Los Angeles – Sitting in an antiseptic, disgracefully overpriced cafeteria in the L.A. Convention Center’s West Wing, Chris Cox and Barry Harris sip beverages and recount their recent NAMM show exploration. For the previous two hours they’ve been chaperoned by DJ Times through a slew of DJ- and studio-related exhibits, but the boys from Thunderpuss – America’s top dance-music remix team – appear unfazed by the nearly 500,000 square feet of exhibit space of America’s largest pro-audio convention. As veterans of marathon studio sessions, Cox and Harris have learned the virtues of patience, but moreover they relish their free time – and it shows.

Schlepping from booth to booth in the labyrinthine hall will take a chunk out of anyone’s energy – even the wisest trade-show veterans – but the Thunderpuss boys are just getting started. When both agree that the convention visit is a kid-in-a-candy-store experience, it becomes apparent that their day at NAMM is no chore. No, ask them about any of the show’s new DJ gear and they’ll offer copious comments on everything from effects boxes to the latest crossfader design. They obviously love what they do and, after 10 years in the business, they remain fired up about their work. And who wouldn’t after reeling off eight No. 1 dance mixes in the past 15 months?

"You know, we still have to meet with the MOTU people," says the inexhaustible Cox, referring to Mark of the Unicorn, makers of Digital Performer, the duo’s sequencing program of choice. So, after getting their takes on a few more product debuts – Cox being more effusive, Harris more biting – we part. While they head for MOTU and I slink back to the Testa Communications booth, it occurs to me Cox and Harris are the perfect DJ Times cover boys. As an aspiration-and-application-oriented magazine, we attempt to reveal the roadmaps to success used by top DJs. And right now, nobody fits the bill as well as Thunderpuss.

Before forming Thunderpuss – until recently, known as Thunderpuss 2000 – both Cox and Harris lead parallel, yet different lives in the dance music community. Raised in Carson City, For the record, Thunderpuss mixes for Whitney Houston ("It’s Not Right, But It’s OK" and "My Love Is Your Love"), Amber ("Sexual"), Pet Shop Boys ("New York City Boy"), Eurythmics ("17 Again"), Jennifer Holliday ("Think It Over"), Donna Summer (a co-production for "Love Is the Healer") and most recently Enrique Iglesias ("Be With You") have all topped Billboard’s club chart, sales chart or both. At presstime, Thunderpuss mixes for "If It Don’t

Fit" by Abigail and "Share My Joy" by GTS featuring Loleatta Holloway had stormed the club chart’s Top 10 as "bullets."

Perhaps Cox and Harris’ crowning achievement remains their work on Whitney’s "It’s Not Right, But It’s OK," which the duo transformed from a smoldering, modern-R&B track into a peak-hour, vocal-house anthem full of bold, hooky synths, tribal grooves, dramatic changes, and throw-your-hands-in-air moments. In recent years, few mixes have had as many full dancefloors singing along to every word. I’ll surely never forget the first time I heard it. After about 90 minutes of hyper-buildup, progressive tracks, Sound Factory DJ Jonathan Peters dropped the "TP2K Mix" and effectively turned a room of blissed-out breeders into a dancefloor of pantomiming queens. Sociological implications aside, it remains one of the best examples of how a club remix can blow the doors off an original version.

According to A&R reps, who have commissioned Thunderpuss for remix projects, the duo’s somewhat divergent backgrounds serve them well. "Each of them brings a different perspective," says Frank Ceraolo, former Epic Records’ A&R man, now an independent consultant. "Chris, from years with Hot Trax, was an expert with editing and structure. He has the distinct ability/ear to hear exactly how to properly structure or restructure a song to make it more palatable for the dancefloor or the airwaves. Barry, on the other hand, comes from an artist perspective and has dealt with producing his own music from the Kon Kan days. He, like Chris, has a great ear, but knows exactly how to give his productions the ‘signature twist’ to make it his/their own."

Adds Tommy Boy’s Victor Lee: "Their remixes serve the underground as well as the mainstream. There are many great remixers out there who can deliver No. 1 club hits, but they lack Chris and Barry’s sensibility to the mass radio audience."

