Daft Punk’s gear list for their 1997 album Homework has surfaced online
Find out which synth made that classic Da Funk lead line.
Image: daftbootlegs.weebly.com
After Daft Punk announced they were hanging up their helmets, tributes poured in from fans and collaborators. They shared old footage, classic songs and insightful interviews – including a particularly interesting feature in a Japanese magazine from 1999, which revealed the gear used on Homework.
The article saw Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Honem-Christo share their complete studio gear list in the creation of 1997’s Homework. The duo also shared their signal path and production techniques.
Despite speculation that the iconic Da Funk lead sound was made on the Korg MS-20, it appears to not be part of their arsenal at this time. Instead, Daft Punk had a Roland Juno-106, MC-202, MKS-80, TB-303 and a Sequential Prophet-VS, along with a host of effects.
Along with those classic synths, the duo also produced with a Roland TR-707, TR-808, TR-909 – which is, obviously, the inspiration for the track Revolution 909 – an E-Mu SP-1200 and much more. Less obvious is the use of some 90s Behringer gear and an Iomega floppy disk drive. It goes to show what kind of influential music you can make with affordable gear.
In the interview, Bangalter says: “In the first step, when making music with hardware, [the signal] goes through the mixer and the compressor and is recorded on the DAT. After that, effects are put on the sound source before going into the mixer to be recorded. We don’t use the AUX on the mixer.”
“The second step is directly putting the sounds from the DAT into the S-760 sampler and editing/cutting the two tracks into however many pieces, like hard disk recording.
“Lastly, we recorded it directly from the S-760 to the DAT. From here we do the rest with the Macintosh.”
Check out the equipment list below.
Sequencers
– Alesis MMT-8
– Apple Macintosh + EMAGIC MicroLogic
Samplers
– AKAI S01
– E-Mu E III
– E-Mu SP-1200
– Ensoniq ASR-10
– Roland S-760
Synthesizers
– Roland Juno-106
– Roland MC-202
– Roland MKS-80
– Roland TB-303
– Sequential Prophet-VS
– Drum Machines
– Linn LinnDrum
– Roland TR-707
– Roland TR-808
– Roland TR-909
Effects
– Alesis Microverb III
– Alesis 3630 Compressor
– Behringer Compressor
– Behringer Parametric EQ
– Ensoniq DP/4+
– Lexicon Vortex
– Lexicon JamMan
– LA Audio Gate/Compressor
– Waldorf MiniWorks 4-pole
– Yamaha Digital Delay
Mixers/Recorders
– Mackie. MS-1202
– Mackie. CR-1604
– Panasonic SV-3700
Other
– Iomega Zip Drive
Check out the full-size feature here.
For more music tech news, click here.
