how did daft punk make homework

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The Past, Present, and Future of Daft Punk’s Homework

A track-by-track breakdown that will take you around the world

Editor’s Note: With breaking news that Daft Punk are hanging up their helmets, we’re revisiting several of our relevant features. That includes Lior Phillips’ ambitious look at Daft Punk’s debut 1997 album, Homework, in which she examines, song by song, both the group’s influences and how they impacted the music that followed. This crash course in Daft Punk’s Homework was originally published as an anniversary piece in January 2017.

Homework will be playing as my soul glides into the ether.

These days, Daft Punk announce their superhuman abilities almost immediately — some might argue they’re more ubiquitous for their robotic guise over their actual music — but 20 years ago, when they released their sublime debut album, Homework , they were merely two French tricksters named Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. At the time, they had begun wearing masks to produce an ego-less, universal presence for dance music — a language that could exist without signifiers, if you will — though decidedly not the chromed helmets of today. Rather than mechanic flourishes on the album art, they opted for simple satin.

Though the packaging has ramped up to surreal new heights of whimsy and wonder, it’s now remarkable to see just how much of Daft Punk’s sound has crystallized over the past two decades. Of course, it helps that they chose some valuable inspirational signposts in house, techno, G-funk, and hip-hop. Even so, the two producers were only 22 years old, an incredibly early age given the clarity and grace they had exuded in this complete and timeless masterpiece. In fact, it’s become more or less an instruction manual for current would-be producers, namely how it runs through genres as though they were hyperactive cartoon characters.

For that reason, the album’s connections to the past and influence on the future can be viewed much more clearly. Granted, the genres they twirled into Homework were previously indebted to sampling and remixing, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg to this album. What’s far more intriguing is the matter bubbling underneath, which is why we’ve gone ahead and dismantled each of the album’s 16 tracks piece by piece, searching for particular influences that they might have had and uncovering which artists might have been influenced. It’s an around-the-world study of Daft Punk, and one that requires zero airfare and zero SkyMiles. Dancing shoes are optional.

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The Past, Present, and Future of Daft Punk's Homework

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By Larry Fitzmaurice

December 2, 2018

Daft Punk ’s Homework is, in its pure existence, a study in contradictions. The debut album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo arrived in 1997, right around the proliferation of big-beat and electronica—a twin-headed hydra of dance music fads embraced by the music industry following the commercialization of early ’90s rave culture—but when it came to presumptive contemporaries from those pseudo-movements, Homework shared Sam Goody rack space and not much else. Daft Punk’s introduction to the greater world also came at a time when French electronic music was gaining international recognition, from sturdy discotheque designs to jazzy, downtempo excursions—music that sounded miles away from Homework ’s rude, brutalist house music.

In the 21 years since Homework ’s release, Daft Punk have strayed far from its sound with globe-traversing electronic pop that, even while incorporating other elements of dance music subgenres, has more often than not kept house music’s building blocks at arms’ length. 2001’s Discovery was effectively electronic pop-as-Crayola box, with loads of chunky color and front-and-center vocals that carried massive mainstream appeal. Human After All from 2005 favored dirty guitars and repetitive, Teutonic sloganeering, while the pair took a nostalgia trip through the history of electronic pop itself for 2013’s Random Access Memories . Were it not for a few choice Homework tracks that pop up on 2007’s exhilarating live document Alive 2007 , one might assume that Homework has been lost in the narrative that’s formed since its release—that of Daft Punk as robot-helmeted superstar avatars, rather than as irreverent house savants.

But even as the straightforward and strident club fare on Homework remains singular within Daft Punk’s catalog, the record also set the stage for the duo’s career to this very day—a massively successful and still-going ascent to pop iconography, built on the magic trick-esque ability to twist the shapes of dance music’s past to resemble something seemingly futuristic. Whether you’re talking about Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s predilection for global-kitsch nostalgia, their canny and self-possessed sense of business savvy, or their willingness to wear their influences on their sleeve like ironed-on jean-jacket patches—it all began with Homework .

It couldn’t possibly make more sense that a pair of musicians whose most recent album sounds like a theme park ride through pop and electronic music’s past got their big break at Disneyland. It was 1993, and schoolboy friends Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s rock band with future Phoenix guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, Darlin’—named after a track from the 1967 Beach Boys album Wild Honey that the three shared an affinity for—had disbanded after a year of existence that included a few songs released on Stereolab ’s Duophonic label. (Melody Maker writer Dave Jennings notoriously referred to their songs as possessing “a daft punky thrash,” which led to the pair assuming the Daft Punk moniker.)

While attending a rave in Paris, Bangalter and Homem-Christo had a chance encounter with Glasgow DJ/producer Stuart McMillan, the co-founder of the Soma Recordings dance label; like any aspiring musicians would, they gave him a demo tape of early Daft Punk music. The following year Soma released Daft Punk’s debut single “The New Wave,” a booming and acid-tinged instrumental that would later evolve into Homework cut “Alive.”

A follow-up, “Da Funk” b/w “Rollin’ & Scratchin’,” hit shops in 1995; according to a Muzik profile two years later, its initial 2,000-platter pressing was “virtually ignored” until rave-electronica bridge-gap veterans the Chemical Brothers started airing out its A-side during DJ sets. A major-label bidding war ensued, with Virgin as the victor which re-released “Da Funk” as a proper single in 1996 with non- Homework track “Musique” as its B-side. During this time, Bangalter and Homem-Christo casually worked on the 16 tunes that would make up Homework in the former’s bedroom, utilizing what The Guardian ’s Ben Osborne referred to in 2001 as “ low technology equipment ”—two sequencers, a smattering of samplers, synths, drum machines, and effects, with an IOMEGA zip drive rounding out their setup.

Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s work ethic while assembling the bulk of Homework was of the type that makes sloths appear highly efficient by comparison: no more than eight hours a week, over the course of five months. “We have not spent much time on Homework ,” Bangalter casually bragged to POP . “The main thing is that it sounds good… We have no need to make music every day.” The songs were crafted with the intention of being released as singles (“We do not really want to make albums,” Bangalter claimed in the same interview), Homework ’s eventual sequencing a literal afterthought after the pair realized they had enough material to evenly fill four sides of two vinyl platters. “Balance,” the pair said in unison when asked about Homework ’s format-specific sequencing in Dance Music Authority following the album’s release. “It is done for balance.”

Indeed, Homework is practically built to be consumed in side-long chunks; taking the album in at a single 75-minute listen can feel like running a 5K right after eating an entire pizza. Its A-side kicks off with the patient build of “Daftendirekt”—itself a live-recording excerpt of introductory music used during a Daft Punk set at 1995’s I Love Techno festival in Ghent—and concludes with the euphoric uplift of “Phoenix”; the B-side opens with the literal oceanic washes of “Fresh” before stretching its legs with the loopy, Gershon Kingsley-interpolating “Around the World” and the screeching fist-pump anthem “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.” The third side keeps things light with the flashy, instructional “Teachers” before getting truly twisted on “Rock’n Roll,” and the fourth side takes a few rubbery detours before landing on the full-bodied “Alive”—the thicker and meaner final form of “The New Wave”—and, quixotically, a slight and rewound “Da Funk” return, aptly titled “Funk Ad.”

Bangalter explained to POP that the title of Homework carries a few meanings: “You always do homework in the bedroom,” he stated, referencing the album’s homespun origins before elaborating on the didactic exercise that creating the album represented: “We see it as a training for our upcoming discs. We would as well have been able to call it Lesson or Learning .” That instructional nature is reflexive when it comes to listeners’ presumptive relationship with the album, as Homework practically represents a how-to for understanding and listening to house music.

Nearly every track opens with a single sonic element—more often than not, that steady 4/4 rhythm inextricably tied to house music—adding every successive element of the track patiently, like a played-in-reverse YouTube video showcasing someone taking apart a gadget to see what’s inside. Such a pedagogic approach can have its pitfalls; there’s always a risk of coming across as too rigid, and Daft Punk arguably fell victim to such dull, fussy didacticism later in their careers. But they sidestep such follies on Homework by way of the purely pleasurable music they carefully assembled, piece-by-piece, for whoever was listening.

Under the umbrella of house music, Homework incorporates a variety of sounds snatched from various musical subgenres—G-funk’s pleasing whine, the cut-up vocal-sample style of proto-UK garage made popular by frequent Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards , disco’s delicious synths and glittery sweep—to craft a true musical travelogue that also hinted at the widescreen sonic scope they’d take later in their careers. Above all, the album represents a love letter to black American pop music that’s reverberated through Daft Punk’s career to date—from Janet Jackson ’s sample of “Daftendirekt” on her 2008 Discipline track “So Much Betta” to Will.i.am’s failed attempt to remix “Around the World” the year previous, as well as the duo’s continued collaborations with artists ranging from Pharrell to Kanye West and the Weeknd .

The spirit of house music’s Midwestern originators is also literally and musically invoked throughout. Over the winding house-party groove of “Teachers,” Daft Punk pay homage to their formative influences, ranging from George Clinton and Dr. Dre to Black house and techno pioneers like Lil Louis, DJ Slugo, and Parris Mitchell—and in a meta twist, the song’s structure itself is a literal homage to Mitchell’s 1995 Dance Mania! single “Ghetto Shout Out,” an interpolation clearly telegraphed in the middle of Daft Punk’s astounding contribution to BBC’s Essential Mix series in 1997 .

Alongside Daft Punk’s preoccupations with American popular music, Homework also carries a very specific and politically pointed evocation of their native Paris in “Revolution 909,” the fourth and final single released from Homework that doubled as a critique of anti-rave measures taken by the French government after Jacques Chirac assumed power in 1995. “I don’t think it’s the music they’re after—it’s the parties,” Homem-Christo told Dance Music Authority , with Bangalter adding, “They pretend [the issue is] drugs, but I don’t think it’s the only thing. There’s drugs everywhere, but they probably wouldn’t have a problem if the same thing was going on at a rock concert, because that’s what they understand. They don’t understand this music which is really violent and repetitive, which is house; they consider it dumb and stupid.”

“Revolution 909” opens with ambient club noise, followed by the intrusion of police sirens and intimidating megaphone’d orders to “stop the music and go home.” The accompanying Roman Coppola-helmed music video was even more explicit in depicting the frequent clash between ravers and law enforcement that marked dance music’s rise to the mainstream in the early-to-mid-’90s; amidst a kitschy instructional video on making tomato sauce, a pair of cops attempt to disperse a rave, a young woman escaping one of their grasps after he becomes distracted by a tomato sauce stain on his own lapel.

It’s been rumored, but never quite confirmed, that Bangalter himself appears in the video for “Revolution 909”—a slice of speculation gesturing towards the fact that Daft Punk’s Homework era was the time in which the duo began embracing anonymity. The now-iconic robot helmets wouldn’t be conceived of until the Discovery era, and the magazine stories that came during Daft Punk’s pre- Homework days were typically accompanied by a fresh-faced photo of the pair; during Homework ’s promotional cycle, however, they donned a variety of masks to obscure their visages, including frog and pig-themed disguises .

In conversation with Simon Reynolds for The New York Times in 2013, the pair cited Brian De Palma’s glam-rock masterpiece Phantom of the Paradise as artistic inspiration for their decision to retain visual anonymity, and Daft Punk’s press-shy tendencies (since Homework , the interviews they’ve chosen to take part in have been few and far between) are firmly situated in a long tradition of letting the music do the talking in dance culture—from the sci-fi evasiveness of Drexciya and Aphex Twin ’s relative reclusiveness to the preferred reticence of Burial and his contemporaries in the UK bass scene.

