the synths for the Chemical Brothers photo shoot.] We have one. It's actually only on the end of the album, on ‘The Pills Won't Help You Now.’ It's got an amazing filter on it and a phase shifter. I put some synth from Logic through the filter and the phase shifter in the 700. That was what we'd been aiming for. At the end of the track when everything swells up, we were having a lot of problems making that sound good. The 700 has the nine oscillators and many filters. It's got a good panner on it. Quite an expensive panner.”
“It costs a million pounds!” Simons says.
SYNTON SYRINX
“A fantastic synth!” Rowlands exclaims. “It makes an amazing noise. Its filters are totally different. It was made by people who had an idea of how filters should work. It's another synth where we were playing it and not MIDIing it up. Instead of having a pitch wheel, it's got a touch-sensitive little black thing that you press harder. It's not a strip but a little black square; it's about the pressure you apply and the way you apply the pressure. It just roars! It's just a normal mono synth. It looks a bit bigger than a Roland SH-101. It's a legendary synth, but it looks quite normal. It sounds totally different than anything else.”
THERMIONIC CULTURE VULTURE
Another secret weapon the Chemical Brothers used on almost every track of We Are the Night is Thermionic Culture's Culture Vulture — the Chem's tube-driven distortion unit par excellence.
“All the synths went through the Culture Vulture,” Rowlands reveals. “It drives the signal through its tubes in different ways. You put a synth through it, and it sounds 10 times better. Before we went to main mixing, we recorded just about all the synths through the Culture Vulture. It gives everything a bit of dirt and makes it sound less clean and a bit more real somehow. That is the sound we have been usually getting but through quite complicated levels of distortion and overdriving the Neve desk and EQing and compressing it. But with the Culture Vulture, you just plug something in; there are three different tube settings and two knobs, and you just play around until something happens. I don't know how it works. I have lost my mind in this gear pit!”
SAME-OLD SOFT SYNTHS
What with all this ancient synth gear and tube-driven distortion, you might think the Chemical Brothers are against the soft-synth revolution. You'd be 90-percent correct. “There is a total turnaround happening with soft synths,” Rowlands believes. “Everyone who uses them, their records all sound the same. Dance records really do all sound the same.”
“We're getting old, so they all sound the same,” Simons adds. “But they actually do all sound the same!”
“First, you had all those minimal German records,” Rowlands states. “All those sounds loaded up in Reaktor make a drum beat that sounds a bit like those German records. In some ways that is good — it's a very quick means of making music. It shouldn't matter how it was made. But we only hear records that all sound just like each other now. It's a bit boring. But there is no reason you can't take those things and make something different. It's about your ideas. That is the bad thing about synthesizers — it makes people that haven't got them think that they need them. We didn't have them when we started. You could just buy two records and put one on top of the other, and that was good enough. That is the trouble in talking about these really expensive and rare synths. [People think] ‘I won't be able to do that until I get that’ — but that is not how it works.
The Chemical Brothers' return to the simpler club sounds of their youth — of a time when Rowlands and Simons lived for New Order and Blaxploitation soundtracks, Kraftwerk and Eric B. & Rakim — signals their full-circle maturation. Adults with separate lives and children (well, three for Rowlands), the Chemical Brothers' We Are the Night shows the duo operating as savvy businessmen after all — intent on selling records, establishing their legacy and ultimately, communicating and connecting.
“We want it to connect to people,” Rowlands says. “When you are DJing, you have to be aware of how the music works in real life. If you do live in a rarified atmosphere, and you remove yourself from everything, you will make a very different record. But we are still concerned with making music that has a form and that people immediately get. We still want that basic response to music — to have something that connects. Maybe through DJing is why we are still concerned with that, and maybe that is what gives you relevance; you are still aware that this music has got to have a function. We want people to go mad. That is a high aim for the music.”
