Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
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Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
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Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
#2It could to without those people popping up all over the place. Other than that, awesome reconstruction of an awesome song.
Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
#3It could to without those people popping up all over the place. Other than that, awesome reconstruction of an awesome song.
"Those that love law or sausage shouldn't watch either being made"...but in this case, extremely fascinating.
But how much of this technology existed in 1997? How did Prodigy really make the track?
Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
#4I am curious how he found the original songs whose samples are mixed into the song. I guess in an interview the authors told about it, but hard to believe that he recognized those pieces by ear.
Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
#5It could to without those people popping up all over the place. Other than that, awesome reconstruction of an awesome song.
"Those that love law or sausage shouldn't watch either being made"...but in this case, extremely fascinating. But how much of this technology existed in 1997? How did Prodigy really make the track?
Mostly hardware rack samplers. I think Liam used (uses?) Akai S1100 or a similar model. You play in chunks of audio to them, trim the waveform to the part you need, optionally build a keyboard-split/layered patch with it, and then play it via MIDI. They also have some envelopes for pitch modulation and other stuff you can use.
You can do this with sounds you make yourself (The Prodigy frequently samples their own synthesizers) or to anything you play in.
The sequencing would have been done with a hardware sequencer (unlikely) or a PC tracker or MIDI sequencer (more likely.) Record the outputs onto tape for mixing at the studio.
Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
#6It could to without those people popping up all over the place. Other than that, awesome reconstruction of an awesome song.
"Those that love law or sausage shouldn't watch either being made"...but in this case, extremely fascinating. But how much of this technology existed in 1997? How did Prodigy really make the track?
I'm sure the algorithms for time stretching and the effects have been tweaked over the years, but the core principles of snipping wav files, sequencing on multiple tracks and adding parametrized effects are the same.
I'd love to see someone reconstruct some other tracks (like Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet", 1989) with readily available consumer software like Apple's GarageBand.
Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
#7Back when Prodigy did this in the late 1990's they must have used tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment... samplers, synths, sequencers, filters, etc...
Today, the entire thing can be done in a single piece of software.
Wow.
Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
#8Back when Prodigy did this in the late 1990's they must have used tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment... samplers, synths, sequencers, filters, etc... Today, the entire thing can be done in a single piece of software. Wow.
Even in the late 1990s they had powerful audio editing software. The first version of ProTools came out in 1991 and there were a ton of cheaper tools as well.
I'm not saying they didn't do this on thousands of dollars of equipment but in 1997 there's nothing you saw on this video that couldn't be done on a single piece of software (ok maybe two) even then. It wasn't the dark ages.
And get off my lawn.
Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
#9It could to without those people popping up all over the place. Other than that, awesome reconstruction of an awesome song.
"Those that love law or sausage shouldn't watch either being made"...but in this case, extremely fascinating. But how much of this technology existed in 1997? How did Prodigy really make the track?
[deleted]
Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
#10Great song, I have seen these guys live more than once. I never realized that it was mixed like this. Very interesting post. The mixer is a very talented guy indeed.