I can hear these in my head first.
I imagined a fast techno version of the song, which didn’t exist, and so I had to create it. It would have a distorted bullhorn kind of announcement voice. And be danceable.
If you go back to the original version it’s got some problems. I made changes. There’s this stiff horn section playing some British anthem sounding stuff–which I hate. I wanted none of that. Also, I made an attempt at the “Love Love Love” harmony intro, but it wasn’t working at all, and it derailed the mood. This intro is a better solution to me.
It’s tough doing the entire recording and mix solo. I also keep introducing errors, mostly with too much compression that makes it sound dull and hollow. There were about 4 days of mixing and hundreds of passes just to get it in the ballpark. That’s how much work goes into these things, people.
You might think that funky squishy synthesizer sound was a keyboard. It’s very Goldfrapp inspired. But in reality is a highly distorted electric guitar put through the meat grinder. The grinder in this case was the post-processing flange/wah-wah function. It’s automated and does its own weird cycling thing. Then I decided to give all the guitars a degree of that, make it sound techno without a real synth to play.
The hardest part by far was getting the bass to sound right. It throws off the whole mix every time it’s changed. It needs to sound wide and carry the song, but since I picked it on an electric guitar (no bass) and pitch shifted it, it brings its own set of issues. In the end I decided to hammer it down with big-time compression, attacking the leading edge to dull it and make the timing imperfections sound cloudy and rounded off. This was after I hacked the files to pieces and corrected the timing like five times. It’s all matched to the drum track zoomed-in with precision.
In the end I was going deaf and bonkers, so I had to call it complete.
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J. Giambrone 