It’s been two years since LMFAO released the Winter Music Conference’s unofficial theme song, “I’m in Miami, Bitch!”.
The proud parents of this dancefloor anthem are Red Foo and Sky Blu, the uncle/nephew team hailing from L.A. who have taken the world by storm with their unique style of electro hip-hop.
In addition to producing club bangers, they’ve been working on multiple clothing lines, a movie, signature liquor, a hot sauce, and anything else they can stamp their moniker on.
Unofficial remixes of Kanye West, Katy Perry, and Fergie have cemented a fan base that is salivating for more. Beatportal sat down with LMFAO before the WMC record release party to find out more.
We’re in Orlando, bitch! Your pre-WMC Record Release party is tonight at Blue Martini. Tell us about the album.
The ‘Party Rock’ album is designed for the party. It might even inspire a non-party person to want to go out and party, like a gateway drug!
You might get introduced to electro through our sound and then you can go deeper from there. We have a tentative release date in May around Memorial Day. This will give us time to work on some things and experience more of the “party rock life”.
The more we tour, the more we refine the art of partying.
You seem to have mastered your craft. Between the booze-fueled escapades what are you working on?
We did a mix for Chris Cornell. We’re working of remixes of U2, Pussy Cat Dolls, and a lot of stuff for Interscope.
We have an idea for our material. Instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars on a remix that is just okay, why not have a remix competition and have thousands of submissions from kids that are just getting started? Their track could be featured on our album.
Now that’s community service. Please tell your fans what the LMFAO lab consists of.
We do everything on Mac laptops. Ableton son! Get us on the board. I mean, I could tell ‘em a million things that they could do like new swing templates and automation in the parts.
We’re using all soft-synths. The reason our sound is different is because we make our sounds starting from a sine wave.
So no presets?
No presets. Well, maybe a couple. But we don’t like that. (Ableton) Operator, all the way man. Like the bass in ‘Miami’, Operator. ‘Lil Hipster Girl’, Operator. All Operator with a lot of side-chaining. You can make a kick in Operator.
You can make an 808 if you filter it right and do a couple other things. That type of stuff is exciting, when you can make the sound.
When you sample you don’t know how something is made and you don’t have that power. Sampling is like plagiarizing.
You can’t take everybody’s jokes and write a paragraph from it. When you create the music you have the confidence to keep creating. Some producers fall off because they have just been sampling.
Then when someone doesn’t want to pay for their samples or when James Brown is not cool anymore then what are they gonna do?
You gave a tip once that said to record live hand claps in mono and then layer them in a track. Any more LMFAO production tips?
There’s an old trick from R&B that uses a reverse-snare echo.
‘Put Your Hands Up For Detroit’ uses this, for example. You take the snare and clap that you’re working with and put a big echo on it. Export that. You resample and reverse it.
So your “khhaaaa” sound becomes “aaaahhk”.
You can find a reverse snare on sample CDs but it won’t sound like this. We’re doing this now in all of our songs.
Good stuff. For those who haven’t been lucky enough to experience an LMFAO show in person, what can they expect?
You’re going to see polka-dot bikini girls. You’re going to see a lot of girls. The ratio of girls to dudes is crazy. They’re going to be sexually charged.
Everybody gets laid more at an LMFAO show, whether they know us or not. There’s a lot of sex in the air. It’s probably our pelvic thrusting.
