Especially back then, in the time of vinyls and cassettes (browsing music wasn't exactly as easy as pressing "play"), it shows the amazingly deep musical culture of these artists. The samples they use are from all over the place, and their songs are often built around a handful of seconds from obscure b-sides.
I'd like to sneak in a movie recommendation here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_(2014_film), semi-related to the thread. Be aware that there are a lot of Eden movies, as well as another one in that same year.
Maybe they didn't. They are musicians, not just DJs so it's entirely possibly that they made an entire track from scratch. Their last album I think was a lot of originals not using pastiche IIRC.
There are a hell of a lot of samples used throughout Discovery. If Something About Us was entirely original then it would be an outlier.
Also their latest album (Random Access Memories) came more than a decade later than Discovery and was departure from their older techno roots.
You also have to bear in mind that while Discovery is a great album, it wasn’t created in a vacuum. Electronic artists sampling rock and funk music was in vogue at the time. With artists like Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy having their own seminal albums with heavy use of creative sampling.
If you look at popular electronic music from that era, more tracks have made use of sampling than tracks that haven’t.
> Maybe they didn't. They are musicians, not just DJs
I think that’s rather disparaging to artists who do sample. Producing electronic music might be a different skill to playing the guitar but it’s still a difficult craft to learn. It’s also an entirely different skill to DJing
Source: myself, who was a DJ and producer in the Daft Punk era.
Interestingly, there aren't any listed on whosampled, but a comment there calls out that the bass line borrows extremely heavily from Curtis Mayfield's Tripping Out (and a bit more than the bass, if you listen to it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCR6ecWb064
Not quite a sample necessarily, but more than a bit of inspiration there.
And when you watch the Discovery sample deconstruction videos, it becomes obvious just how much artistry went into their albums... how they'd hear the tiny guitar riff and mix it into exactly what they need for so many tracks.
Something About Us is the odd track on the album that does not use any known samples. The backing music is likely inspired by Oliver Cheatham's "Get Down Saturday Night", which Daft Punk has sampled in two other songs (Voyager and the intro to their 1997 BBC1 Essential Mix).
> Also their latest album (Random Access Memories) came more than a decade later than Discovery and was departure from their older techno roots.
I don’t know. When it came out it felt very off brand, but now another decade later looking back, it feels pretty on brand and more of an evolution than a revolution.
I feel the same about Radioheads Kid A. It was quite controversial when it came out, but looking back it’s like OK Computer was 1 step and Kid A another step.
As to sampling being in vogue, I think it’s more of a copyright enforcement thing that have pushed a lot of artist to create their own samples.
Using samples doesn't mean not musician. A lot of progressive rock used the Mellotron which are clever tape loops. The biggest artists of the 80s used Fairlights and Emulators. Entire genres of music owe some lineage to Akai. If you are "producing" (in the arranging, mixing, mastering sense) today in a DAW you probably use sampling techniques all over the place even if you did a live take of real instruments. The sampler is a real instrument.
I don't think parent tried to say they're not musicians because they used samples. But more like they had more options, since they weren't just DJs, so it's possible they actually did sound design themselves, rather than sampled it. Someone who only knows DJing obviously has less options available in the beginning if they start producing.
That said, Daft Punk did rely heavily on samples all over the place (not a bad thing), and it would be surprising if there was tracks out there where they didn't use any samples at all.
I think the false dichotomy is really jarring. Setting up a straw-man population of "just DJs" that are yet capable of making sample-based music is fairly uninformed. And even "just DJs" picking the right tracks, cross fading at the right time, and potentially beat matching is still an artistic endeavor.
Listening to the break down of the tracks, they barely takes any music playing ability so I imagine they could have easily made them from scratch instead of using samples.
Artists don’t sample because they’re unable to perform elements of a track.
They sample because they hear an element of one track and go “that’s awesome, I want to use that creatively but in a different way”.
To that end, most of the samples you’ll hear are pretty simple to reproduce. And sometimes artists don’t get the license to use the sample so they are forced to reproduce (this happens a lot more with vocal samples from what I’m aware)
I don't know. I think it would be pretty difficult to reproduce say the Amen Break. You would have to be a great drummer and be able to reproduce that particular sound it has.
Drum machines have been around for literally decades.
You could take a sample of real drums and then structure it in a step sequencer which, again, is technology that’s been around for decades.