WE ARE THE GEAR
Computer, DAW
Apple Logic Pro 7 software, Mac G5 computer
Console
SSL AWS 900+ console
Samplers, drum machines
Akai MPC3000, S3000 (2), S3000XL (2), S6000, X7000 samplers
Casio RZ-1 drum machine
E-mu E4 Ultra (4), E64, SP-1200 samplers
LinnDrum drum machine
Sonor Mini-Movement drum system
Synths, software, plug-ins, instruments
Alesis Andromeda A6 synth
ARP 1603 sequencer, 2600 synth
Clavia Nord Modular synth
Doepfer MAQ 16/3 MIDI analog sequencers (2)
Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer
Elektron Machinedrum, Monomachine
Elka Synthex synth
EMS Synthi AKS, VCS3 synths
Fender Deluxe Reverb amp, Jazzmaster guitar, Precision bass, Telecaster guitar
Korg Mono/Poly, MS-10, MS-50, MS-2000 synths
Moog Memorymoog, Minimoog synths
Native Instruments FM7 soft synth, Kontakt soft sampler
Oberheim Xpander synths (2)
Octave Cat, Kitten synths
Parker MIDIFly guitar
Roland Juno-106, Jupiter-6, Jupiter-8, SH-101, System 700 synths
Synton Fenix, Syrinx synths
Vox Phantom XII 12-string guitar
Wiard 300 and 1200 Series Modular synths
Mic preamps, EQs, compressors, effects
Chandler Limited TG1 compressor, Germanium preamp
Electro-Harmonix Graphic Fuzz effects unit
Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor
EMS Synthi Hi-Fli analog effects unit
Eventide DSP4000, H3000 Ultra-Harmonizers
Ibanez Analog Delay
TC Electronic FireworX, M5000 multi-effects processors
Thermionic Culture Culture Vulture
Monitors
Dynaudio ABES subwoofer, M2 speakers
Genelec 1031As
Yamaha NS10s
Mixdown
Miloco Studios: the Neve Room
http://www.miloco.co.uk
[http://emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/chemical_brothers_aug07/index2.html]
Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
The Chemical Brothers talk with Remix about their vintage-synth collection and recording their album We Are the Night.
“Instead of sitting in a bedroom with three keyboards and a sampler, we were sitting in a studio with 30 keyboards,” says the Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands.
On their sixth album, We Are the Night (Astralwerks, 2007), the Chemical Brothers delve deep into the world of ancient '70s- and '80s-era synths, making all their squiggly sounds and technical challenges a part of the joy of music making. The London duo of Rowlands and Ed Simons has always worked it out with classic sounds, but We Are the Night finds the Brothers exploring some of the oldest synths imaginable, such as the ARP 2600, Roland System 700, EMS Synthi AKS and VCS3, Moog Minimoog, and the rare Dutch-made synth, the Synton Syrinx, and its more recent sibling, the Synton Fenix.
“We've always used those synths,” the easygoing Rowlands recalls. “But this time we really got into the combination of those wild synths and a computer and Logic, doing very long sweeps of playing with those synths and editing the results easily on a computer. Back in the old days, we would have a synth running and sample it into the Akai [samplers] and then create a segment like that. But now we have the freedom of having it all in the computer; we can do a long 20-minute jam playing around with the synths and then edit the highlights and use it in a track. If anything, it's a coming of age — the precision of the computer with the unreliable and unrepeatable nature of synthesizers. It's a dream combo.”
We Are the Night changes course from the Chems' 2005 treatise, Push the Button (Astralwerks). Where that album gloried in massive funk beats 'n' breaks, We Are the Night clings closer to four-on-the-floor terrain. Where Push the Button produced a stadiumlike soundfield, We Are the Night reflects the mind of a nocturnal DJ. We Are the Night eschews the globetrotting DJ ethic in favor of a purer experience: the club as nest, sanctuary, and altar — a virtual home away from home.
“I was really surprised,” Rowlands says. “People were around when we mastered the album, and they were just dancing the whole time. It's only right at the end of the record that there is any moment that lets up. It just pushes you all the way to the end. A lot of this record seems to jump straight at you as being music that's going to make a room full of people dance. We have always been a dance band, but in this case there is less jerkiness to it. There is a nice psychedelic pulse.”
