How to mic and record a band using the Apogee ONE and Logic

 

Four reviews, four opinons, four perspectives. One Album. 

 

 

 

Reviewer: Alan Fearns Artist: Daft Punk Album: Random Access Memories Rec’d Tracks: 2, 4, 6, 12, 13 Comments: In Daft Punk’s latest release, the duo takes a moment to appreciate musical influences and the ability to advance ideas of genre by musicianship. From the welcome opener, “Random Access Memories” demonstrates the duo’s drive to take on production obstacles to obtain the specific disco vibe of the late ’70s. It was unexpected that a band so futuristic would lean towards the late-career revivalist and collaboration tactics, but there is a worthwhile listen here.

“Game of Love” sounds like it could have been from a moody crime show. The recordings here are crystal clear, and the microphonic nuances talked of by Giorgio Mororder in The Collaborators shine through. A monologue by Moroder is sampled on the next track, “Freedom”. Turns out the word-on-the-web that Daft Punk wouldn’t sample till the last track is false. “Freedom” is the longest running track on the album—just breaking 9 minutes—which consists of climatic synth sequencing. The instrumental revolves around the monologue, dramatizing it like an audio documentary.

Chilly Gonzales is brought in to play piano on the key-changing ballad, “Within”. The sound of the vocoder’s hard tuning becomes more apparent here, as the group sings in one of their wider ranges. The auto-tunage is taken up a notch with the hard pop, “Instant Crush”, a fitting title for a something so horridly catchy. “Lose Yourself to Dance” is what this album is all about.

The first couple minutes of “Touch” is galactic ambience, before the slow electric piano chords steam under Paul Williams elegant voice of the past. Hi-hat triplets and quacky guitars are then back, and keyboard notes glissando around curiously. The song adds in a honky-tonk and brass section before settling into a Beatlesque rise. The rest of this track drags out to a distant transition for “Get Lucky.”

If you haven’t heard this track by now, you wouldn’t be reading this review. Its got Pharrell, it gives you danceallnightis.

Daft incorporates the Tron strings and swells in “Beyond” and “Motherboard,” but the subtle acoustic guitar is what stood out most to me. “Beyond” has a similar feel to “Within” and “Game of Love,” but more Eiffel 65. “Fragments of Time” was a tad too ordinary that late in the album. “Doin it Right” has an addictive sparse rhythm. Very chill, but dancey and would please a crowd. The final track is the most Daft Punk classic, with some excellent live drums that suddenly all distorts to take the album away.

The group covers many different genres and smooths them all together on Random Access Memories. There is a lot of paying homage to the classics, but has enough bounce and flair to sound fresh in today’s music. It’s a celebration of music in itself.

Reviewer: Phil Hokenson Artist: Daft Punk Album: Random Access Memories Rec’d Tracks: 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12 Comments: The distant future. The year 2000. Franco electronic-disco androids rule American airwaves with an iron fist (or perhaps titanium or adamantium). The shocking dystopia envisioned by mid-90s ravers madly waving glow sticks and seizuring through mountains of foam has almost become a reality. Although outside of “Get Lucky” and “Lose Yourself to Dance,” Daft Punk’s latest clearly isn’t pandering for Top 40 plays, we will likely feel the tremors in the output of our all-consuming pop music machine.

At their best, DP and friends (Pharrell, Panda Bear, and Julian Casablancas of the Strokes) offer tracks that make you want to boogie down till your knees blow out, but they also include some oddly satisfying idiosyncratic jams. “Giorgio by Moroder” sounds like the Terminator describing his life’s passion of making krautrock on the side (y’know, after saving John Connor, becoming the robotic overlord of California, and what not).

The inexplicable midpoint of the album, “Touch,” sounds like Andrew Lloyd Webber joined the band for a track, and the closer, “Contact,” is their best argument to date for a Daft Punk-scored remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey. When they stray too far from their cyborg Saturday Night Fever wheelhouse, they lose the plot a bit (even these guys can’t convince me that auto-tuned slow jams and Hall & Oates homages are good ideas).

As a firm believer in rock ‘n’ roll salvation and the evangelical power of real drums, I’m not quite ready for the Punks to beam me up, but since the album meets me half way with a healthy helping of humanity, I’ll admit I had a helluva good time. Finally, robotic beings rule the earth. The humans are dead.

Reviewer: Brady Gross Artist: Daft Punk Album: Random Access Memories Rec’d Tracks: 5, 7, 8, 12, 13 Comments: So, it’s been eight years and everyone has been freaking out. The album is here, and now what do we do? This isn’t “Discovery” or “Homework” and you can tell Daft Punk didn’t want “RAM” to mimic those previous album ideals AT ALL.

