RS: With the three of you, is there a way you all approach a project? For example, when a vocal comes in do you all do separate parts or do you all sit there and fight over the keyboard?
Andy: We’ve kind of now got it down to who does what and it flows through quite easily. Basically I strip all the vocals down from the master tape, so I of take off all the parts that we want. We usually just scrap all the music from the previous version’s mix and just keep the vocals and start again. Then we sort of build the track around that so that tonically it sounds like the song was written for the new chords; we keep it quite melodic. Pete is the really good one to do all the chords because he's a bit of a musical genius. He sits down and redoes the chords and puts the guts of it together, then between us we whack it into shape and decide what direction we’re going with it and what the sounds are going to be.
A lot of remixing is not just about making the records that you want to make, it’s making the records the A&R man hears in his head. I’d say half of the trick of why we’ve done it so long, is deciphering what the guy wants in his head so that you can turn it into music for him, that’s the trick.
RS: Do you DJ also or are you strictly a studio guy?
Andy: We’re just studio, me and Pete don’t DJ. I think that’s one of the things that kind of separates us from a lot of other producer/remixers, and we basically came from studio backgrounds initially. I spent five years as an in-house engineer around a lot of the Manchester studios, and that’s how we paid our dues - making records for Boy George, Black Sabbath, Take That and Teenage Fanclub, basically just engineering records. I think we got sick of twiddling the knobs on desks and making other people’s records sound pretty, so we decided we’d rather do all the music ourselves as well as the engineering, and that’s how we got into remixing.
RS: Was David like the DJ side of things?
Pete: Yes, he’s more into that kind of thing. He's also a very good programmer and general musician now, and we’re all achieved a comfortable level of musicianship. You're always learning, trying to get more improved. It doesn’t stop, it carries on and continues and always will.
RS: Going a bit more geeky, what’s your favorite piece of studio gear?
Pete: The coffee machine.
RS: <laughing> Aside from that?
Pete: We still on occasion use samplers and the S6000 sampler is fantastic. At the time it came out there wasn’t anything that could touch it, and I still think it has something nice about it.
Andy: It’s a very old piece of equipment, I still use a lot of Yamaha SBX90, I know they’re really noisy and horrible old pieces of kit but we’ve got about eight of them and every remix we’ve done, we’ve used all of them. It’s a very old multi-effects processor, but we’ve in the back got lots of stop settings on them that we like to use and so every Love to Infinity mix has got about eight of those on them somewhere.
RS: Are you on Mac or PC?
Pete: We’re on Mac.
RS: Are you using Cubase, Logic or Reason?
Pete: We use, Cubase VST. It’s not a huge setup, but it’s a good setup and it works. You see people with huge, complicated and enormous setups that cost an absolute fortune, who actually can’t use them, and I don’t see the logic or point in that. For years I was working on an Atari and producing some really good and very expensive-sounding music on it and you can do wonders on little gear. If you spend a fortune on a system but you actually can’t program it or you don’t have the ears to listen or the kind of disciplines to use it properly, then it’s a waste of money.
