TN:187 Overmono

Welcome to Take Notes

0:00Hello, I'm John Kennedy, and joining me for this episode of Take Notes are Over Mono, to talk about how they wrote, recorded, and produced the album Pure Devotion. I met up with the brothers Tom and Ed at Strongroom Studios for a really deep dive into the record. They had some really great stories about the inspirations behind the music that went from rescuing equipment from a flooded lock-up garage to plug-ins that they've actually built themselves and to baking cymbals. Yes, cymbals that you have on a drum kit to achieve a certain kind of sound,

0:34and they love their tech, trying out everything, including loads of plug-ins. Just have a look at the full list of gear mentioned in the show notes if you'd like. We think this possibly might be the longest gear list we've ever had on Take Notes. The full video episode is available to watch on the Take Notes Patreon page, where you can look into their sessions and see the screens as they go through the numerous plug-ins you'll hear about in the episode. So head over to patreon.com forward slash take notes to check that out. Thank you as well to Tape It for sponsoring the show.

1:04For those of you who don't know, Tape It is the iPhone voice notes recording app crafted specifically for musicians, with fantastic features including layering new recordings, shared mixtapes, and many more. To try it for yourself, and to get a special offer on the pro version, head to tape.it forward slash take notes. But now, without further ado, let's get started.

Over Mono background

1:32Over Mono are an electronic duo from Wales, consisting of brothers Tom and Ed Russell. Both initially working with successful solo careers, Tom as Technoact Truss, and Ed as the rave-inspired Tesla, the brothers didn't begin to collaborate until 2012, performing as TR ER. Three years later, they began to produce together as Over Mono, releasing debut EP Arla in 2016. They quickly built a reputation for their energetic live shows, with breakthrough single So You Know becoming a huge club hit in 2021. Their debut album, Good Lies, arrived in 2023

2:07to widespread acclaim. A world tour and major festival appearances followed, as well as collaborations with artists including Fred Again, The Streets, and High Contrast. Their second album, Pure Devotion, arrived in August 2026, this time attempting to capture the physical space of their studio through experimental recording. Today, I'm at Strongroom Studios with Over Mono, and what better way to start than by hearing something from the record. This is Lock Up.

2:55New York City чтобы the character is more than a complaint. This is Lock Up. New York City where you want to start this album. The Streets, and High Contrast.white.com You want to start this album. The Streets, and High Contrast. The Streets, and High Contrast. it is lock up by over mono from pure devotion the new album that is in fact the opening track

Making the opening track Lock Up

3:37and i'm very pleased to say that i have ed and tom who are over mono sat with me here in the studios of strong room hello hello hey it's great to have you here thanks so much i know you traveled up from bristol today to talk to us we really appreciate it and i thought lock up would be a nice start not just because it's the opening track on the album but because in a way it hints at the depth that you've gone to on this sonic journey of exploration looking far and wide and deep for sample inspiration for musical inspiration and i know that you dug into an obscure post-punk track to create lock up yeah exactly it was uh i as far

4:14as we can tell it's the only only song they ever release is a band called fast relief uh a song called what a waste which we found i think it was a compilation of sort of birmingham post-punk yeah and and we'd been reading um rip it up and start again the brilliant simon reynolds book and uh we just got on this mad post-punk deep dive and kind of all the way the way that they were producing those records i think was really appealing to us to sort of quite carefree embracing all of the imperfections not getting too sort of bogged down in it all and

4:47i think that was something we then took across the whole record they get just a real raw energy it's just like i don't know something really magic that you can only get really when you sort of abandon a need for the things being perfect or like um yeah you just throw caution to the wind yeah and on that track you just sampled a little bit of the vocal um and i was telling you before we started recording that it's so open to interpretation you can come up with various different uh meanings from uh quite profane uh to quite mundane in some ways and i think there's a

5:23kind of mundane story behind the title yeah it was um because you'd you were wondering whether the the lyrics were saying lock up or something close to that and uh but the reality was we just uh our dad who lives in south wales that he had there was a really big flood uh and his lock up that way like stores just it was mostly full of all of our old crap wasn't it uh and it got completely flooded it was six feet high with water and so we had to go down there in a couple of hazmat suits and um try and salvage anything we could there's one keyboard in there that was like really high up but

5:55it was uh it's completely cooked uh and then we got home and we wrote and then we wrote lock up that evening and um it was one of those ones you know as most things are it's a sort of working title and then you get really attached to it yeah excellent so we're going to dig deep into three tracks from pure devotion i guess we should just dive straight in and if you could give us a blast to the master of ballad which is the first song we're going to look at that would be great so yeah

6:29yeah yeah yeah I'm running through my dreams I'm trying to move my place I feel like I can't do it, baby We lost it And I'm going to pass it Oh, oh I'm trying to move my mind I'm trying to move my life I'm trying to move my life

6:59I'm trying to move my life I'm trying to move my life I'm trying to move my life

Building the duet Ballad

7:07it is ballad by over mono from pure devotion so how did this one begin you sent me a data set yes um i think i was on holiday in spain and i was just relaxing just listening to loads of stuff and then this data searching just really jumped out at me and just just just as in like a beautiful piece of music and i sent it to ed being like oh i've not heard this one before with you and he's

7:38like no we sort of left at that and then next thing i know ed's like got an idea for a tune and i think he's in a hotel and he's just like just sort of tried to like loosely copy the bass line and i feel like this could be a really good basis for like a tune with kindora the vocal we sampled kindora on so many records and um he played me a little loop i was just like oh yeah there's um there's something really interesting in there i can see i can see where this goes you know and then it was one of those ones that i think it took us quite a long time to really sort of realize

8:10what we're trying to achieve with it i feel like we worked on it in so many different places lots of different places i think it was like i remember playing you the first loop of it in um i think it was like in a in a van in south america somewhere and it was like or on the way to a festival and um basically the the data set song sounds like this and it's so it's like a the main base from from ballad is a kind of interpolation i think they call it of this bass line

8:41which is amazing then comes in this incredible counter melody on top

8:48which suddenly gives the whole bass context i remember when tom first sent it to me and i heard those sort of first few notes of the bass line i was thinking like wow this is like kind of kept catching me off guard where it was going to and then as soon as that melody came in it sort of anchored it and so so we started with the bass

9:09which is loosely i mean it's similar to melodically and we the sound i think with this one

9:16can't remember exactly what we recorded that off originally but it would have been something in the studio probably the i'm guessing it sounds like it could be the jupiter

9:27so we started with this and then we we had lots of vocal ideas for this one um and maybe we can play you a really early demo where the vocal was quite different before and then we sampled a song from each of them

9:58so who's that vocal that we just heard so that's rock uh he is kindora's partner they're together and we we sampled a song from each of them or actually maybe multiple songs from each of them and then the idea with this was to try and create a kind of a love song between the two of them but from two uh from sort of music that they both released completely separately and i don't know if they're talking about each other originally or not but we uh we wanted to put them together and have them both singing at the same time and with the idea of as the song goes along they kind of they start

10:32almost singing over each other more and more and they're sort of both fighting for their own sort of uh point of view in yeah in the song so kind of like a duet but yeah yeah yeah because since we start first started sampling kindora we've got to know her quite well and we have had loads of late night zoom sessions um recording new vocals and and rock will always be there engineering and and then we just like one day found out that he's got also got an incredible voice like outrageous unbelievable unbelievable we're just like hang on a minute we need to get both of you on a track

11:05and that's kind of like where like the idea yeah came came for this it's like um obviously we've got another track on the album that's that's just a kindora feature and then we thought it'd be amazing to get them both on the same track yeah and is that where the title comes in yeah so it was originally we we were going to call it the ballad of rock and kindora and then we realized it was going to be featuring rock and kindora so that would be the ballad of rock and kindora featuring rock and kindora so we should call it palette but i'll show you it might be it might be good starting with the vocals on this one actually because um it's so some of the vocals were recorded for the session but

11:40then most of them were bits that we sampled from some of their other songs and so if i solo rocks vocal bus

11:57so like the the babies are from one song and then this middle one here i think i think was something he recorded on a on a zoom session one night but we we ended up having a lot of vocals that were all from different places and all sounded quite quite different and so we spent a long time trying to get them all to sound like they were recorded in the same session and we we use a lot of processing on vocals a lot of the time and so this one this is like this looks like it's rock sort of main track

12:28here yeah so this is the main kind of baby and on this it's um okay so that's pitching them up and if we look at this one here i reckon it's probably would you be able to build it up from the sample like

Vocal processing chains

12:43go step by step yeah with with all the plugins yeah yeah there's about a hundred plugins so um um bear with me yeah we can definitely do that a few yeah yeah yeah let me turn them all off so on this one it's so intrigued to hear what this is so there's about four different stages of processing that's gone through there and so on its own it sounded like that this sounds like it's been this has definitely been pitched at some point and we've bounced it by the looks of things we pitched him

13:13down a bit there i think um but that was how it was originally i'll see if there's any other we lost baby so you can kind of hear all the like where we've like warped stuff and stretched it or pitched stuff down and then try and smooth a lot of that stuff out with um with some of the processing so if we turn on this is the processing just on the on the baby section of the vocal which i think is going to be pitching him up a little bit baby yeah so let's just bring all the four months up a lot

13:43this is the same pitch obviously but just the four months coming up um a bit of eq i don't know what we're really thinking there uh micro shift which we use on absolutely loads of stuff and a bit of auto-tune although it sounded like it was auto-tuned already but yeah and then from there it then goes up into the group here which will have a bit more sort of general processing on it um the towel chorus which we rinse on basically everything don't we um cla vocals which we don't use that much but when

14:17we do it works really well it's one of those ones we've dug out recently and sort of started using it again a little bit because for certain things especially for high-end energy it's just it's amazing yeah and um is this helpless preset which i think we've used on a bunch of stuff it's it's yeah it just kind of makes everything like pop a lot it takes a lot of the lows out and and then we've got a duck doing some sidechaining on it that looks like a tiny slapback delay so then without with those effects on it would be starting to get into more of a natural natural space again and a lot of

14:54what i can see here is a lot of vocals have got completely different processing on and that will be because they were sampled from different songs or recorded for the session and then we're just trying to get them to all match each other and then from there they could then go up into the main this is the kind of main vocal processing for his bus he him we've we've done quite different processing for for him and kindora and so this starts off with discord 4 which is it sort of does a lot like micro shift does but with some more a bit more control over how much you're you're spreading

15:27the the pitch and and and delay of something but we're just using it here to widen the vocal

15:34suddenly it's really stereo it sounds like there's multiple uh copies playing another duck um an 1176 with album ready vocal reset lotus so yeah yeah we compress all of our vocals really heavily most of the time we really wanted rock's vocal on this to sound very much like a sample and and some heavily compressing something can really pull up all of the extra noise and stuff i think almost like we sampled it from an old chicago house record or something like that that's the sort of um

16:08the energy that we're going to yeah yeah yeah and is that what you're seeking i mean in that quality of creating something to sound like it's been sampled even though you've done a late night zoom session yeah yeah a lot yeah i think um when we get it into a world where it feels like it's been sampled then we start approaching using it in a different way um the way that we approach using samples in general is so much different to how we would if it was just recorded for us you know i think with the recording we tend to be so much more precious in terms of like the lengths we'll

16:40go to to process it with a sample we're much more carefree and i think we realized that quite a while ago and and that is a headspace that we enjoy being in where we feel like oh you know you can just do whatever you want with it and you know get it into this spot that's giving you that feeling without feeling like oh i shouldn't really pitch it too much because you know that's i don't in some way it's been disrespectful to the person who's recorded it yeah whereas with a sample you feel like you've just got that license to kind of run with anything yeah yeah and it's it sounds like as well with this even though there's still lots of plugins on here we've definitely bounced these vocals at some point in the

17:15in a previous project and so we probably got it to a point where we thought oh yeah this is feeling like a sample let's bounce that yeah we have the sample and then we've taken that and we've we've built on it um for this so then we yeah we've got another compressor which is probably that's like a very mu compressor so it's uh much more just slow and gentle and adding a bit of harmonics to it some just fairly savage corrective eq and we took out loads at the bottom end on his vocal to give it a slight sort of like phone quality to it which again just makes it feel more like it's been

17:47sampled from from somewhere uh we've got two of those doing exactly the same thing are you working on the track at the same time as adjusting these and so yeah yeah kind of adjusting the vocal according to what's happening in the yeah exactly we we always do most of our mixer because we go along yeah um try to yeah so as you're doing all that what is happening to the track so we would with something like a vocal we'd spend a lot of time going through this part of the process where we're adding we've got lots of different eqs here um lots of ds's and things and we spend quite a lot of

18:22time doing that whilst we're writing so we would have had the main melodic elements written in the project and then when we start working on the vocal spend quite a long time on that and then we'll go back to the uh to the synths and stuff so some of those synths would have been recorded whilst we're on the road and then we'll get back into the studio and we would re-track everything yeah and build up the thing from there but it's important to us that the vocal feels quite strong and where it needs to be from the off because otherwise it can be really difficult to make decisions on what you're trying to achieve if it's not fitting sonically in the in the right space but it's nothing we're

18:53not doing actually anything particularly crazy here it's you know it's a bit of cutting a bit of sub on a mag um and a bit of a 2.5 k we often do like a little it's like one db boost at 2.5 just gives a bit of bite to his to his vocal and that's that's everything on on rocks vocal oh and then one one last compressor just to i don't know because we've got about four different compressors but that that's yeah even this one which is the last compressor this is still doing minus five db compression even

19:23more minus six maybe so the overall is probably like about 20 dbs of compression if you add them all up together but it's it's just what sounds nice to us and it means that you end up having to do loads of really annoying things like loads of the clicking and whatever because you bring up every single bit of mouth noise and everything else but the the quality of the actual tone of the voice becomes sort of a bit grittier and raspier and and i think that compression just makes it feel a bit

19:54more brings out the emotion i think the compression a lot of the time we use we use compression just generally a lot yeah so there's real perseverance to the processing approach isn't there and that you're determined to get to the sound that you're looking for yeah we start off yeah we're really drawn towards the tone of the vocal in the first place which is why we actually just fell in love with condora's voice straight away because it was for us it's just perfect and then you know we're very very particular about how we then wanted to push it and just for it to sound on our record um it's very

20:26rare that we'll take a vocal and not process it quite heavily we we do from time to time but mostly it's there's lots of layers of compression and eq and then whatever else and we're very very aligned yeah lots of chorus um we're very aligned on when we get to that point that we're after we're quite aligned on like oh yeah that's that's it you know yeah um and i could say that probably about our music in general you know it's like we have a very clear idea in our head about what how we want the end product to sound and it's not necessarily traditionally what would be considered correct but it's how we envisage

21:01it to be sounding and it can take quite a long time sometimes yeah we go round and round and round because um i can tell here from this from this project that we've we've had to flatten the voc uh kindora's vocal at some point because of cpu it would have been and so this one will sound like there's loads going on but actually there's just two ds's and a and a reverb but this will have also have gone through the same treatment of multiple layers of compression eq chorus

21:39so it's like you can hear there it's almost like the backing vocals and and artifacts from where we've ripped the vocal from they're being brought up just as much as the actual vocal itself they all become part of the the rhythm and the groove yeah yeah let's hear them in context then yeah oh these are then all the vocals just sort of the vocals and the synths give them some content

22:12oh

22:20oh

22:30you kind of get this the the idea was always that we'd have this sort of a b call and response between the two of them you know you'd have rock doing the verses and then kindora coming in on the choruses and keep keep going between the two and it's all it's all just chopped up in audio we

23:00always do everything like this in audio in fact most of our projects all end up as as audio that i don't think there's anything from this that would be running in in midi still so you've clearly got the vocals where you want them you've got the bass line that inspired you and your version of that what happens next because obviously there's a lot of other stuff in the song in terms of the beat and the drums and the whole movement and momentum within that track i think the next thing was the synths wasn't it because a lot of the time early on in a song especially with something

23:32like this we'll keep the drums really simple and it could just be it might be just a drum stem from one of our other tunes or it can be whatever and it's just kind of there as a placeholder a lot of the time in the early bit so we just just sort of focus on on what the song should be and so i think the next thing we we spent a lot of time on was the chorus synths which are made up of loads of layers there's that which we haven't actually labeled what that was but it sounds like it was possibly the

24:14i think we did third wave we did i remember the recording session we did lots of third wave lots of decades um some juno 60 and then we sort of chose what we thought were some of the more interesting bits and then comped them together so if i play this bit here where they're all layered up together so this is what they sound like all together so there's a there's a virus layer

24:46a nice sort of almost like plucked organ kind of thing this one's just called accordion and i think was the jupiter four oh yeah and then these are so these two layers these are two layers together that give it the kind of sort of churchy feeling and a big part of that is these two plugins here

25:18one is the eventide omnipressor which is just again it's just slamming them and it's they're they're both quite short sounds and we wanted to make them feel much more sort of drawn out and and more just ethereal and so when there's more staccato this is just a bit too jolly that's it without the the processing and it just sounds a bit um a bit polite and then we're essentially using this is a plugin that will split your transient and your uh the sort of

25:56sustain parts of a signal into two different controllable things we're not using any of the effects on it but we've just turned down the transient quite a lot and we've turned the sustain up massively and so that combined with another pretty savage compressor then turns it into something that's you know it's all all the all the reverb and stuff that we would have recorded in the studio which is probably the pcm 80 and the noise and everything like that as well just suddenly starts

26:27coming up and we always love that with um filling in the gaps and creating that rhythm and helping the groove yeah and then on on top of that there's a there's some more this is a layer from the juno and this is i think we've done the same thing on the um yeah we've we've turned the sustains up again on it to give it just that not nothing too transient or attacky and a bit of compression

26:58and that's yeah that's it on there actually there's not even any eq which is oh it's been flattened so maybe that wasn't cute at some point but then yeah they all layer up with the main bass and there's oh there's these profit lines as well which are really nice so we've recorded the profit dry and we've panned that hard left and then we recorded the echo

27:33fully wet which would have been a uh space space echo 201 and we've panned that hard right and then against all logic we've mono'd the two so i don't know what we've been with panning are we really yeah there's the first first buggy in the chain then monos it this maybe unless it was sometimes why it distorts mad if you so anyway we've then mono put that back into mono and um that's being compressed and kind of warming it up a bit with soundtoids radiator which we use on a lot

28:08we use that on on mix buses quite a lot as well um the pre-1973 we often use that for just a bit of a top like the top end boost on that is always really nice isn't it and you only need a tiny amount and that adds a huge amount and then this um insane reverb which it just sounds yeah like no other reverb i've heard which will just be putting it into a tiny bit of space if i turn the reverb off it probably sounds quite similar what is the reverb it's called cinematic rooms i think it's more for like

28:45audio post stuff like you can just choose loads of different rooms and things to to put the sound in and a lot of them are really subtle we use it quite a lot to just give something a sense of space you know sometimes you don't want something to sound like it's got any reverb on it but it should sound like it's in a sense of space and so we use we use that a lot and do you ever go back on your processing because you must spend hours doing this and then think oh no that's that that doesn't sound the way we wanted it yeah all the time yeah right yeah it's complete trial and

29:15error yeah endlessly yeah it'll often be i mean this i guess is one of the benefits of working the duo you know like ed might spend ages and ages with this huge processing chain and i'll come along and i'll just switch some of it off and i'll be like i kind of prefer it like that and then i'll sort of argue why the other 10 plugins need to go back on and we'll normally settle with about five of them yeah and obviously likewise the other way around yeah although ed does have a more of a tendency to throw a few more plugins on than i do it does get a bit um it gets a bit over the top a lot of the time

29:47so all this development has been done to the sound of a placeholder beat at this point so now what do you have to do to get that right rhythm that you're looking for again it's just a lot of trial and error and experimentation and i think we did multiple different beats for this song which which probably all sound like really similar but um we we knew we wanted the drums to be quite simple and not like melodically this song is quite complicated and we wanted the rhythm to just sort of solidify the whole

30:20thing and so the beat if we solo the drums

30:30in this track obviously the the vocals the star then the the baseline the synths and then i think the drums you can say are probably the not the afterthought but the the least important aspect and i think it's just a case of finding something that served a purpose yeah um with the rest of the

Drum patterns and mix bus magic

30:46supports rest without at all being um the thing that you focus on yeah and yet i mean it's called ballad so the immediate assumption before you've heard it is that oh it's going to be a downbeat track and there are mellow downbeat tracks on the album but this is not one of them but it is called ballad yeah yeah it felt like that would be the obvious route to go so we thought we'd yeah make this one the ballad um but in terms of what's actually going on in the beat the kick just has a little bit a bit of eq and a bit of frequency shifting as well um i'm just going to

31:17butt in here with a question that we've had via patreon from matt day who says i'd love to hear more about how they write and sequence their drum patterns do they use drum machines to create loops and chop later or build a lot of their own kits using drum samples we build a lot of our own kits whenever we get a new synth in studio we multi sample it and create a drum rack in ableton so we've got a load of different drum racks from like sampling the mono machine decadestream just like juno yeah you make you can make drums on basically any synth uh ms20 yeah so we've got a lot that we can lean on

31:52we do use every now and then drum machine like we've got the tr1000 at the moment and that's been featured on the record on a couple of tracks but we tend to avoid like using too many sort of um traditional drum machine sounds yeah so this this kick drum for example probably would have been recorded from like one of multiple sources in the studio and we don't have like any sort of set way of work you know if it's like okay we need a kick for this tune we don't have any like go-to thing that

32:23we would our approach in general doesn't have much sort of routine to it or structure no it's always kind of like okay well what can we make a kick drum with today and we'll then you know it and it can be just it can be just something simple using a really simple single oscillator synth and just trying to get something that's got the rough shape of a kick drum in terms of how it's decaying and then you just record that and then we'll process it more and more and similarly with the rest of the drums in here i mean it's um a couple of clap layers one of them i think is probably just some that

32:58sounds just like uh like the start of a record click kind of thing it's got a lot of hiss on top this is just this is just some white noise uh running into a filter just to give it that kind of bit of bit of body and then there's just a little 808 clap in there as well which gives it the gives it the crack and then those three together make something that's sort of got a bit of a bit of everything to it and then one thing we do a lot of is we do a lot of bus processing and this whole song would

33:31sound completely different without it like all of our songs would so if i turn off the everything we've got here on the drum bus so the drums should sound like this that's what sounds like without with all of the all of the all of the drum bus processing off it sounds like that but that wouldn't have been the point we had it at but you once you've started adding loads of plugins to it you then start mixing into those plugins and that way of working with kind of mixing into into chains and

34:07buses it kind of applies to the mix bus as well i know a lot of people don't like to have anything on the mix bus and it's maybe the more correct way of doing things sometimes but we we just do whatever like this mix bus chain i don't think it would make any sense to someone that was like a audio engineer necessarily but we just keep on going until it sounds right to us and we mastered the record with a lot of these plugins and we we would the the mastering we we did a combination of sort of hardware and plug-in depending on on the song and and this song we ended up a lot of the mastering

34:41ended up just being done in this project i've got a feeling this might have been the final master that we we did from this session i'd say this plugin is without a doubt our most used our most used plugin and probably the most important to the sound of our records would be fair to say in terms of which plugin is this is called ruby 3 it's based on a the dw fin valve eq it's like pull textile eq and um we got to use the real hardware like a long time ago and it sort of blew our minds like what it did you know