Marc Nathan, the longtime Atlantic and Universal A&R man, who actually introduced Cox and Harris to each other, says that their DJ experiences remain crucial to their crossover sensibility and their success. "They both have extensive backgrounds as club DJs in parts of North America – Vegas, Tulsa, Toronto – that are not too hip for the room," says Nathan, now with Farm Club.com. "I have complete confidence in Thunder- puss that if they say they ‘hear’ the record, they will do a magnificent job. I don’t believe they take projects just for the sake of keeping checks rolling in. I think they stand behind their work and are as proud to have completed something as we are to have them do it."

Two months after our NAMM date, DJ Times re-connected with Thunderpuss. In addition to explaining some of their production and remix methods, Chris Cox and Barry Harris – dance music’s odd couple – tell the story of how a pair of DJs with different backgrounds and distinct personalities can continue to crank out the hits without driving each other crazy. Here’s what we found.

DJ Times: What musical instruments do you play? What kinds of bands have you played with?

Harris: Piano, guitar, bass. Just rock bands in the basement as a teen.

Cox: I started playing drums when I was six. I then started playing saxophone when I was 10 and did that all of the way through college via a full music scholarship. I also started playing guitar at about 14. I have played in just about every kind of band you can imagine from garage rock bands, jazz big bands, small jazz combos, dance/show bands, and basically anywhere else I could possibly play.

DJ Times: What’s your DJ background?

Cox: I started DJing at a roller rink in 1981 at 14. I graduated from that into doing mobile gigs in high school and college before landing my first club gig. I had also done quite a bit of radio from about the age of 16 on.

Harris: Started in 1983 part-time in the gay bars in Toronto.

DJ Times: Was there a genre of music that inspired you to DJ?

Harris: Disco.

Cox: At first it was alternative and indie college radio stuff from the early ’80s. Shortly after that, I got into electronic urban and hip hop and, through it all, everything by Prince or anyone else from Minneapolis in the ’80s. My life completely changed, though, when I first heard house music while on a trip to Scotland in 1987.

DJ Times: Was there a DJ who rocked your world?

Cox: I had already been spinning for awhile on my own, but when I went to Las Vegas for college there was this crew of DJs who pretty much owned the town and had mad turntable skills – DJ Frankie, DJ R.O.B., Hypo Scott, and Dino of "Summergirls" fame. I watched and listened to their styles of music, which was my first introduction to stuff from New York. Also to this day R.O.B. is one of the best scratchers I have ever seen in my life and he inspired me to stay in my bedroom polishing my scratching and turntable tricks. My biggest inspiration for working a big room was being in the booth at the Palladium in New York City watching Scotty Blackwell for a night in ’88, as well as a cassette I got a hold of – "Little" Louie Vega at Studio 54. I still love that tape!

Harris: Wally Mac- Donald, one of the first DJs to do remixes and re-edits in the late ’70s from Toronto. Did lots of work for Sony/Epic at the time. He was very progressive and innovative. Used to do re-edits himself and play his own stuff at the big, mixed afterhours club called "Stages."

DJ Times: Barry, what was the Toronto scene like when you were first going to clubs?

Harris: I love Toronto very much. Though after living in Los Angeles, it really does feel like a small town. Toronto really does have it going on clubwise. Because it’s U.K.-influenced more so than European influenced, multi-cultural, and so close to New York, it’s inundated with all those influences and always has been for years. The club crowds are very, very open-minded to everything.

DJ Times: When you first started DJing, what kinds of events were you doing?

Cox: When I hit college I would do part-time work on the weekends with a mobile company. Since I was in Las Vegas, there was a huge amount of conventions and weddings. I would do about two to three events a week. I didn’t care for weddings much, but the big corporate conventions were really cool because there would be thousands of drunk people and huge buffets of free food and open bars. There would be no shortage of friends from the campus that wanted to help me carry equipment for the opportunity of eating, getting drunk, and hooking up with out-of-town women courtesy of Minolta, Nikon, IBM, etc. When I finally moved on to clubs, it was great because there was no guesswork in what the people were coming to hear musically, and it was awesome to not have to move equipment anymore!

Harris: I started at a stand-up gay bar in ’83. The owner came up to me and said, like lots of DJs have had the owner do this to them at one time or another, "Don’t you ever play that song in this bar again." The song for me was "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life." Hmm, go figure.

DJ Times: Chris, any funny or interesting stories about your beginnings?

