Two years ago, you couldn’t go anywhere — in a club, near a radio, even on the dancefloor at a wedding — without hearing “Do It Again.” While that infectious hard-synth house track undoubtedly launched the commercial careers of remix team Razor N’ Guido, the duo just as quickly disappeared, mysteriously, into the nether, like a drop-out. Perhaps they dreaded the feared sophomore slump, or maybe “Do It Again” would prove to be a towering statement that would be impossible to follow.

Well, for any DJ who knows what it’s like to do remixes and put tracks together, the duo were busy with a huge undertaking: assembling an album of original songs, as in vocal productions, not just tracks, as proper artists, not hired-gun remixers tooling with someone else’s DAT.

Not an easy leap for any remixer. The result, Dancefloor (Groovilicious), did offer up to Razor N’ Guido fans and to (mostly East Coast) house DJs their customary dose of New York underground kick drums and hard synths, with plenty of room to mix in and out of, of course.

But the duo also served up some darker, moodier moments (“Interlude” and “Interlude #2”); and I was surprised at the Euro inflection on some of the tracks. Did they successfully pull off the vocal tracks? Sure, with “Work It” and the wonderful “Never” by Darrel Martin, the stomping house-y “Won’t You Tell Me” with the lungs of Reneé, and the first single, “Miss The Way” featuring Reina, DJs have had plenty of dancefloor momentum in their crates.

But for our purposes, we wondered what it takes for the average remixer to make that great leap of faith, to brook the chasm between remixer and artist. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for most of us, we don’t have a “Do It Again” to pigeonhole us. We talked to Razor N’ Guido, well after Dancefloor had been released, to talk shop, not hype, and find out how they’ve tried to go beyond their signature Yamaha CS1X keyboard sound, and to unearth some tricks to recruiting vocalists.

DJ Times: Not many remixers decide to put out an entire album. What made you decide to do it?

Guido: I think it’s a sign of the times. The producer/DJ is becoming an artist and we kind of got flung into it in a way. You don’t think about it when you’re originally in it. Like, when we were doing tracks and stuff we weren’t thinking, “Yeah, this is the album.” But when you put out a single and it does well, the record companies kind of look at you and say, “Well, are you going to do any more?” and that kind of turned into the idea of the album. Even when we were offered the chance to do the album by Groovilicious, I think we still kind of looked at each other and said, “What are we going to do?” because we didn’t think we were going to get that heavy into the songwriting, but it kind of evolved into itself. That’s why it took a little time.

DJ Times: I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of different types of music on Dancefloor, from underground to almost Euro-pop. What style are you most comfortable with?

Guido: We wanted to show people that we weren’t just “Do It Again.”

Razor: We really planned to be a lot more eclectic. We have other lives. We like drum-n-bass and 2-Step. We like all these different forms and we wanted to show that on the album, but we realized we couldn’t get too crazy. We like R&B and we were going to put an R&B song on it. We had to focus and stick to doing a dance-oriented album. But we really wanted to show on the album our eclecticness, that we’re a little bit deeper than “Do It Again.” That’s why we were able to accomplish making an album. People didn’t think we could because most of the producers in our vein are DJs that have just become producers. We have a little more history than that, and a lot of people don’t know about it.

DJ Times: When people see that you’re doing music with artists, they’ll ask questions like, “Do you go out and find the artists or do they come to you?” How does that all work?

Guido: People will be surprised at how much talent there is out there. That girl Reneé that we found, even though we found her through a friend, the reason why she was so good was because she sang in church all the time. I know that’s where she got a lot of her skills, and she has a real, real smooth voice because of that. Talent is everywhere. You just have to go look for it. Ask friends. There’s always someone who knows someone and you just keep looking until you find somebody you can work with. We got lucky with a couple of the artists on our label. We’re not selling them short, by saying that it was easy, but it was convenient that we had two good artists that we could work with in the label. Initially, we set out to try and find and discover new talent or to work with talent that was either just getting started or that is undiscovered. It’s our first time, why can’t it be everyone else’s first time? Why not rise together?