35:11with the mid scoop and the cat and and boost and so we found this this plugin from acoustica and it's using uh impulse responses so it's like pretty faithfully based on the original hardware and it just does this magic thing that you it's like a real treat when you get to like a fairly good spot on the track you're just like gosh we treat ourselves to a ruby and we put that on the mix bus and suddenly it just sounds much more like a record right and you just dial in really really quickly you know like a little bit for cut and boost on on the base around 40 hertz or something um and then

35:45a little scoop at 200 hertz and then maybe like a little cut and boost at the top as well and then it just suddenly just sounds yeah we can play you play you a bit with it with it off yes um so this is i'll play it with it on first which is

36:08and then off

36:14it sounds quite subtle in this one it's but it is basically takes away a load of the lower mid mud this has become another go-to plugin which is the ampex tape simulator from um uad and when we don't record something physically to tape we often end up using this because it has a bit more control and the classic jazz vision master is the uh it's the go-to setting and it's got this thing in

36:49the repro section where it kind of really lifts the top end but it's it's does something really different to just boosting an eq at the top end i'm not sure what the science is behind it but it always just adds this really nice sort of sheen and kind of crispiness to the top and again just feel it has that thing of like i don't know it's just existing as it should sound it's hard to yeah well i hear that now too yeah so then so this is what it sounds like with no processing and it'll sound particularly because we would have ultimately ended up mixing into this process but this is

37:20fairly like standard for how we'd end up making something isn't it so this is it with nothing

37:31tape machine which we're taking off 10 db before we hit the tape machine just so we can hit it at the right level which on this instance was not very hard and then another 3d boost into this plugin here which is doing a lot of the heavy lifting this is a plugin that we've been working on that's going to be coming out later in the year one of your own creation we yeah with um collaboration with a collaboration with another company uh it's called diamond cut and we ended up

38:05using it a lot on this record it's just uh basically a a bus processor a mix bus processor and it's yeah get a bit of saturation a bit of stereo with some clipping um expansion that sort of thing and you can go quite wild on it if you want but you can also just um and this one we haven't gone that wild it's just a little bit of soft saturation i think yeah we've got a little bit of the stereo width the the limiter section on it is is really good at kind of particularly for for songs

38:36like this it gives you a huge amount of level without detracting from whatever else but i don't know if it's it's it's very good at just making things very loud without it squashing things too much and we've used it fairly lightly here it doesn't even look like we're getting we're getting about one db of of gain reduction but and this is often how we'll use uh limiting is kind of multiple limiters happening one after another something we've got four in a row here so then after that we've just eqed it a tiny bit we've got about half a db boost somewhere in the in the

39:11lower mid so that would have been just sometimes if you take out a bit too much with the ruby doing the kind of pull text style high and low cut at the same time at the same frequency sometimes you can take out a bit too much and it can sound like you've got loads at the bottom loads at the top and this kind of gaping void in the middle so we've probably just added half a db there to try and bring a little bit of that in and in terms of this layers of limiting why do you use the layers is it because you want to use the different types of limiting that they're on offer they have different

39:41characteristics and then the effect that each of those has on each other as you layer them up yeah exactly so the the four limiters we've used here are the first one's diamond cut that would make things just quite loud and quite punchy and then vintage warmer does a sort of similar thing but it's we're using the eq section of of the vintage warmer here and then that the the next limiter after that would be the l2 which has a really different sound to it it can ruin l2 can ruin music really quickly it's like a really sort of smeary sounding limiter but a little bit of it can be

40:17really nice and again it just pulls up loads of noise we're always very like keen on just like pulling up all of the other stuff in the music that isn't just the the actual things that we've been intending to record and then we've got a pro l2 on the end which is like in you know we've got it set to transparent mode it's doing it's like very very clean um and again doing yeah maybe maybe 2db limiting tops and so having different limiters one after another you can have

40:48they'll all have different attack and release settings and so you can have instead of having one limiter and you're getting 6db of gain reduction but with the same attack and release settings you could have one limiter that had a very quick attack and release and you can just do you know get one or two db of limiting out of that and it's almost at that point you're it's almost just acting like a clipper whereas then you know something like the l2 ultra maximizer which is the sort of complete opposite and more kind of takes off a lot of transients a lot of the time if you're not careful

41:20it sort of it can really just like take your source material really far away from what from what it was but again just a tiny bit of that so we're just sort of using all the different characters i think of these different limiters and again it's just like trial and error and just seeing what sounds right to us yeah really interesting um let's have a blast of everything together to hear all those wonderful things in effect

41:55i got a feeling that i want i know so so

42:26One thing I thought of whilst we were listening to that was this noise here, which we've used quite a lot on the record, haven't we?

42:44Just this kind of intense that. There's a little synth box that we picked up in Japan. Is it Hakimi? Yeah, something like that. I'm not entirely sure what it does. But it just creates lots of interesting, just random static noises. And we just spent a few hours sampling that before it broke. I think it's just like a bunch of feedback circuits, basically, isn't it? And you kind of just control the amount of things feeding back into each other. And it's kind of impossible to get it doing anything musical properly.

43:17It's very, very difficult to tame, yeah. But it's very fun just to spend a while seeing what it does when you push various sliders up. And, yeah, we sampled it for a while. And, yeah, that's one of those things. You know, there's a few sounds that we have that we always leaned on to do various things and tracks. And that's definitely one of them. Yeah. One of the signature sounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. New record. Excellent. Right. Well, thank you. That was amazing. That was ballad. We're going to take a quick break.

Creating the hypnotic track Barham

43:46And the next song we're going to look at is Barham. The next song we're going to look at from Pure Devotion by Overmono is Barham. But before we get into it, I've got a couple of questions from Patreon. Kalia Berry asks, what is something you both wish you'd known when you first began performing live sets? And what did your prep for those sets look like when you had minimal pro resources? To tape in any USB leads inside of the computer because vibrations are, yeah, quite savage sometimes.

44:18Yeah, we got caught out a lot with that in the early days. We used to change the entire live show setup basically after every single show. We'd finish a show, go back to the hotel room, and we'd sit down, chat, and we'd like go through everything that we sort of, what was working, what wasn't, what was good to perform, what wasn't. And then we'd go again with another revision. And we did that for, I don't know, a few years. And then you got to a happy place where you were happy with everything. Yeah, we slowly started to figure out exactly what we wanted to achieve and how we wanted to do it.

44:52Yeah. Yeah. I think the best advice would be to start small and slowly build up. It's, you know, it's really different being in your bedroom or whatever, and you're playing around on whatever gear. And you're like, oh, yeah, this could be great. And then you get on stage and it's 3 a.m. and you're in Australia and you're just really confused. And so the amount of times we would make some insane modular patch and then you get on stage and you're like, I actually don't know if this is going to do what we thought it was going to do. And you forget all those times in the studio where you're like, oh, I'm going to dial this in a bit.

45:26And so it was kind of, I think if you start out small, you can really get to know the equipment that you're using and get really comfortable using that. So you can just use it completely second nature. You don't really need to think what you're doing. And then each time you can just slowly expand it and keep keep making sure that you're kind of across everything because it's really easy for it to just like run away. Yeah. You're always just trying to keep the wheels from falling off. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, the next song we're going to look at from Pure Devotion is Barham. So maybe if you could give us a blast to the master, that would be great.

45:58We're going to look at it.

46:28We're going to look at it.

46:58It is Barham by Obermono from Pure Devotion in quite a contrast to Ballard, which we've looked into already. And in contrast to the discussion of live music and live performing, this one is more intimate. And there's a couple of tracks side by side within the album that kind of take it down and get quite hypnotic and downbeat and more mellow.

47:29And show us the other side of Obermono. Yeah, I think a lot of the time we write a lot of our music quite late at night in the studio and it's me and Tom locked away in a room somewhere where we often try and sort of isolate ourselves as much as possible. And that's when songs like this seem to emerge. A lot of the time we just like to spend hours and hours with a few synths and just writing melodies, dialing in a sound and then writing some melodies or some bass lines or whatever and just hitting record.

