All of the stuff I did with White Zombie was on a rig that was for sure laughable by today's standards. Either a Macintosh Iix or maybe I'd moved to Quadra 950 by then, NuBus ProTools with the old pre-DSP Farm setup. I think it used one card to connect to the SCSI drives, bypassing the Mac's internal SCSI bus, and then one card for every four channels of audio - but I only had one of those so I had a grand total of four audio tracks. I used two SampleCell cards (8 voices, 8 megabytes of RAM each) and then later graduated to a pair of SampleCell II cards (32 voices, 32 meg RAM each I think?) with the TDM daughterboard so their outputs could be routed to the TDM bus internally. Can't remember exactly when the switch was made in terms of the White Zombie timeline though... I think it was still SampleCell v1 cards then.

I think the DAW I was using at the time was StudioVision Pro, but I might have switched to Logic which happened around 1994 or so. And of course I also had ProTools - although at the time ProTools had no MIDI features to speak of. But I did have the Digidesign SMPTE Slave Driver and StudioVision and Logic both could use the ProTools hardware for audio playback, and it all worked quite well. Accurate SMPTE lockup to analog tape was no problem, as long as tape was the master.

All of the drum "reinforcement" and loops was done by hand. No Beat Detective in those days! And the producer, Terry Date, was pretty adamant that we not attempt to quantize John Tempesta's live drum performances. I was fine with this, as Johnny's feel doesn't need any help! Plus in those days, trying to quantize live drums across 16 tracks and keep everything in phase would have been... challenging to say the least. So it was much easier to disassemble the loops I was going to add and adjust their timing to match Johnny's performance.

I had created loop "beds" for each song that the band could play along to while tracking, giving them a turbo-charged click track of sorts. Since StudioVision / Logic worked so well with SMPTE, it was no problem to dump these "play along" tracks to tape, and then once basic tracking was finished, I dumped kick, snare, overheads, mono bass, stereo guitars, and mono vocals into my rig - eight tracks in total, although I could only play four of them at once.

Then I just manually programmed MIDI tracks that accurately represented the timing of Johnny's live kick + snare, going through it painstakingly and nudging notes and velocities until everything lined up. Once I had those "master" MIDI tracks, I could duplicate them and use them to trigger single hit samples as well as loop slices.

The loops that I chopped up were all from the sample CD's of the era, like X-Static Goldmine, Zero-G, etc. - the kind of stuff you'd hear on boom-bap records of the day, but I didn't sample anything off any vinyl myself. I then crushed the bejeezus out of them using Waves L-1, guitar pedals, etc. until they were absolutely flattened and smashed. So much interesting low-level goop, so many weird artifacts would get brought up to audible levels - it sounded great to me. To me, when L-1 came out it was a revelation. I'd been dreaming about look-ahead, true-zero-attack-time compression forever! I'd even attempted to do it with analog hardware by flipping the tape, bouncing a drum track to an empty track through 100ms of digital delay, flipping the tape back, and then running that 100ms-early track through another 90ms delay and into the sidechain input on an analog compressor. It worked... sort of. Too fiddly to really use all the time. But once L-1 came out it was like the clouds had parted and I was in heaven! And I was not shy about stepping on the signal with L-1, most of the waveforms on the Zombie loops were absolutely square and completely flattened. By the time I was done, a perky little rare groove kick+snare turned into a monstrous cloud of doom - and with no annoying "pips" on the attacks where an analog compressor would struggle to kick in fast enough. Just crushing force and no pips!

Then I divided the loops into pieces that started with kick 1, hat 1, snare 1, kick 2, hat 2, snare 2, etc. I wasn't slicing the loops into single hits, each chunk started with a drum hit and then continued to the end of the loop. This way I could decide as I was building out the loop tracks whether I liked whatever came next in a chunk, or whether I had to start a new chunk to prevent some extra kicks or snares or whatever from happening where I didn't want them.