Cox: Too many to mention! I know there seems to be a loss of morals when many people go clubbing, but I think that feeling amplifies in Las Vegas. There seem to be many random acts of sexual intercourse that happened within the various DJ booths around town – especially on Halloween! Also, since Vegas is a big tipping town I used to make double my wage per night in a club on tips alone. At one club I worked at we used to have a guy come in every Saturday night named Prince Alex. Nobody knew what he was a prince of, but he would come in surrounded by bodyguards and hot women. Each week for about a year one of his bodyguards would come up to me and ask me to announce that the Prince was there and play his favorite song – "Humpin’ Around." As he would do this, he would slip me a crisp $100 bill. "Ladies and Gentleman, we’d like to welcome Prince Alex in the house!" Cha-ching...

DJ Times: How did you get your first club gig?

Cox: I was doing college radio in Las Vegas at KUNV and the station would hold parties at a teen club. The main DJ was the then-PD Ken Jordan now of Crystal Method. He would get bored – or more likely want to go pick up girls – and let me take over throughout the night. That led me to get heard by DJ Frankie, who had a radio show on Power 97. I started doing mix segments on the radio, and he then got me my first full-time gig at a club. Most of the music at that time was Latin hip hop – what they now call freestyle – and electro hip hop, stuff ranging from Exposé, Cover Girls, Noel, to Debbie Deb, Soul Sonic Force, and similar party tracks.

Harris: I got the gig from a friend of mine who was about to leave the place because he was pissed off and about to quit. He knew I was really into music and suggested I give it a shot. I remember the first pile of records to get started that I ever bought. Well, not exactly everything, but I do know that the Thriller LP was in it.

DJ Times: How did you make the move into remixing and production?

Cox: I was a music major in college, playing in bands and studying theory, but I was also a DJ and clubhead at night. Remixing seemed to be the marriage of the two worlds. I took one MIDI and studio engineering class in college, which gave me the studio bug really bad. With some scholarship money, I bought my first Macintosh and a copy of [Mark of the Unicorn] Digital Performer and started teaching myself how to sequence pretty exten- sively. At this same time, I also started teaching myself how to edit, first on a cassette deck with a pause button – I made some sick megamixes for the radio that way – and then moving up to cutting and splicing reel-to-reel tape.

Harris: By 1987 I had enough of DJing. I purposely quit my day job in 1984 to DJ and eventually do my own record. I’d moved up into the largest straight club in Toronto, The Copa. Worked Saturday night and a very successful house night on Sundays. Remember, this really was the early days of house music. Anyway, I was bored and really frustrated in not finding a way to do my own record. So, I found a programmer outside of Toronto who was willing to work – DJs can really procrastinate. I had an idea for a song. I also worked out of the main DJ import store, Starsound Records, which also had its own indie label, Revolving Records. I worked on the song for about three months, part-time on weekends, March, April and May in 1988 with Tom Gerenscer. By late May and June, we had the record out and self-promoted it ourselves. Little did I know my life was about to change forever. The song was "I Beg Your Pardon" by an entity I entitled Kon Kan. My skills came from a combination of working with Tom and comparing other people’s records, and listening closely for years myself as to what made them great records. Also working with lots of other people, producers, engineers. Meantime, you constantly learn from them and, of course, from your own mistakes.

DJ Times: Chris, how did your experience with Hot Tracks DJ remix service help you?

Cox: I was producer there for five years. I was responsible for researching and picking tracks, getting clearance from record labels, doing remixes of tracks – as well as coordinating other remixers and editors – designing and typesetting all graphics and label copy for the releases, and even helping box up orders and unloading trucks of product. You name it, I did it. Nobody was above any job there. The studio and gear there was very limited, mainly a Mac running Digidesign’s Sound Designer II, Samplecell II, and a few generic MIDI modules. The one thing that happened to me while at Hot Tracks was that I learned digital audio well, and I learned how to work an 80-hour week without blinking. Since it was based in Tulsa, Okla., I was generally bored, so I lived in the studio – and there was just way too much work to get done. Just sitting in a small room with a computer day in and day out, I taught myself everything possible about editing, sequencing, and all of the ins and outs of the Macintosh operating system and hardware. Also, with the volume of product that was required to get out, I knew every single mix of every record that came out from every label for a five-year period. There was not an aspect of my life that didn’t revolve around the studio – which just about killed my marriage. I have no regrets about all of the time and energy I spent during these years, as I came out of them with the confidence and knowledge to handle just about any task.