“Hedonism and abandonment have always been themes of what we do,” the at-times-persnickety Simons adds. “That is what is good about being in a club and getting completely absorbed in music and the headspace that creates. It's an escape from whatever reality you are in. That's the joy of psychedelic music. There are lots of different albums we could have made after two years of being in the studio. This is the one we felt like giving to the world at this moment.”
While admitting that they no longer hit the clubs like they did in the '90s, Simons claims that the experience has stuck with them, that they don't need to maintain residencies or work the tables at local one-offs to stay connected.
“That feeling of how a record can fill a room with sound, how a beat can affect people, how little nuances in music work, how one sound can take over — that is not something that you need to experience every Friday night,” he says. “That is something you know and think. The studio we use helps; it's the Neve Room at Miloco Studios. It has these amazing monitors. They are whacking good monitors, a combination between Dynaudio tweeters and ATC drivers. We insist on going there; it is integral to re-create that club experience. We have been to more expensive studios, but nothing quite matches them.”
Beyond the Miloco Studios' monitors and tried-and-true Chems gear like the Culture Vulture, SSL AWS900+, EMS Synthi Hi-Fli Analog effects unit and various Akai samplers, the sound of We Are the Night is all about the synths. Without further ado, Rowlands and Simons divulge the ins-and-outs of their synth collection.
ARP 2600
“We have the normal black-and-white 2600,” Rowlands explains, “not the really rare one, the Blue Meanie. All the modules inside that one are sealed in plastic. The ARP 2600 is a synth that you can play, and something good just seems to happen. It's quite simple, yet inspirational. Synths like the Minimoog and the ARP 2600 were successful because they were simple, but you could achieve quite complicated things with them. It was the days of improvements over the big modular systems, which could seem incomprehensible. With those, it would take 10 minutes to get a normal lead sound, but with the 2600, you can touch just a few things, and you will be playing and having fun. Sometimes in the studio you want that difficult challenge of making a sound, and you want to spend three hours. Other times you just want to have an idea and then do it. The ARP and the Minimoog are those machines. They want you to touch them. The 2600 has one of the best distortion sounds; the preamp in it has a setting where you can choose the distortion from times 10 to times 100 to times 1,000 on the input. Anything that offers you 1,000 times the input — whoo! You do hear a big difference.”
ELEKTRON MONOMACHINE
“Unlike the other gear, this is a brand-new synth, really,” Rowlands says. The Chems used the Monomachine as well as Elektron's drum-machine cousin, the Machine Drum. “We really love it. It's all over the album. It's actually set up like a drum machine but with proper synthesis. So you're writing a bass line, but if you've grown up programming on something like a Roland TR-808 with the flashing lights, you will be comfortable with the Monomachine. For each step you can tweak so much; there are hundreds of parameters for each step. You can really get into messing around with it. I really like its sound. It's very different from the other synths that we've got. It's digital, and you can make very lovely sorts of things, and it can do very hard, rough things. It's on ‘Saturate’; that track is practically all the Monomachine. You can start playing with the Monomachine straight away. Then you may wonder how you do other things later. [The options] are just different sound sources you can use, different synthesis options that you can use within the Monomachine. I can't remember which ones we used — not the voice modeling program, though. It is digital; it is just different.
“The way you program it, you can automate each step. The first step, you can have it tuned to X tuning. Then you can have the decay down, and you can have the LFO modulating it one way and the distortion pushed right up. For step two, if it is a 16-step sequence, you can have all those parameters set completely different. Then the third step is completely different as well. You can end up with totally mad sequences, something you couldn't physically do on any other sort of machine. And it looks cool, more importantly!”
“We like that company,” Simons adds. “A lot of people are obsessed with making things that have already been made or copying the software. Elektron is trying to do something new with nice, quality hardware. They are really individual-sounding machines.”
EMS VCS3
“Our engineer has that on constantly in our studio,” Simons says. “The VCS3 has its own speaker on it. We might be trying to do a complicated mix or program something, and the EMS is always squeaking in the background. ‘Can't you turn that fucking thing off?!’ This has been going on for 10 years. But it's good.”