To me, this approach was much better than slicing the loops all the way down to individual hits and then rebuilding exactly what Johnny had played - the result was a bit more organic sounding, with extra snare drags, soft kicks, extra hat hits, etc. occurring in the murk. But I agonized over the combination of loops and live drums for weeks until I liked what I was hearing versus Johnny's live drums. I was stacking, swapping out bits, pitching things down (sometimes by a lot), using just a kick from one loop and a snare from a different one, and just generally mucking about with it until it was an unrecognizable murky gloop. I did add some single hits for drum reinforcement as well, but the real weight and sensation of a locomotive chugging down the track came from the murky beds that I did.

And of course the timing of all of this stuff was completely un-quantized, so it all flowed and sounded "more human than human" (pun intended).

We didn't want to make White Zombie sound like Nitzer Ebb or Kraftwerk or anything, we wanted it to sound like a larger-than-life, super-human, turbo-charged version of reality. So.... tons of compression and zero quantizing.

I wound up doing between four and eight re-arranged loop tracks for each song, building an arrangement out of them that followed the song structure. Then I dragged my rig into the studio, locked up to SMPTE, and printed everything back to a slave reel. In the final mix it's kind of hard to pick out where the loops sit in relation to the live drums, and that's intentional, but if you put up the multitrack and mute all the loop stuff, it's like the bottom falls out and you've turned off all the reverbs!

There wasn't a whole lot of synth stuff, just some bits here and there like the analog synth at the start of More Human, stuff like that. All analog, Arp Solus, MS-20, and I think the More Human synth bass is the original Novation Bass Station. I also had a Roland MKS-80 Super Jupiter (still have it BTW) and that appears here and there.

When it came time for me to do all the remixes that appeared on Super Sexy Swingin Sounds, I took new dumps of everything from the multitracks and, since I only had four tracks of ProTools audio to work with, I used those four tracks for vocals and lead guitars. Everything else came from the SampleCell cards.

I'd take just the hi-hat track and chop that into loops from which I could build a more or less complete rendition of the live drum performance, and then augment that with more chopped-up loops and single hits to build a complete drum track. For bass and rhythm guitars, I took a similar approach - I chopped everything into chunks that I could trigger from the keyboard. Somehow I got everything to fit into two SampleCell cards!

This let me re-trigger guitar chunks, use pitch bends, flip riffs backwards, all kinds of fun stuff. I loved doing it that way because I could build "super versions" of the riffs, using exactly the bits I wanted, stacking stuff, etc. - but not totally changing things so they're unrecognizable.

In those days I owned exactly zero hardware compressors, and plugins inside your DAW didn't exist. So I'd take Rob's vocals and load them into Sound Designer II, which had exactly two plugins - Waves L-1 and Q-10 (but I only had L-1). I'd crush the vocals to death with L-1, basically flattening them entirely, export that file, and then load that into my DAW. I did some processing of vocals and guitars with a Boss RPS-10 pitch shifter + delay, which had a crazy reverse delay mode, as well as HyperPrism software which was a standalone program that had an X-Y pad (like a Kaoss pad) to control a handful of fx algorithms like pitch shifters and ring modulators. Again, I'd process that stuff offline, print the results, import it into my DAW, and edit it down to the best bits. I did add some synth parts, and process some guitars through the external filter inputs on my Arp Solus, Korg MS-20, and a pair of Peavey Spectrum Filters as well.

All of my mixes on Super Sexy were done on a Mackie 32x8, with everything running live. Four tracks of audio, 16 outputs from the SampleCells, a few live synth tracks, done. (The big super-saw on the More Human remix is the Super Jupiter). I used no outboard eq, and no compressors at all, not even on the mix bus. The only outboard I used was a QuadraVerb+, an Ensoniq DP/4, and the RPS-10's - plus whatever was running through a synth filter in real time during the mix. Printed everything straight from the Mackie to a Panasonic SV-3700 DAT machine and off it went to mastering. People slag the Mackie stuff all the time but that remix album sold half a million copies and those tracks got licensed to a ton of movies.

Fun and easy! But not quick by any means.