But refusing to turn themselves into rock stars upon Homework ’s release also afforded Daft Punk a crucial element that has undoubtedly aided their perpetual ascent to the present-day: control. Retaining a sense of anonymity was but one of the conditions that the pair struck with Virgin upon signing to the label before Homework ’s release; while the music they released under the label (before signing to Columbia in 2013) was licensed exclusively to Virgin, they owned it through their own Daft Trax production and management company.

But Homework proved influential in other, more explicitly musical ways. G-house, an emergent dance subgenre in the mid-2010s dominated by acts like French duo Amine Edge & Dance, borrows liberally from Daft Punk’s own musical mash of hip-hop’s tough sounds and house music’s pounding appeal; the dirty bloghouse bruisers of Parisian collective Ed Banger—founded by Pedro Winter aka Busy P, who acted as the group’s manager until 2008—would literally not exist were it not for Homework , and that goes double for the party-hardy bloghouse micro-movement of the mid-late 2000s, which Ed Banger’s artists practically dominated. Parisian duo Justice , in particular, owe practically the entirety of their 2007 landmark † to the scraping tension of “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.”

It’s tempting, too, to tie a connective thread between Homework and the brash sounds that proliferated during the peak heyday of the financial descriptor-cum-music genre known as EDM; close your eyes while listening to “Alive”’s big-tent sweep and try not to imagine the tune destroying a festival crowd. But for all of Homework ’s aggressive charms, it’s also retained a homespun intimacy in comparison to how positively widescreen Daft Punk’s music became afterwards. “We focus on the illusion because giving away how it’s done instantly shuts down the sense of excitement and innocence,” Bangalter told Pitchfork in 2013, and the fact that two Beach Boys fans fiddling around in their bedroom could conceive of something so generously in-your-face and playful as Homework might still stand as Daft Punk’s greatest illusion yet.

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Daft Punk: How A Futuristic French Duo Changed Dance Music Forever

As Daft Punk, French DJs Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo revolutionised dance music and created a legacy for the aged.

Daft Punk , the French electronic music duo formed in the 1990s, are well known for their countless hits combining elements of techno, funk, disco, rock and house music to craft a new type of electronic dance music. Having collaborated with everyone from Pharrell Williams to Chic ’s Nile Rodgers, The Weeknd and The Strokes’ frontman Julian Casablancas, and soundtracked Tron: Legacy , the 2010 sequel to the cult 1982 movie Tron , they not only led a revolution in dance music, but have pervaded all corner of popular culture. Not bad for a group that took named themselves after a comment in a negative review.

“Daft punky thrash”: new music, new energy

At 17 years old, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo formed a rock band called Darlin’ – named after a 1967 Beach Boys hit – with future Phoenix guitarist/keyboardist Laurent Brancowitz. A Melody Maker critic dismissed them as “daft punky thrash”, having no idea this would spark a French house movement that would change the pop culture landscape for good. Darlin’ disbanded, leading Bangalter and De Homem-Christo to discover a different kind of scene after attending a rave on a rooftop in Paris’ Beaubourg district. It was this moment that Daft Punk formed, ready to explore a new sound and conquer mainstream popular dance music for decades.

In September 1993, Daft Punk attended a rave where they gave a demo tape of their debut single, The New Wave, to Stuart Macmillan, one half of Glaswegian production duo Slam and co-founder of Soma Quality Recordings. Quickly growing in popularity through singles such as Da Funk, and gaining a live following thanks to their outrageous live performances, the duo signed a deal with Virgin Records, retaining creative freedom with a vision of a bright future ahead.

Uninterested in fame – or even being recognised – Bangalter and De Homem-Christo focused on generating high-quality electronic music that spoke for itself while covering their faces with a variety of cheap shop-bought masks during interviews and photoshoots. Stoking the mystique, Daft Punk continued to grow in popularity through highly acclaimed live performances in which Bangalter created unique, powerful basslines from the buzz of a turntable mixer’s wire. The duo were also known for incorporating various musical styles into their sets, leading them to complete their debut album, Homework , which UK dance magazine Muzik greeted as “one of the most hyped debut albums in a long long time”.

1997: Homework

Not yet the gold and silver robots they would evolve into, Daft Punk released their long-awaited debut album on 17 January 1997. Homework perfectly encapsulates how the duo’s love for music and technology led to their producing top-grade music in their bedrooms. With full creative control, Daft Punk did what they did best: generating varied and energetic dance music that brought worldwide attention to French house music.

The use of sampling, looping, keyboard and bass hardware, vocoders and drum machines crafted a unique, heavy analogue sound that’s difficult to emulate with today’s modern music technology. Homework has a massive weight to it, with a certain rawness to its musicality and feel. This is perhaps because De Homem-Christo and Bangalter composed every song on the album for live performances. It’s almost as if Daft Punk re-imagined their live set for an album that could potentially bring house music to the masses. However, dance music was doing fine at the time; what Homework did was introduce something far better: the unrivalled sound of Daft Punk.

Introducing the complexities of the duo’s music, from the gritty hit that is Da Funk to the noisy, aggressive Rollin’ & Scratchin’ and the more disco-influenced and mainstream chart-topper Around The World, Homework shook up the 90s, bringing new energy and an unparalleled sound to electronic dance music. The album immediately propelled the duo from underground artists into mainstream pop culture, with pop stars such as Madonna , George Michael and Janet Jackson queuing up to work with the duo. The answer was always a polite no, but Daft Punk had something new up their sleeves for their second album.

2001: Discovery

Two decades after its release, Discovery remains arguably one of the most influential electronic dance records of all time. After catching the millennium bug, Daft Punk reinvented themselves as the robots we know and love, creating a retro-futuristic sound that turned them into one of dance music’s most iconic acts. With their second album, Daft Punk explored a free-flowing sound that expanded their sound beyond their Chicago house roots to include shades of the 70s and 80s pop, funk and disco music that inspired them.

As well as raiding their own live recordings for source material, Daft Punk openly sampled their childhood influences on Discovery . The blend of original and second-hand sounds perfectly captured the essence of Daft Punk, proving exactly what the duo were commercially capable of. Not that this was their intent. Discovery redefined house music for the 21st Century, blending funk loops, distorted rock arpeggios, filtered synths and samples with catchy vocoder melodies as well as contributions from the likes of DJ Sneak, Romanthony and Todd Edwards.

