Daft Punk are famously secret about, well, most everything they do. Marc Edwards recently took a detailed look at some of the devices that the duo probably used for the vocal effects on their albums.
Talk boxes are relatively simple devices — they’re a speaker in a sealed box with a small opening. One end of a hose is fitted to the opening, and the other end is placed into the performer’s mouth, blasting noise towards their throat. The performer can pretend to speak, shaping and filtering the sound coming out of the tube with their vocal tract. A microphone is then needed to record the resulting sound. A keyboard or guitar is typically connected to the talk box unit as the sound source for the speaker. This lets the keyboard or guitar sound like it’s singing. If you’ve heard Chromeo, 2Pac’s California Love, Peter Frampton’s Do You Feel Like We Do, or Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer before, you’ve heard a talk box.
I can confirm firing loud sounds into your mouth while holding a tube with your teeth is a bit uncomfortable. In terms of vocal effects used by Daft Punk, I think talk box might be the least used and least interesting, in terms of hunting down the exact hardware used. Talk boxes are simple devices and typically all sound similar. The sound source and performance play a bigger role in the result than the hardware itself.
The two videos above are worth watching for their comparisons of the effects of the different devices. They don’t include any direct Daft Punk samples (rights issues?), but if you’re familiar enough with their oeuvre, it’s easy enough to compare w/o samples.
I linked to this in the recent David Bowie post, but it’s worth pulling out separately: the 100 greatest BBC musical performances. This is an incredible trove of late 20th and early 21st century musical greatness. Some selections just off the top of my head:
Blondie – Atomic/Heart of Glass (The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1979):
Talking Heads – Psycho Killer (OGWT, 1978):
Daft Punk – Essential Mix (Radio 1, 1997):
Hole – Doll Parts/He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)/Violet (Later, 1995):
Joy Division – Transmission (Something Else, 1979):
Earlier this week, the retired electronic duo Daft Punk released the 10th anniversary edition of Random Access Memories, their last studio album. The anniversary album includes 35 minutes of previously unreleased music.
Among the tracks is a demo of Infinity Repeating, featuring Julian Casablancas and The Voidz, which a recent interview w/ Casablancas on Daft Punk’s YouTube channel called “the last Daft Punk song, ever”. The music video for Infinity Repeating, embedded above, features a cool evolution-of-humanity animation (with robots!) and is highly re-watchable.
This is video of a live show by Daft Punk recorded at LA’s Mayan Theater on December 17, 1997; they’re playing mostly tracks off of Homework, which was released earlier that year. Note that this was before they started wearing the robot outfits for all of their appearances, so it’s just two normal humans DJing. Here’s the setlist. Ohhh to have been there for this.
Part of what makes this so good & funny is the obvious level of care put into making it, right down to the smallest details. The audio distortion? Perfect lip syncing? The Doppler effect?! It’s just a meme, you didn’t have to go so hard! (via the xoxo slack)
Musical duo Daft Punk have called it quits after 28 years. They said goodbye with the video embedded above. This is so far from the worst thing that has happened in the past year but I am unexpectedly emotional about this. I still remember quite vividly hearing their music for the first time and I was hoping for more to come. So much of what they’ve created continues to resonate with me and, gosh, I can’t believe it’s over. Thank you, gentlemen.
As a post-Tr*mp gift to the world, YouTube user Johnny Airbag uploaded a “previously uncirculated” full-length video of a Daft Punk concert in Chicago in 2007. This was from the first night of Lollapalooza and was one of the stops on the duo’s Alive tour, which later resulted in their Alive 2007 album (recorded live in Paris a few weeks before the Chicago show). You can find bootleg recordings of several of their 2007 shows on Soundcloud.
Donald Trump’s idiotic brag about how well he did on a cognitive test (“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”) set to Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.
You just have to laugh because if you actually stop to think about how much harm this man has done and will continue to do in his remaining time in office, the incandescent rage might make you pass out.
