FEATURE

AT catches up with the Sydney duo that’s been

pressing all the right buttons.

Text: Mark Davie

To some, synthesizers are a scientific nightmare of oscillators, virtual patch

cables, 200 knobs, faders and no idea where to begin. No worries… platinum-selling band The Presets say it’s fine to start with – yep, you guessed it – the presets. Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes guide us through the making of their latest record Apocalypso, and how the sound of a few presets helped inspire the album.

ROLL OVERPropped up on the Hohner Pianet in Julian’s studio is a Ludwig van Beethoven action-figure sitting comfortably alongside a hard copy of The Presets’ single Are You The One?. A present from his brother, the figurine is a nod to the classical training that has taken Julian from a pizza joint in Balmain, to piano teacher and session muso, to one half of a No.1 Australian duo. Figuring that classical was the best training a musician could get, Hamilton and Moyes spent years in the conservatorium developing musical discipline and a theoretical knowledge of the Western harmonic tradition. After all, says Julian, “the harmonic tradition has been around since Beethoven and really hasn’t changed since then. He and Mozart were doing things that everyone does in every pop song today. We’re not writing a new harmonic language… but then, who is?”

They work a nine-to-five when not on the road, traipsing into their studios to plug away for the day regardless of whether they feel like it or not. It’s this discipline that has afforded them a raft of opportunities to hone their craft, including helping out the likes of Daniel Johns, Paul Mac, The Cops and others. But, this is all about The Presets, and how they managed to squeeze out one of the best Australian dance records of the last decade.

STARTING AN APOCALYPSOMark Davie: So, Kim and Julian, how long did it take to finish Apocalypso?

Kim Moyes: We started in February last year.

Julian Hamilton: A friend lent us her holiday house in the hinterland behind Byron Bay and we did a lot of the early writing up there for a couple of weeks, after which time all the touring started up again. When we got home, I guess we probably worked solidly for three or four months, from August to January.

MD: How do you work together?

KM: A lot of ideas were started by Julian or myself, then we’d swap sessions and maybe work two to three days a week together. You work faster and make decisions more quickly when you’re by yourself.

JH: When we got together it would generally be for a couple of hours in the morning.

We’ve both developed different types of skills, so by doing this it lets us play to our strengths a little more. Also, sometimes it’s very hard to talk about music, and the only way to get across an idea is to do it and then play it back. I don’t think a lot of the music on this record would have been finished if we’d worked together the whole time!

MD: So what are these different skills?

JH: I generally follow Kim’s lead on sound choices, especially with regard to drum sounds and mixing, because he’s done a lot more remixing and his own techno.

KM: … And the way Julian programs a synth is so different to how I’d do it because he can actually play the piano.

JH: In the same way, being a non-keyboard player, Kim programs synths in ways that I never could. I might consider myself a piano player and a songwriter, but the way some of the songs evolved, like for instance I Know You, is because Kim bashed away at them at his place.

KM: The process was really efficient and reduced everything to its essence; it was survival in a way. I had a huge problem with starting this record because I had certain barriers in my mind about where we were going, but there’s nothing more inspiring than simply diving in and scrambling to get it happening.

CUSTOM PRESETSMD: How do you record, and how much is performance as opposed to programming?

JH: We do a little bit of MIDI programming and use some soft synths, but most of it comes down to playing synths and percussion with our hands. ProTools is a tape machine to us. We record the parts in, and then chop up the bits we like. We do a lot of programming too. MIDI tightens the parts up but we’re still going for takes.

KM: We both got ProTools setups in about 2002. The initial inspiration still comes from performance, even setting up drum machines and using MPCs. From there it moves into the realm of editing and programming. Because we both come from playing backgrounds, it needs to be a physical thing in order for it to actually feel real. I know so many people who can finish a song inside a computer, but I’ve been struggling with that idea for so long – somehow I can’t seem to get into it unless I’m an ape in a studio. But I really want to spend this year developing that part of my mind so I can finish a song in a computer. That’s my biggest goal. I want to get that monkey in my mind.

MY PEOPLEMD: Could you talk us through a couple of the tracks, perhaps starting with the single My People?

JH: My People eventuated after I bought these cool pedals from a store in Pomona, California, called Analogue Haven, and I wanted to see what the Korg MS20 sounded like through them. I got an Effector 13 Sucka Punch pedal, a LastGasp Art Laboratories Thunder Box Donshariser and this little yellow Diamond Compressor, and that was the bass line for My People. I also bought a Bixonic EXP2000 Expandora multi-stage distortion pedal that we used a lot. It was one of those times where you plug in, click through pedals and suddenly you’ve got this sound. I programmed up a really basic beat, started playing the MS20 through my new pedals and got this snarly mean sound. And that was it – the bass line just came out of the sound. We always try and let the sounds inspire the parts.

