Chromeo – Hot Mess

"The Pro One is something that P bought before we started the album 'Business Casual.' This is the bass sound on 'Don't Turn the Lights On' and on 'Hot Mess' as well. What's cool about this is that contrary to the Prodigy, this is MIDI so we can program. What P actually did for 'Hot Mess' was he programmed a line in MIDI and then did the glide manually and then re-recorded it with the glide in it... I actually found it hard to deal with the filter because the synth has a phase. The oscillators are not really in sync. When oscillators get too in phase you lose some of the width of the sound and the depth. When they're out and not apart they sound off key and not in tune. So what we did is that we let it run for the length of the song and we chose the parts where we found them aligned and it sounded great. You could sync it but you lose all the clarity, it's horrible - I hate that. You need the right balance of cheating and the human element of these synths, which is a little imperfect but you want to cheat it to contain it and make it sound more modern. Also, for the aficionados, this is totally not a typical Pro One case. They're black usually. This is custom built with parts from a Prophet 5. So it's like a mini Prophet 5, kind of. It's still the Pro One just with a different casing."

"This was a synth that P bought before the newer record, before 'Business Casual,' and that ended up being really useful to us. Obviously there's a Vocoder function that he did on the 'Hot Mess' demo. 'Hot Mess' is not Talk Box, it's this Vocoder. We ended up using this for other sounds and other patches, like for the human voice. I love that. That's in the intro to 'Contagious' and in 'Hot Mess' in the chorus. It's actually cooler than the Vocoder preset. It also has great strings on it. So it's using the Vocoder for something different than what it's intended. There's no MIDI on this. We copy paste a lot of parts because it's got to sound robotic, it's got to be modern."