Aside from being masterclasses in DJing, these sets feature a bunch of classic house tracks from pioneers like DJ Deeon, DJ Sneak, Todd Edwards, and Giorgio Moroder. What’s amazing is that these performances happened over 20 years ago, but sound like they could be from last week.
At the Bastille Day parade in Paris, with Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron looking on, a marching band played a medley of hits from Daft Punk. Macron gets it pretty quickly while Trump looks confidently clueless as usual.
Daft Punk creates their songs by extensively sampling records, mostly from the 70s and 80s. In some cases, bits of song are used relatively unchanged while others are chopped up and repeated to the point of being unrecognizable. Here are a few of the group’s samples compared with their original sources.
See also the duo’s Alive 2007 live album, which I have been listening to extensively lately.
Update: The video I’d originally linked to got taken down but I replaced it with another one. Here’s another one as well.
A track called Computerized featuring Jay Z rapping over Daft Punk beats has surfaced. Take a listen:
I agree with Drew Millard’s take that this is an old unreleased track from the Tron Legacy / The Blueprint 3 days.
First, this isn’t an original Daft Punk instrumental; that keyboard line is a loop from the song “Son of Flynn” off of Daft Punk’s score for Tron: Legacy. From there, literally anyone-like, even me in GarageBand-could loop that, throw some drums in there, get a vocoder plugin and sing “computeriiiiiized” into it.
From there, let’s analyze Jay Z’s lyrics, which include the line, “I got an iTouch but I can’t feel,” and also a reference to Hov Jobs’ BlackBerry. Judging from the dated technology iHova is talking about on here, this is probably old as fuck.
This is great…Daft Punk’s Get Lucky as it would have sounded in every decade from the 1920s to the 2020s.
This is what singles should be from now on…you get the original song, a 30s jazz version of the song, a 1800s classical version, an 80s new wave version, and so on.
[SORTA MAD MEN SPOILERS! but not really] I don’t know if Ken Crosgrove dancing on the latest episode of Mad Men is the best thing that’s ever been on the show, but it’s definitely in the top 10. And it might be even better with a little Daft Punk.
And it might be best with the Crazy in Love cover from Gatsby…just load up that this YT video while watching the animated GIF and you’re all set. (This is how Millennials watch TV, BTW…it’s all animated GIFs with YouTube video soundtracks. Civilization is gonna be juuuuuuust fine.)
Daft Punk’s fourth studio album, “Random Access Memories,” is an attempt to make the kind of disco record that they sampled so heavily for “Discovery.” As such, it serves as a tribute to those who came before them and as a direct rebuke to much of what they’ve spawned. Only intermittently electronic in nature, and depending largely on live musicians, it is extremely ambitious, and as variable in quality as any popular album you will hear this year. Noodly jazz fusion instrumentals? Absolutely. Soggy poetry and kid choirs? Yes, please. Cliches that a B-list teen-pop writer would discard? Bring it on. The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of “Random Access Memories” repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard. Daft Punk engages the sound and the surface of music so lovingly that all seventy-five loony minutes of “Random Access Memories” feel fantastic, even when you are hearing music you might never seek out. This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?
This is supposedly a leaked version of the song Get Lucky from Daft Punk’s forthcoming album, but from what I can tell, this is just an extended version of the song cobbled together from this minute-long commercial that ran during SNL this weekend. Not that that’s a bad thing…I’ve had it on repeat for the last 30 minutes.
Update: Hmm, getting some reports that this is the actual radio edit of Get Lucky…and it does have some Pharrell lyrics that weren’t in the promos and commercials. And if not, we’re getting closer!
Update: Ha! Probably still fake. But it’s the best fake so I’ll take it for now. Would probably take DP, Pharrell, and Rodgers themselves to top this one. (via @Robbie)
For Homework, their 1997 debut album, Daft Punk drew on a large number of musical influences. Here’s two wonderful hours of the music that influenced them.
This is a mashup of Daft Punk with scenes from Tron and Tron Legacy by Electric Method. Let’s see… Daft Punk? Check. Tron? Check. I’m CERTAIN it is relevant to the interests of a lot of you.
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