Fatboy Slim & The BPA & Norman Cook – Better Living Through Chemistry
The music gear and equipment used by the artists, producers, engineers, and more involved in the making of the 1996 album Better Living Through Chemistry.
Music from Better Living Through Chemistry
Gear Used On Better Living Through Chemistry
Explore the instruments, equipment, software, and production tools used in the making of Fatboy Slim & The BPA & Norman Cook – Better Living Through Chemistry (1996). Click more on each item to see exactly how it was used.
Studio Monitors used by Fatboy Slim on Better Living Through Chemistry
Avg price: $172.50
Visible in this photo of Fatboy Slim's studio, from this Sound on Sound interview about "Praise You". It can be found on Slim's desk. He has used them since the production of Better Living Through Chemistry.
At this time, Cook was using a Soundcraft desk and monitoring through a pair of Auratones during the writing phase and Yamaha NS10s when it came to mixing. “I had four flatmates,” he remembers, “and you can’t work at any volume. So I worked on Auratones, the same pair of which I still use now, and you could feel when the bottom end was there, but it didn’t go through to other people’s bedrooms. Then when it came to mixdown, I would go onto NS10s. I would say to everyone, ‘Look, sorry, I’m mixing tonight, so I’ve got to actually play this at volume just to check the bottom end.’”
Studio Equipment used by Fatboy Slim on Better Living Through Chemistry
Avg price: $126.50
A retrofitted D-Sync is visible in this photo of Fatboy Slim's studio, from this Sound on Sound interview about "Praise You". It can be found on Slim's rightmost desk. Slim has been using it since Better Living Through Chemistry.
Cook’s home studio setup when he made the first Fatboy Slim album, 1996’s Better Living Through Chemistry, centred around the Akai S950 and the Atari ST computer running C-Lab Creator software. “I also had a [Studio Electronics] SE1 which was basically a Minimoog that had memories and MIDI, a Roland Sound Canvas just for traditional instruments — cymbals and things like that — and obviously a 303.”
So great was Cook’s love of Roland’s originally-maligned bass partner to the Drumatix, which had been co-opted and reimagined by acid house producers, that he named the first Fatboy Slim single ‘Everybody Needs A 303’. “It only had four knobs to twiddle,” he says of the 303’s appeal for him. “You could learn the permutations of what happened between the four of them. And the great fun was that you did it all live. I had a Kenton Electronics sync box, ‘cause the 303 didn’t have MIDI. Hilariously, the retrofit Kenton box was actually three times the size of the 303.
Another photo from the article, which offers another, closer angle of the unit, has a caption that specifies it is the Kenton MIDI box.
Everybody needs a 303 — and a Kenton MIDI box that dwarfs it.
Software Plugins and VSTs used by Fatboy Slim on Better Living Through Chemistry
Mentioned by Fatboy Slim in this Sound on Sound interview about "Praise You". Slim has been using it since Better Living Through Chemistry.
Cook’s home studio setup when he made the first Fatboy Slim album, 1996’s Better Living Through Chemistry, centred around the Akai S950 and the Atari ST computer running C-Lab Creator software.