Ten minutes later, the bass line was sounding really cool, so I plugged in a microphone and started yelling these words over the top: “I’m here with all of my people” was one of the first things that came out and it stuck.

MD: Do you often just start with presets or build sounds from scratch?

JH: The presets are a good starting point, for sure. Usually we’ll turn on the synth, plug it through a few pedals, start playing, and that will inspire a certain groove or a certain bass line. We’re not computer programmers you know.

MD: My People sounds very raw and live, how did you evoke that energy?

KM: Once we had the bass line right, it came down to patterns and sounds that give you the sense you’re watching the band. It had to be full, and full-on, as if it was club music. It also had to be really simple to maximise the space.

JH: We programmed things as if we were playing them – there wouldn’t be techno drum fills. It was all about how we would play it if we were actually performing it physically.

KM: When we’d finished our first album Beams, we had to figure out how we would play the songs live. We tried three or four different approaches before finally figuring out what worked best for us. So we had that in the back of our minds when we were putting the new album together. All the bass lines were kept in the computer, so the bass

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So we added some constant semi-quaver rim patterns behind the kit just to fill up the ears, so the illusions of the spaces weren’t so disparate.

MD: Did you program all the drums on the album?

KM: The only live drums on this record were hats, a real ’80s way of doing things. Previously we’d program drums, layer live drums, and then use Beat Detective to bring them together, and if you listen back it sounds like a drummer who’s got a third arm that can’t keep up. But even the live hats were edited down from a good eight-bar loop to one quaver group repeated.

JH: We’d listen to three-minute takes trying to find the ultimate bar and probably end up cutting one beat out and looping it.

KM: I sampled various records and CD's to get some of the drum sounds. I also did two or three days with Scott Horscroft at BJB, processing and making a lot of sounds from the EMU SP1200, but ultimately a few of these sounds ended up a little too harsh and only suited some specific songs. All the percussion sounds on Aeons were from an Akai MPC60 disk I bought from a guy in California that had orchestral, cinematic and industrial sounds as well as distorted vibraphone, chimes and lightly played metal percussion. Other sounds came from an Elektron MachineDrum, a Jomox Xbase999, Roland TR 808 and Sequential Circuits DrumTracks. I also used toms and crash cymbals from Garage Band. I recorded the hi-hats in my studio, as well as shakers, and handclaps, and finger cymbals for Yippiyo-ay. A New Sky has wood blocks and xylophone sounds from my MPC60 - just don’t tell the guys I went to the conservatorium with...

MD: Is that the only sampling on the record?

JH: A lot of the vocals are sampled, I’d sing and then chop up the bits I liked, put them into a sampler and play them back to try and get that Kylie Minogue ’80s-pop Stock, Aitken & Waterman kind of sound on tracks like Talk Like That and Together.

WATERSHED VOCALSMD: Where did you record your vocals?

JH: I did them all in my shed using a Shure Beta 58 through a Neve 8801 channel strip with a bit of compression and EQ on it. It worked really well, because that’s what I’ve been using on stage forever. I tried using all these really expensive mics and new mics, but I just wasn’t getting the vibe. So I grabbed the Shure, held it in my hand, took off my shirt, had a couple of scotches and got in the zone. I’ve since bought a new Shure KSM9 microphone; that’s killer, and I can’t wait to use that on the next record.

KM: We then added lots of subtle layers of distortion to it. One of the big sounds we used on the vocals was the Ensoniq DP4, using a phaser or doubler to add some really synthetic, futuristic sounds.

JH: There were a lot of choruses and phasers. We also used AutoTune to get a synthetic robotic soulless quality, or slammed it through compressors. Sometimes there were four layers of vocal effects.

TWO MANY CHIEFS IN THE MIXMD: You had two mixers on this album, how did that come about?

KM: We mixed in three stages, with My People, This Boy’s In Love, and the first version of If I Know You comprising the first stage. We’d done My People with Scott Horscroft and it was pretty full-on. It got brutal in the top end and the drums were really small. Initially I was really happy with it – I thought it sounded like Metallica. It didn’t sound like a house track.

Knowing it was going to be the first single, Pav (Steve Pavlovic, Modular Records boss) suggested we give this guy in LA, John Fields, a try to see what he came up with. We sent him the tune and he mixed it really

sounds could always be really different, but the main thing for me, was making sure I could play the drums. It was then just a matter of adding percussion sounds and effects underneath, like white noise under the snare, so it sounds like an epic reverb on the four count of each bar.

MD: How do you keep the parts full-on yet simple?

JH: I’ll record a bass line with a synth, and Kim will find the bits with the same resonance. Sometimes you’ll play these synths and they’ll move in big long waves, so if there’s a low C, he’ll try and grab it when it’s at the strongest point of the wave, and then copy that C. The result is these big, fat, strong sounding instruments. And even then, you can chop the fatter, stronger sounds out of the part. As producers you have to think that way.

