The guys really got a handle on what tape was doing to their recorded music. We prepared tape for Pro Tools, so getting that conversion right was important. We decided to record on tape and experimented with different speeds. Peter remembers that “the early ideas were generated with synths and just recording music in the traditional way. Once the tour had completed, early in 2008, Daft Punk began to experiment with some initial ideas that would eventually evolve and be reshaped into the tracks that made up the record. So that was really the beginning of the analogue-only concept that carried through to Random Access Memories.” We toured with a classic Midas Heritage console. “At that time, there wasn’t really anything close to an analogue console (in the digital realm) as far as sounding good was concerned. Thomas really talked a lot about gear during that tour and at the outset we decided to utilise an analogue console to achieve a warmer sound on the tour, and not to use digital technology, because of the reason of conversion. I got to know the guys so closely during that time. “The eight shows that they’d planned eventually turned into something like 80 shows! We toured for two years, pretty much we started in 2006 and it ended at the tail end of 2007. Then we had a long chat about how much we all loved Paul Williams,” Peter remembers. When I told them I’d done Paul Williams’ front-of-house their eyes widened and they were pretty impressed. It was originally scheduled to be just eight shows, but I met Thomas and Guy-Manuel – they asked me what I’d done. He called me one day and just said: ‘I know a couple of guys who want to do a short tour, would you be up for it?’. They asked him if he knew any front-of-house engineers and he suggested me. I had done a tour with Martin Phillips, who was doing all the lighting for their videos, so they’d already asked him if he’d help design the live show. They needed someone to mix their front-of-house. “They hadn’t performed in 10 years at that point, so they were kind of looking for a crew. “I first met Daft Punk in 2005, when they were preparing their live tour,” Peter tells us. We spoke to him about his tour memories, his first encounter with ‘the robots’ and how the record’s concept developed. Joining them on the tour was engineer Peter Franco, who engineered their Grammy Award winning live album Alive 2007 and went on to work on Random Access Memories. Although initially set to be a short-term affair, the Alive tour became a near-two-year undertaking. Following their third full-length LP Human After All in 2005, the duo decided to embark on a series of live dates.
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