The album begins with the irresistible One More Time , immediately gripping the listener for the voyage that is this iconic album takes them on. As Discovery progresses, Daft Punk show their musical power on tracks such as Aerodynamic and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger , as well as their more romantic side with songs such as Something About Us and Digital Love . Together, the pair tear down the unwritten rules of house music to illustrate an open-minded yet intricately thought-out approach to electronic dance music-making.

Discovery was also reimagined in 2003 as an animation, Interstella 5555: The 5tory Of The 5ecret 5tar 5ystem , developed in collaboration with the Japanese mangaka Leji Matsumoto. Envisioning the abduction and rescue of an alien pop band, the story was a continuation of the one told in the music videos for One More Time, Aerodynamic, Digital Love and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Complete with an anime-style narrative, it reached new types of audiences and fans, ensuring that the legendary Discovery stood the test of time: Daft Punk weren’t just creating catchy dance music, they blended fiction with reality, pushing the boundaries for electronic music.

Discovery would go on to massive commercial success and solidify Daft Punk as lucrative artists. With has something for everyone, it successfully paid homage to the music that inspired Daft Punk in the first place, while inspire future music-makers such as Kanye West, who sampled Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger for his own 2005 hit, Stronger, and Gorillaz , who adopted Daft Punk’s sound for their single DARE (while also lifting crowd noise from Homework ’s Revolution 909 for the track).

2005 onwards: Human After All, Random Access Memories

Following the success of Daft Punk’s incredible bedroom masterpieces, fans and critics speculated as to what they would do next. Not ones for conforming to expectations, Daft Punk followed Discovery with 2005’s Human After All . In refusing to adhere to the sound and recording process of their previous albums, many considered it a rebellious record. This was true. Instead of spending years crafting a follow-up, the duo recorded the album in a mere two weeks, proving that the retro-futuristic robots were, indeed, human after all. But as Thomas Bangalter told Mixmag in 2001: “We create our own rules, so everyone can create their rules, which means there are no rules anymore.” Daft Punk’s Alive tour – and the Alive 2007 album, recorded at Paris’ Palais Omnisports De Paris-Bercy in the summer of 2007 – saw them break even more rules in the live arena. The group have always been punk in their approach to the music business – rightly so, expressing their music freely without adhering to or getting controlled by others.

After a hefty eight-year gap, during which the Tron: Legacy soundtrack proved they were just as adept at scoring for the cinema as they were filling the dancefloor, Random Access Memories dropped. An album that no one quite expected from Daft Punk, it was one everybody needed. Random Access Memories saw the duo flee from electronic music and, instead of paying homage to late 70s and early 80s disco, they re-contextualised it for the modern era. Collaborating with Chic’s legendary bassist, Nile Rodgers, and Pharrell Williams on Get Lucky , the duo proved they could find commercial success in an entirely new, almost anti-Daft Punk way. The album featured wondrous instrumental jams such as in Giorgio By Moroder (featuring a monologue from Italian electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder) and Give Life Back To Music, which allowed their music to breathe once more.

Love them or hate them, there is no denying Daft Punk’s remarkable talent and vision. They have successfully taken electronic dance music to new realms and evolved it through their discography for others to do the same. Along the way, they have inspired many great artists to expand the genre further, leading to a point where electronic dance music now more fluid than ever. Consistently driving change and development, the robot-rebels have remained musically unpredictable, leaving an iconic legacy for the ages.

On the 22nd February 2021, Daft Punk announced they have split. They broke the news through an 8-minute video entitled “Epilogue”. No reason for the break up was given.

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Here’s a list of all the gear Daft Punk used to make ‘Homework’

A 1999 Japanese magazine article contains Daft Punk's studio secrets

• Patrick Hinton
• 23 February 2021

When news of Daft Punk’s split was revealed yesterday , the internet lit up with collective mourning and reminiscing over favourites from the robots’ mighty back catalogue.

The French duo’s debut ‘Homework’ remains heralded as one of their best releases , and one of the finest electronic music albums of all time too, featuring classics such as ‘Around The World’, ‘Teachers’ and ‘Da Funk’.

Read this next: The best Daft Punk tracks ranked

If you’ve ever wondered how Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Honem-Christo made the masterpiece, an archival Japanese magazine article from 1999 shared on Reddit holds some of the clues.

It features photos of a pre-robot mask wearing Daft Punk (they were opting for frog and pig masks in this shoot) alongside a list of all the equipment they used to make ‘Homework’.

Among the list are beloved synths and drum machines such Roland’s TB-303, TR-707, TR-808 and TR-909, and less obviously, an IOMEGA floppy disk zip drive. The 90’s!

Read this next: No rules: how Daft Punk's 'Homework' changed dance music forever

There’s also some quotes from Thomas Bangalter discussing their process alongside some handy diagrams.

He says: “In the first step when making music with hardware, it goes through the mixer and the compressor and is recorded on the DAT. After that, effects are put on the sound source before going into the mixer to be recorded. We don’t use the AUX on the mixer.

“The second step is directly putting the sounds from the DAT into the S-760 sampler and editing/cutting the two tracks into however many pieces, like hard disk recording.

“Lastly, we recorded it directly from the S-760 to the DAT. From here we do the rest with the Macintosh.”

Read this next: Unseen Daft Punk concert footage has emerged online

Check out the article (bigger version here ) and a full list of the gear featured below.