“It is a modular synth, and usually with modular synths, you have to know what you are doing,” Rowlands explains. “But because this is the one with the little matrix panel in it, you just get your patch pins, and you can stick the pins in anywhere. It's really good fun in that you don't have to get annoyed. You can be very quickly gratified even if you don't know what you are doing at all. You can put pins in like spelling your name or something, and you'll get the sound of your name.
“The sound that starts ‘We Are the Night,’ that is a classic EMS. It's on all our records really, from the beginning. Even if we are not using the synthesis bit of it, we always use it to put sounds through. It has such a good filter, nice reverb. And on that track and other tracks, we always play the Fender Telecaster through it. Probably the sound of our records is an EMS and an Eventide Harmonizer.”
EMS SYNTHI AKS
“The same synth as the VCS3 but in a briefcase,” Rowlands says. “The AKS has a sequencer built into the lid of the briefcase. It's the coolest synth, just not a big monster one. It's like jet-age synthesis. You can take your briefcase with you, though not on the plane these days. It has built-in speakers as well. So you can be on the move and play with it. It makes all the Doctor Who sounds; it's the late-'60s British synth. It's the maddest sounding — not so good maybe for melodic patterns, though it has done that on our tracks before. It really excels at big, horrible, spiraling, squashy, splurgy sort of noises.”
MOOG MINIMOOG
“The Minimoog conjures a period of time — early house music,” Simons says. “It's warm sounding.”
“It's easy to get something you can play around with on the Minimoog,” Rowlands adds. “On ‘Surrender,’ we had it in the studio, and we hit upon a classic house bass sound; that led to writing the pattern for that song. It's an inspirational machine that makes you want to play it. Some instruments are not as inviting to play, but [with] that one, you just sit in front of it and mess around, and you'll find something and record it.”
ROLAND JUPITER-8
“That machine totally inspired one of the songs on the record,” Rowlands recalls. “The sounds on ‘Burst Generator’ are almost entirely from the Jupiter-8. It has a brilliant arpeggiator in it. If you set the clock for the arpeggiator externally and have your sequence running with it and then set the arpeggio on Random, it can make great sounds. Like we had this good chord sequence, but it sounded a bit normal. Then we played our chords through the arpeggiator set on Random, and it did mad things. It made it sound exciting. Then it was processed quite heavily through some different boxes. It's on ‘Das Spiegel’ quite a lot. You play something into it, and it can sound quite straight. Then you add the Random stepping through, like, four octaves, choosing where it's going to be on its own. With synths that have a Random capability, you get things that you wouldn't expect.”
ROLAND SYSTEM 700
“That is not really on the album,” Rowlands says with a laugh. “I just wanted to see if you could get one! [Remix rented some of the synths for the Chemical Brothers photo shoot.] We have one. It's actually only on the end of the album, on ‘The Pills Won't Help You Now.’ It's got an amazing filter on it and a phase shifter. I put some synth from Logic through the filter and the phase shifter in the 700. That was what we'd been aiming for. At the end of the track when everything swells up, we were having a lot of problems making that sound good. The 700 has the nine oscillators and many filters. It's got a good panner on it. Quite an expensive panner.”
“It costs a million pounds!” Simons says.
SYNTON SYRINX
“A fantastic synth!” Rowlands exclaims. “It makes an amazing noise. Its filters are totally different. It was made by people who had an idea of how filters should work. It's another synth where we were playing it and not MIDIing it up. Instead of having a pitch wheel, it's got a touch-sensitive little black thing that you press harder. It's not a strip but a little black square; it's about the pressure you apply and the way you apply the pressure. It just roars! It's just a normal mono synth. It looks a bit bigger than a Roland SH-101. It's a legendary synth, but it looks quite normal. It sounds totally different than anything else.”
THERMIONIC CULTURE VULTURE
Another secret weapon the Chemical Brothers used on almost every track of We Are the Night is Thermionic Culture's Culture Vulture — the Chem's tube-driven distortion unit par excellence.