Or if you’re already signed to a label (like Daft Punk were at the time) and neither yourself nor any studio engineers have a clue how to use your hardware (also highly unlikely) then you’d pay a session musician to come in and record an original sample.
In fact this last part happens all the time even for artists who are actual musicians but want collaboration as part of their creative process.
So there are plenty of options available to create original samples. More often than not, artists don’t sample because they don’t have other options, they sample because it’s a desired part of the creative process.
Not to argue the point, but in the article, he can't get the snare sound right so he needed to revert to a sample. I think you're underestimating the difficulty of recreating sounds. It would be impossible for instance, to recreate the amen break with a sequencer because nothing would be on a quantized beat and every single drum hit is different.
A genuine confusion for me - as a visual artist - about how two things can be true: this can be a great love letter to such an iconic and brilliant song, and also why generative AI was used to create accompanying imagery in this article. I don't see how an piece about the 'joys of music production' - aka, creativity - should also actively be anti-creative. To me, those two thoughts seem completely opposing.
Not to mention this being on Daft Punk's Wikipedia:
> In April 2023, [Thomas] Bangalter released a solo work, the orchestral ballet score Mythologies. He gave interviews about the project and allowed himself to be photographed without a mask. He cited concerns about the progress of artificial intelligence and other technology as to why Daft Punk split, saying: "As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."
Then again, looking at the Ghibli trend, I'm not surprised.
Not just the imagery, very clearly the text as well. It really puts me off of reading an article when it's so obvious, I'm not sure why. It almost feels like the author is trying to pull something over on me.
It's disrespectful, that's why. If someone doesn't think it's worth the time and effort to write something, it's not worth my time to read it.
All writing, visual art and music is an act of expression and communication. If one delegates that human element to a machine, they're a poseur, and that's the end of it.
Thanks for calling that out and saving a click. There are lots of nice reconstructions of dance music on YouTube, which are fascinating to learn from as someone who likes to play with DAWs and synths, which are more worth the time.
It's unreasonable to expect someone who posts free blog entries about fun stuff in their specific area of expertise to either 1) hire an illustrator or 2) manage and motivate volunteers.
"As a visual artist, why don't you compose the music too?"
Hey, I happen to own the vocal tool they used for this song and Digital Love. It's called the Digitech Vocalist. It's a MIDI-controlled pitch corrector, and it's the key to that whispery sort of grainy sound to Thomas's voice in both tracks. YouTube has plenty of demos of it, and one even directly of a Digital Love cover.
It's incredible how deeply ingrained in memory some of those songs are that I immediately start to notice the slightest deviation.
Daft Punk especially for me represent a merger of musical genius and perfect execution.
As this is on HN I wonder how far in the future AI will excel at recreating/analysing songs. It seems like it could lend itself extremely well for this type of task.
I haven't touched music production stuff for about 18 years (Mackie D8b + protools represent), however its great to see someone break down a song bit by bit. It also helps that the song they are covering is a banger.
For a slightly tangentially related podcast you might like https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00106lb which is where a bunch of musicians each week create a playlist of 4 songs that each have a link.
If you're a fan of both Daft Punk and the late 70s/80s Anime aesthetic mentioned in the article and haven't yet seen "Interstella 5555", drop everything and do so now.
If you're a fan of both Daft Punk and the 80s City Pop genre and if you were around when City Pop was rising in 2019 then you could have listened to the mashup "Something about Plastic Love"[1]. Beautiful blend. The original got taken down - and second grade recreations remain.
Also Plastic Love is the best Pop song if you go by Vice[2].
This was a fascinating article and I admire the musician in question for committing to the re-Discovery (pardon the pun) of the process behind the original track. Still, I have to agree with the earlier commenter that the many hallmarks of ChatGPT's prose style (so to speak) distracted me somewhat from the story the author intended to tell. The seemingly random italicisation of phrases that couldn't possibly have required actual emphasis created a relentless subvocal choppiness. As much as I'm glad the author shared their insights, I wish the medium hadn't so overwhelmed the message. Not that I think using ChatGPT is fundamentally wrong. I suppose it's a little like cosmetic surgery: the best approach, if you're going under the knife, is to have just enough done that nobody can tell you've had anything done at all.
> "A huge part of the joy came from working in Ableton Live 12, which now feels like an extension of how I think" I feel the same way, but for Reaper
Seeing the author mentions that decomposition of the snare is the hardest, and that’s what I was trying to solve in https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce (just an idea).
Multimodality AI is much more powerful now. I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.
When I was teaching kids with Glicol, I often used KraftWerk’s Das Model as an example:
> I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.
Was thinking along the same lines as I fell into the trap of Ghiblifying pictures earlier this week. As someone who spent countless hours in my childhood trying to copy the styles of my favorite comic books (Japanese and otherwise), at some point in this AI exercise I started rendering each picture in the artistic styles of each of my favorite artists and placing them side by side for comparison. Realized an exercise like this would have been very useful back when I drew in comparing different styles and what _exactly_ made them different. Maybe it speaks more to how I think —- lacking a true artistic intuition —- but simply comparing styles and giving words to their distinctions helped me appreciate them in a way I hadn't (of course the AI didn't produce a perfect representation but a crude enough approximation)
The chords at the end were really difficult to get 100% right. Think I got to about 95%. I didn't get around to the bit crushing. I was a bit deflated that the chords weren't spot on :)
Daft Punk have been my favorite artists for most of my life. Waking up to the announcement of their disbandment was the first time I've been truly sad about the "passing" of an artist
> Now—the snare. This one was tough. I spent a long time trying to recreate it, convinced it was a processed acoustic snare layered with something synthetic. After too many failed attempts, I caved and sampled the original. Yes, the snare is the only part I couldn’t fully replicate.
which seems so weird to me, because when you listen to the isolated sample, it sounds like a fairly standard Lindrum fare, a snare hit plus some kind of other perc sample, maybe a wood block or one of those 'congo' bell samples or something.
I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who has an audio-engineering background about this sort of thing recently. Something to the effect of, even if you program in the exact waveforms a TR-808 was attempting to synthesize into a digital synth, the digital synth wouldn't sound like a TR-808 because the TR-808 had slight noise and flaws in its analog circuitry, so in order to get a true emulation you had to account for those too. And that's part of why 80s music sounded so distinctive, in a way that's difficult to replicate today... it was a sound that came from the specific equipment used at the time, equipment which is much harder to source and simulate in the present.
Very cool article and a great observation about the “French Touch” as a concept. The explanation is insightful and wonderful. It actually reminded me how much study I’ve done regarding the “Swedish Touch” which is best exemplified by Abba, Max Martin, and Avicii for the sake of discussion.
My one gripe is the caption on his guitar. Almost spit-take level…seeing a Gibson Les Paul Honeyburst described as “humble” is tongue in cheek, but the sign of a person who could use a reality check. I get it’s an attempt at humor, but come on bro, that’s a brag haha.
This youtube channel has a whole pile of sampling recreations.
Daft Punk: Discovery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqHSvR9bqs
Daft Punk: One More Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QwOpRh-IfI
Mos Def: Mathematics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--A_89lTuiA
Pogo: Alice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au7RYxqaO10
Fatboy Slim: Rockafeller Skank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBsRzyQ-TfM
And this 30 minute compilation that spans four decades is utterly mesmerizing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpaoCUEhZJM
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrrnE9p4GyQ
Alive 2007 is my favorite album of all time and this video genuinely blew my mind
Any starter tutorials on how to make music like this? Ordering a drum pad rn
Thank you for this, amazing to see a glimpse into how they come up with the songs!
Especially back then, in the time of vinyls and cassettes (browsing music wasn't exactly as easy as pressing "play"), it shows the amazingly deep musical culture of these artists. The samples they use are from all over the place, and their songs are often built around a handful of seconds from obscure b-sides.
not about Daft punk but..
> The samples they use are from all over the place
> built around a handful of seconds
have you seen/head this?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mondovision
the original was at www.giovannisample.com which disappeared..
Discovery is a great album but what this article misses is that Daft Punk, like a lot of electronic artists, heavily used samples.
I couldn’t find anything on the samples used in Something About Us specifically, but chances are they did sample a few funk tracks to create that.
Discovery is a great album. And the anime story that runs through the album is a delight to watch too.
I'd like to sneak in a movie recommendation here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_(2014_film), semi-related to the thread. Be aware that there are a lot of Eden movies, as well as another one in that same year.
Not heard of this movie before but it reminds me of Clubbed To Death, another French movie based on a popular electronic album.
I’ll be sure to check out Eden too.
Maybe they didn't. They are musicians, not just DJs so it's entirely possibly that they made an entire track from scratch. Their last album I think was a lot of originals not using pastiche IIRC.
There are a hell of a lot of samples used throughout Discovery. If Something About Us was entirely original then it would be an outlier.
Also their latest album (Random Access Memories) came more than a decade later than Discovery and was departure from their older techno roots.
You also have to bear in mind that while Discovery is a great album, it wasn’t created in a vacuum. Electronic artists sampling rock and funk music was in vogue at the time. With artists like Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy having their own seminal albums with heavy use of creative sampling.
If you look at popular electronic music from that era, more tracks have made use of sampling than tracks that haven’t.
> Maybe they didn't. They are musicians, not just DJs
I think that’s rather disparaging to artists who do sample. Producing electronic music might be a different skill to playing the guitar but it’s still a difficult craft to learn. It’s also an entirely different skill to DJing
Source: myself, who was a DJ and producer in the Daft Punk era.
Interestingly, there aren't any listed on whosampled, but a comment there calls out that the bass line borrows extremely heavily from Curtis Mayfield's Tripping Out (and a bit more than the bass, if you listen to it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCR6ecWb064
Not quite a sample necessarily, but more than a bit of inspiration there.
And when you watch the Discovery sample deconstruction videos, it becomes obvious just how much artistry went into their albums... how they'd hear the tiny guitar riff and mix it into exactly what they need for so many tracks.
God, I love Daft Punk.
Something About Us is the odd track on the album that does not use any known samples. The backing music is likely inspired by Oliver Cheatham's "Get Down Saturday Night", which Daft Punk has sampled in two other songs (Voyager and the intro to their 1997 BBC1 Essential Mix).
> Also their latest album (Random Access Memories) came more than a decade later than Discovery and was departure from their older techno roots.
I don’t know. When it came out it felt very off brand, but now another decade later looking back, it feels pretty on brand and more of an evolution than a revolution.
I feel the same about Radioheads Kid A. It was quite controversial when it came out, but looking back it’s like OK Computer was 1 step and Kid A another step.
As to sampling being in vogue, I think it’s more of a copyright enforcement thing that have pushed a lot of artist to create their own samples.
Using samples doesn't mean not musician. A lot of progressive rock used the Mellotron which are clever tape loops. The biggest artists of the 80s used Fairlights and Emulators. Entire genres of music owe some lineage to Akai. If you are "producing" (in the arranging, mixing, mastering sense) today in a DAW you probably use sampling techniques all over the place even if you did a live take of real instruments. The sampler is a real instrument.
> Using samples doesn't mean not musician.
I don't think parent tried to say they're not musicians because they used samples. But more like they had more options, since they weren't just DJs, so it's possible they actually did sound design themselves, rather than sampled it. Someone who only knows DJing obviously has less options available in the beginning if they start producing.
That said, Daft Punk did rely heavily on samples all over the place (not a bad thing), and it would be surprising if there was tracks out there where they didn't use any samples at all.
I think the false dichotomy is really jarring. Setting up a straw-man population of "just DJs" that are yet capable of making sample-based music is fairly uninformed. And even "just DJs" picking the right tracks, cross fading at the right time, and potentially beat matching is still an artistic endeavor.
Listening to the break down of the tracks, they barely takes any music playing ability so I imagine they could have easily made them from scratch instead of using samples.
Artists don’t sample because they’re unable to perform elements of a track.
They sample because they hear an element of one track and go “that’s awesome, I want to use that creatively but in a different way”.
To that end, most of the samples you’ll hear are pretty simple to reproduce. And sometimes artists don’t get the license to use the sample so they are forced to reproduce (this happens a lot more with vocal samples from what I’m aware)
I don't know. I think it would be pretty difficult to reproduce say the Amen Break. You would have to be a great drummer and be able to reproduce that particular sound it has.
Drum machines have been around for literally decades.
You could take a sample of real drums and then structure it in a step sequencer which, again, is technology that’s been around for decades.
Or if you’re already signed to a label (like Daft Punk were at the time) and neither yourself nor any studio engineers have a clue how to use your hardware (also highly unlikely) then you’d pay a session musician to come in and record an original sample.
In fact this last part happens all the time even for artists who are actual musicians but want collaboration as part of their creative process.
So there are plenty of options available to create original samples. More often than not, artists don’t sample because they don’t have other options, they sample because it’s a desired part of the creative process.
Not to argue the point, but in the article, he can't get the snare sound right so he needed to revert to a sample. I think you're underestimating the difficulty of recreating sounds. It would be impossible for instance, to recreate the amen break with a sequencer because nothing would be on a quantized beat and every single drum hit is different.
Part of the magic of Daft Punk is using samples even when it does not sound like they're doing it
Of course they're musicians and they could make the track from scratch, but where's the fun in that :)
It looks like maybe they didn’t sample anything in that songs, https://www.whosampled.com/Daft-Punk/Something-About-Us/
For a super duper long time daft punk asserted that one more time had no samples, then one day someone figured it out.
Who knows? Today it has no samples, maybe tomorrow someone will find them.
if you wanna find out who sampled who theres great sites where people collect this info (whosampled)
Related: this recreation of Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up. I'm amazed at the level of musical knowledge needed to do this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU5Dn-WaElI
Also, ReverbMachine does this sort of thing regularly for all different artists. They have covered Daft Punk's albums pretty thoroughly:
https://reverbmachine.com/blog/how-kavinsky-created-nightcal... https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-homework-synth-soun... https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-discovery-synth-sou...
All their work is amazing. Perhaps I will post all of these here as posts individually? Someone should...
Damn I was about to post that, one of the best Ableton showcase ever made.
A genuine confusion for me - as a visual artist - about how two things can be true: this can be a great love letter to such an iconic and brilliant song, and also why generative AI was used to create accompanying imagery in this article. I don't see how an piece about the 'joys of music production' - aka, creativity - should also actively be anti-creative. To me, those two thoughts seem completely opposing.
Not to mention this being on Daft Punk's Wikipedia:
> In April 2023, [Thomas] Bangalter released a solo work, the orchestral ballet score Mythologies. He gave interviews about the project and allowed himself to be photographed without a mask. He cited concerns about the progress of artificial intelligence and other technology as to why Daft Punk split, saying: "As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."
Then again, looking at the Ghibli trend, I'm not surprised.
Not just the imagery, very clearly the text as well. It really puts me off of reading an article when it's so obvious, I'm not sure why. It almost feels like the author is trying to pull something over on me.
It's disrespectful, that's why. If someone doesn't think it's worth the time and effort to write something, it's not worth my time to read it.
All writing, visual art and music is an act of expression and communication. If one delegates that human element to a machine, they're a poseur, and that's the end of it.
Thanks for calling that out and saving a click. There are lots of nice reconstructions of dance music on YouTube, which are fascinating to learn from as someone who likes to play with DAWs and synths, which are more worth the time.
We humans can't be great at everything.
Which is why we can compensate other humans (or cooperate with them in some way) to achieve things.
It's unreasonable to expect someone who posts free blog entries about fun stuff in their specific area of expertise to either 1) hire an illustrator or 2) manage and motivate volunteers.
"As a visual artist, why don't you compose the music too?"
Nothing in this blog post about songs required an illustration.
Not everyone believes that generative AI is anti-creative. If that is understood, the confusion disappears.
It's also just one image, clearly just for aesthetic. It's not that big of a deal.
Hey, I happen to own the vocal tool they used for this song and Digital Love. It's called the Digitech Vocalist. It's a MIDI-controlled pitch corrector, and it's the key to that whispery sort of grainy sound to Thomas's voice in both tracks. YouTube has plenty of demos of it, and one even directly of a Digital Love cover.
It's incredible how deeply ingrained in memory some of those songs are that I immediately start to notice the slightest deviation.
Daft Punk especially for me represent a merger of musical genius and perfect execution.
As this is on HN I wonder how far in the future AI will excel at recreating/analysing songs. It seems like it could lend itself extremely well for this type of task.
This is the kind of content I am here for.
I haven't touched music production stuff for about 18 years (Mackie D8b + protools represent), however its great to see someone break down a song bit by bit. It also helps that the song they are covering is a banger.
For a slightly tangentially related podcast you might like https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00106lb which is where a bunch of musicians each week create a playlist of 4 songs that each have a link.
If you're a fan of both Daft Punk and the late 70s/80s Anime aesthetic mentioned in the article and haven't yet seen "Interstella 5555", drop everything and do so now.