DJ Times: Chris, in your time working with Giorgio Moroder, what did you learn?

Cox: Working with Giorgio was a dream come true! Imagine being stuck in Tulsa, Okla., working in a wood-paneled, tin-roofed building and immediately being placed in a mansion at the top of Beverly Hills with a million-dollar studio at your disposal! It was pretty overwhelming. I know that I was pretty useless to him at the beginning – a combination of being star-struck and out of my usual element. Reality quickly hit me, though, when he hated the first few things I did for him. The most valuable lesson I learned from him is the importance of melody. It is all about the song. I was so busy making grooves and tracks, I never paid attention to the song. He is a brilliant writer that has a gift of writing a simple melody that you can’t get out of your head for 15 years. I also learned from watching him that nice guys, indeed, can go somewhere in business. Here is a man who has had countless hits, three Oscars, more money than I could imagine, and he is a great and genuine person! I really enjoy conversations with him, and it’s funny because the thing he talks about least is music. He is a very well-rounded, well-read individual and I have a world of respect for him and his work.

DJ Times: For up-and-coming remixer/producers, what advice would you give them as far as honing their production skills?

Harris: Just do it. Don’t depend or rely on anyone else but yourself and your own ambition. If you find a great working relationship with someone else like Chris and I have found, great – all the better. It took me almost 10 years to find that chemistry.

Cox: One of the most important things you can do is to listen closely to records that you like or are inspired by. This doesn’t mean copy them, but what about that record moves you? What sticks out that is unique about that record when you hear it in the club? Or on the radio? Do you like the low end? What is happening that creates that low end you like? Things like that. You need to develop your ears and your vocabulary of ideas. The other thing is to A/B your material next to something that you know sounds great. Play this comparison to yourself, as well as a friend. Sometimes you can’t hear the good and bad of something you’ve created yourself, so another set of ears is helpful. For this same reason, it’s very good to have a partner to work with. Quite a few DJs find it helpful to work with a musician, programmer, or engineer that knows the technical end. As a DJ, you can bring the ideas and the underground mentality to a project, where the engineer can help translate those ideas into reality because of their technical knowledge of the studio. As you are working in the studio or watching someone else work, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Most of the knowledge I have acquired in the field of engineering has been due to the fact that I constantly ask questions of anyone I work near. Absorb everything you hear. The other main aspect is that it just takes time. You need to work on it and be serious about it. I’ve been working on records well over 10 years and I still learn things every day. Just as you master one thing, something else will come up. It is a never-ending cycle of work, knowledge, and loss of money – on gear.

DJ Times: When doing a remix for a vocal, very artist-driven track, how do you make sure you highlight the choruses?

Harris: Just go with what feels right. DJ experience has been vital. You could actually ask a DJ the exact same question.

Cox: You do it the same with a remix as you do if you are an arranger or a producer of any style of music. The chorus needs to lift from the rest of the song and it needs to be memorable. At the chorus, the percussion should move more and the musical elements should lift from the rest of the song. Generally, this is done via arranging and not just by raising the volume. It’s good to save a certain synth or sound for the chorus, so you don’t get sick of it by then, and you also shouldn’t repeat a chorus over and over. Have it only play every now and then so it’s special. It’s all a balancing act.

DJ Times: Generally speaking, how do you treat vocals during a remix? How do you deal with time compression of the vocals?

Harris: I’m sure Chris will answer this basically the same. Depends on the performance and BPM of the original. Basically we’ve learned that time compression in the AKAI S5000 is much better than in Digital Performer...so we first go there. Then I fiddle with the vocals, if necessary, back in Digital Performer and comp from the original vocal track to make sure nothing sounds like a "billygoat." I so truly hate that. Ever since I heard the remix for Celine Dion’s "It’s All Coming Back To Me Now," I swore I would never have a vocal track that sounded that bad. My goal is to make the vocalist sound like she re-sang it. Whitney’s "My Love Is Your Love" was the toughest – so far.

