Making the Album

I hear you take off to remote cottages in the English countryside when you record your albums. What studio gear do you take with you?

The first sessions we do are always in the countryside, so we take a really basic setup: a 24-track Mackie desk, an E-mu e-6400 sampler, a Mac G3 running [Steinberg] Cubase sequencing software, and one basic effects unit -- usually something like an Alesis Midiverb. We use a basic MIDI keyboard, the Roland A-33, and for synth sounds we use a Roland JP-8000 for those deep, big, rich paddy noises, a [Clavia] Nord Lead, a Roland JV-1080, and a Novation for subby bass noises. We use a lot of Fender Rhodes for the analog sound, which we tend to route through effects units and amp simulators to give it a crustier feel.

Do you use any other vintage gear?

We've started to use an old Roland vocoder on the new stuff we're writing, often putting beats through it rather than actual vocals. And we use a Roland Space Echo which is a real old chorusy tape delay effect. It's cool, but it's really random. So we tend to find the sound we like and then sample it.

What made you choose that Patti Page sample for your single "At The River"?

It was totally by chance. We were in the countryside recording, and we went down to the local shop to buy some food for the night, and sitting in this bargain basement bin was this Best of the Fifties hits CD. We bought it and fell in love with that song. It has that wonderful '50s chord progression, which is still quite lovely to the ear. We shadowed that with some strings from the JV-1080, which are about as close as you can get to the real thing.

As well as having an old-fashioned, nostalgic air, "At The River" actually sounds like an old record. What production techniques did you use to rough it up?

The parts that we sampled off the original, like the Northern brass-sounding parts, we sampled at 22.5kHz instead of the normal 44.1kHz to get a crustier feel. We also time-stretched them down a little bit on the E-mu, and we picked a crunchy filter on a lower bit rate. Andy played trombone on that track, and when we got to the cottage we realized we'd forgotten to bring a microphone with us. But there was a speaker in the house, an old Alba which is a really crap old British speaker, and we reversed the polarity in the back of it and Andy played the horn into the speaker. That's how we got that sort of Louis Armstrong sound on the trombone, which we then put a tiny little bit of reverb on. The fact that the trombone sounds really old and rough was totally by chance.

"I See You Baby" is built upon a very distinctive rhythm loop. Do you sample your rhythm loops, or construct them yourselves?

When we put our rhythms together we go through loads of different records and pick loads of different parts, which we chop up using [Steinberg] ReCycle, that program that comes with Cubase. On the song "I See You Baby," that was a series of different loops, little Latin loops and stuff like that, cut up and moved around.

What did you use to get those whizzy synth sounds on that track?

That was the Nord. In Cubase you've got all those different filters and if you click onto [MIDI controller] #74 and go down to the [control edit] window you can do all the filter stuff on a Nord. That's how we did it, although an easier way to record all that realtime filter stuff is to play it live and record the MIDI data from the Nord into the computer.

You're a bass player as well. Do you use live bass or mostly stick with synths for bass parts?

We use live bass a lot. "Inside My Mind (Blue Skies)" has got live bass on it. Actually most of the tracks have got some live bass on them. With all that stuff, rather than do a long take straight into the computer, we tend to sample maybe 40 seconds of the bass going through an amp simulator into the E-mu, and then pick just a few bars that we like and drop them into the sequence. I think that's the secret to using live instruments in dance music; make sure you don't allow the takes to run too long because you lose the grooviness that makes dance music what it is. It's basically a case of sampling your own performances.

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