In The Studio With Chromeo

This video, via Factmagazine, features a studio tour with electro funk duo Chromeo (David Macklovitch and Patrick Gemayel).

Macklovitch & Gemayel give an overview of their Burbank, CA studio, demonstrate how they use some of their key synths & talk a bit about their production workflow.

Chromeo is currently working on their fifth studio album, Head Over Heels.

9 thoughts on “In The Studio With Chromeo”

  1. I really like the point that they were making about how you can make big music with only a few workhorse synths (esp a 106) and a dinosaur computer. Takes some know-how, and some mad skills.

    They seem to know their gear and where to look for their tones.

    I can relate to the way they like to work with old-school MIDI– and a piano roll.

    1. Nice studio.
      Looks like they picked up that JP-8 and other stuff recently from Westlake Pro Audio from the Andrew Gold estate. They were handling the sales of his stuff after his passing…. can see his name on the JP-8.

  2. My legacy studio is built around an old Dell Precision 360 running Windows XP. Running old versions of SoundForge and Sonor and a bunch of classic modules and keys. I have faster and better computers on the Mac side in my other studios but I love using my old hardware gear and older vst synths in this studio. I work super fast and totally focused. This was a cool video. Love their vintage gear.

  3. These two seem like great guys, not taken with their success, and fantastically talented on their instruments.

    Not my style of music, but I could watch them work all day anyway.

  4. I still use midi only cubase and do so as its the best . I wish Steinberg would fetch out a simple version of cubase without the audio on it or bloat ware. There is a market. I have been getting 12s out since 93 and hardware midi sequencing is where its at for a lot of us. No changes , just music.

    1. No WordPress account so: +Like.

      Totally agree that there is a market for this. Just look at the up tick in hardware sequencer sales over the last 5 years. A dedicated MIDI sequencing app with full QWERTY control would be aces. All of the big DAWs have great MIDI facilities but they’re too packed with other stuff that gets in the way. You can sort of ignore the other stuff but it’s cognitively overhead and you lose key commands (that is, key commands you might want for efficient MIDI editing are already in use). No, really, QWERTY is king!

      Would also be great if it had support for entering commands *via the musical keyboard you already have your hands on* like the long mighty Sequetron. You send a command to change the mode and then each key on the MIDI keyboard is now a different command instead of a note. Jump to 3:30

      Hard to imagine Steinberg doing this though. Maybe it could come in the form of a Reaper fork. Or a Max project. Or a team of former Cakewalk employees!

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