Cox: The vocals are the most important element of an artist’s mix, so we pay close attention to detail in the vocal track. Most of the time we use Digital Performer’s Pure DSP for our time compression. However, we have recently used the BPM matching feature of the Akai S5000 sampler for more complex waveforms such as stacked background vocals. There seem to be a few less artifacts with the S5000 compression and complex waveforms, but Digital Performer is much more convenient and flexible to use. After time compression, we will spend time editing various words, phrases, or syllables to lock the performance even tighter into our groove. We also like to use tons of compression and EQ to give the vocals punch and presence over the track.

DJ Times: Explain the idea of "comping" original and compressed tracks. How does it work and on what kind of song would you do it? What do you do when you are expected to make a club mix out of a much slower track?

Harris: Comping is taking two or more vocal tracks and taking the best lines out of each, maybe even words, and making one really great vocal track. We are at the point now that if a song was never intended to be a dance track, either written or performed as such, we’ll turn it down. I’ve learned that for most tracks 80 BPM to 100 BPM is the "danger zone." Sure, you can do it if you really want to, but come on – what’s the point? Just play the original. We tried to make "From The Bottom Of My Broken Heart" by Britney work and just gave up after a week of trying to milk blood from a stone. Not only was her performance going to sound bad, but the song was never intended to be a dance track. Plus, there weren’t enough vocal elements hidden or buried in the outro to pull out into the forefront like other remixes we’ve done in the past, like "Kiss The Rain" and "It’s Not Right, But It’s OK." "Bye Bye Bye" was the same. The only way to not make it sound stupid was to actually slow the vocals down from the original on top of, say, 132 BPM. Jive hated the time stretch and so did we, but there was no other way. To speed them up sounds ridiculous to us, so, hey, in my opinion don’t even bother with dance mixes. Play the original or just do alternate hip-hop or R&B mixes.

Cox: The first and hardest thing to do in this instance is getting the vocal to play at a speed conducive to the dancefloor. Most of the time this consists of speeding the vocal up; however, there are cases such as with those of ballads that you slow the original vocal down a bit and let it play half-time over the new beats. Barry came up with a very cool method one day while working on "Kiss The Rain." Generally, if you just time compress – that’s speed up – the vocal, the singer’s phrasing and vibrato speed up as well. This is what creates that "billygoat" effect that is not desirable at all. What he started doing was taking the sped-up vocal and editing bits of the original vocal at the ends of words and phrases so the rhythmic lines are in time with the dance tempo, but any sustained note sounds original and natural. It takes tons of time and tons of patience, but short of getting the singer to re-sing at the new tempo, it’s extremely effective for creating a natural sounding performance.

DJ Times: What’s your favorite synth and why?

Harris: Has been the Nord Lead, but now am moving on to experimenting with other synths. I’m becoming a fan of Waldorf products lately.

Cox: The Clavia Nord Lead 2 has amazing range and we use it for both our bass sounds, as well as for cutting edge lead sounds. I also love how just about every knob and button on the thing correspond to a MIDI controller number. It makes it wonderful for programming and auto recall of tweaking and filtering. It’s pretty evident in most of our productions, as we have three of them now. Plus, it’s the most beautiful piece of gear – red, great sleek Swedish design – just bitchin’!

DJ Times: Why the Akai S3000 sampler? Also, how do you approach filtering?

Cox: That’s the sampler that Barry owned when we threw our gear together. I have always used Digidesign’s SampleCell II as my main sampler, although I fell in love with the Akai’s resonating filter right away. Recently, we purchased the Akai S5000, which has tons of amazing filters – really fun to play with. We use filters on vocals, percussion elements, and synth sounds. They just have a way of adding both edge and movement in a track.

DJ Times: Why are you such advocates of MOTU’s Digital Performer program?

Harris: Everyone says that their sequencer is the best. It’s whatever you are used to and can work with comfortably and fast on. Chris and I have chosen Digital Performer because we both love Macintosh computers.

Cox: Digital Performer is simply my favorite sequencer on the market. No, it’s not the only digital audio/MIDI sequencer on the block, but it is so powerful. You can manipulate MIDI data and digital audio in every possible way you can imagine. It’s also extremely fast to work on. Barry and I have been in situations in other studios where programmers use other sequencers, and we go crazy watching people take two or three steps to do a simple operation that we can do in one step. As a rule, there is no right or wrong software to use, it is whatever gets the job done that is important, but after trying virtually every other system on the market we feel that Digital Performer is the most powerful and makes the most logical sense to operate.