- Alesis MMT-8 - Apple Macintosh + EMAGIC MicroLogic

Samplers - AKAI S01 - E-MUE III - E-MU SP-1200 - ENSONIQ ASR-10 - ROLAND S-760

Synthesizers

- ROLAND Juno-106 - ROLAND MC-202 - ROLAND MKS-80 - ROLAND TB-303 - SEQUENTIAL Prophet-VS - Drum Machines - LINN LinnDrum - ROLAND TR-707 - ROLAND TR-808 - ROLAND TR-909

- ALESIS Microverb III - ALESIS 3630 Compressor - BEHRINGER Compressor - BEHRINGER Parametric EQ - ENSONIQ DP/4+ - LEXICON Vortex - LEXICON JamMan - LA Audio Gate/Compressor - WALDORF MiniWorks 4-pole - YAMAHA Digital Delay

Mixers/Recorders

- MACKIE. MS-1202 - MACKIE. CR-1604 - PANASONIC SV-3700

- IOMEGA Zip Drive

Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Digital Features Editor, follow him on Twitter

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It's a fact - Daft Punk's Discovery and Homework really were recorded in a bedroom (and mixed on a JVC boombox): "That little boombox is what we mixed and recorded both Homework and Discovery on. That was the magic one"

We made LEGO models in ours, they made two multi-platinum selling albums in theirs

"You can do some real lo-fi stuff with two drum machines and an old synthesiser" Thomas Bangalter

Yes, we all know the bedroom studio is 'a thing' and that great albums can be created anywhere, these days, right? But 25 years ago? And twice? Damn you Daft Punk, you've done it again.

We knew it. All that time playing with Lego and dreaming about Star Wars in our bedrooms was a waste of time. We should have been building a studio with a couple of old synths and a drum machine, and creating two of the finest albums ever made instead. Taking a leaf out of Daft Punk's book… 

There were always rumours that Daft Punk recorded their debut album Homework out of a bedroom studio, but it turns that both this and second LP Discovery were recorded in just that way and – get this – mixed on an old JVC boombox. And all this was around a quarter of a century ago, when DIY music making was in its infancy. 

There were, admittedly, big clues back in the day that the duo were taking the DIY route with their first recordings for Virgin Records. 

"We're very keen on recording in the bedroom, not going into studios," Thomas Bangalter told Mixmag in 1997. "It was very seductive to do that with a major record company. You can do some real lo-fi stuff with two drum machines and an old synthesiser."

They even told Melody Maker in the same year: "Our album is cheaper than nearly any rock album. No studio expenses, producers, engineers. We're not saying there is a right way or wrong way to go about things, but this is certainly a way."

But no-one really believed the duo's debut album Homework, let alone its follow up Discovery, went anywhere near a bedroom, such was the quality and impact of both long players. However, in a recent BBC Sounds podcast the truth was revealed. 

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"That little boombox is what we mixed and recorded both Homework and Discovery on" Thomas Bangalter

"The myth is that Homework was all in your bedroom, is that true?" asked the BBC's Matt Everitt in The First Time… podcast with Thomas Bangalter as his guest.

"It's true," Bangalter replied. "Homework and Discovery were done in the bedroom, in the same flat as I was watching [TV show] Modern Times and we had [Stevie Wonder album] Songs in the Key of Life constantly on the turntables. This small bedroom, [and] my parents had given me this small boombox for my 11th birthday, a JVC boombox with a little graphic equaliser, and I kept this thing. 

"One day when we plugged in a few keyboards and samplers, I found that boombox and I put it on the stack of machines. And that little boombox is what we mixed and recorded both Homework and Discovery on. That was the magic one."

So there you have it. If only our parents had given us a boombox when we were 11 years old, rather than Kerplunk, then we too could have had two platinum selling albums to our names. 

Bet we'd beat Daft Punk at Kerplunk any day, though, so we're not bitter.

Andy has been writing about music production and technology for 30 years having started out on Music Technology magazine back in 1992. He has edited the magazines Future Music, Keyboard Review, MusicTech and Computer Music, which he helped launch back in 1998. He owns way too many synthesizers.

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Daft Punk – Homework (25th Anniversary Edition Review)

Released as a surprise drop one year to the day since the duo announced their separation, the 25th Anniversary edition of Daft Punk’s debut album Homework , reintroduces audiences to the duo’s early work which kickstarted their critically acclaimed and award-winning discography.

While those more familiar with Daft Punk’s funk and disco based music from Random Access Memories as well as recent collaborations with The Weeknd with ‘Starboy’ and ‘I Feel It Coming’, Homework brings harder hitting electronic music which helped push French House and electronic music into the mainstream inspiring later artists such as Justice, Disclosure and Porter Robinson amongst many others.

The House classic, ‘Around The World’, is certainly the biggest single from this album and still remains on rotation for many 25 years later, however, relistening to Homework, gives opportunity to re-appreciate some of Daft Punk’s lesser known and underrated tracks. Tracks such as ‘Phoenix’ with its thumping kick and humming beat as well as ‘Indo Silver Club’ with its bouncing drum beat and melody, are both underrated upbeat and joyfully addictive house tracks.

Harder and more techno inspired tracks such as ‘Rollin’ & Scratchin’ and ‘Rock’n Roll’, illustrate the eclectic ability of Daft Punk to make both hard hitting techno and funk and disco inspired house. Those harder hitting tracks however may not be the tracks listeners have on repeat for casual listening, rather playing a much stronger role within Daft Punk’s highly recommended live albums, Alive 1997 and Alive 2007 .

To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the original release of Homework, an additional fifteen remixes of songs from the original album have been added to this release. Some of those are fresh unheard remix such as Master at Works’ low tempo and relaxing ‘Around The World – Mellow Mix’, while others are releases of deeper cut remixes which accompanied the original single releases of tracks such as ‘Burnin- Ian Pooley Cut up Mix’ and ‘Revolution 909- Roger Sanchez & Junior Sanchez Remix’. While these remixes are a welcome addition for Daft Punk fans, with eight of the fifteen being remixes of ‘Around the World’ and four being remixes of ‘Burnin’, the 25th Anniversary feels like a missed opportunity. Including  early limited released material such as the Soma Records published singles, ‘Assault’, which was released in the lead up to Homework, and the unreleased 1994 single ‘Drive’ would give listeners music previously unavailable on streaming services, and make the album a must listen.

