Name: Chromeo
Members: David "Dave 1" Macklovitch, Patrick "P-Thugg" Gemayel
Nationality: Canadian
Current release: Chromeo's Adult Contemporary is out now.

If you enjoyed this Chromeo interview and would like to know more about the band and their music, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter. 

For more about their bands, read our earlier conversations with them about originality, and about the importance of “the look.”



How do you see the relationship between the tools to create music and originality?

You can create any kind of music with any tools nowadays. A rock record can sound cheesy if it’s entirely made on plug-ins, but it can also sound cheesy if it’s entirely made with “classic” drum sounds and vintage Marshall amps.

It’s all about the way you put it together — the sum of a million individual micro choices. The sound of a hi hat. The low end on a bass. The swing on a kick drum. A word choice. A vibrato or not.

How did you put together the sonic- and gear-palette for Adult Contemporary? What were key elements?

For Adult Contemporary it was interesting: we wanted to revisit the brute, unpolished MPC-style drums of the Fancy Footwork era. But on other songs we wanted live drums. We wanted a less layered feel than Head Over Heels, but we also strived towards slicker, more sophisticated orchestration: string arrangements, horns, drawn-out song outros.

At this point we have our go-to synths that make their way into every song — Juno 106, Elka Synthex, Jupiter 8, Prophet 5, Minimoog, Korg MS20 … but again we wanted at least one new sonic palette on this record. Something that would clash within those textures.

It ended up being the Ensoniq SQ-80. It’s on almost every song.  

[Read our feature on the Roland Juno 106]
[Read our feature on the Roland Juno 60]
[Read our feature on the Sequential Prophet 6]

How and for what reasons has your music set-up evolved over the years and what are currently some of the most important pieces of gear and software for you?

Well the great Chromeo tragedy was when we couldn’t use our late 90s Cakewalk Pro Audio sequencer on a Pentium II. We managed to keep that thing running until the White Women album in 2014! We were literally looking for old Pentiums in garbage dumps.



Now we’re on Cubase (and yes, a Mac), but we’ve made it look like the old Cakewalk and use it almost the same way — all MIDI. We use Cubase and only a handful of plug-ins, which we sometimes get rid of to send our mixer pure, unprocessed stems. For vocals we do ProTools, always have. It’s all pretty straightforward.

The secret sauce is that our drums have always been individual samples (kick, snare, hats etc) that we chop up, isolate and program from scratch. That’s because we’re from a 90s hip hop background. That’s the way DJ Premier does it.

We don’t use loops, we don’t stack loops. So all our songs’ pockets have a strange, very personal feel.

Have there been technologies which have profoundly influenced, changed or questioned the way you make music?

Nothing since MIDI and that came before us, haha.

I am big fan of your collaboration album Clusterfunk. It's a fascinating variation of your sound and an expansion of it. Can you very briefly tell me about the recording of that album, please?

Thank you so much! We had a very specific sonic palette in mind for that project — we didn’t want it to sound like a Chromeo record and we also didn’t want it to sound like lo-fi alternative rap. A-Trak kept saying the words “Jeep beats.”

We got MixedByAli to mix it and the brief was: tons of low end. It gave the whole thing a really muscular feel that contrasts nicely with the lighthearted tone of certain songs, the playful vibe that Ric’s delivery has, and that the same time the seriousness of his political subject matter.



What did you draw from that collaboration for your work with Chromeo?

Not sure … it was just a challenge and now we can’t wait to make more collaborative projects like this. There are actually a few that are still unreleased and that we need to wrap up. It’s amazing to take one or two aspects of our preexisting sound and then add stuff to tailor make it to a specific artist.

Check the songs we produced for Onyx Collective, Blu DeTiger and Ian Isiah for other examples. But it’s just the beginning!



What did the production process for Adult Contemporary look like – were there things you specifically did differently compared to Head over Heels?

Touched on that earlier. Everything was different. Down to the vocal recording, processing and mixing.

Most of the vocals are super dry. Morgan Geist (one of our musical heroes — we were so psyched to have him mix the album) used the H3000 on all the vocals and it really gave them a cohesive sound.

The brief with Head Over Heels was “let’s make this sound big and expensive”; the brief with Adult Contemporary was “let’s make this sound cool and classy.”



On HOH, the songs would start collaboratively — often with other writers and producers —  and we’d then take them to our studio and rework them and really impregnate them with our sounds.

On the new album — much like our older ones — everything started with us and everything ended with us. Two best friends locked in the studio for months and months.  

For Adult Contemporary, how important was the actual performance and the moment of performing the song still in an age where so much can be “done and fixed in post?”

Well we were never great players, so to speak. We love to cheat and fix in post. But we also like to keep things spontaneous and sloppy when needed. The flavor comes with combining it all.

Think of Prince: dirty, live, one-takes of guitar over a mechanical, repetitive, Linn drum loop. If he had live drums in “Kiss” it would be cheesy.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches and musical forms you may be very familiar with?  

We’re always being new (old) gear. And analog machines are human — they have moods and characters and quirks — so they constantly surprise us.

Thankfully there’s a lot of fun and humor in our music so we still make each other laugh all the time. Even within our canon of influences there’s always the oddball random song we’ve never heard before. Or there might be something new that we just Shazamed and think is amazing.

When you’ve got that student mentality, the discovery never ends.