DJ Times: What was Thunderpuss’ first big break and how did you make it happen?

Cox: Billie Myers’ "Kiss The Rain." Thunderpuss had done a couple of records up to that point, mostly for Interhit Records, and Marc Nathan at Universal called us to do a dance remix for Billie’s record. He called not based on our Thunderpuss work, but more because what we had done individually. That’s the record, however, where our sound finally fell together – tribally/Latin beats with tough synths and a kick-ass diva vocal. That record started getting played around New York and was heard by Arista’s brilliant A&R man Hosh Gureli. Even though we were a new name on the block as Thunderpuss, he felt our sound would be right for the new Whitney Houston project. That call resulted in "It’s Not Right, But It’s OK," which turned into the avalanche of the past year-and-a-half.

DJ Times: You’ve had an incredible string of success since then. What qualities does Thunderpuss bring to a mix that makes club and radio people equally enjoy it?

Harris: I’m not too sure, to tell you the truth. It’s always a battle to do a crossover record, not to be too poppy, not to be too commercial, not to be too underground – save that for the dub. I’m always trying to make a balance. Guess the bottom line is that both Chris and I like making the peak-of-the-night party anthem, and we strive to do that – you know, the record you just can’t wait to play!

Cox: It’s all about balance and walking a fine line between underground edge and mainstream accessibility. Some tracks need to be harder to even out a very pop vocal, some vocals are too clubby for mainstream radio and might need to be rethought with radio in mind. Our first job is to make a record for the DJs and if it can translate to radio, cool. I don’t feel comfortable alienating DJs and clubland merely for the glamour of radio. It’s all about balance. When we do a vocal track, we highlight the singer and the song. It’s about them and not our track. We are providing a mood and environment for that piece of work, and our time to shine is in the dub or in the sections of the 12-inch before and after the song take place. You have to give respect to the singer and the song, or there’s no reason for it to be that artist’s record in the first place.

DJ Times: When Thunderpuss gets commissioned for a remix, what does the label want from you?

Cox: Generally, it is up to the A&R person to determine if we will be appropriate or desired for a mix. The needs or hopes from a label standpoint vary depending on the label and the project at hand. Sometimes a label will merely want a presence in the clubs. Sometimes they will just want a chart position. They also might want to help break a new artist, help a struggling artist or song, or potentially need a whole new radio version to replace the original production. As far as Thunderpuss goes, we just try and do the best possible job with the material we are given. We have no preconceived notion of what success level we are aiming for with each project. We merely want to make good records that people, including ourselves, enjoy.

DJ Times: How did you prepare the Whitney mix for her musical director when she was on tour? How did that translate into a live musical arrangement?

Cox: When she was on her tour, Whitney had a live band as well as a [Digidesign] ProTools rig for triggering certain samples and grooves. The man behind that rig is Dirk Vanocheck and he came over to our studio with a Glyph 9-gig drive and we recorded our tracks directly to his system. It was really handy because he also uses Digital Performer, so we were already compatible. We were told then that the band would play live with a few of our key elements being triggered from ProTools – mainly the synth hooks and certain unique percussion sounds.

DJ Times: How do you DJ together? What genres do you cover? How do you know when to change musical course?

Harris: We’ve DJed together, but I prefer not to. Not that I’m disrespecting Chris, I just enjoy the night much more on my own. I’ve never DJed with someone else before last year as Thunderpuss. We probably won’t DJ together again simply because it’s just not as fun – for me, that is.

Cox: On the few gigs we did together it was mainly tribal and some filter disco, oh....and, of course, some of our records! Changing genres throughout a night just becomes an instinct of reading crowds for years. Really hard to verbalize how, you just know when it’s time to work them in a different way.

DJ Times: When you’re spinning solo, which genres do you prefer?

Harris: Tribal, underground, hard, and sometimes progressive – Nervous Records, Groovilicious, Tommy Boy and other indies.

Cox: I like to play peak of the night party anthems. I love a good wailing diva and driving beats. I generally play tribal, circuit, uplifting house, some filter disco, energetic progressive, and anything else that moves me or the crowd. A few producer/remixers whose work I love now are Club 69, Hex Hector, The Dronez – or anything on Subliminal, Ralphi Rosario, KLM, Escape, Plasmic Honey, and many others. I continue to be a fan of dance music first and foremost, anything that excites me or a large gathering of people!