When I first played the My People bass line it was really snarly and had lots of harsh mids in it, and Kim EQ’d the hell out of it on his Crane Song EQ to make it fit into the mix. He dipped a lot of the mids out and brought a lot of the subs up. He essentially took out all the things that I loved about the sound! But looking back, it sits so much better in the track now yet it still has a nastiness about it. I thought the nastiness was in the snarl, the round mids, but then I guess one person’s nasty sonic character might be another person’s irritating thing that’s getting in the way of the mix.

KICKING & SCREAMING THROUGH LAYERSJH: Kicking and Screaming originally started when we were trying to make a techno track out of hip-hop sounds on the E-mu SP1200 [old-school sampling drum machine]. Until we eventually admitted that even though we loved those sounds, they weren’t cutting it in the mix.

KM: The acid bass line ended up being a Roland TB-303, one of the Korg Legacy synths, and the Studio Electronics Omega 8, all layered to make the one sound. We could have done the whole album on the Omega but it’s fun to use different synths.

MD: Do you record filter sweeps live or automate at a later stage?

JH: All the filtering on the 303 for Kicking and Screaming was recorded live. The bass synth in My People was played with one hand on a knob while playing at the same time. The Korg Polysix arpeggiator was programmed and filtered with hands, then cleaned up in the computer. It’s always a mix of approaches – sometimes we use technology and get really geeky.

JH: One of our favourite instruments is the Korg MS20s. They get used a lot, and there’s a certain sort of character that’s associated with what we do. We’ve got four of them now. And they’re all a little bit different. We couldn’t work out why when I wanted to change the bass line for My People I could never get the sound again. It was because I was using the wrong one. (Far Left) Julian's studio with Omega 8 synth, the sound of the record, on right, (Left) Bass line for My People, (Right) Julian's favourite synth, the Roland Strings - not Kim's favourite.

THIS BOY’S IN LOVE WITH GROOVEJH: The bass line for This Boy’s In Love was quite a long line that Kim programmed. I chopped a lot of it out and made a single-bar loop.

MD: How much are you altering the MIDI performances?

KM: Everything’s on the grid. We record the MIDI, and then quantise it to be tight, and for feel. And once it comes back in, you tighten it up again.

JH: But then you sometimes have to move elements even when it’s on the grid. For instance, kick drums may flam against bass notes, and even though you can see it’s bang-on visually, you still have to move it a few milliseconds to make it feel a certain way. I remember especially with This Boy’s In Love, the whole time I’m thinking, “Is this pushing? It sounds like it’s rushing. It’s just not sitting.”

KM: Certain syncopated rhythms and sound qualities stuff up how grooves sound. That was the problem we had with This Boy’s In Love. We had a rock kick and snare with hi-hats, and the hi-hats made every bar sound like it wasn’t looping properly. Even without those sounds it still didn’t sound right, because the bass line is so syncopated.

well. The drums were massive; everything was really aggressive and a lot of the top end had been reined in. The problem was that the bass on these mixes was competing with the vocals, but once that was pulled back, all the vocals found their space. From then on we decided we’d continue to do the record as if Scott was mixing it, but every time a single came up, we’d send it to John and see what he could do. It was a luxury having that backup second opinion.

JH: Sometimes the mixes came back better from overseas, sometimes they didn’t. The problem was really that Scott was mixing it, Kim was mixing it and I’d walk in and add my two bobs’ worth as well. The result was that sometimes it would end up sounding like crap, whereas we weren’t in John’s face. But I’m thrilled we had the chance to send some tracks to John, because the album sounds really good now.

KM: And Scott’s amazingly intellectual with mixing. The levels of intricacy he gets with the mix is pretty amazing. But a lot of the time it doesn’t need to be that intricate, it just needs to be full-on. That’s what was good about John. He did his mixes in half a day on ProTools, all with plug-ins.

MD: Would you do that again and maybe even send a whole album to someone?

JH: We’d definitely do all the pre-production, because all the processing we do at BJB is really good.

KM: That was the best thing about doing all the work with Scott, and aiming to get a finished mix before sending it to John. And that’s why John could make decisions really quickly, because it was all there laid out in front of him. As long as you had in your mind that you’d got to the point where you thought it was at its pinnacle, letting go was refreshing.

A WORD FROM SCOTT HORSCROFTWe pulled Scott away from the psychedelic sessions of the upcoming Daniel Johns/Luke Steele record to talk about his role in Apocalypso.

“I just grabbed the Shure, held it in my hand, took

off my shirt, had a couple of scotches and got in

the zone

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MD: What approach do you take when mixing The Presets?

