The Prodigy: Climbatize (Always Outnumbered Never Outpunned)

The Fat of the Land was the Prodigy’s third album, and a huge commercial success. Released in 1997, I still remember buying it on cassette and taking it home to listen to for the first time (there were no leaks or previews in those days!) Everybody of course remembers Smack My Bitch Up, Breathe and their hit single Firestarter but it was a track towards the end of side two, Climbatize, that caught my attention:

The album saw Liam Howlett and co take the guitar and rock influenced sounds of Music for the Jilted Generation a step further, and it was perhaps amongst all this industrial big-beat stuff that Climbatize stood out as an eerie breakbeat hardcore-era chillout number. Let’s have a look as it’s composition.

Intro

Let’s start by making our DAWs tempo to 129 bpm. The tracks begins with an ominous twelve-bar string loop that fades in over eight bars. This is actually a sample taken from John Ottoman’s soundtrack to The Usual Suspects, a track called Kobayashi’s Domain. John recalls this about the string recording session:

Financial constraints forced me into making a little go a long way. The room in which the score was recorded was so small that we couldn’t fit the entire orchestra in all at once. So we recorded the score multiple times with each section separately. The first two days we recorded the 38 strings, whose elbows practically rubbed the walls. I was able to foster the technique of “multiple-passing” the strings (which simply meant stacking three separate performances of string parts on top of one another) in order to create an almost larger-than-life sonic experience and great mix control of the string section.”

The sample kicks in at 2.09:

After purchasing the track off of iTunes, I added it to Live, isolated the sample and pitched it down two semitones in Live’s Sampler.

This is what the strings are playing. The loop is alternates between F major and Bb minor in 2nd inversion three times, then Db major with a pitch bend up to Eb major and back down again.

Next, we need to add a tambourine. The original tambourine is from this Megabass Remix Sample CD (thanks Leo!).

Breakdown

At 1.07 the track breaks down for the first time. The tambourine continues with a gated sound that turns out to be the organ from the intro to Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who:

The sound itself is a Hammond Organ processed with an ARP 2500 and an EMS VCS 3, which provided a sample and hold low-pass filter. Pete describes it here:

After pulling the track in and warping it, I tuned it down four semitones. It was hard to find the right bit, but playing it with our reference behind I soon found it was the third beat of bar twelve. I looped that and began to process it:

As you can see, the track has a wide stereo image with the organ panned almost hard right so I added Live’s Utility and set the Channel Mode to Right. Next, some Overdrive, Redux, Auto Filter and Saturator finished the sound off.

There’s a simple hi-hat pattern that enters at bar forty one, and that’s the breakdown done.

Bass

For the bass I used Kontakt’s excellent (and free) Classic Bass. This kicks in at 1.37. From the default patch I turned the tone down, added some more noise and disabled the reverb.

It took some fiddling with the velocity to get the groove and human feel just right, so I’ve added some slight velocity randomization. This could well be programmed or played in by Liam – it’s hard to tell, but sounds real enough:

Give the Drummer Some

After sixty-eight bars the drums and percussion have fully faded in. I wasn’t able to identify exactly what breakbeat was used, but I could get close to it with Bill Withers’s Kissing My Love.

The percussion is famously resampled from The Jedi Knights’ Air Drums From Outer Bongolia, which in turn samples The Incredible Bongo Band’s Bongolia (and often wrongly thought to be from the band’s other liberally sampled Apache).

The Jedi Knights weren’t too happy with The Prodigy sampling them without permission; however, it turned out they themselves hadn’t cleared the rights to the original recording, which XL Recordings (The Prodigy’s label) acquired during this heated legal mess.

Ironically the case was brought to the attention of George Lucas who was none too happy with The Jedi Knights using Star Wars intellectual property without permission, and he apparently sued them.

The track was harder to find but after tracking it down, I pulled it into Ableton and isolated a bar where not much else was going on (no echoes or FX).

I tuned the sample down forty-three cents to get it in time (this was made pre-Ableton warping, so I’d imagine getting drum loops in-time involved tuning them). Sounds good:

Hornorgraphy

The haunting horn in Climbatize is a sample of Egyptian Empire’s Horn Track (from 1991) and is actually quite easy to source and extrapolate the sample:

Chop out the intro note and transpose it as follows: minus ten semitones, plus three, plus two then minus three. I’ve colour-coded the clips to help visualise this. It’s certain Liam would have done this within a sampler, as by by 96/97 while DAWs like Pro Tools and Cubase could run audio, doing the processing, time stretching and pitch-shifting would be much quicker and more CPU efficient in a sampler, but I could well be wrong!

All Done!

From just after 6.00 the track breaks down to just drums and the organ sound and eight bars after this is an effect achieved by adding a 100% wet reverb to the master channel. Again, it’s hard to be accurate about exactly what reverb unit he used, but he was known to have the Boss SE-70, Yamaha SPX1000, ART Multiverb and an Alesis Quadraverb.

To simulate this, create a blank audio track and set the I/O input to resampling. Then, record an eight bar section (I chose bars 101 to 109) with the bass and organ muted out.

With a combination of Reaktor’s Fusion Reflections and Live’s built-in Reverb, I could get close to the diffused sound:

Here’s the finished track: