> This article is the longest piece I’ve published on Bjango’s site, and it took a couple of years of research. I purchased around 25 pieces of music gear. I emailed Imogen Heap, and to my surprise, someone from her team got back to me and confirmed the exact harmonizer used on Hide and Seek.
> It’s been a huge effort, and I’m confident it contains a lot of information that is not widely known. For those of you who are into Daft Punk, I hope it’s interesting.
Anyway, I keep remembering how panned 'Human After All' was, and how bad the reviews were because the album was too "mechanical" and was "missing the warmth of House", while this is EXACTLY how the genre evolved in the years to come and none of those music experts saw this.
Many journalists did a retrospective of it a few years later and admitted that they misjudged it.
It's not that Daft Punk drove the industry in this direction, the album wasn't well-received by most at that time. They showed the destination of a journey while people didn't even realize they are traveling...
In the end, it appears that 'Random Access Memories' is one of their least innovative and "lasting" albums. It's probably their most successful one, the most complex to conceptualize and produce, but IMO it has the least unique character of all their productions.
Looking at the whole picture, the product of "Random Access Memories" is less the music, but the duo celebrating the process of production itself...
It's dour. It's depressing. And it's repetitive in a way that feels tiresome; You can't dance to most of it or even really tap your foot to it.
What happened was that Daft Punk challenged themselves to make an album in six weeks and ended up with a showcase for a few neat guitar pedals and two fun songs (Robot Rock and Technologic), one of which consists almost entirely of a barely-changed sample (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFwGQAEYqHs).
Electronic music certainly evolved in ways that made it less warm, but that didn't make it less fun. Case in point, Skrillex's early music is weird and playful despite relying on 'cold' synth sounds. Human After All is just cold.
FWIW, I wouldn't call myself a particular fan of house or dance music in general. This mechanicalness and lack of warmth is probably what I like about the album.
R.A.M. is more that they'd decided to finish and made one last album that was as much fun as possible. It's a bit like "Accelerate" by REM in that respect.
I guess there is the concept of a Rock Opera, but that doesn’t seem to have expanded much across the genres.
No idea what she is listening to these days when doing those chores.
Daft punk had a large impact on music overall, they were ( are? ) really really good musicians.
The Sennheiser VSM201 sounds so clean, I really like the analogue sound. The TC Helicon Talkbox Synth also sounds nice.
For the harmonizers, the Digitech Studio Vocalist EX sounds the best to me, but I also like the Korg ih Interactive Vocal Harmony for its spacey vocal effects.
It’s hard to know without an official word from our favourite robots, but I think you’d struggle to get the sound of any Daft Punk song out of a VP-9000. I’m really not sure where that rumour started.
I almost bought a VP-9000 to test, but sonically it’s so far off, I didn’t bother.
If you don't have a vocoder, Behringer recently released one as a Eurorack module for $99. It's fine.
https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-homework-synth-soun... https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-discovery-synth-sou...
Anyone here has any good article, or explanation, or theory, of why is that the case?
I guess you can get similar results with cheaper hardware, but if you have money and you have it around... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
His German WP page also claims that he sold a VSM 201 to Neil Young in 1982! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause
English WP has less details on that part of his life, especially the VSM 201 :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause
Just in time for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_(album) !!!
I was surprised about how much better the Sennheiser sounds compared to the others. From the audio comparison in the first YouTube video. I did expect minor variations in the harmonics but the differences are quite significant between the models.
The other vocoder that sound almost as good is quite new and it seems to still be a prototype with a "contact us" price.
I can’t speak on Dromedary Modular’s behalf and I think rising parts costs have been an issue, but buying an Ultimate VoIS should be a fair bit cheaper than the Moog vocoder.
The shape of the filters, the smoothing between the filters and the synthesis section, and (on some models) the patchability all create a very different result.
The reason the best analog vocoders are so expensive is because the filter for each band is much more complex than a plain old bandpass filter, with a much higher component count. Typically there's a flatter passband and a steeper slope than you'd expect.
You can do digital convolution with thousands of bins and it sounds nothing like analog vocoding. It's much cleaner, doesn't have those lovely harmonically spaced filter resonances, and creates sounds that can feel more acoustic than electronic.
Oh, it also might be of interest that the IVL algorithm isn’t FFT-based. I think their harmonizers sound better than the rest, so maybe FFT isn’t the best way to go.
Above all, the biggest help from his father was probably to insist that they keep the ownership of their music when signing with any label, regardless of any money, because as a producer he knew that this is how artists get screwed by record labels.
As for Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: It’s difficult to know for sure without comments from Daft Punk themselves, but the DigiTech Talker has such a unique, throaty sound, and it’s all over the Human After All album. My confidence varies with my guesses, but Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is one of the more confident ones, given how distinctive the Talker is. They also used so much DigiTech gear, especially on that album.
Hopefully they’ll see the article and let me know which bits are wrong.
(Note that the XILS 201 plugin requires iLok. I think iLok sucks.)
128 bands, band redistribution, ability to further route using patcher, just look at its manual to see :)
Though its shrouded by the standard "FL is for rap dumb dumb" stigma. Marketing is one hell of a drug.
Thanks. :)