The release was accompanied by a twitch stream of 1997 Concert from the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles from Daft Punk’s Daftendirektour as well as a vinyl reissue of the live album, Alive 1997 . For those new to Daft Punk’s older work, this new 25th Anniversary  release of Homework certainly worth their time. For Daft Punk fans who are very familiar with Homework , their time would perhaps be better spent relistening to Alive 1997 or seeking out other recordings of Daft Punk’s live concerts.

Homework remains a strong release that should  be regarded as highly as Daft Punk’s later albums, Discovery, Human After All and Random Access Memories . The vinyl release of  this 25th Anniversary edition, coming on the 15th April will be a worthwhile collectors item for Daft Punk fans as it compiles alternative versions of classics that could previously only be available within the now hard to find single releases. The re-release is available for streaming now and is a classic album worth revisiting for any dance and electronic music fans.

Ben Stewart

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Daft Punk were the most influential pop musicians of the 21st century

By resurrecting disco, soft rock and 80s R&B, and bringing spectacle to the world of dance music, the French duo changed the course of pop music again and again

• News: Daft Punk split up after 28 years

I t’s hard to think of an act who had a greater impact on the way 21st-century pop music sounds than Daft Punk . The style Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo minted on their 1997 debut album Homework – house music heavy on the filter effect, which involved the bass or treble on the track gradually fading in and out, mimicking a DJ playing with the equalisation on a mixer; drums treated with sidechain compression, so that the beats appeared to punch through the sound, causing everything else on the track to momentarily recede – is now part of pop’s lingua franca.

In fact, no sooner had Homework come out than other artists started to copy it. Within a couple of years, Madonna had hooked up with another French dance producer, Mirwais, employed to add a distinctly Daft Punk-ish sheen to her 2000 album Music, and the charts were playing host to a succession of soundalike house tracks – 2 People by Jean Jacques Smoothie, who turned out to be a bloke from Gloucester called Steve; Phats and Small’s ubiquitous Turn Around; and No 1 singles, Modjo’s Lady and Eric Prydz’s Call on Me among them.

The hits made in Daft Punk’s image were cannily done, but never quite Daft Punk’s equal. They alighted on one aspect of their sound, missing the duo’s sly sense of humour – heard on Revolution 909, or their remix of Ian Pooley’s Chord Memory, which stopped midway through to enable a cheesy radio DJ to announce the song’s title and artist, the label it was released on and indeed the country in which the label was based – and their capacity for the kind of ferocious, minimal 3am intensity found on Rollin’ and Scratchin’ and Rock’n Roll. Certainly, no one came up with anything remotely like Daft Punk’s UK breakthrough single, Da Funk, an irresistibly simple 111bpm confection of distorted synth and slow-motion acid house, or anything as creative as their remix of Gabrielle’s Forget About the World, with its extravagant warping of the pop-soul singer’s voice.

By the time the copyists made the charts, Daft Punk had moved on. At least part of the mixed critical reaction to their song-based 2001 album Discovery was down to the fact that it seemed to be dabbling in musical styles considered deeply unfashionable in 2001. There was music influenced by soft rock, 80s AOR, the same decade’s super-smooth R&B balladry: Superheroes offered a pounding kick drum topped off with a cut-up sample from, of all things, Barry Manilow’s Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed.

In Discovery’s wake, all of them – except perhaps Barry Manilow – became part of the accepted lexicon of mainstream pop once more: it was as if Bangalter and de Homem-Christo had become taste-making arbiters of what was and wasn’t cool, a state of affairs acknowledged by LCD Soundsystem’s single Daft Punk Is Playing at My House, in which an appearance by the duo is held up as the last word in hip. For tracks made 20 years ago, there’s something curiously undated about the single Digital Love or the ballad Something About Us, perhaps bolstered by the fact that both tracks offered an early example of vocals treated with Auto-Tune, another aspect of Daft Punk’s sound that was fully absorbed into latter-day pop. In rap meanwhile, Busta Rhymes and Kanye West both sampled tracks from Discovery, and the latter tapped the duo to work on his album Yeezus; in R&B, the Weeknd became another of the duo’s production clients and Janet Jackson sampled Daftendirekt’s strut.

But arguably their greatest and most influential work of all was the Alive tour of 2006-07. The album it was ostensibly supporting, Human After All, a rough-hewn reaction to the glossy production of Discovery, had been met with poor reviews. The live shows, however, were a triumph: a son-et-lumière sensory overload with the duo performing in their trademark robot outfits in the middle of a giant illuminated pyramid. More than one observer has pinpointed the tour’s US dates, particularly their performance at the Coachella festival in 2006, as the spark that ignited America’s EDM movement, where DJ performances and live shows involving such vast productions became a staple of festivals and a huge attraction in Las Vegas, and Deadmau5 – a dance producer who, it was hard not to notice, performed in a giant LED-covered helmet not unlike those sported by Daft Punk – ended up on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

The duo themselves were extremely coy about kickstarting EDM. When I asked Thomas Bangalter about it in 2013, he muttered something noncommittal about hearing elements of their sound in other people’s music – “gimmicks that at the time [Daft Punk used them] were not really gimmicks,” as he wryly put it – before giving up and offering a very Gallic shrug. It was hard to work out whether he was simply being modest, or whether he absolutely hated the music they’d influenced – Bangalter and de Homem-Christo were connoisseurs of Chicago house and Detroit techno, who’d recorded a track called Teachers, listing their musical influences – and didn’t want anything to do with it. Others were not so circumspect. “Who’s responsible for EDM?” asked the duo’s sometime collaborator Pharrell Williams rhetorically. “Daft Punk are.”

In truth, Daft Punk always seemed apart from any scene, a step ahead of the music they inspired: at the commercial height of EDM, they began protesting that technological advances had made making music too easy and formulaic, and released Random Access Memories, an album immersed in the late 70s and early 80s. “You have all these recordings from the past that are these little sparkles of magic, but people feel we don’t live in a magical world any more – we’re trying to demonstrate to ourselves if we can break that line and try to do something classic and timeless today,” Bangalter explained.