If you're a fan of both Daft Punk and the 80s City Pop genre and if you were around when City Pop was rising in 2019 then you could have listened to the mashup "Something about Plastic Love"[1]. Beautiful blend. The original got taken down - and second grade recreations remain.
Also Plastic Love is the best Pop song if you go by Vice[2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOTlyCZmVa8 [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mariya-takeuchi-plastic-love...
This was a fascinating article and I admire the musician in question for committing to the re-Discovery (pardon the pun) of the process behind the original track. Still, I have to agree with the earlier commenter that the many hallmarks of ChatGPT's prose style (so to speak) distracted me somewhat from the story the author intended to tell. The seemingly random italicisation of phrases that couldn't possibly have required actual emphasis created a relentless subvocal choppiness. As much as I'm glad the author shared their insights, I wish the medium hadn't so overwhelmed the message. Not that I think using ChatGPT is fundamentally wrong. I suppose it's a little like cosmetic surgery: the best approach, if you're going under the knife, is to have just enough done that nobody can tell you've had anything done at all.
Hey Marca, thank you for this art and the inspiration bomb first thing in the morning
Keep them coming! <3
Related: Theremin cover https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkp9bDGDd1w
Very interesting article and process.
> "A huge part of the joy came from working in Ableton Live 12, which now feels like an extension of how I think" I feel the same way, but for Reaper
Seeing the author mentions that decomposition of the snare is the hardest, and that’s what I was trying to solve in https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce (just an idea).
Multimodality AI is much more powerful now. I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.
When I was teaching kids with Glicol, I often used KraftWerk’s Das Model as an example:
https://glicol.org/demo#themodel
This rough midi version is very different from the original, but the kids had a lot of fun messing around with it.
> I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.
Was thinking along the same lines as I fell into the trap of Ghiblifying pictures earlier this week. As someone who spent countless hours in my childhood trying to copy the styles of my favorite comic books (Japanese and otherwise), at some point in this AI exercise I started rendering each picture in the artistic styles of each of my favorite artists and placing them side by side for comparison. Realized an exercise like this would have been very useful back when I drew in comparing different styles and what _exactly_ made them different. Maybe it speaks more to how I think —- lacking a true artistic intuition —- but simply comparing styles and giving words to their distinctions helped me appreciate them in a way I hadn't (of course the AI didn't produce a perfect representation but a crude enough approximation)
Great post, and nice recreation!
I went through a period of recreating songs during Covid. Here's my attempt at Short Circuit from the same album: https://on.soundcloud.com/F5dcikiLb9RNQ4jC9
The chords at the end were really difficult to get 100% right. Think I got to about 95%. I didn't get around to the bit crushing. I was a bit deflated that the chords weren't spot on :)
Having the authentic French accent is cheating.
Daft Punk have been my favorite artists for most of my life. Waking up to the announcement of their disbandment was the first time I've been truly sad about the "passing" of an artist
> Now—the snare. This one was tough. I spent a long time trying to recreate it, convinced it was a processed acoustic snare layered with something synthetic. After too many failed attempts, I caved and sampled the original. Yes, the snare is the only part I couldn’t fully replicate.
which seems so weird to me, because when you listen to the isolated sample, it sounds like a fairly standard Lindrum fare, a snare hit plus some kind of other perc sample, maybe a wood block or one of those 'congo' bell samples or something.
Yo! Don’t hate on BBEdit, it’s old but it’s still really really good. I’m using it everyday for everything.
I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who has an audio-engineering background about this sort of thing recently. Something to the effect of, even if you program in the exact waveforms a TR-808 was attempting to synthesize into a digital synth, the digital synth wouldn't sound like a TR-808 because the TR-808 had slight noise and flaws in its analog circuitry, so in order to get a true emulation you had to account for those too. And that's part of why 80s music sounded so distinctive, in a way that's difficult to replicate today... it was a sound that came from the specific equipment used at the time, equipment which is much harder to source and simulate in the present.
Very cool article and a great observation about the “French Touch” as a concept. The explanation is insightful and wonderful. It actually reminded me how much study I’ve done regarding the “Swedish Touch” which is best exemplified by Abba, Max Martin, and Avicii for the sake of discussion.
My one gripe is the caption on his guitar. Almost spit-take level…seeing a Gibson Les Paul Honeyburst described as “humble” is tongue in cheek, but the sign of a person who could use a reality check. I get it’s an attempt at humor, but come on bro, that’s a brag haha.
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