DJ Times: When the two of you set out to do a song, what do you start out with?

Razor: It ain’t nothin’ without the rhythm. Sometimes if you’re doing a remix, a very heavily vocal remix that includes a lot of time-stretching and stuff, you might just add a couple of hi-hats or kicks and get to work on the vocals flowing first and then revert back to the [rhythm] later. You want to get the vocals flowing first because that’s tedious stuff and you don’t want to break in the middle of the creative process to go back and do time stretching. You want to get that out of the way and the sampling and stuff and then you have all of your creative tools. But it usually starts with the beat.

Guido: A lot of times people will say, “Oh man, I always think of things in my head.” Call your answering machine and put your ideas down and then you get home and listen to it and remember that keyboard line. It sounds funny, but it works.

DJ Times: How does the pressure of being one of the top remix teams affect your work?

Guido: We definitely respect where we are but I think the reason we got where we are is because we try to do something different always, regardless of what was expected from us. So the formula is if we don’t feel it then change it. It’s just like DJing: you have to stay on top of what’s going on. And what’s new and what’s going to happen. It’s very hard to do, but that’s the life of a DJ. Remixers, it’s the same. I mean you don’t need to be a DJ to do that, but you try to stay on top of things. If you don’t go out and listen to music, other DJs that play different sets, you’re not going to be able to stay ahead of what’s going on.

DJ Times: I’m sure that everyone in this industry gets into ruts sometimes and they have to do something to work themselves out of the ruts. What do you do to work through your ruts when you run into a song that you’re having trouble with?

Guido: Razor plays video games. It helps, for him. I walk away. Whatever you have to do to walk away. Even if it’s for an hour, you have to know when to get away. There’s always that moment in every good track that you do, I call it the “magic moment,” and it’s that moment that you do that one last line or beat or whatever and you say, “There it is. There’s the concept. All we have to do is just arrange it.” Sometimes at that moment you want to step back and let it sit for a minute and come back and listen to it again. Sometimes that’ll make it even better because you disassociate it from yourself, because you’re so close to it at that time. Trust me, we’ve had our share of projects that we thought we’d never get through, but then there’s always that moment when all of a sudden it just broke. Like, I’ll be sittin’ there on the keyboard going through a barrage of lines and then suddenly Razor will be like, “Stop! Stop! That’s the one.” Or I’ll be upstairs and he’s playing around and I’ll hear something. You never know. It’s lucky we’re two people because we don’t both have to walk away. One person can keep trying while the other is taking a break. If you’re in a rut, the thing is to walk away and rethink it.

DJ Times: All good partners can’t always think the same way. When there’s a disagreement, who usually wins and why?

Razor: Guido lets me get away with a little more. Like, if I want to put a part in and he doesn’t want to, we’ll try it out and then if someone comes up to us at a club and says how much they like that part, I’ll say to Guido, “Thanks for letting me put that in.”

Guido: The thing is that in every good partnership there’ll be disagreements because there’s two different views. Unfortunately, Razor’s view is usually the one that’s more cock-eyed. If I’m playing something forward, he’s thinking about it in reverse...It’s not that I let him do something, it’s just I’ll be sitting there thinking, “Do you really want to put that in there, dude? It sounds really strange.” But then it does work. And the only reason I’m thinking it’s strange is that I wouldn’t have thought about it that way. At this point in the game, I’ve just learned to say, “OK, that’s Razor’s little weird part and it’s in every song.” He always does something different and sometimes it’s subliminal more than other times and I’ll tell you what, it’s usually the one thing that people cue in on. Like on “Banswar,” the hook was fine, there was nothing wrong with the hook, but he put in this little thing and that’s the part that everyone always centers in on. It became an alternate hook within a hook. It blows my mind how just one little thing will change a whole song.

DJ Times: Up until now, would you consider “Do It Again” your biggest success?

Guido: Yeah, we probably could’ve done a Madonna remix and everyone would still know us by “Do It Again.”