The sense of distance was amplified by the duo’s very un-21st-century reticence: after the release of Homework, they were never photographed without wearing masks, they spurned social media, and in the scant handful of interviews they gave, never discussed their personal lives. The aura of mystery was maintained to the end: their split was announced with a video, excerpted from their avant-garde 2006 film Electroma, in which one of their robot alter egos blew the other up, followed by a burst of Random Access Memories’ Touch. No explanation was given for the split. It was a very Daft Punk way to go out, preserving their enigma right to the end.

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Daft Punk’s Homework Synth Sounds

On January 20th, 1997 – 25 years ago today – Daft Punk released their debut album, Homework . They hadn’t planned to release an album, but they’d spent five months recording tracks and decided they had enough material for an album. In a 1997 interview , Thomas Bangalter stated that “The Homework title relates to the fact that we made the record at home, very cheaply, and very quickly and spontaneously, trying to do cool stuff.” Many of the songs on Homework had been made to play live in clubs, so the album has a raw, live feel to it.

In a 1999 interview with a Japanese magazine , Daft Punk listed all the gear used on Homework and even outlined their typical recording process. The gear listed is mostly vintage Roland, including a Juno-106, MC-202, MKS-80 and a TB-303 alongside a digital Sequential Prophet-VS. 

For drum machines, they listed the LinnDrum and Roland TR-707, TR-808 and TR-909 as the drum machines used on the Homework . They used E-mu SP1200, Ensoniq ASR-10 and Roland S-760 samplers alongside a host of effects, sequencers, and mixers.

This article focuses on the synth sounds of Homework and how to recreate them using modern softsynths. I’ve recreated Da Funk and Around the World  and the presets that I created for the remakes are available for free download at the end of the article. This is a follow-up to last year’s Daft Punk’s Discovery Synth Sounds article, which I recommend checking out after this one!

Da Funk was the first single to be released from Homework and was played live from as early as 1995. It features a distorted guitar-like melody playing over a relentless 4-to-the-floor beat before a famous acid-bass synth line ends the song. Before I start talking about where the sounds came from, here’s my remake, created from scratch with no samples from the original song:

The distorted synth line has a characteristic band-passed sound run through distortion, which creates a sound similar to an overdriven electric guitar. The melody is played in perfect fourths throughout, so the original patch likely had an oscillator tuned to a fourth.

The common belief is that the Da Funk lead synth sound is a Korg MS-20, but the MS-20 wasn’t listed by Daft Punk on their Homework or  Discovery gear lists. There are no photos of them using a Korg MS-20 and they’ve never mentioned the MS-20 in their interviews.  Although the MS-20 is a strong contender for the Da Funk sound because of its high-pass filter and the ability to patch in distortion. I think it’s more likely that they used their Roland Juno-106 or MKS-80, both of which have high-pass filters, run through a distortion pedal such as the Ibanez Fat Cat Distortion seen in the below live pictures:

The Da Funk lead synth also sounds like it’s been sampled and played back from a sampler. The beginning note of each phrase has a slightly different envelope time – the higher note’s envelopes playback faster than the lower note envelopes, which is characteristic of vintage samplers. The may have sampled the sound play a fourth, letting them play or program the melody using only one note. Note that I didn’t sample the sound for my remake, so the envelope times are a little off compared to the original.

I recreated the lead sound using TAL U-NO-LX , a software emulation of the Juno-106 run through Brainworx bx_greenscreamer plugin, which emulates an Ibanez Tubescreamer pedal. Onboard  distortion and overdrive effects in g uitar amp simulators like Guitar Rig or Amplitube would also be suitable. Most of the sound comes from the character of the distortion pedal, so experiment with different models for different sounds. Here is the sound before and after distortion:

• Single Line Clean 00:00
• Added Fourth 00:00
• Tubescreamer 00:00

Da Funk 303

Halfway through the song, the kick drum drops out and an acid bassline is introduced. Interestingly, the bassline wasn’t programmed with Da Funk in mind, it was just one of a few bass lines that Bangalter had programmed on his TB-303, and the one that best fit Da Funk .

“The bassline itself was from a 303 l’d bought in 1993. I’d just made all these random patterns, so when we were looking for a bassline, we listened to some of the ones I’d already programmed and took the one that fit best.” – Daft Punk, Musik (1997)

The Roland TB-303 is a monophonic bass synthesizer originally intended to emulate bass guitars, which it does a terrible job of. It was quickly discontinued, which allowed cheap units to fall into the hands of electronic musicians who favoured it for its aggressive, screeching filter and onboard sequencer.  Because the 303 is such a simple unit with only one oscillator and one envelope, the magic lies in how you program the sequencer. Notes can be set to glide and this can be combined with big octave jumps to create dramatic slides.

303 synth parts are usually recorded by programming a 16-step sequence and changing the filter settings manually while the sequencer plays. The 303’s sequencer only has a three-octave range from C1 to C4 and the Da Funk bassline, which runs from F1 to F4, was likely sequenced in another key and transposed using the 303’s tuning knob to help it fit the key of Da Funk .

Below is my patch for Da Funk using AudioRealism’s ABL3 plugin, an accurate software emulation of the TB-303. Similar to the lead sound, the 303 in Da Funk has been run through a distortion pedal. The ABL3 plugin features onboard distortion which can be added via the small drive and distort knobs at the top-right, which I’ve cranked to almost the maximum settings.

• Da Funk 303 00:00

I also used TAL U-NO-LX to recreate the bass synth. It’s a simple patch using a single sawtooth wave, and the filter os closed almost all the way to let only the bass frequencies through. The ADSR envelope is set up with medium decay and sustain at halfway, which is applied to the filter and VCA to create a subtle plucking motion.

• Bass with Beat 00:00

The brass hit sample that plays through most of the song is from the Zero-G Datafile Three sample CD from 1992, where it appears as track 63, Dance Stabs . All credit to Aguila909 on Reddit for unearthing this sample!