“All the synths went through the Culture Vulture,” Rowlands reveals. “It drives the signal through its tubes in different ways. You put a synth through it, and it sounds 10 times better. Before we went to main mixing, we recorded just about all the synths through the Culture Vulture. It gives everything a bit of dirt and makes it sound less clean and a bit more real somehow. That is the sound we have been usually getting but through quite complicated levels of distortion and overdriving the Neve desk and EQing and compressing it. But with the Culture Vulture, you just plug something in; there are three different tube settings and two knobs, and you just play around until something happens. I don't know how it works. I have lost my mind in this gear pit!”
SAME-OLD SOFT SYNTHS
What with all this ancient synth gear and tube-driven distortion, you might think the Chemical Brothers are against the soft-synth revolution. You'd be 90-percent correct. “There is a total turnaround happening with soft synths,” Rowlands believes. “Everyone who uses them, their records all sound the same. Dance records really do all sound the same.”
“We're getting old, so they all sound the same,” Simons adds. “But they actually do all sound the same!”
“First, you had all those minimal German records,” Rowlands states. “All those sounds loaded up in Reaktor make a drum beat that sounds a bit like those German records. In some ways that is good — it's a very quick means of making music. It shouldn't matter how it was made. But we only hear records that all sound just like each other now. It's a bit boring. But there is no reason you can't take those things and make something different. It's about your ideas. That is the bad thing about synthesizers — it makes people that haven't got them think that they need them. We didn't have them when we started. You could just buy two records and put one on top of the other, and that was good enough. That is the trouble in talking about these really expensive and rare synths. [People think] ‘I won't be able to do that until I get that’ — but that is not how it works.
The Chemical Brothers' return to the simpler club sounds of their youth — of a time when Rowlands and Simons lived for New Order and Blaxploitation soundtracks, Kraftwerk and Eric B. & Rakim — signals their full-circle maturation. Adults with separate lives and children (well, three for Rowlands), the Chemical Brothers' We Are the Night shows the duo operating as savvy businessmen after all — intent on selling records, establishing their legacy and ultimately, communicating and connecting.
“We want it to connect to people,” Rowlands says. “When you are DJing, you have to be aware of how the music works in real life. If you do live in a rarified atmosphere, and you remove yourself from everything, you will make a very different record. But we are still concerned with making music that has a form and that people immediately get. We still want that basic response to music — to have something that connects. Maybe through DJing is why we are still concerned with that, and maybe that is what gives you relevance; you are still aware that this music has got to have a function. We want people to go mad. That is a high aim for the music.”
WE ARE THE GEAR
Computer, DAW
Apple Logic Pro 7 software, Mac G5 computer
Console
SSL AWS 900+ console
Samplers, drum machines
Akai MPC3000, S3000 (2), S3000XL (2), S6000, X7000 samplers
Casio RZ-1 drum machine
E-mu E4 Ultra (4), E64, SP-1200 samplers
LinnDrum drum machine
Sonor Mini-Movement drum system
Synths, software, plug-ins, instruments
Alesis Andromeda A6 synth
ARP 1603 sequencer, 2600 synth
Clavia Nord Modular synth
Doepfer MAQ 16/3 MIDI analog sequencers (2)
Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer
Elektron Machinedrum, Monomachine
Elka Synthex synth
EMS Synthi AKS, VCS3 synths
Fender Deluxe Reverb amp, Jazzmaster guitar, Precision bass, Telecaster guitar
Korg Mono/Poly, MS-10, MS-50, MS-2000 synths
Moog Memorymoog, Minimoog synths
Native Instruments FM7 soft synth, Kontakt soft sampler
Oberheim Xpander synths (2)
Octave Cat, Kitten synths
Parker MIDIFly guitar
Roland Juno-106, Jupiter-6, Jupiter-8, SH-101, System 700 synths
Synton Fenix, Syrinx synths
Vox Phantom XII 12-string guitar
Wiard 300 and 1200 Series Modular synths
Mic preamps, EQs, compressors, effects
Chandler Limited TG1 compressor, Germanium preamp
Electro-Harmonix Graphic Fuzz effects unit
Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor
EMS Synthi Hi-Fli analog effects unit
Eventide DSP4000, H3000 Ultra-Harmonizers
Ibanez Analog Delay
TC Electronic FireworX, M5000 multi-effects processors
Thermionic Culture Culture Vulture
Monitors
Dynaudio ABES subwoofer, M2 speakers
Genelec 1031As
Yamaha NS10s
Mixdown
Miloco Studios: the Neve Room
http://www.miloco.co.uk
[http://emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/chemical_brothers_aug07/index2.html]
#4
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Posted 21 June 2010 - 9:56 AM
good articles,
i love reading about the gear
this is quite an interesting one from Come With Us period
http://planet-dust.l...y.net/remix.htm
i love reading about the gear
this is quite an interesting one from Come With Us period
http://planet-dust.l...y.net/remix.htm
#6
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Posted 21 June 2010 - 1:05 PM
chemicalmat, on 21 June 2010 - 02:53 PM, said:
Woooh ! Thanks Ben, I never seen this interview before, very happy to learn some interesting thing about Come With Us !