48:03And just building up layers and layers and layers that we can then go in at a certain other point, maybe when we're on a plane or in a hotel room and we can start chopping it up and seeing if there's something there. And you get a little bit of a break from it. And I think that was one of the sort of ways that this track came about, you know, it started off just with a few synths and not much else. And I think we probably left it for a couple of months and then came back to it. And if you come back to an idea, you know, or like some sounds that you're just like, you're still really into it, then you think, oh, it's probably something here that's worth carrying on with.

48:34And then we built it up from there, I think.

Keyboard voices and re-amping drums

48:36This one, I think, started with this melody that you wrote on the performer, didn't it? There's a synth called the Vimona Performa, which is basically four monosynths all sort of on top of each other, all with their own controls. But it plays like a polyphonic synth. So you can have different, you know, release and envelope times for the amp or the filter. And you can basically have each of them as its own separate voice. And what you can do is, because it's four voices and you can set the way that it does the polyphony.

49:07So you're going to have it in monophonic, duophonic, polyphonic. And one of the settings, it'll randomly cycle between the voices. And so if you send it a triad chord, every single time the triad, you know, you repeat that chord, it's going to sort of do some different voicing. So you could have like a couple of voices, different octaves, different envelope settings and stuff like that. And you end up just with these really beautiful, evolving chords, which I don't think we've been able to figure out how to do that on pretty much anything.

49:37I mean, the monopoly, I think, does something similar, but not quite the same. So this is the Vimona part here, which has just a bit of EQ, but this would have been recorded through the Decades Expander. Decades Expander, yeah. So you can hear, I think, there's a chorus and there's a bit of ring mod, so you can hear the modulation, which is like some sort of noise, almost like a Juno chorus, I guess. So you can clearly hear there's some, you know, one of the voices there has got the envelope with the attack sort of turned up a bit in a slower attack.

50:19And then one of the voices has got much more of a punch to it, so you get the odd note kind of jumping, jumping through. Should we hear it without the processing? So we probably just decided that it sounded a bit too nice on its own, a bit too, like, easy to digest.

50:58Also, because it's got four independent voices, they've all got their own tuning, and there's no, there's nothing to tell you where, I mean, there's no indent where zero is. I think it's probably purposefully done so that it's notoriously difficult to get it bang on in tune, but that's one of the things that gives it so much character. And it very, very quickly becomes very detuned, but as a result, it's just beautifully, beautiful sounding and imperfect in a very nice way.

51:32Yeah. And what came next? And where were you doing all this?

51:36Some of it would have been done at yours. This was, yeah, so some of these synths were done in my studio. So we've got the performer and then there's the CS-15, which is doing the bass. Which is this one here.

51:49And this is fairly raw, I think it's maybe, I think maybe recorded it through a 501, just for a bit of chorus.

52:07But then other than that, I mean, we just love the way that this, I mean, that synth sounds amazing, just straight out of the box. And then we spent quite a long time on the drums on this one. The drums were originally recorded from the TR-1000, which is this rhythm here.

52:35Which would have been recorded in the studio going through Space Echo and the Great British Spring, which was giving it all that space and everything to it there. And it's relatively unprocessed. We've got a bit of multiband compression on it and a little bit of EQ and a bit more compression. But it's like everything's doing a tiny amount. But then the drum, the main bit of the drums is we took that TR-1000 recording. And then once we had mapped, had the whole song mapped out, we then retracked the drums through two different speakers in the studio.

53:12And so on the left, you have this signal here from just a big, was it like a 4x12 Marshall stack? And that's just got loads of space to it, quite gritty, all the low ends gone, obviously. I think we might have EQ'd a lot of that out.

53:40So that's through the Marshall with a microphone in front of it then? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then on the other side is this recording.

53:51And that was the drums tracked through a, we've got an announcement speaker from a train station from, we reckon it's about from like somewhere like 1925 to 1935. It's about 100 years old, we reckon. But no one seems to know where it came from. But it's this old, like big metal round speaker. And it's got like a really unusual sound to it. We've got it hanging from the ceiling in the studio. And to be honest, the first time we turned it on, we were amazed by how it sounded so good.

54:23The first thing we played through it was Flight FM by Joy. And it just sounded like amazing. And then we started recording an MS-20 through it. And immediately, like a hundred year old speaker that survived everything, we just, we just tore it enough. And so then we opened it up and the driver, it was a Goodman's driver. So we contacted someone from Goodman's in the hope that they'd be able to sort of like ID it. And they had no idea, they'd like, I've never seen one of these before. So it was like, oh, it's definitely pretty old. But we managed to source another driver, which is another pretty old one.

54:54We tried a few different ones and we found another one that we really liked the sound of. It's not exactly the same, but it does the sort of trick. Wow. So you were actually able to mend it and make it work. Yeah. Well, mostly our studio tech, John, I don't even know, it feels wrong calling him a studio tech. He's just someone who's just helps us with a lot of stuff, whether it's like, you know, so he tried out like a Celestian driver in it, for example, that we'd taken out the back of an old amp and these sorts of things. But anyway, so then when you combine those two files together, you've got the Marshall on the left and the train speaker on the right.

55:25And these are just the re-amp drums on their own.

55:29It gives this really wide stereo image. It also feels like slightly unusual or unnatural. And then we've just got a bit of the dry in there as well with the kick.

55:45And it just gave everything this really nice big sense of space. And especially with the 808 carobells and things, you can kind of hear where compressors are sort of like trying to pull everything in. Basically, anytime we can add elements that have things that we can then compress is always kind of good. And this one we've got, yeah, we panned a lot of the drums before recording them. So if we had, say, like a ride that was panned hard left and when we recorded it through the Marshall, we'd only record that side of it.

56:19So we kind of sent only the left signal to the Marshall and then only the right signal to the train speaker. So we've still got the same stereo image afterwards. And then the vocal. The vocal was through the. Is that a sample? Yes, we sampled it. It's a jazz carousel track. And we played about with a few different vocals for this one. And this one just sort of jumped at us quite, quite quickly with what we were trying to convey with the track.

56:50And the processing on this is reasonably minimal. I think we tracked it through a space station to begin with. It's lucky enough to have been lent a major space station. And that is just incredible sounding. We've been using the plugin for ages and to have used the real one. It is amazing. And then. But then that's. Yeah. The processing is pretty minimal in it. Yeah. Right. Compared to Ballard, for example, where we wanted it to sound quite heavily processed. This one felt right that it should be a bit more natural sounding.

57:21But also as well as the space station probably did quite a lot of the heavy lifting, didn't it? In terms of giving it a sense of space and width and everything. Yeah. We've got this MV2 plug in, the Waves one, which still don't fully understand what it does, but it's really useful. You just kind of, it's only got two sliders on it. You just sort of move them around until it sounds right. It's doing some sort of compression, expansion, upward compression, possibly. And a golf us again, which is just kind of smoothing out some of the vocal. But I think the vocal would sound.

57:50So this is the, we don't have the original dry vocal. This would have already been resampled. There's this layer here too. Is this through the. Now you're saying that I lost it. That's the 501, is it? Now you're saying that I lost it. Anyway, some sort of effects then there that we've recorded separately. And then we've got this whole, we've got some extra channels here of just some sort of vocal throws and effects and things. Like, this is just some takes of some 501 recordings of the chorus echo. Just little bits like that, which were made with the sending out the vocal and a couple more here, which.

58:31So that's the PCM80.

58:37And that's just used there to try and put the vocal into a bit of a different space during that section. And then this was one of the last bits that we did, which was this kind of profit section in the middle, I think, wasn't it?

59:01We played around for ages with how much we wanted to detune it there, didn't we? There's so there's this sort of main profit ten layer, which is.

59:22Here we go in there. Yeah. We decided in the end, it was just starting to sound a little bit too demonic. As much as we love detune since, it was just going a bit too far in the wrong direction. That one sort of fades out, doesn't it? Yeah. So then it was a case of sort of like having that fade out and then having a much warmer, I think, pad from the Juno that comes in. Yeah, that one.

59:53And in terms of the track, I mean, you've got all these different elements. Have you already arranged the song or are you still working on that? At this point, we'd already arranged the song. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the original part that was in. It was just the CS-15. It was the CS-15, right? Yeah.

1:00:19Yeah. So that would have been the original file. And then there was those two other, there was the Prophet and the Juno, but then there's this group here, which is, I don't know, like eight more Prophet parts by the looks of it. So I solo those. And I think what we've done, there was this old Stephen Stills record, which I've completely forgotten the name of now, but does this amazing sort of stereo trick early on in the song. And we wanted to do something sort of similar in this. So as this sort of little breakdown bit progresses and everything sort of slightly becomes detuned, we started bringing the stereo field sort of narrower and narrower and narrower.

1:00:52So it feels like it's kind of closing in on your head. And then when it cuts to the next section, it suddenly opens back up again. So you don't even really notice until it opens back up again. We've done that a couple of times on the record. Yeah. And so these are all the Prophet layers during this section, apart from the other sort of the main detuned one. I feel it sort of slowly coming into the middle of your face, basically.

1:01:38And then suddenly opens up right at the end. And those were Prophet recorded onto some of us through the Mugafuga Cluster Flux, which just sounds like amazing. It's just some weird sort of delay thing. And then also a lot of them, loads of them through the 501, which we use, we use a huge amount. And that's, so we've got like one layer on the left there, just 501 completely wet. And then another one. Again, it's sort of, it's all, a lot of that's just all recording the wet only signal of effects.

1:02:15And we'll do that a lot. So we can then kind of pan it differently to the dry or sometimes just not use the dry at all and just use the wet. But that's sort of all the stuff we tend to do. Like once we've written, kind of finished the writing, like the whole arrangement of that was done, wasn't it? Before we started adding all of these layers to it. Yeah. And that's not necessarily the way we always work. It's just how it panned out for this track. Yeah. And what was the intention with this track when you were writing it? Were you thinking about the album and its position on the album? Or was it just that you happened to be getting lost in this world?

1:02:49We generally just get lost in worlds. Yeah. We were always writing, like it's just obsessively writing in the studio. So it's more of a case of just doing whatever you feel like doing at that particular day. And like I said, this one came about by just playing about the synths for a few hours, recording that, keeping that on a hard drive, and then opening it up at some point and being like, oh, there's something in this. And I can sort of like, you know, maybe we hear it and we're just like, oh, we can see where this, we want to take this now.

1:03:22And for this one, it was like, okay, we wanted to take this. I think we tried a kick drum in it at some point, like a 4-4 kick and maybe some sort of like snare rhythm and stuff like that. But as soon as we then made it a bit more just, I don't know, deeper and darker, it felt much more sort of where we wanted to go with it, where the track should go, I think. Yeah. Well, we've got to move on as well. So let's have a blast of the ending of Barham and then we'll take a quick break. Well, you owe me everything out of my first name.

1:04:16See you all. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Even if you don't love me Even if you don't love me Even if you don't love me

1:04:58It is Barham by Overmono Counturing up all sorts of other artists Now that I'm listening to it with you I'm thinking of Leila and Borders of Canada And Borders Head Yeah, fantastic All very on-point references Excellent, right Well we're going to take a quick break And in contrast The next song we're going to look at Is Night in Shining Prada The next song we're going to look at From Pure Devotion by Overmono

Writing Night in Shining Prada

1:05:25Is Night in Shining Prada But before that I've got another question via Patreon This time from Bardman Who says I heard you mention in a past interview That regarding harmony You try to sound not too happy Or too sad I think you guys do this perfectly On your tracks Pulling on emotions that do sit In that middle ground And I was interested to know About the keys and the notes And the chords that you choose When writing a track To achieve that kind of effect It's kind of just the notes That sound right to us basically We would rarely be able to tell you

1:05:56What key we were working in It's sort of It's often led by whatever We've sampled Or just whatever we've played At that time But we wouldn't necessarily Be in a position to say I've just written something in F minor It would be You've just sort of written something And you listen back to it And then you start developing it And then you're like Hang on a minute What key are we in here? It'd be handy some points To know the key But that's usually Like quite way down the line Yeah I think a lot of it's informed By the sample And if we find a vocal sample We really like We don't want to push it Too far away from the original

1:06:27Pitch that it was at But we usually sort of like We'll pitch it up A semitone or two So that will often inform But again It's like It's whatever sounds Good to us at the time And then finding the key Will be further on down the line I guess there's like Certain intervals That we're always really Drawn towards That sort of thing But yeah It's kind of hard It'd be nice to know What we're doing more But maybe that's not But it's also probably good That we don't Yeah And it's an emotional response As much as Yeah Yeah Exactly

1:06:58Trust us out Yeah Excellent Right Well Night in Shining Prada Is the next one We're going to look at Featuring John Joseph Holt I think we should hear A blast of the master Yeah I'm not sure if I'm getting Closer to you Or further away I shut my eyes

1:07:30And try to picture Your face Faith keeps me close to you But not close enough I long for your embrace But you're gone when I wake up The herons on the riverbank Are always out of reach I go to ask a question But they're gone before I speak

1:08:02I get on the train Everything looks the same But it's clear to me That it's all changed As I stand here today I am a spitting example of you They say it's like we're in the same Just a little taste of Night in Shining Prada Featuring John Joseph Holt By Over Mono How did this one start? We were introduced to John And he was up for working on something with us

1:08:35Which was incredible Because we'd both been fans of John for a while And his various projects And he sent us a voice note And it was just this incredible poem That he'd written It was almost like an internal monologue Because it just flowed out of him And it took us quite a while to figure out What we wanted to do with it How best to give it a platform That we felt like did it justice And then Ed at some point said I've got this chord sequence Or this series of chords

1:09:06I think could work well And we were in a studio in northern Spain A place called Udra And as soon as he played these chords And I think we maybe rooted them out So there's a Prophet 6 They've got this amazing It's got this really cool phaser on it Yeah, the phaser made it And we rooted it out to that And I think it was just like A sort of fairly random patch We maybe just dialed in pretty quickly But it had this phaser already on it And as soon as he played those chords And we put the vocal on it We were just like Oh There's one of those ones

1:09:36It's just like Oh yeah, that's it Do you have the original voice note? Or an approximation of it? Yeah Because did you re-record the voice? Yeah, we did We did We recorded it in this studio In fact, the studio upstairs Yeah In this building So we're in the strong room We're in the strong room And you recorded the vocal In Tommy's studio It's my Warwick studio upstairs And yeah So we did a couple of sessions In there with John It was one of those ones That it was

1:10:06It became really sort of Done We really, really loved What he'd done So off the cuff In the original voice note There was something That was so Of a moment And this Like I said The internal monologue Is outpouring And it felt so immediate And that was something That we really wanted To try and capture And The voice note itself The quality just wasn't Quite Yeah Good enough And so this is something That we wanted to then Try and get in higher fidelity

1:10:36I've got I can't find the The original voice note But I've got the Very first demo Which will have The voice note In it And this would have been What we were working on It was about 4am In Spain And we had to fly The next day And it was kind of Like the last thing That we could do In this studio So this This would be really Really rough And Like often the way We won't I'm guessing This vocal's probably Going to be Completely out of time And There won't be much drums

1:11:06Or anything going on But it's kind of Often how we work Early on Just to As we're sort of Sketching ideas And seeing Trying to find the right Route for something And so this was This was what we recorded On the first night Faith keeps me close to you But not close enough I long for your embrace But you're gone when I wake up Sound of the vocals About twice the speed of the track The heavens on the riverbank Are always out of reach I'll go to ask a question But they're gone before I speak I get on the train

