Chromeo

"This is pretty much one of the most important pieces around here. I usually start all my demos with it. It's really fast to go to. Its MIDI sounds great. We've kept it on some songs, but it will be the starting point for everything basically. It's kind of a poor man's LinnDrum, I think. It's easier because it's MIDI, first of all. I guess the Linndrum you can retrofit to MIDI as well, but this one is a little more simple to work with. It can sound pretty much like a LinnDrum, you can make it sound like it. It's great! We start all of our stuff with it."

"The Yamaha RX5, we've used that a couple times. This is very, very 80s. There's like an integrated reverb that's kind of not like a real reverb... but it's a delay. It’s pretty good."

"The Akai s950... that's what I used when I made hip-hop beats. That's my old one, that's what I started with. We used it on the first album. The drums from 'Needy Girl' were on there, but we haven't used that recently. The MPC is just more powerful. The s950 is good when you you're dealing with loops and you want a filter. At this point it's just an old school sound."

"The drums are all either vintage drum machines, or an Akai MPC1000, which is one of the two smallest ones. It has a clean sound, and makes everything really punchy and loud. I’ll sometimes sample, say, a kick from the DrumTraks into it, if I want it to have a more bottom-y, compressed sound."

Asked about what sound source is used with the talkbox, P-Thugg says, "An old Yamaha DX100, which is what Roger from Zapp used. I became friends with one of the guys from his band, and he sent me the patches by email as MIDI Sys Ex files. I just dumped ’em in, and there were all his sounds. I couldn’t believe it. The whole first row of buttons is one sound that’s transposed - since he had to concentrate on singing with the talkbox, he played in a comfortable key and selected the different patches for the different songs."

via Guitar Center Interview

Patrick: "The MPC 5000, that's where you can see our hip-hop roots... It's a great machine. It’s very clean, a bit cleaner than the [MPC] 1000. It sounds great, it's really good."

Dave: "So P samples. When P's not working on demos he samples drum sounds, like when you produce hip-hop (or at least when you produced hip-hop in the 90s, which is how we came into production in the first place)."

Patrick: "This has a built-in phono in so that you don't have to go through a mixer or anything... I think it makes the sound cleaner. The MPC, of course, has a built-in compression, one that it's always had, since the days of the [MPC] 3000."

"This is the... Dave Smith Prophet 08, which is serial number nine - very, very important. It's actually one of Dave Smith's own keyboards, it’s one of the first he did."

"...Since the first album we've had this. It’s one of the best out there for re-creating vintage sounds. Especially the second generation, which they call the G2. I have the original and the G2, and you can basically re-create any synthesizer if you know its basic structure and signal path. The G2 series has options to do the FM synthesis of the Yamaha DX7, which so much of the digital-sounding part of '80s songs relied on. You can even import old DX7 patches as Sys-Ex data, right into the Nord! Between the Nord and Native Instruments FM7, I don’t need my DX7 anymore!"

Live, Chromeo run their guitars through the Fender Deluxe Amp, with "nice and warm 6L6 tubes inside."

"One of my first synths, the Six-Trak, which we still use very heavily. The sequential Six-Trak is the baby brother of the Prophet 5 and the baby brother of the T-8."

"This was used on the pad on 'Needy Girl,' 'Night by Night,' and 'You're So Gangsta.' So this made its way up to the new album. We still use it."

"We used a Juno patch as a bass and it's stereo, so it could be cooler because then it doesn't interfere with your kick. This is because your kick stays in the middle and the bass pans hard left and right, and the track breathes more."

"At the end of the day, the Juno we've used has come in hand for bass, it's come in handy for chords. If you notice, all of my default bass sounds are just one octave low or one octave high, and they all sound Minimoogish. I like fake Minimoog sounds because they always sound really different. When I want that Minimoog sound I try to recreate it with something else. It always gives something interesting because this one is stereo. It's a bit colder but it's still trying to be the Minimoog."

"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."

"In the studio we had a Roland SH-101."

In this video, Chromeo talk about the old Pentium 2 computer they use to run an early version of Cakewalk.

At 20:00 the Nord Modular can be seen at the backround.

"The Roland R-70 is a bit more 90s. We haven't used it that much yet - first album - but maybe it's going to come back. We've used crashes and little elements from it. This was one of my first drum machines. It was very cheap and it's very 90s."

"The classic CR-78, we've used it on our Eagles Cover and 'J'ai Claque La Porte.' What we did for the French song on the album is that we actually separated all the sounds and reprogrammed it ourselves. So we have the sounds from that machine, but we're not using a pre-existing pattern in it."

"The only old piece of gear that I think we're going to bring back, or that I would still use in making comtemporary electronic music, is the SP-12."

"We actually wrote a lot of the record just on a Wurli in vocals. So, for instance, when we came in with the riffs, say like on a P demo or one of my demos we had a main riff and we wanted to work on a pre-chorus, or maybe a chord change, then we'd just sit and hum ideas and P would find the right chord and we'd flush the idea out just with the Wurli. So this is there almost more for making demos and song writing. We have this on some songs: 'Grow Up,' it's in the back of 'Night by Night,' and in the back of 'The Right Type.'"

"For 'Momma's Boy,' for instance, we actually used a plugin, the Lizard Lounge. We used it because it's giving us something more modern. That and the effect on the vocal gave it more of a twist."

"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."

"I love this. It's a big secret weapon for us. I really love how if you really want to emulate a Minimoog, this is the best thing to do it with. It's like four oscillators, and it stays on tune and just works really well. We don't use this for many basses. Part of the reason why we don't use this for a bass is that for bass lines we tend to privilege keyboards that are MIDI enabled just because you can lock it in with the drums and it stays on. This one is not MIDI, so we use this more for like leads and funk flourishes. It gives you a million different ones. Also more like soundtracky patches. This is a great synth. It has all these great options right where you turn the effects on and off... it's just an amazing synth. There's chord memory - great synth!"

"This is great sounding. It has a particular sound because it's actually strings. There's pickups for every string and the basses have a single string. This piano gives you that really compressed gritty feel. It's really thin. It runs beautiful. We've used it on songs like 'Don't Walk Away' and 'The Right Type.' If you really want, it has an integrated tremolo - it's amazing. It's got direct XLR outs - it goes straight into the board with no complications."

"We got two TLM-103s here: one for Talk Box and one for vocals/percussions when we use them."

While Chromeo prefer vintage hardware synths in the studio, they turn to Logic to jot down ideas on the road: "The Logic people from Apple took me into a studio for a tutorial on Logic Studio. It’s pretty cool, and I intend to use it on the road for ideas. If I have something in my head that I want to get out, I can bust out Logic and with the included soft synths, I’ve got a great Wurlitzer sound, great Rhodes and Clav sounds, B-3 sounds, synth sounds, all that."

In this Vine video clip, P-Thugg jams out on Chromeo's Jupiter-8 synth.

Dave 1 of Chromeo is seen performing live with an Epiphone Les Paul '56 Goldtop guitar, as noted on their Twitter account.

Chromeo's P-Thugg DJs using Serato Scratch Live.

"Chromed out MS20"

When asked what their go-to synth is, Chromeo says the Prophet-5, since it's "...easy to program, lots of options, great beginner synth."