Instead, this is a reverence of sorts – a distinct reset to what Daft Punk had curated as their ‘sound’ over the last 10 years. That’s great, sure. Does it work? Is “RAM” an album that properly portrays the influences of yesteryear and inject them into our current day understanding of what EDM, disco and electronic music is, was and will be? All these questions are tough to answer. With the amount of coverage and attention “RAM” has received over the last two months, it would be hard to argue that the public isn’t clued in to what Daft Punk is going for. But that still doesn’t answer what does the present and future hold for listeners that really don’t ‘care’ what ideal Daft Punk is going for.

What happens when you are a fan who just wants a good record and could give two shits less about the two guys behind the robot costumes and where they draw influence from. A majority of people don’t know who Giorgio Moroder is, or Paul Williams, or even Chilly Gonzales. I didn’t to a certain extent. And so looking at the tracklist of “RAM” and listening to these songs, what connection or ‘awe’ feeling am I going to have here to properly ‘feel’ like I ‘get’ it.

There are songs here that are classic Daft Punk and no one will second-guess their composition. (“Game of Love” and “Contact” especially) But the girth of the album isn’t typical. There are whole orchestras of sound here, spoken word inserts, and a very conscious show-tune-influenced epic centerpiece track (“Touch”). This is where I can’t decide if I truly love or just ‘like’ this album. It places me in a weird middle spot, where after twenty plus listens, I still can’t decide how the fuck I feel. “Lose Yourself To Dance” is probably the best example of a track that truly fails in my mind. It is a legit ten seconds shy of six minutes and the song could/should have been cut off at three.

But even saying that out loud, throws my mind for a loop. It’s hard to convince myself I believe that’s what the song ‘should’ be because maybe I’m just not getting it. Disco has historically been cheesy as fuck and the duration of songs long as fuck also.

Take Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” from 1977 – a 6+ min song where she croons the same lyric over and over – over the same beat, over and over. The song was a wild success. That was what defined disco. No one ever gave a shit about 8-10 min songs because people were DANCING AND FUCKED UP.

So back to “Lose Yourself” for a second. Taking into context what Daft Punk is after – trying to conceptualize that late ‘70s disco sound into 2013 – I get it, but just because I get it, doesn’t make it necessarily work. Because when it comes down to it, people AREN’T dancing and getting fucked up in the same way anymore.

While I don’t want that perspective to diminish the potential of “RAM” – it throws a riff in the experience I hold with it – at this exact moment in time. There are bangers, “Get Lucky” and especially “Doin’ it Right” – but for the most part, this is a two-way record. You either go into a comatose with headphones on and further slide into a robotic haze, or you are experiencing it live. I’m not sure there is a place where I will feel ok just ‘throwing’ this record on while doing dishes or during a road trip. I tried it this last weekend driving to Anchorage with a few friends – everyone fell asleep.

Reviewer: Bobby Pendleton Artist: Daft Punk Album: Random Access Memories Rec’d Tracks: The entire album. Comments: I’ve never had such a changing view point on an album. I’ve written three reviews on the new Daft Punk album “Random Access Memories,” listened to the record again, read some reviews on it, read up on Daft Punk and rewritten again. My thoughts on the album needed time I suppose, and so now I think I’m ready.

This is a complete album! It shouldn’t be looked at based upon specific tracks because when it’s looked back upon it may be as influential as their 2001 album “Discovery.” I was torn on certain tracks like “Touch” and “Fragments of Time” based on the singers they chose or how cheesy the music sounded, but then I realized Daft Punk doesn’t mind being cheesy. They have lots of influences from other eras that may seem cheesy or cheap today – like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Jackson Browne.

What they are doing is showing what music with soul sounded like, cheesy or not, and they are doing this with the best engineers and session musicians in the industry. They put everything they had in themselves into this album over the past three years, recording orchestras for every track ( but not actually using most of the orchestra recordings), recording on analog for the quality, working in the best studios in the world and using live instruments almost exclusively.

This makes for an album that bases its merits in sound quality and how it flows together. Yes maybe there are a few tracks that aren’t “Get Lucky”-good and the constant hype over the past few months has been annoying to some, but that shouldn’t matter. What will matter is that this maybe is the last time we see an album that is perfect as a whole body of work and will influence others to strive to do the same in the future.

The one issue I do find is that Daft Punk has been successful enough to have the resources they needed to make such a high-quality piece of work, but not everyone has that and maybe not everyone should.

As Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (gold helmet from Daft Punk) states, “Technology has made music accessible in a philosophically interesting way, which is great, but on the other hand, when everybody has the ability to make magic, it’s like there’s no more magic—if the audience can just do it themselves, why are they going to bother?”

Maybe perfection has to be for the best of the best, I don’t know that answer. All I know is this is an album that will make musicians look back to their influences that didn’t have the technology we do now and strive for the quality of sound they did have. So when you listen to this album listen to it as a body of work and for its perfection – then you might see what Daft Punk is trying to do. Bring life back to music.