HN Reader

I haven't touched music production stuff for about 18 years (Mackie D8b + protools represent), however its great to see someone break down a song bit by bit. It also helps that the song they are covering is a banger.

For a slightly tangentially related podcast you might like https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00106lb which is where a bunch of musicians each week create a playlist of 4 songs that each have a link.

10 months agoby KaiserPro

It's incredible how deeply ingrained in memory some of those songs are that I immediately start to notice the slightest deviation.

Daft Punk especially for me represent a merger of musical genius and perfect execution.

As this is on HN I wonder how far in the future AI will excel at recreating/analysing songs. It seems like it could lend itself extremely well for this type of task.

10 months agoby nakedneuron

Hey, I happen to own the vocal tool they used for this song and Digital Love. It's called the Digitech Vocalist. It's a MIDI-controlled pitch corrector, and it's the key to that whispery sort of grainy sound to Thomas's voice in both tracks. YouTube has plenty of demos of it, and one even directly of a Digital Love cover.

10 months agoby pathless

If you're a fan of both Daft Punk and the late 70s/80s Anime aesthetic mentioned in the article and haven't yet seen "Interstella 5555", drop everything and do so now.

10 months agoby lxgr

Hey Marca, thank you for this art and the inspiration bomb first thing in the morning

Keep them coming! <3

10 months agoby yard2010

> Now—the snare. This one was tough. I spent a long time trying to recreate it, convinced it was a processed acoustic snare layered with something synthetic. After too many failed attempts, I caved and sampled the original. Yes, the snare is the only part I couldn’t fully replicate.

which seems so weird to me, because when you listen to the isolated sample, it sounds like a fairly standard Lindrum fare, a snare hit plus some kind of other perc sample, maybe a wood block or one of those 'congo' bell samples or something.

10 months agoby mock-possum

Daft Punk have been my favorite artists for most of my life. Waking up to the announcement of their disbandment was the first time I've been truly sad about the "passing" of an artist

10 months agoby squigz

10 months agoby hnlurker22

This was a fascinating article and I admire the musician in question for committing to the re-Discovery (pardon the pun) of the process behind the original track. Still, I have to agree with the earlier commenter that the many hallmarks of ChatGPT's prose style (so to speak) distracted me somewhat from the story the author intended to tell. The seemingly random italicisation of phrases that couldn't possibly have required actual emphasis created a relentless subvocal choppiness. As much as I'm glad the author shared their insights, I wish the medium hadn't so overwhelmed the message. Not that I think using ChatGPT is fundamentally wrong. I suppose it's a little like cosmetic surgery: the best approach, if you're going under the knife, is to have just enough done that nobody can tell you've had anything done at all.

10 months agoby dimitri_deploys

Very interesting article and process.

> "A huge part of the joy came from working in Ableton Live 12, which now feels like an extension of how I think" I feel the same way, but for Reaper

Seeing the author mentions that decomposition of the snare is the hardest, and that’s what I was trying to solve in https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce (just an idea).

Multimodality AI is much more powerful now. I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.

When I was teaching kids with Glicol, I often used KraftWerk’s Das Model as an example:

https://glicol.org/demo#themodel

This rough midi version is very different from the original, but the kids had a lot of fun messing around with it.

10 months agoby chaosprint

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who has an audio-engineering background about this sort of thing recently. Something to the effect of, even if you program in the exact waveforms a TR-808 was attempting to synthesize into a digital synth, the digital synth wouldn't sound like a TR-808 because the TR-808 had slight noise and flaws in its analog circuitry, so in order to get a true emulation you had to account for those too. And that's part of why 80s music sounded so distinctive, in a way that's difficult to replicate today... it was a sound that came from the specific equipment used at the time, equipment which is much harder to source and simulate in the present.

10 months agoby bitwize

Very cool article and a great observation about the “French Touch” as a concept. The explanation is insightful and wonderful. It actually reminded me how much study I’ve done regarding the “Swedish Touch” which is best exemplified by Abba, Max Martin, and Avicii for the sake of discussion.

My one gripe is the caption on his guitar. Almost spit-take level…seeing a Gibson Les Paul Honeyburst described as “humble” is tongue in cheek, but the sign of a person who could use a reality check. I get it’s an attempt at humor, but come on bro, that’s a brag haha.

10 months agoby 6stringmerc

Great post, and nice recreation!

I went through a period of recreating songs during Covid. Here's my attempt at Short Circuit from the same album: https://on.soundcloud.com/F5dcikiLb9RNQ4jC9

The chords at the end were really difficult to get 100% right. Think I got to about 95%. I didn't get around to the bit crushing. I was a bit deflated that the chords weren't spot on :)

10 months agoby afro88

Having the authentic French accent is cheating.

10 months agoby djmips

Yo! Don’t hate on BBEdit, it’s old but it’s still really really good. I’m using it everyday for everything.

10 months agoby simian1983