Razor: In the clubs, I think it’s Kim English’s “Unspeakable Joy.”

Guido: In the public eye, the mainstream, I think it’s “Do It Again,” which sucks, because it’s like they couldn’t have known us for a song that has a regular lyric – like whenever you have to explain to someone who you are you have to sing that stupid melody. I wish I would’ve screamed, “Do it again!” real loud in the middle of the song so everyone would hear it and that’s all I would have to say. Instead, I have to sing that freakin’ line. At this point, it’s like sweet torture because it’s done really well and everyone knows it, but do I have to sing it for you?

DJ Times: Since the success of “Do It Again,” what have you learned about the music industry?

Guido: I think the music industry is like Lotto – you never know.

Razor: It’s hard to trust people.

Guido: You wanna, especially if you’re a good-hearted person, like I think we are, but a lot of things that have come...when you get popular and you’re on the radio and there’s a buzz, everybody starts coming out of the woodwork, whether it was someone that washed your car five years ago or people that you don’t know who want to manage you. We fell into all of that. We were wet behind the ears, green and we fell into managers and agents and other stuff and we learned our lesson. Luckily we came through it OK, somewhat unscathed, other than our egos and our pride, but other than that it could have been worse. I’ve heard worse stories.

DJ Times: What do you think your biggest mistake on the album was? Guido: Thinking we had to go out of house to finish it. Everything that we’ve done has always been at home in our studio. When the album came to be done we thought – and so did our A&R guy – “Well, you have all of these vocal tracks and you haven’t really done any serious vocals. You saved a lot of money because you did all of the pre-production in your house, so why don’t we take some money and go into a major recording studio and mix this down. You’ll get a studio sound.” Then a lot of money later, we’re re-doing three or four little songs because we’re not happy with them, they don’t sound right. And it’s not because the people we worked with were any less professional, it’s just that this is what we do and this is what we wanted it to sound like and by the time you get somebody, another engineer, in there to understand where your head is at, the cost is immense. Maybe somebody that’s used to going to a big studio, it isn’t an immense cost, but for us, who never spend money outside of house, we were like, “Why did we just spend this money?” Records like “Miss the Way” and “Dancefloor” we had to remix at home. And they really sound amazing. If you listen to them closely and you go through, it’s very hard to pick out what was done at home and what was done at the studio. So that, for us, was the biggest lesson. Stick to what you know and don’t fix what ain’t broke.

Razor: Other than the studio issues, I think it went really well.

DJ Times: How long did it take to put it out?

Guido: Two years.

Razor: I guess because it was our first one, we switched studios back and forth.

Guido: There were a lot of mistakes that went on, it wasn’t just one.

Razor: The next time we do one, it’ll be out in six or seven months.

DJ Times: In your last DJ Times interview, you talked about your equipment. What pieces have you bought since then?

Guido: One of the best toys that we’ve gotten since is the Akai 6000. That sampler’s awesome. I think it’s the basis of the whole studio right now. Some of the best sounds on the album are samples that we manipulated in some way or another. I could say the computer, the G4. Having the G4 and being able to get a bunch of plug-ins working at the same time and the sampler. We maxed out all our cards on the JV2080. Some cool stuff. We got a country card.

Razor: When we went to Japan, all the cards were really cheap so we bought a whole bunch.

Guido: The past couple of days, we haven’t been able to play them yet, but we bought [Electrix] Filter Factories, which are really cool, the Vocoder Factory and the Focus Factory. We’re very careful about what we buy. We love all these pieces of gear, but in reality we keep going back to the sampler because we buy tons of records, as DJs, and you hear a sound and you take a snippet and change it around. There’s one song where we used a vocal as the lead sound. The sampler’s the most powerful thing in any studio.

DJ Times: With that in mind, with outboard samplers and now with computer technology changing so quickly, what percentage of your stuff is outboard gear compared to the computer stuff you’re starting to use? Do you find that there are still a few pieces of outboard gear that you use, but now because there’s all these new synthesizers in your computer that you’re starting to make the turnover?