1:11:37Everything looks the same It's really interesting hearing it Because obviously To find the right chords That would Match The tone Of what he's saying And you just Happened to get them Yeah And you instinctively knew Right The emotional Landing of this tune Was really Really important to us And it was It was important That it didn't feel It's a really The lyrics are very Very personal to John And it was important That it didn't feel Too saccharine Or We wanted it to feel Like a celebration As much as anything

1:12:08And also Maybe a bit of Anger Sort of a call to arms Almost You know Like something That you could just Feel hyped about But that wasn't Gonna be Just a straight up Party tune Or anything like that Yeah Yeah So I think When we started Developing this Then after After we had That first demo The first Like Tom was saying The first synth We recorded Was This prophet And that Is just How can I

1:12:39Take these off So that was What we recorded And then We've just put on Some One filter That's being triggered By the kick drum And so every time The kick drum's hitting It's kind of Opening up the filter And just a bit of EQ But then So that was the That was the first layer We recorded In this studio And that was what We started building

1:13:09Everything around And then We wanted to try And start Like Beefing it up A little bit And adding some other layers So we got Back to our studio We don't have a prophet 6 But we've got a prophet 10 And so we started recording Some more prophet layers To make these We really wanted these chords To just be like Really immediate And We didn't Sort of want it to sound Like there was too many layers Going on But it was just trying To get the right tone And we couldn't get it When we were just trying One thing on its own So then we added These two Prophet layers To a really wide one

1:13:41Then this one as well Just a really fizzy Top layer And most of these Would have been recorded Onto tape In the studio And then recorded Into the project It depends on What we're doing But a lot of the time For synths or drums And things We record them Onto tape As we're going along And then

1:14:12On top of that We then had Another layer From a This one's from an OB6 Just that really Sort of lush Brassy Oberheim Kind of Feeling to it And then We went back To the same studio In Udra That had the same Prophet 6 And then we recorded Because we had changed The arrangement By this point And so then we Fanned the sound again On that Prophet 6 At that studio And then recorded These parts We changed it a bit

1:14:43But really brought out The phaser This is the Prophet 6 Phaser It's just I don't know What it is How it works But we couldn't Seem to replicate it On anything that we tried Because we were just like Oh we'll get home We'll use the Prophet 10 And just bung a phaser on it And we just couldn't Get it anywhere near What this was So then with all of those Layers combined It makes up

Synth layers and mixing choices

1:15:12The processing on that Is pretty minimal In the main We would have Done a lot of the Processing of these As we were tracking them So we would have been EQing them As they were going in And probably adding Some other effects And things from the studio And then we've just Put in a tiny bit Of clarophonic EQ Just a bit of Sort of top end boost And then Soothe And we don't use Soothe All that much I mean Use it a fair bit But we use Plugins that are

1:15:43Like Soothe Loads So whether it's Like Pro-Q 4 Or just A whole number Of different DS's But we have to do A lot of Corrective work To a lot of the stuff That we've recorded We've got Quite a sort of Inherently noisy studio And we record everything Through about 10 compressors So everything comes out Kind of baked In like grit And noise And everything else And then it's often A case of just Trying to carve A bit of that away Not to get rid of it Entirely But just so that The whole thing Isn't just full of noise And this song

1:16:14Is really basic It's got Those chords That kind of run Throughout the whole The whole song The bass Which was recorded Off an SH2 That Tom bought me For my birthday Last year Which is Just an amazing Sounding synth So basic And on this The bass is basically Just playing two notes For the most part It's We didn't really want The bass to be much For a feature It was just to Kind of Just add to the groove Yeah And then there's A copy of the bass That was recorded Through the Marshall

1:16:45Which is just adding A bit of Upper harmonics Onto the bass Just to make it A bit more audible It was quite Sort of subby before So you were conscious Of like If you didn't We were listening to it On speakers Big speakers You know You weren't going to be able to hear it So instead of You know Sometimes we just use A saturator Like a plug-in saturator To saturate Some of the mids But we had the Marshall Ready to go So we thought We'd call it on that Yeah And then The big bit That comes in Sort of halfway through

1:17:15Is this 303 line Which we spent Ages trying to get Because this seems To add a punch To the track Yeah And almost Adds a punch To John's words As well Yeah Emphasizing The strident Aspect of The words Even though They're not Necessarily strident Does that make sense? Yeah Absolutely I think For us

1:17:45We felt like We'd nailed The emotional Landing of the track With the chords The combination Of those And John's vocal Were exactly Where we wanted to be But there was Just one more element That we knew We needed To really Drive the track Home And I guess It's that Kind of call To arms Thing I mentioned Earlier That's something About being Super hype But without It being At all Not too happy Or just You know But something

1:18:15That's really Kind of Get the blood Pumping Kind of thing Yeah And I think I think Obviously A 303 Is something That everybody Knows And lots Of people Love And I think It was one Of those things It was kind Of a no-brainer For us To have a sound We often Veer away From sounds That are too Familiar Whether it's Drum machines Or synths Or using synths In the way That they'd Sound Classically But with this I thought It was very Important to have A 303 That was just Loud and proud And unashamedly A 303

1:18:46Yeah And in terms Of the Arrangement Of this song How much Of that Was dictated By what John Had said And was Saying And then Thinking about How you're Going to Introduce Those other Elements To emphasise That Or to Reinforce That We went Over a Lot With Sort of Space The spacing Was really Important To get A sense Of just The pace The general Pace Of the track So to Begin with I think There was a Vocal That went Pretty much The entire Way through The track And then We were Just like As much

1:19:17As we Wanted To keep All those Incredible Lyrics In there We had To be Brutal And chop Some of Them So we Went Through it With John Upstairs And then We started To craft A version That had A little Bit of The space In it And The pacing That we Thought was Best for The track This is This version We're listening To here Which is The final Version Is version 83 And We did 84 versions In the end And then For some Reason went With 83 But with

1:19:48Those previous 82 versions A lot of It was Pacing and Arrangement Wasn't it But then Also just The tone Of John's Vocal And we I think We got up To version 56 And then Realised We'd lost Something After version 28 So I had To sort Of go Back and Then rebuild From there And then we Ended up Doing multiple Sessions here Didn't we To Retrack the Vocal And Sort of Have everything That we Needed To build To put It all Together Multiple Sessions With John So was He having To change His delivery Or change

1:20:19His inflection Yeah we Tried lots Of different Ways of Delivering it Because it Wasn't immediately Apparent while We were doing The sessions Which ones We thought You know The ones We thought Were absolutely Bang on Then we'd Go back And we'd Start comping The vocals In Ed's Studio In Bristol And then we Sort of Start quickly Realising that Actually that Isn't quite Giving us What we Want after All So it Was a Process Of then Figuring out Exactly what It was That we Wanted And then Coming back Here And then Trying That And even Then it Was So difficult

1:20:49To try And figure Out how To get The take That we Wanted And John Was just Doing The most Incredible Takes But it Wasn't Until Getting Back In the Studio And starting To comp All these Things Together That you Really Start to Figure out Okay That is What was Going to Give us What we're Looking for In this Track It was A really Tricky One To get Right Because we Wanted to Do John's Lyrics Justice Because it's Such a Personal Track Such a Personal Poem The content

1:21:20And it Felt For us It was Quite a Responsibility To Deliver Yeah It's Really Interesting Reading a Little bit About the Track And what He wrote About I don't Want to Go into Too much Detail In some Ways Because I Think that It also Achieves a Universal Meaning Somehow Because I Found the First few Times I Was listening To it When I Hadn't Read Anything Anything Anything Anything Anything About What John Was Writing About I was Projecting My Own Interpretations And they Seemed Just as Valid As Where John Was Writing From

1:21:51And that's Quite an Achievement For both John and Yourselves To create That power And yet Be Malleable Enough For Everybody Presumably On a Dance Floor When you Play it Live To be Able To bring Their Own Meaning And Interpretation To it I think That's Really Important That it's Not Too Prescriptive And it Can Be Open To Interpretation And Means Something Hopefully Means Something Powerful To Different People In Different Ways Yeah Yeah I think That's Something Generally We Think About Quite A Lot Is That Never Trying To Guide People Too