yeah it's cool, and we learn about the myth of 'here come the drums'!
#8
- dork
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Posted 22 June 2010 - 2:27 AM
Hey guys - check this old'ish thread starting from 2007 out for some light reading from the forum perspective regarding Chems tour gear:
http://www.thechemic...r-on-this-tour/
Enjoy!
http://www.thechemic...r-on-this-tour/
Enjoy!
be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle
#9
- Random Noise Generator
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Posted 22 June 2010 - 5:37 AM
Great topic, we did have studio tech talk, but that became about our stuff, then it came down to basically me, beh_j, and one or two others. I'm really anxious to read a Further technical interview.
#10
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Posted 25 September 2010 - 9:54 PM
#11
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Posted 18 March 2011 - 8:48 AM
Over at gearslutz (link) there is a topic on the chems live setup and also some pretty cool photos. Most of this we already know but its nice to see some new photos.
It lists there live gear as:
Macbook Pro, 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 4GB RAM, 10.6.3
Mackbook Pro, 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 10.5.8
Apogee DA 16X Firewire, Lynx Aurora 16 and Unitor 8 MKII x 2
Logic Studio (9.1.3) and Ableton Live (8.0.1)
MOTU MTP AV
Kenton Thru
Elektron MachineDrum
Elektron MonoMachine
Future Retro 777
Doepfer MAQ Seq x 2
Akai MPD 32
Line 6 Echo Pro
Line 6 Filter Pro
Eventide Pitch Factory
T.C Electronic FireworX
Eventide Eclipse
Electrix Filter
Peavy Analogue Filter
...all receiving MIDI clock from syc-lock.
Other gear on this tour are:
Nord Modular
Roland Jupiter 6
OctoPad
Octave Cat
Roland SH-101
Korg MS-10
DSI Poly Evolver
Korg Mono/Poly
Roland Juno 106 > Boss Distortion pedal
Axiom Midi Keyboard
Oxygen Midi Keyboard
Alesis QuadraVerb
Octave Kitten
Also, over at recordproduction.smugmug.com/Music/Musicians, there is a gallery of pics taken of Tom in his studio. Unfortunately the gallery is private until Tom approves the photos or something. Hopefully he has time cause i'd love to see where the magic happens.
It lists there live gear as:
Macbook Pro, 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 4GB RAM, 10.6.3
Mackbook Pro, 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 10.5.8
Apogee DA 16X Firewire, Lynx Aurora 16 and Unitor 8 MKII x 2
Logic Studio (9.1.3) and Ableton Live (8.0.1)
MOTU MTP AV
Kenton Thru
Elektron MachineDrum
Elektron MonoMachine
Future Retro 777
Doepfer MAQ Seq x 2
Akai MPD 32
Line 6 Echo Pro
Line 6 Filter Pro
Eventide Pitch Factory
T.C Electronic FireworX
Eventide Eclipse
Electrix Filter
Peavy Analogue Filter
...all receiving MIDI clock from syc-lock.