Guido: We did and didn’t. We have a Mackie Digital [desk] so all of our outboards are in the board and the only thing that we still use is the BP4. Because it’s got some weird effects on it and it can give you a different kind of effect. Those are probably the only pieces of equipment that we still use. The rest is either in the computer or in the Mackie.

DJ Times: So you rely more on the computer? I’ve talked to remixers who won’t touch a computer. If they can’t touch it or physically manipulate it, it’s not good for them.

Guido: We kind of have that phobia in a way.

Razor: We have all of the keyboards.

Guido: We won’t totally give in to the computer yet. We still need to have our hands on the knob. Maybe it’s some kind of Freudian thing [laughs] or maybe a man thing [laughs again]. I don’t know, but we need a knob to turn. If it’s in the computer and it’s done through a mouse it feels artificial. It’s not the same. But everything is going the way of the computer and we’ve updated a lot of our effects. It’s just, to me, I feel very apprehensive...we’re very virtual. We don’t record any of our synths to tape, so, to me, to record the synths to tape, what happens to that synth, if you want to change it at any moment, you’re working with sound bytes instead of the actual synth itself. I just don’t think it sounds the same. Maybe that’s my old school talking, but I don’t feel comfortable committing my synths to tape. And the computer is where you have most of your outboard accessible to you. I just don’t feel comfortable letting go.

DJ Times: In the last interview, you mentioned Neal Patrick Cohen as your agent. Is that still the case? What does an agent do for you as a remixer? Do they actually work for you?

Guido: It’s good and bad. If you can hook up with someone who’s well connected in the industry, but doesn’t have a huge artist already — which is almost impossible we found — it’s worthwhile. You’re better off waiting awhile until you get to a certain point and you need someone to handle your business. I’m not trying to put down managers, but we’ve learned that it’s a Catch 22. We went through two managers in the past and they helped us, Neal helped us and our other managers helped us, but it was like we weren’t getting focused attention because all of these people had larger artists that they were already working with. In Neal’s case, he already had Armand van Helden. I can’t blame him — he’s got to take care of his guy. And Armand’s a full-time job. And for us to turn around and say, “Hey, pay attention to us!” It’s selfish and wrong. He can’t. As far as agents, we have an agent for DJing. We work with Track Central Booking. And that does really well for us. That gets us bookings at clubs. They go out for us. And as far as DJing is concerned, we’re very happy because it would be impossible for us to go out to all these clubs. As far as remixing, we’re handling ourselves.

DJ Times: Is there a particular method that you use to put together your songs and what types of tweaking do you use?

Guido: It’s a little different when you’re writing the song. What happens with us is that we wind up doing a melody or a beat or something and writing to it and then we wind up changing it after we write it. I think it’s because we’re remixers at heart, not songwriters, so we kind of would get the concept right but then the remixer in us would want to come out and remix it. I’m saying remixing, but it turned out to be the production. In the case of “Miss The Way,” that was a very good example of that because the original version of that, which is on Napster...the original “Miss the Way” production was totally different. It had a totally different feel, kind of like an “Alright” mix we did for Club 69. It was cool, but after we wrote the song we felt it needed more driving beats. “A” we felt it needed more driving beats, “B”, at the time, Groovilicious signed “Dammit Janet” and they got all of the parts so we were like, “Well, Groovilicious owns parts of ‘Dammit Janet,’ so we can take it and use it.” We’re taking an instrumental track, which was very popular, and incorporating its sounds into a vocal track, which as a remixer, as DJs, we like to do an instrumental track and make it into a vocal if we can. There were a lot of cool parts in “Dammit Janet,” but there were no vocals in it, but I guess that was what made it what it was, a good underground record. What we did was we took a song that we had written to a different production, and remixed it. The main instruments in that song we used the samplers for. I sampled the synths, which were a combination of the quasi-MIDI Cyrus and the Roland JV2080 with, I’m pretty sure, a vintage synth card on the Roland 2080. I believe the Roland 2080 is one of the most versatile boxes you can buy, because of the expansion cards and it’s a really good sound system. I think the programmers did a really good job on it. The only other boxes I can say that are working for us right now is the Proteus 2000. There’s just so much stuff in there. We haven’t even begun to get into the expansion on there. I know there’s a whole other level to that thing. But it’s just been invaluable to us. E-MU’s really got it together. And we have the Orbit, we have the Planet Phatt, we have the Audity and the Proteus 2000.

