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Remixing
'We found the way to do that distinctive Portishead bass noise,
but I can't tell you how we did that. It's a trade secret.'
You've just remixed "Music," the forthcoming single off Madonna's follow-up to Ray of Light. How did you approach the remix?
The great thing about remixing a record like that is everything's so clean. All the signal paths are perfect, every sound is so easy to work with and, of course, the vocals are great. We were inspired by the Massive Attack song "Unfinished Sympathy," which has got that nice stripped-down vocal that goes into those beautiful string breaks. So with the Madonna track we stripped a lot of it down and then added in the string quartet, all the time trying to retain the sexiness of the original. It has some very lush moments. We also did two other mixes: a beats mix, and a deep house mix that is just strictly for the heads. On that one we used a lot of Novation for bass lines and just a tiny touch of her vocals. We had our live bass player and our guitarist, loads of little snippets of the original stuff, and just some recycled beats. It's very minimalist. We only submitted our remix this morning, so we haven't heard if it's been accepted yet!
Tell me about the theme song you just wrote for the Sex & The City soundtrack.
That was quite weird because they basically sent us just a CD of the complete Sex & The City theme song rather than providing us with the separate parts, which is what normally happens. So there wasn't a lot we could do with it. We basically took the piano loop from the song and put it through a telephone effect on a Lexicon effects unit to make it sound like it was on a car radio. Then we added all these car noises into the background -- the door shuts and it opens up into our tune. We took a little motif from the riff and played it on a Rhodes, but otherwise, the rest of it is all original. On this song we put loads of stuff through virtual amps to make it sound really crusty. We found the way to do that distinctive Portishead bass noise, but I can't tell you how we did that. It's a trade secret. All I can tell you is the bass came from a Fender Rhodes and it's gone through an amp simulator, and I can't tell you which one because then everyone will find out.
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Trade Secret:
Groove Armada's Spin on Portishead's Bass
With a lot of begging, whining, and assurances that his secret was safe, Groove Armada's Tom Findlay finally caved in on his "trade secret" Portishead-style bass sound:
"Okay, okay... it's a Fender Rhodes put through a Line 6 POD amp simulator. If you play around with the Rotary Speaker effect and add a little compression, Portishead will creep up at you at some point. But don't tell anyone, this is just between you and me."
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