Other gear on this tour are:
Nord Modular
Roland Jupiter 6
OctoPad
Octave Cat
Roland SH-101
Korg MS-10
DSI Poly Evolver
Korg Mono/Poly
Roland Juno 106 > Boss Distortion pedal
Axiom Midi Keyboard
Oxygen Midi Keyboard
Alesis QuadraVerb
Octave Kitten
Also, over at recordproduction.smugmug.com/Music/Musicians, there is a gallery of pics taken of Tom in his studio. Unfortunately the gallery is private until Tom approves the photos or something. Hopefully he has time cause i'd love to see where the magic happens.
#13
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Posted 20 March 2011 - 5:11 PM
really interesting stuff guys! Ive actually been interested in starting to buy synthesizers, i really want to make sounds from scratch and stuff, what do you guys suggest to get for a first one but which is still amazing?
ADAPT OR DIE
#14
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Posted 29 April 2011 - 9:44 AM
http://facilities.br....jsp?id=1469704
Quote
The Chemical Brothers use Solid State Logic Duality Console for New Creative Work
Private Studio, Rowlands Audio Research, Using Duality for Film Scoring and Upcoming Album
April 26, 2011 --
DMN Newswire--2011-4-26--Tom Rowlands, member of innovative and Grammy Award winning group The Chemical Brothers, is using a newly-installed 48-channel Solid State Logic Duality console as a creative tool for his private studio, Rowlands Audio Research. Duality provides the signal routing, channel count and DAW integration needed for new The Chemical Brothers projects covering writing, production and mixing. Duality also delivers the coveted SSL SuperAnalogue™ sound used by The Chemical Brothers on previous projects.
"As we got into ever larger creative sessions, it became clear that we needed the 48-channel Duality over our original AWS 900," says Tom Rowlands, studio owner and member of The Chemical Brothers. "As we capture to Logic, Duality has the same on-board DAW control features as the AWS, so we did not need to learn an entirely different system. Essentially, Duality gives us what we had with the AWS, while delivering the added channel count we needed to move forward in our work."
Since the Duality was installed, it has been put to work for the duo's soundtrack and album work. Duality was used on The Chemical Brothers' contribution to composer Clint Mansell's (Requium for A Dream, Sahara, The Fountain) score for the recently-released psychological thriller Black Swan and the complete score for the upcoming release of director Joe Wright's (Atonement, The Soloist and Pride & Prejudice) first action movie Hanna.
"Duality was a good choice for us on many levels," asserts Rowlands. "It is a very powerful console, yet it is straightforward and easy to use. We did not need to have a dedicated machine room as the console does not draw too much power, so it fits perfectly within our existing facility. The transition from the AWS to Duality was smooth and allowed us to take on projects immediately. Beyond the two movie soundtracks, we have mixed some of The Chemical Brothers material and the results were great."
Far from acting as just a console, The Chemical Brothers consider Duality an instrument in their projects that gathers together all the synthesizers, outboard gear and Logic DAW for creative experimentation with new music and beats. Duality offers the sophisticated and flexible bus structure necessary to accomplish this mission.
"We like playing with our outboard gear, combining sounds with plug-ins in Logic and running multiple channels on the console," Rowlands explains. "Duality gives us more routing options and the multiple mix buses necessary for our expanded use, so we are really using it as creative tool. The sonics Duality offers are essential for us to capture the right sound for every track we produce."
"We spent a lot of time looking at console options to replace the original AWS 900 and the Duality was really the only choice," says Nick Clarke, owner of Tech Nick Clarke, the systems integrator for the Rowlands Audio Research project. "Tom is now bringing up all his favorite keyboards into all the places he wants them, while retaining the option to use submixes to bring up banks of keyboards. Duality tames the very complex mixes necessary to complete a Chemical Brothers production."
Solid State Logic is the world's leading manufacturer of analogue and digital audio consoles and provider of creative tools for music, broadcast and post production professionals. For more information about our award-winning products, please visit: www.solidstatelogic.com.
