> 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.
jedimastert · 5h ago
It is unreal to me the amount of impact Daft Punk had with only four studio albums.
rickdeckard · 3h ago
(They also did the Soundtrack for Tron:Legacy, basically their fifth studio album)
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...
dfxm12 · 55m ago
how bad the reviews were because the album was too "mechanical" and was "missing the warmth of House"
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.
_DeadFred_ · 1h ago
Tron:Legacy still lives in my head. I'm still chasing the music I imagined after seeing the movie/hearing the soundtrack. Also half of Daft Punk Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's work in Kavinsky’s 'Nightcall'.
DHPersonal · 50m ago
The composer who assisted them also worked with M83 for the Oblivion soundtrack, which I think is also pretty spectacular.
morsch · 1h ago
Check out Tron: Legacy Reconfigured if you haven't (you probably have).
bongodongobob · 3h ago
Random Access Memories was such a letdown. It's an OK disco album that doesn't innovate at all. Masterful recording, it sounds great of course, but it didn't take any risks. I listened to it twice and that was it.
spcebar · 2h ago
RAM brought back that funky sound which had been completely absent from contemporary dance music. It was a revival of old elements, mixed with modern electronic sound. A masterful mingling of elements of the past and the future coming together to form something not quite as good as either, but listenable and danceable, and most importantly impactful, because after that album there was a wave of artists emulating that sound. We wouldn't have gotten Uptown Special if we hadn't gotten Random Access Memories. That's my feeling on it anyway.
mzs · 40m ago
Guess you didn't listen to it on shuffle. There are multiple stories to be discovered depending on the order of tracks, like the one about the alien robot that crash lands on earth and strives to experience humanity. The album is RANDOM ACCESS Memories after all.
maplant · 12m ago
The stories are maybe 1/10000th the importance of the quality of the music, which is simply Ok.
rickdeckard · 3h ago
Exactly, fully agree.
If it would have been released as a Pharrell Williams Album "produced by Daft Punk", it woul have been met with different expectations.
And especially now it would perfectly blend with other Pharrell Williams Albums (i.e. "Happy" could have been on "Random Access Memories" without standing out at all...)
diggan · 4h ago
To be fair, they've done a lot more than just studio albums, from collaborations to live albums, concerts and whatever more. Personal favorite is probably Alive 2007 that went on repeat until Mom complained about the windows in the living room downstairs almost breaking.
joezydeco · 3h ago
The TRON:Legacy soundtrack was an incredible piece of work. Fit the movie exactly.
prmoustache · 3h ago
Funny because Mom alternated between a Bob Marley greatest hits and Daft Punk Discovery and Human after all records when doing the ironing and cleaning at home.
No idea what she is listening to these days when doing those chores.
pengaru · 1h ago
Is your Mom one of my exes?
KolyaKornelius · 1h ago
dad?
cpitman · 3h ago
Interstella 5555 is still one of my favorite movies. It's an anime movie where the entire soundtrack is the album Discovery. There are no vocals, the entire story is told by only the animation and music, and it works incredibly well.
bee_rider · 2h ago
I don’t even know what it is, haha (maybe it is an… Album Video). But it is great.
I guess there is the concept of a Rock Opera, but that doesn’t seem to have expanded much across the genres.
cpitman · 1h ago
They were the official music videos for the album, looks like Daft Punk released all of them on YouTube.
Both of them had separate labels and released a lot of other artists. See DJ Mehdis super hit for one of my favourite tracks ever :)
olelele · 4h ago
Specifically Roulé and Crydamoure (unsure if spelling correctly)
marcedwards · 5h ago
Absolutely. Hopefully there’s at least one more.
ilinx · 4h ago
I mean, they’re retired, and I’m not holding out hope. But it’s remarkable that 30 years after their debut Daft Punk could put out an album and probably be as innovative and relevant as ever. That’s such a rare quality.
ukuina · 5h ago
How can this be?
marcedwards · 4h ago
There’s rumours they’re working on more material. I wouldn’t blame them for telling the world they’ve broken up, just to take the pressure off. I can live in hope, right?
colecut · 1h ago
At least if they don't produce another album, we still get to see them perform at Burning Man this year, out by the trash fence
smjburton · 4h ago
Very cool OP listening to the original samples compared against the different harmonizers and vocoders.
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.
Isamu · 5h ago
This is a really great deep dive, I wish I could upvote more to reward this kind of quality work.
marcedwards · 5h ago
Thank you! Your kind comment helps. :)
amelius · 5h ago
Reading the title I thought this was about extraordinary singing techniques. But nice article anyway.
brudgers · 3h ago
If you have a vocoder, running a drum machine through the modulator won't sound all that much like daft punk, but will probably sound familiar. And maybe become part of your sound.
If you don't have a vocoder, Behringer recently released one as a Eurorack module for $99. It's fine.
brianstorms · 2h ago
I love, no luuuurrve, this article. Just fantastic research and fantastically useful for a music project I'm workin' on.
gen3 · 3h ago
Outstanding article, don't skip the youtube videos!
tecleandor · 6h ago
Ah, the Sennheiser VSM201. Just a $30K vocoder. Seems like it was $25K when it released in 1977, but also didn't get to sell even 50 units, so quite rare.
