Remaking Daft Punk's 'Aerodynamic'

We've covered the work of Reveb Machine on the site before, with experlty made Beach House and Boards of Canada tracks in recent months. Here we have a full track remake of Daft Punk's 'Aerodynamic', with Project, MIDI & Stems availeble to download from his Patreon. They've created an excellent overview of the track and how it was built on their site here, As with all of their work, the detail and accuracy of the remake is stunning, and there's a lot to learn in the sound design and processing. Here's an excerpt from that:

The Funk Sample
The backbone of Aerodynamic is a sample from Sister Sledge's Il Macquillage Lady, specifically the instrumental section before the verses, at around 20 seconds. Aerodynamic runs at exactly the same tempo as the Sister Sledge original, so this sample was almost certainly the seed that Aerodynamic was built around.

I'm not sure which sampler Daft Punk used, maybe an Akai S-series sampler or MPC, but the Sister Sledge sample remains stereo and multiple slices get triggered simultaneously.

To recreate the sample chopping, I loaded the sample into Ableton's Simpler, switched to slice mode, and set it to slice by eighth notes. You can also try slice by transient, though that needs manual adjustment either way. Every eighth note gets its own slice, and they are then triggered in a completely different order to the original recording.
 

The "Guitar" Solo
After a minute of the funky Sister Sledge sample, everything drops out and we get an extended solo. This is commonly believed to be a tapping-style guitar solo, but to me, it doesn't sound like a guitar was actually used. The biggest giveaway is the phrasing: guitar tapping is legato and the motion between notes is completely smooth. The "Aerodynamic" solo is slightly staccato, with tiny gaps between every note.

There's a lot going on sound-wise in this solo. The instrument, whatever it was, was almost certainly mic'd through a speaker cabinet, with heavy distortion and pitch shifting layered on top. Let's break it down!

Plugins Used
The following plugins were used in this article.

• Arturia DX7 V
• Arturia Mini V4
• DX7 V and Mini V4 are both included in Arturia V Collection Intro.
• Arturia Wurli V
• Native Instruments Guitar Rig 7
• Soundtoys Decapitator
• Soundtoys Little Alterboy
• Valhalla VintageVerb

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