1:22:22Much With Like This Is What We're Trying To Tell You It's Sort Of Like

1:22:35Is I Just Found Something On Here That Is Probably Interesting To Hear This Is Okay So Yeah We On This One We Recorded Whole Sections Of The Song Through We've Got A Rodec MX Modular Mixer And It's Got A Kind Of Like Built In Mini Sherman Filter Bank Into It And It's Also Got All This Weird Modulation Stuff That You Can Do Loads Of Good Effects And Things As Well And I Think We Recorded The Whole Song Into Or At Least The

1:23:05Whole Drum Mix And Then Recorded Out This Really Horrible Distorted Phase And That's Going Through A Roland Jet Phaser As Well And We're Just Kind Of Messing Around With The Eqs And The Filters And Stuff On It And That Is Just Playing In The Background With The Rest Of The Song As Well And

1:23:35Similarly I Think We Did Something With The Chords This Is Just All Of The Chords Going Through The Rodeck As Well And It's Getting Some Sort Of Modulation That's Being Triggered By Something And So Then In The Context Of The Song These Elements Add Another Sense

1:24:00There's The Elements That Are Tracked Through Speakers And That Sort Of Thing I Think We Recorded John's Vocal Yeah We Recorded Tannoy So Not As In Not The Train Tannoy The Make It Was A Tannoy Little Gold I Believe Which We Got Set Up In The Store Room Next To The Studio And It's Just Got This Naturally Very Like A Slapback Very Tight Reverb It's Like A Little Bit Smaller Than This Room Isn't It And But Just Completely Brick And

1:24:31Concrete And So We Just Have A Speaker Set Up In The Corner Of Them It's How We Did A Lot Of We Recorded Quite A Lot With It During The Album But Have The Speaker In The Corner And Then Just Just You Start Moving The Microphone Closer Or Further Away From

1:24:56You Record These Kind Of Other Little Sections That Are Just Going Like An Entire Part Of The Song That Goes Through It Was Really Useful For This Vocal In Particular Because We Didn't Really Want To Process The Vocal Very Much At All But We Couldn't Use It Completely Dry Because It Just Sounded Just Too Unnatural But We Went Through So Many Different Types Of Reverb Plugins We Just Weren't Quite Getting What We Wanted And The Tannoy Really Helped Get Us Into That Spot Where We Felt Like It Didn't Sound Like It Was In Reverb It Didn't Sound Like It

1:25:44All Its Glory Again

1:26:14Sunshine Through My Window That's What You Are My Night In Shining Prada Brilliant It Is Night In Shining

1:26:45Prada Over Mono Featuring John Joseph Holton I Guess It Does Beg The Question Is John Going To Be Taken To The Stage With You At Any Point We Hope So Yeah Yeah Yeah That

1:27:14Give The Train Speaker The Prize Yeah Where Did You Get This Train Speaker It Was From John Our Studio Wizard Who Who's Just Just Amazing At Everything Where Did He Find It In His Shed Yeah I Think He Got It From A Friend Of His Quite A Long Time Ago And Then Just Had To Store It Somewhere And Put It In The Shed And Then Rediscovered It And Thought

1:27:44One Of The Things That Was Used Most Consistently Across The Yeah Yeah Yeah And I Mean That Wasn't The Only Kind Of Thing That You Experimented With I Read That You Baked A Symbol So

Baking cymbals and studio experiments

1:27:54That Was Something That So The Crash In This In This Song I've Got It Here In Front Of Me This Is Roger's White Hot Crash Which Is I'll Play On It And So We've Clipped That Slightly But Basically It's A We Bought A Crash We Don't Know Anything About Symbols We Just Bought The Nearest One To Us On Facebook Marketplace And Turned Out To To Be A Roger's White Out Crash And So We Bought That We've Been Reading This Book By Sylvia Massey Called Recording Unhinged Is It And

1:28:24Just Generally Just Getting Obsessed With Everything That Sylvia Massey Does I Think Her Approach To Recording Is Incredible Like Throwing Guitars Off The Side Of A Cliff Just To See What Noise It Makes As It's Feeding Back To The Amp That's Still Stuck At The Top All These Things That Clearly Cost Loads Of Money And Time And May End Up Sound Terrible But It's Just The Kind Of Having The Motivation To Just Go And Try These Things And One Of The Things She's Got In This Book Is A Recipe For Baked Symbol So We Got Roger's Crash And We

1:28:54Got A drill With A Bristle Brush On The End Of It Got Rid Of The Lacquer On Top Of The Symbol And Blended A Load Of Crisps Two Kilogram Of Salted Crisps And With

1:29:12Up Into This Thick Black Paste Covered The Symbol In It And Then Baked It In The Oven Overnight And Took It Out In The Morning And It Got This Kind Of Mad Black Like Crust To It We Then Had To Chip Off And Underneath The Black Hard Shell Is The Kind Of All Of The Metal Has Corroded And It Sort Of I Guess Whatever It

1:29:42So This Symbol Now Resonates Almost Like It It Got Infinite Sustain Somehow So You Can Record It And Actually Sometimes The Bits After It It Sustained For Like A Minute Straight On Its Own And Sometimes It Is The Bits Later On That Are Really Interesting You Get These Things But In This We Just Used It As An Actual As The Crash We Often Find Crash Symbols Can Sound Like A Bit Crap A Lot Of The Time You Sort Of Never Really Want To Use A Crash But Then I'm Also It Is Just Like Part Of A Drum Kit But I Think We Went Years Without Using

1:30:13Any Crashes At All And The Way That We Had to Justify To Ourselves Was We Had To Buy A Crash And Bake It We Have To Hear It Again Yeah So

1:30:33Fantastic I Love That And Advice We Ask Everybody Who Comes On Take Notes Whether They Have Any Advice That They Would Pass On To Somebody Something You've Learned Something That You've Been Given Suggested To You Do You Have Anything Like That That You Could Pass On I Think The Best Bit Of Advice And The Thing That Changed My Approach More Than Anything Was After Years Of Spending Time On Forums Like Dogs On Acid And

1:31:03These Sort Of Older Like Drum And Bass Forums And Stuff I Was Just Hoovering Up All This Production Knowledge When I Was 16 Or Something Probably And I Was Taking It All On Board As Fact And People Saying You Can't Boost The EQ On A Breakbeat You Can Only Cut It And All This Stuff And I Think Over Years A

1:31:29Not Allowed Stereo Bass Or Whatever And Actually The More You Do It The More You Get To Realize That There Are No Rules And There Are No Secret Tricks To Getting A Record To Sound However You Want It To Sound And It's It's Lots Of Small Incremental Changes And The Best Thing You Can Do Is To Just It Sounds So Obvious But Just Do Whatever Sounds The Best Regardless Of Whether It's Right You Don't Have To Know How To Use A Compressor To Know If It Sounds Correct To You I Think It's Just Having The Confidence And Your Own Conviction You Know Like It

1:32:01Took Me

1:32:21End Up Right And The Stuff Which Is I Guess The Truest Form Of Your Of Your Creative Output And That Is Always Generally The Best Fantastic It's Been So Nice Talking To You Thank You So Much And For Going Deep With Us Yeah It's Been An Pleasure It's Been Brilliant We Should Leave With One More Song Another Selection From The Album Like An Outro What Do You Think

Closing thoughts and Adra

1:32:51This Is A Track Called Adra Which Is Probably The Most Simple Track On The Record It's But About Four Parts To It And Mostly Just A Deckard's Dream Being Really Heavily Slammed Through An Old Midi Verb And 303 That's Just Really Heavily Slammed Through Multiple Compressors Got A bit Of Theme Going On Yeah Thanks Again Thank You

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1:34:21Bye Thank you.