DJ Times: Let’s go from start to finish on a production.

Guido: Obviously, the drumbeat and the rhythm is the first thing you lay down. I’m sure that any producer you talk to will have the same idea, unless you have a specific situation where you need to just get chords down to get your idea. But that’s usually not the case. We work with the rhythm first. We use an Ovation drum station a lot. That’s our basic drum kit. But we use samples. In the case of “Miss the Way” we used a kick sample, we didn’t use the drum station. But our signature kick is from the drum station.

DJ Times: What type of sequencing software do you use?

Razor: We use the [Mark of the Unicorn’s] Digital Performer 2.7. A lot of people use Cubase because of the plug-ins and stuff like that and as of late Digital Performer has caught up.

DJ Times: And you’re Mac-based.

Guido: We are Mac-based. We have a G4. That’s our baby. It’s a big difference, working on that computer. I’ve been using Digital Performer since 1992. I’ve grown with it and I know the program inside and out. To me, it’s one of the most versatile programs out there.

DJ Times: So you lay down your kick...

Guido: We lay down our kick and depending on how much of a hurry we are to get the vocals down and get an idea down, it might just be a kick and a high-hat and a clap. Then we start working with the bass lines and stuff, trying to get an idea out. If we really don’t have any ideas, we just keep working with the rhythm because that’ll always spark something. If you work on the rhythm and the rhythm is tight, your bassline is rhythmic. It depends on the rhythm a lot – the bass line. If you have a solid rhythm, the rhythm will kind of help you with the bass line. And that’s what drives the song, the bass line. That’s part of the drums, as far as I’m concerned. So that’s the first foundation of the song. Then we move on to say, looping the chorus, and working out the chords to the chorus, and the chorus part, because that is obviously your kitchen sink part. Because when you get to the chorus, that’s where you have to be full-on. Everything else from then on is arranging. The verses are always a lot less energetic than the chorus, so we usually work on the chorus first, to get the energy we want, and then we downgrade from there to work on the verses – and the arrangements. So we usually get an eight-bar loop going and just add different ideas, different melody patterns, different chords, different melody lines until we have something that we feel works. Like you can walk upstairs, get a drink of water and when you come back it still hits you the same way. You know you got it. Once you have that, then the song, to me, is pretty much done because the rest is arranging. And editing. If you have a good song with a good loop, good chords and melody and a good pattern – basically it could be a bass line and a synth line. But if it’s rhythmically working and everything’s jibing with the vocal, it will arrange itself because it’s just a matter of putting each piece in. And getting to the full part, like I said, if you work on the chorus and get it tight, then everything falls into place.

DJ Times: When you get projects that you have to time-stretch, what programs do you use?

Guido: Digital Performer. It’s very clean. Since I’m already in that field, it’s very clean. It’s all automatic, you tell it what the initial tempo was, if you don’t have it, figure it out and put the sequence at that tempo and set the soundbite to that tempo. Say the original tempo is 98 and once you go to the tempo you want it at, say, 133 or something, you press adjust, soundbite, sequence and tempo and it automatically adjusts it and it’s really clean.

DJ Times: Explain the importance of getting dry vocals.