The drums are a mixture of sampled drum breaks and programmed drum machines. The main beat is sampled from Vaughn Mason And Crew’s  Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll  and the drum fill at 0:23 is sampled from Barry White’s  I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More . The hi-hats that join the beat at 1:43 in my remake are from the Roland TR-909.

• Dance Stab 00:00
• 909 Hats 00:00

Around the World

Around the World is a classic French House banger that featured a Michel Gondry (of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame) music video. The song is simple and highly repetitive, featuring only one vocal line repeated 144 times in the full 7:44 album version. There are a minimal number of sounds in the track that get played in various combinations, proving that if the groove is right, repetition can work. Here’s my full remake:

Around the World is built around a simple bass sound that plays three different bass lines throughout the song. The main bassline shares a strong resemblance to the one in Good Times by Chic, whose guitarist Niles Rogers the duo would collaborate with on 2013’s Random Access Memories.

Daft Punk could have recorded the Around the World synth-bass on any of their synths, but I’ve recreated it in TAL U-NO-LX. To create the patch yourself, start with a simple sawtooth wave, lower the filter to 2.7 and crank the resonance to the point where it’s high but not quite screeching (6.89 in TAL U-NO-LX). Add a tiny amount of envelope modulation by raising the ENV fader to 2 and set the ADSR envelope with an attack time of 1, decay of 6 and no sustain to give the patch a subtle pluck. Here are all three basslines played using my TAL U-NO-LX preset:

• Bassline 1 00:00
• Bassline 2 00:00
• Bassline 3 00:00

Funky Leads

Four funky lead sounds play throughout Around the World , with two only appearing during the outro. The main synth lead is a bouncy lead that uses high filter resonance and a synced delay effect to create a funky, rhythmic effect.  I again recreated this sound using TAL U-NO-LX, this time with the square wave DCO waveform selected. Set the filter to 3, resonance to 6 and envelope modulation to halfway. The envelope has attack time set to 2, which works with the resonance setting to create a funky wah-wah sound.

• Organ 1 // Organ 2 00:00

The delay effect is a tempo-synced stereo delay with a 1/8th note delay time in the left channel and a dotted 1/8th note delaying the right channel. The mix level is 25%, feedback is 40%, and I adjusted the delay’s onboard filter to roll off the high frequencies. Here are my settings using Ableton’s Delay effect:

Towards the end of Around the World , the beat drops out and two new outro synth parts get introduced. The two sounds work together to create a musical sequence reminiscent of some later melodies on Discovery , such as Aerodynamic or Veridis Quo , both of which I covered in my Discovery Synth Sounds article.

• Outro Synth 1 00:00
• Outro Synth 2 00:00
• Layered 00:00

Downloads & Related

Thanks for reading! The recreated Juno patches for TAL U-NO-LX are available for download below alongside the Da Funk 303 patch for AudioRealism ABL3.

Download the Presets

Download the synth presets created for this article here. Alternatively, you can find them in the Synth Sounds Collection , a free download containing all of my free synth presets.

Get the Ableton Projects

Get the Ableton Live Projects for these remakes on the Projects Store. All projects have frozen tracks in case of missing plugins and all downloads include stems and MIDI files for use in other DAWs. 

Read Me Next

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out my first Daft Punk article, covering the synths from Homework’s follow-up,  Discovery.

Buy Robot Funk

For even more Daft Punk sounds, pick up Robot Funk , my preset pack for Arturia Analog Lab V, featuring faithfully recreated sounds from every Daft Punk album in one pack.

Header artwork by Makarxart  

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What DAW Does Daft Punk Use?

If you’re an aspiring musician and a fan of Daft Punk, it’s natural that you’d want to learn more about their unique production process. After all, Daft Punk is without a doubt the most popular electronic dance music (EDM) act.

Behind the robot, personas are talented French musicians Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. They rose to immediate fame and success in the late 90s with the release of their debut album, Homework.

The iconic duo has said before that they don’t like using DAWs. They prefer utilizing hardware synthesizers to make their music. Nonetheless, some of the DAWs they’ve claimed to use are Ableton Live and Avid Pro Tools.

Table of Contents

What DAWs Did Daft Punk Use?

The two DAWs Daft Punk claimed to use are Ableton Live and Avid Pro Tools.

Ableton Live

Used for their 2007 song “Alive,” Ableton Live ’s clever interface and integrated audio time, pitch, and tempo manipulation make it an exceptional music production tool.

Avid Pro Tools

Avid Pro Tools is currently the industry-standard DAW for professional recording. We know Daft Punk have used this DAW for production, but they haven’t provided information on what specific albums or songs they used this DAW for.

What Hardware Synths Did Daft Punk Use?

As for hardware synths, Daft Punk have used many synthesizers over their long, 28-year career. Here are the most popular ones they’ve used over the years:

Roland Juno-106

This one’s been on almost every Daft Punk album. If you’re a retro musician or just really into old music hardware, you’ve definitely heard of the Juno-106 . Its early implementation of MIDI and deep analog sound made it a pioneer in the early synth era.

Sequential Circuits Prophet 5-S

The Prophet 5-S is another oldie used in their song “Around the World.” Although the current version of the Prophet 5-S is a great synthesizer, the original version truly changed the music space.

Do You Have to Use the Exact Same DAW as Daft Punk to Become a Successful Music Artist?

No, you don't. Daft Punk have made a workflow and environment that works for them and their style of music. What you need to do is figure out your own process and look for DAWs that are best suited for said process.

If you’re just starting your music career, it might be overwhelming at first because of the sheer number of choices you have, but everyone goes through this.

Over time, as you try more and more equipment and software, you’ll find the ones that work for you and your music!

Wrapping Up

Over the course of their career, Daft Punk pushed the French House genre to the extremes and expressed the impact of blurring the borders between analog and digital schools.

Perhaps another artist will come one day and change EDM music entirely with the help of future technology yet again, the same way Daft Punk did.

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