I guess you can get similar results with cheaper hardware, but if you have money and you have it around... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ofrzeta · 6h ago
I didn't know the device. Also I didn't know that Kai Krause who later got famous through his Kai's Power Tools was an electronic music expert who sort of did sales for Sennheiser in 1977, according to this page (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sennheiser_VSM_201 - only on the German WP, it seems). He also wrote the manual for it.
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.
marcedwards · 5h ago
Yep! The Sennheiser and Ultimate VoIS are in their own league. There are some other rare high-end analogue vocoders that I would have loved to include in the comparison, but I don’t know anyone who owns them. The EMS vocoders are supposed to be amazing, too.
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.
bibinou · 5h ago
Thomas Bangalter's father was a French disco producer and songwriter who helped them a lot in their early career.
Sure helps.
rickdeckard · 4h ago
They used the VSM-201 for "Random Access Memories", their last Studio Album. At that time they didn't need such help anymore, they famously rented a huge amount of equipment and large studio-floors (i.e. they recorded simultaneously with microphones from different decades because Thomas heard a difference and wanted this reflected on the record).
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.
marcedwards · 6h ago
I wonder how many are still in working condition today? Can’t be many. I’d love to see one in person, one day.
LuciOfStars · 5h ago
It's Daft Punk, are we really surpised? :-P
nonrandomstring · 6h ago
Never had the pleasure of a Sennheiser but when working in radio I got
my hands on a lot of rack vocoders for doing branding, stings and
idents. Funny how the number 9000 comes up a lot, like Roland VP9000
and Eventide H9000. 80 and 90s vintage ones like Korg VC-10 or
Elektronik EM-26 had unique sounds, but tbh the modern digital
recreations are amazing models. There's not a world of difference
between vocoding, autotune, shifting, harmonising etc once you realise
how all the fx are now based in FFT, convolution etc - just different
variations on processing and control graphs - and so it's fun to
create your own vocal effects in things like
Max/MSP/PureData. Technically there's a distinction between "effects"
and "processing" in terms of how much of the direct (parallel) signal
is put through. Chers Believe is a yardstick for "effect", whereas a
lot of what I hear with Daft Punk (and Air, Kraftwerk) is quite
heavily processed as to disguise the original voice entirely - just
letting a bit of top/sibilant through to define the stops and
fricatives.
marcedwards · 5h ago
Did you listen to the example audio in the video? Soft synths and digital emulation can be absolutely amazing these days, but the VSM201 and Ultimate VoIS are in their own league. It’d be pretty easy to pick them out from a blind test with other vocoders.
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.
jschafer · 3h ago
Yes exactly, I was really excited when I found out that you do not need a FFT to do speech processing.
If you look at the code of (phone/voice) codecs GSM/Speex/Opus you can see that you can estimate the spectral envelope (or the configuration of a physical tube model for the vocal tract) in time domain with linear prediction coefficients (LPC).
And it is simple, e.g. the often used Levinson-Durbin algorithm is just 22 lines of C code.
It is an interesting exercise to build your own vocoder from scratch that fits in a single screen page.
Many of the code snippets I have seen (which likely have already processed your voice) are just translations of the Fortran code of the book "Linear Prediction of Speech" by Markel and Gray (1976).
nonrandomstring · 26m ago
Ah yes, ladder or lattice filters. If you don't mind old fashioned
mailing lists there's still a few of hanging around in
MUSIC-DSP@LISTS.COLUMBIA.EDU where code gets shared.
nonrandomstring · 5h ago
I thought it was phase synchronous overlap add, but I just checked and
now I'm not so sure.
Has anyone got more details?
marcedwards · 5h ago
That gives me something to research! I’ve only scratched the surface of IVL’s algorithm, but intend to look into it further.
_DeadFred_ · 1h ago
Tangentially related if you make music in the box and want some simple Daft Punk breakdowns to experiment from:
> 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...
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.
And especially now it would perfectly blend with other Pharrell Williams Albums (i.e. "Happy" could have been on "Random Access Memories" without standing out at all...)
No idea what she is listening to these days when doing those chores.
I guess there is the concept of a Rock Opera, but that doesn’t seem to have expanded much across the genres.
This Playlist has them all in order: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSdoVPM5WnndLX6Ngmb8wktMF...
Sorry, in retrospect my comment was a bit confusing.
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.
If you don't have a vocoder, Behringer recently released one as a Eurorack module for $99. It's fine.
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.
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.
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.
If you look at the code of (phone/voice) codecs GSM/Speex/Opus you can see that you can estimate the spectral envelope (or the configuration of a physical tube model for the vocal tract) in time domain with linear prediction coefficients (LPC).
And it is simple, e.g. the often used Levinson-Durbin algorithm is just 22 lines of C code. It is an interesting exercise to build your own vocoder from scratch that fits in a single screen page.
Many of the code snippets I have seen (which likely have already processed your voice) are just translations of the Fortran code of the book "Linear Prediction of Speech" by Markel and Gray (1976).
Has anyone got more details?
https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-homework-synth-soun... https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-discovery-synth-sou...