DJ Times: Can you list some DJs you admire and like to hear? Why them? What quality or style do you admire about them?

Harris: Learning about Junior Vasquez now that I go to New York more often. In my mind, he really is the Elvis Presley of DJs and a DJ’s DJ. I admire his never-giving-up attitude and, in talking with New York club people, he really is about to make a huge comeback.

Cox: The most important thing about a DJ, in my opinion, is how well they are rocking the party. It’s not all about educating, and it’s not all about technical skills. It’s about people get-ting off and having a great time. Dance music is a release and a cel-ebration. The DJs I like are people that I enjoy dancing to, and people who move my soul. I have had wonderful times dancing to some of the following DJs, in no particular order: "Little" Louie Vega, Danny Tenaglia, Roger S., Bad Boy Bill, DJ Escape, Peter Rauhofer, Johnny Vicious, Eddie Baez, DJ Boris, DJ Irene, Manny Lehman, Davey Gold, Ron Thomas, Junior Vasquez, Stonebridge, Tony Humphries, Joe T. Vanelli, Laurent Garnier, and – lest I forget – Barry Harris.

DJ Times: What kind of DJ mixer do you prefer?

Harris: Just bought a Pioneer DJM-600 for home and am having fun.

Cox: I have always been a Rane fan. The MP24 has great sound quality and just a perfect amount of inputs. I also really love the Pioneer DJM-500 because of the amount of features and its very smooth operation.

DJ Times: Do you spin CDs? What kind of player do you prefer and why?

Cox: Yeah, I spin CD and vinyl about 50-50. I love the Pioneer CDJ-700 because of its quality and creative features. I either prefer that or the Denon DN-2500 dual deck because it’s just such a dependable workhorse. Also, we use Adaptec Jam to burn audio CDs with a Teac 6x burner.

DJ Times: Do playing new projects in a club impact their final mix?

Cox: Yeah, it definitely helps to hear it in that perspective. Most of the changes we have made afterward have been EQing and mix issues. Bass was too boomy, kick not loud enough, vocal too loud, things like that. Fortunately, we haven’t seen a major arrangement change as a result of a live play of a new track.

DJ Times: Generally speaking, remixers get hot for a brief amount of time, then the styles change and often the audience tires of their sound. How does Thunderpuss expect to buck that dance-music trend?

Cox: By constantly researching and keeping our ears open to everything that’s happening. That doesn’t mean that we will jump on any musical trend that comes along, but we can definitely grab influences and ideas from new stuff that comes out. Live DJing is also a very vital link to staying in touch with the marketplace.

Harris: I’ve been around for some time, toying with different kinds of dance music throughout the years. It’s one thing that I really love to do. One thing I really can’t stand is when some people just get locked in their own favorite era or genre musically and just can’t move on. I think we already have experimented with a few other directions with Thunderpuss and will continue to do so. I really don’t want to keep making the same record over and over again. I do like challenging ourselves and pushing ourselves. It’s all a juggling act with pleasing record companies, DJs, dancefloors and yourself.

DJ Times: How do you two work together in the studio? How do you settle disagreements and remain productive?

Harris: We constantly argue and agree or disagree with each other. I think we’ve both gone through lots of growing throughout the past two years of working so close together, and understand each other’s way of thinking better. Chris is definitely better and faster at the technical aspect. I can do it, but prefer not to, besides he loves doing it – at least I think so. He’s also strong with grooves and drums. I feel I’m strong at direction, influences, hooks and musicality. We both have different influences – mine in gay clubs, Chris in the straight clubs – so I guess we fill in each other’s gaps in probably more ways than we probably realize.

Cox: The rules are getting along with someone in a working/creative situation are no different from the rules that you should use in everyday life. You are with another person who has the same feelings, emotions, and depth as you – so respect them. You have to be mature and address things when they come up so they don’t develop into future bigger problems. Both Barry and I had careers in music for over 10 years before we were together, but the combination of the two of us has been stronger and more fruitful than when we were separate. We need to respect and remember that and make it work and continue. We started out as friends before the success and can only hope that the day we move on career-wise that we remain friends. That’s the most important thing of all. Artists, record companies, fame, money - it all comes and goes. Family and friends are forever."