Private Studio, Rowlands Audio Research, Using Duality for Film Scoring and Upcoming Album
April 26, 2011 --
DMN Newswire--2011-4-26--Tom Rowlands, member of innovative and Grammy Award winning group The Chemical Brothers, is using a newly-installed 48-channel Solid State Logic Duality console as a creative tool for his private studio, Rowlands Audio Research. Duality provides the signal routing, channel count and DAW integration needed for new The Chemical Brothers projects covering writing, production and mixing. Duality also delivers the coveted SSL SuperAnalogue™ sound used by The Chemical Brothers on previous projects.
"As we got into ever larger creative sessions, it became clear that we needed the 48-channel Duality over our original AWS 900," says Tom Rowlands, studio owner and member of The Chemical Brothers. "As we capture to Logic, Duality has the same on-board DAW control features as the AWS, so we did not need to learn an entirely different system. Essentially, Duality gives us what we had with the AWS, while delivering the added channel count we needed to move forward in our work."
Since the Duality was installed, it has been put to work for the duo's soundtrack and album work. Duality was used on The Chemical Brothers' contribution to composer Clint Mansell's (Requium for A Dream, Sahara, The Fountain) score for the recently-released psychological thriller Black Swan and the complete score for the upcoming release of director Joe Wright's (Atonement, The Soloist and Pride & Prejudice) first action movie Hanna.
"Duality was a good choice for us on many levels," asserts Rowlands. "It is a very powerful console, yet it is straightforward and easy to use. We did not need to have a dedicated machine room as the console does not draw too much power, so it fits perfectly within our existing facility. The transition from the AWS to Duality was smooth and allowed us to take on projects immediately. Beyond the two movie soundtracks, we have mixed some of The Chemical Brothers material and the results were great."
Far from acting as just a console, The Chemical Brothers consider Duality an instrument in their projects that gathers together all the synthesizers, outboard gear and Logic DAW for creative experimentation with new music and beats. Duality offers the sophisticated and flexible bus structure necessary to accomplish this mission.
"We like playing with our outboard gear, combining sounds with plug-ins in Logic and running multiple channels on the console," Rowlands explains. "Duality gives us more routing options and the multiple mix buses necessary for our expanded use, so we are really using it as creative tool. The sonics Duality offers are essential for us to capture the right sound for every track we produce."
"We spent a lot of time looking at console options to replace the original AWS 900 and the Duality was really the only choice," says Nick Clarke, owner of Tech Nick Clarke, the systems integrator for the Rowlands Audio Research project. "Tom is now bringing up all his favorite keyboards into all the places he wants them, while retaining the option to use submixes to bring up banks of keyboards. Duality tames the very complex mixes necessary to complete a Chemical Brothers production."
Solid State Logic is the world's leading manufacturer of analogue and digital audio consoles and provider of creative tools for music, broadcast and post production professionals. For more information about our award-winning products, please visit: www.solidstatelogic.com.
#16
- dork
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Posted 29 April 2011 - 3:56 PM
Great find, Kosek!
Love the name Rowlands Audio Research, very cool.
" Duality tames the very complex mixes necessary to complete a Chemical Brothers production."
Must be something powerful to tame the beast that is a Chems production. New album..? Hmmmm!!!
Love the name Rowlands Audio Research, very cool.
" Duality tames the very complex mixes necessary to complete a Chemical Brothers production."
Must be something powerful to tame the beast that is a Chems production. New album..? Hmmmm!!!
#18
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Posted 30 April 2011 - 12:28 AM
mls8888, on 30 April 2011 - 11:14 AM, said:
Could it have just meant the actual soundtrack itself to Hanna?
It says "for Film Scoring and Upcoming Album" OMG every day something happens on this forum to get my adrenaline pumping. Another Album!!
Further Remixed There's nothing else...
#20
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Posted 30 April 2011 - 8:20 AM
it also says upcoming album, not next album - are we going to have a release soon? similar to what radiohead do? "hey guys, we'll have a new album out in 5 days, it is called the androidy of demoniac spheres ya ya"
love is all.