Guido: It’s key because when you have DSP or effects added to a vocal, when you stretch, the effects get weird because you’re deleting information and the effects are very heavy in information. The effect information is so complex that if you take away some of it, it sounds weird. You get artifacts out of the track that sounds weird and strange. The only other thing that creates that is layered vocals. They’ll create artifacts before the lead vocal will. If you’re working with a track with a vocal that has backgrounds, I suggest time stretching the background separately or sometimes not using them at all, if at all possible, if you’re doing a really big stretch, because it’s the chorus background vocals that are going to give you more problems stretching than just a single lead vocal. It’s imperative that you have a dry lead vocal, especially if you’re doing a really big stretch or a really difficult stretch. The more stuff that’s on the track, be it background vocals or effects, will just make it harder to stretch because you’re going to have artifacts.

DJ Times: When you say dry you mean...

Guido: I mean vocals without any effects, just with the EQ it was put down with. And not even that, even if it was just flat it’s fine because you can do that afterwards. Nothing. No compression. Usually the record labels will send you – they like to try and get away with sending you the a cappella, but that already has effects and stuff. I usually go and try to get a dry vocal. When you do get a dry vocal, it has the backgrounds mixed in and stuff like that. So what we do is try to get the masters, because it’s the only way to go. When we did Biggie [“Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems”], when we did Shaft, we got the masters. But they messed up because they sent us all the masters to the movie, so we had to go through 10 masters. So sometimes you have to be a little more clear. But the great thing about it is that we had all of the parts separately, so when we stretched it, it was really clean.

DJ Times: About vocals, do you sample your vocals or do you just go ahead and put them in Digital Performer?

Guido: You know what? It would be very easy for us just to put them in Digital Performer because we do a lot of tricks in there, but Digital Performer doesn’t filter like our sampler. That’s a good question because to me, personally, there’s something about having a vocal on a sampler up on a key and being able to hit the sampler with a key. I could program a vocal to do the same thing in Digital Performer, but it’s not the same as having it to play with and having the track run, playing with it and figuring out a cool little rhythm with it. In certain cases that’ll signature a track.

DJ Times: The difference between the Digital Performer, which you just explained, and working with a sampler: do you still take the vocal, do a time stretch and load it into the sampler?

Guido: Yes.

DJ Times: If so, what size segments are you loading onto each key? Are you loading the whole chorus on one key?

Guido: No. I split it up by what you would call rhythmic syllables. Let’s say we’re talking about “Miss the Way” and our track says, “I miss the way that you love me, I miss the way that you touch me.” I would go, “I miss the way” and then, “that you love me.” It depends on what the person is saying. So I’ll put “miss the way” then “love me” and “that you love me” on different keys, so I can have bits and pieces that I can get rhythmic with. And sample it. But I do stretch it first and then put it in the sampler. I’ve made the mistake of putting it into the sampler and then having to stretch it. That sucks. Because you have something really cool, but now you have to speed it up so you have to do it all over again. Try to do all your stretching first and make sure you have it at the speed you want it at. That’s good advice. And save everything. That’s good advice, too.

Razor: Right. Back up everything. Three times.

DJ Times: After the vocals are laid down and the rhythm and vocals are put in, you said now it’s just the arranging. What are some things you do to add excitement? Explain, briefly, some of the things you do to make your transitions more smooth, whether you use snare rolls or kick rolls or whatever.

Razor: Well, a lot of people know us for our snare rolls, so we’ve been trying to get out of that. But I think a transition, making transitions from verse to chorus to bridge, making all those transitions smoother is probably one of the hardest things you have to do. That’s one of your later touches as you’re arranging things. Is the energy continuing? You have to be careful because you can get a lot of energy as you’re going towards the chorus, but then the chorus doesn’t keep the energy. So transitions, how you place them and what you do with them, are very important. You can do it with a snare roll, or keyboard synth rises or reverse crashes into a crash or a crash roll – it could be a lot of different things. It could be a drum tom roll. The key is whatever is right for the track and whatever kind of energy you’re trying to build. We used a lot of drum rolls but we also use synth rises in order to get the same effect. There are so many different way of doing it. Sometimes you can drop down and get energy from that.

