In The Studio With… Darude

“The demos were done in my studio… well, the corner of my kitchenette at home. I had a Pentium 2 PC running Cubase VST-32 and a Korg TR-Rack. Then I used FastTracker 2, Propellerhead’s ReBirth, HammerHead and Sound Forge. Then I went to Jaakko’s studio, which was in the basement of a hotel in the centre of Turku, Finland, which he used to live in, and we developed the tracks and wrote the rest of the album there. He was using an Atari ST 1024 and Cubase, two Ensoniq ASR-10 samplers, a Tascam DAT, a Nord Lead 2, a Roland Super JV-1080, an Ensoniq DP4 effect unit and a Roland JP-8080. And everything was mixed through a Mackie 24/8 analogue mixer and a couple of Behringer compressors. All the filter, effect level, and volume rides were made manually, as there was some sort of difficulty getting MIDI back and recording it in Cubase. On the final mixes of Sandstorm, for example, we’re opening and closing the Nord Lead and JP-8080 filters by hand on the synth rack, live.”