Scott Horscroft: I guess the big difference with The Presets is they produce the music at home so it comes to me completely recorded other than some vocals and synth lines to tie it all together. The process that we go through is really developing their sound and the depth of the tracks. We do a lot of re-amping, go through pedals, and a lot of the time they’re also just developing the parts in the tracks.

Being the second record that Kim, Julian and I have done together, we now have a working method that’s really open, and songs change. Each mix took about two to four days on average. It was a production workshop cum mixing session.

MD: Was there much fixing and cleaning up required of their home studio recordings?

SH: Not so much fixing as a lot of tinkering and experimenting with different sounds and placements, and the tightening up of arrangements. Even though everything is done to the grid we’re shifting things to get them to groove exactly how we want them, whether it be late, or really pushing the track along.

Vocal production is another big thing we spent a lot of time on, finding the right space and delays, and a lot of cutting up. The album sounds extremely present, and that’s due to a lot of the dramatic automation we were doing to keep something in focus at all times and right up front. Always the vocal, but whenever the vocal wasn’t there we’d try to aim to have something to respond to it and keep a melody flowing through everything.

MD: What are the differences between mixing dance and rock music?

SH: It’s really drum driven, the whole thing is smashed through with the kick leading the way, which is quite different to rock. The big thing between mixing dance and rock is you have to get a lot of clarity, presence and punch. Because it’s all so compressed and synthetic, any space you bring in has a huge impact, so space is used much more minimally. There’s a certain amount of natural depth with rock, when everything

JH: We used the Ensoniq DP4 and the Korg SDD1000 a lot, because they’ve got them at BJB as well. Probably every vocal sound on the record has the DP4 over it in some way. And a lot of the dubby, atmossy stuff, is with the Korg SDD1000. We used the Boss DM2 analogue delay more than the Roland RE-201 Space Echo, because it does the same ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’ rising step delay kind of stuff, only much cleaner. (Far left) Scott Horscroft at BJB.

is noisy, amped and recorded with mics, whereas dance music offers an open platform for working with depth and space. It’s also a lot of work to create that atmosphere and put it in a place.

Nearly everything in the mixes is very dry. Then there are a few minimal things that we used to put the sounds in a space depending on which track it was and how noisy the bass was. Big noisy basses are a really key element that determine how the mixes work, because they take up so much space. It then becomes a matter of fitting things around it to keep the bass really present.

A big thing we used was the SPL Spatializer, which puts things out of phase, extremely left and right, so it feels like it’s coming from another world. That gives you the space, but it’s nevertheless still dry. So it sounds present and danceable, and you can hear every rhythm and every element that makes up the groove. Keeping things dry is really crucial.

MD: Obviously the drums are a key factor in driving the mix, what did you do to make them sit right?

SH: We did a lot of work on the drums in the studio, everything from re-amping bits and pieces to interesting side-chaining action. We would always try to get interplay happening between different drums, and affect the music with those drums through keying. A lot of the time we’d try to build it up as an organic beast that triggers and opens other things up, so it’s making itself work. It’s a little mathematical puzzle that opens and closes and creates random responses, which we’ve always been excited about.

MD: How much compression could you use?

SH: A lot of it is so synthetic and compressed coming to you, it’s more about looking at compression over how the mix is working, how the vocal affects the track when it comes in, and whether you want anything disappearing due to compression. The mixes were heavily compressed and the mix bus on the Neve was also compressed and EQ’d. There was a lot of

compression in the drums to get them right up there and clean, and a lot of pre-EQ to pull out anything that was going to make it sound a little bit distant or roomy when it didn’t need to be.

MIXINGWhen we initially started we all had different ideas about what the shape of the mix should be in terms of the drum levels and vocal levels, and we had to do a lot of experimenting to get that right. In the end, we had a great shape in our heads. The drums had to really be thumping and pushing things along. If the bass is too loud, then you don’t get the impact of the drums hitting you in the face as if they’re right in front of you, because the drums are what everyone dances to. A lot of it is maintaining the push and pull of the drums on the bass compressor, and slotting things in without affect the balance too much. Once we had that down it was a lot easier.

MD: What stage were the tracks at when they were sent to John Fields?

SH: We’d gone through the whole process of producing the tracks up, so I sent him stems of what we’d done, and then little bits and piece of what we thought he’d want from the original sessions. It was really to get that American, compressed, totally upfront sound that he’s renowned for. And those tracks came back sounding great, and in a way it really helped us find a great shape for the rest of the record that suited the American radio sound. He did a lot more work on the same shape that we were looking for and it came out really well.

There was no animosity, it was a really good thing, especially when we got the first mix back and it was really fantastic. We sent some more to him, and he was saying, this sounds fine and fantastic. And that was great coming from him, because we were looking for him to go to the next step after doing all that work.

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