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.
Watch the Remix video interview with the Chemical Brothers here.
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!”
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