100%
ZooG's notes on the creation of the track "100%"

This came together in a flash...infact, of all the tracks on KRANKHAUS, 100% was completed in the shortest time. We wrote it on a bass guitar - so it's definitely 'riff' driven.

When we produced the track we tried to keep it as sparse as we could. The guitars and bass follow each other, the drums are very simple....but there's A LOT bubbling on in the background.
The lyrics have the same idea...they're simple on the surface but very complex and fucked up.

WEIRD PERCUSIVE THING IN THE INTRO
This is a drum loop being fed into the Middle Finger of God (our modular synth). The loop was patched into an 'Envelope Follower', this is a gadget that traces the volume contour of a sound...it tracks the loud and soft bits and outputs them as a signal that can control other things. We patched this output into an oscillator and a filter...hence the percussive and bubbly sound was produced.

SYNTH LEAD LINE
This was an accident. The original lead line was crap, so we were tweaking it on the computer. We grabbed the top note and accidentally dragged it up 4 semitones...and the lead line was born.
We then made an extremely fucked up version of the melody with lots of bends and trills.

BASS SYNTH
The main punch is a single oscillator panned dead centre (no chorus - just a plain, solid well defined tone). This sound supplied the thumping bass frequencies.
The Jupiter 8 doubles the bass and is panned 50% left and right (the Jupiter8 is an incredible synth...it is SO PHAT!!). We put a low shelf (-12dB @ 120Hz) over this to make sure the Jupiter 8's PHATNESS would not clutter the main bass sound. This sound supplied the mid range.
The Prophet 5 makes the psycho element of the sound. There are two versions (slightly different from each other) panned hard left and right. A High Pass filter was put over this at about 200Hz. This sound supplied the mid/high end.
All five sounds were fed into a multiband compressor so they would gel together.

DESTROYX'S VOCAL TAKE
She wasn't in the mood to do vocals. Her dark mood came across beautifully! She did it in one take....she usually does the vocals in the first or second take. Destroyx has an incredible voice - she has gloriously clear high end definition and a gravelly mid low range. Her voice vocodes brilliantly because she has such an amazing frequency spectrum on her voice.

VOCODERS + RANDOM STUFF
The both Jupiter 8s and the Prophet 5 are used here. We also fed noise into the vocoder to dirty up the sound.
There's a lot of small random percussion bleeping in the background. All this was made with the Analogue Sequencer driving the Middle Finger of God. We cut it all up and simplified it. We panned much of it medium left and medium right...this was to compensate for everything else (which was either centre or hard left or hard right)
HINT: Always try and mix as if you are looking at a stage. Some of the instruments are in the middle, some are slightly off to the side, some are hard left or right. Panning everything centre, hard left or hard right will make the mix sound thin.

STRUCTURES
This song has a weird structure...and that was another accident. It was 2 different chorus, then it combines them together at the end. Weird. Random. Possible alien involvement.

GUITARS
The Guitars are the handy work of Graeme. We cut these so there was no noise between the notes – this way they sounded punchy and solid, plus they made space for everything else to peak through the mix.

OTHER
We listened to a lot of ElectroClash during the making on Krankhaus. One thing we really like about ElectroClash is it's simplicity. If you simply the mix you will allow the sounds to share the spotlight...instead of it becoming a shit-fight for volume space. ALSO, when you go to mastering, it's easy to make a simple mix sound HUGE.

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