Guido: It’s all about presentation and introduction. Transitions are what’s going to tell you, or give you a hint, of what’s going to happen. Second, it’s what’s keeping the person listening. Razor gave a very good example: Before “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” there were no movies that had ever come out like that, where you had action scene after action scene. All of the movies that had action would have a regular intro and then it would come to this climax at the end – one big car chase or gunfight or something like that. “Indiana Jones” was the first movie to have continuing action one after another with a big climax and transitional parts that kept you interested. That’s a good analogy. If you don’t do the right kind of transition, then you’re not going to keep the person interested. You’ll make them bored.

DJ Times: Once everything is finished, what types of things do you do? Do you do your own mastering? And if you do, what types of things do you do?

Guido: I really don’t do much. I concentrate on the mix itself. We have a Mackie Digital 8-Bus and it’s been a godsend for us. One of the most important things I could tell anyone is to buy a good pair of monitors. They don’t have to be expensive, but they should be good. For all the initial stuff that we did, we were using the JBL self-powered, 8-inch...forgot the model number. They were good for a year but they kind of wear out. When we went to go do the album we bought the JBL LSR-32s that weren’t self-powered but they were three-way. And what we realized was that first of all, a three-way system in a small studio is not practical. It’s hard to make a three-way system sound right. The woofer and mid-range tweeter, it’s hard to get those three aligned so that they sound right. It’s hard to get a real sense of what things sound like. Three-way systems are better for bigger rooms where you have the speakers set farther from you. For near-field monitoring, our console is right up against the wall like most people with small studios. They don’t have six feet behind the board. We thought bigger is better and it’s just not true. We wound up going back and getting the Tannoys and the Reveals, the non-powered ones. The Reveals are small so we’re like, “We’re going to pop these guys. We popped the JBLs, we’re going to pop these. So let’s get two pairs.” We get a nice good amp with it, I think it’s a 550, and you have these two pairs of these little speakers and they sound better than the bigger ones. I’ll tell you right now, the key to any good mix is a good pair of speakers. You’re only as good as your weakest link. If you can’t hear what you should be hearing, then you won’t get a good mix. You have to be able to hear exactly what is coming out of that board. If not, you’ll have a hell of a time with the album. That’s why we ended up going out of the house and mixing some stuff outside until we finally narrowed it down to the monitors. I really thought I was losing my hearing. I thought I was losing my ear for mixing. It scared the crap out of me. But we finally got back on track when we got new monitors. That’s key.

DJ Times: And as far as mastering, what are some tips?

Guido: As far as mastering goes, we concentrate on the mix more. But we just bought an Alesis MasterLink and that’s an amazing piece of machinery. It’s not really practical for the beginner, but for someone who’s starting out, instead of going and buying a $1,000 DAT machine, they can go and buy a $400 or $500 MasterLink machine and it’s the same thing because you’re making CD masters. Most of the record companies want CDs instead of DATs. You can just hand in CDs and that’s what we do. We don’t even use DATs anymore. We just hand in CD masters and it’s so much easier, the media’s cheaper and the MasterLink has mastering tools in it, EQ, compression limiter. It’s definitely a worthwhile piece of gear. You can master at 96K and that’s really high end. And since we have a digital 8-bus we go from the masterboard right into the machine. It’s really pure and really loud when you do the compression on it – sometimes too loud.

Razor: It’s really to each his own and what you want to use. Anything that I suggest is something that I’m using. Cubase is fine. If you have a Roland sampler and know how to use it, great. If you have an Akai sampler and you know how to use it, great. Most of the samplers today have all of the features of any other sampler. I could tell you that you could probably buy more CD-ROMs for the major brands, but I’m sure a Yamaha or a Roland is just as good. So it’s whatever you have. I don’t want people to get it wrong. Use whatever works for you and whatever’s in your price range.

DJ Times: So, it’s not the piece, but how you use the piece that makes a difference.

Razor: Absolutely. No doubt about it. It depends more on the person’s creative styling than the unit itself. If this is what you want to do, you won’t let a piece of gear stop it. If you’re really committed, get ready to spend some money, but there’s no reason to drop the bank on it.