Mirwais

" Similarly, "Music" begins with a nearly unrecognizable vocoded phrase, "Boogie woogie/Do you like to?" [5] In this case, though, Mirwais went old-school and used an EMS 2000 vocoder on Madonna's vocal track.

"Impressive Instant" opens with out-of-phase synth LFO sweeps, panned hard left and right [3]. Light and transparent, the sound forms a backdrop for the entire length of the track. "Those are from the Nord Lead, run through a lowpass filter," says Mirwais. "The Nord Lead is an impressive machine because it's so simple."

The bass part on "Impressive Instant" is elusive, seeming massive and muted at the same time. "It's more of a sub-bass tone. There isn't much information in the mid or high range," explains Mirwais. "It's all from the Korg Prophecy. It's my secret weapon, an amazing synth. It's the Minimoog of the millennium. It has the most incredible bottom end, and it's very flexible -- though it's not easy to use. I just use the straight sound; I don't process it."

The organ-like suspended voicings behind the vocal are from the Waldorf Microwave XT [8]. "It's a kind of fake Rhodes sound on the Waldorf," he says. "The part is kind of a church organ vibe, but the church organ sound was too obvious; there was too much characteristic of the sound in the track. We needed something more dreamy and discrete."

"I used a Waldorf Microwave XT, Korg Prophecy, Roland JD-990, Clavia Nord Lead 2 Rack, and an E-mu E6400.

That's why Dre, Timbaland, and the Chemical Brothers all have an AWS900 at home then is it?

and BTW - Mirwais has a Duality.

His acoustic guitar makes another appearance on "Don't Tell Me," with very different results. "This was a demo that I recorded in my own studio," he says. "I recorded it to my ADAT using a Martin D-28 guitar that I borrowed from a friend. I ran a Neumann KM84 into the preamp of the 02R. I deliberately played it poorly, and then I chopped it up to make it stutter. I made it for myself, just as a demo. I had a melody over it, but when Madonna heard it, she came up with her own."

Put auto-tune into overdrive and you get what became known as the ‘Cher Effect’. In an interview in Sound-On-Sound producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling attributed the ear-twisting effect they applied to Cher’s vocals on 1998?s ‘Believe’ to a complicated vocoder setup. But what was obvious to most producers was exposed soon afterward: this was an auto-tune plug-in set to ruthlessly round the note up or down, causing lightning fast, perfect-pitch trills in the vocal. Madonna producer Mirwais took things a step further on tracks like ‘Impressive Instant’, redrawing the pitches of notes to create impossible, unexpected jumps in the melody.

who's playing lintronics modified synths ?

Helmut van Aaken, Germany

Andre Abshagen (PET), Germany

Kurt Ader (KARO), Germany

Mirwais Ahmadzaï, France

Thomas Aichberger, Germany

Malik Al-Badri, Germany

mirwais on stage with Madonna playing Gibson hummingbird