Deep Dish: Redreaming “Dreams”
Toss some Stevie Nicks vocals and an infectious dance groove into a Power Mac G5 and what do you get? A progressive house track that pleases your soul as well as your feet. “Dreams” is perhaps the best example of Deep Dish’s ability to fuse funky electronic house with catchy pop/rock themes. It’s the fourth and latest release from the 2005 “George Is On,” an album that brings club addicts and pop music fans to the same scene. This isn’t anything new: Deep Dish — Ali Shirazinia (a.k.a. “Dubfire,”) and Sharam Tayebi — has been pounding out dance tracks for more than 15 years. But with “George Is On,” the group has crossed into new technological territory: Now it uses Logic Pro almost exclusively to record, compose, and mix its tracks.
“We pretty much did the whole album with Logic,” says Dubfire. “‘Say Hello,’ the first release from the album, was the first project we ever did using Logic and it was nominated for two Grammies.”
Deep Dish and sound engineer Matt Nordstrom produced “George Is On” in the duo’s Washington, D.C. studio. The album has hit dance and pop charts hard, earning respect in clubs and on the streets. “It’s a classic example of something danceable, but rocky and poppy at the same time,” says Dubfire. “We try to find that perfect balance.”
Acoustic Inspiration
Most electronic dance music is conceived within a computer, nurtured by complex software and a family of external electronic processors. Not Deep Dish tracks. The duo starts with acoustic instruments and good ideas.
“Usually, it’s like ‘Unplugged,’” says Dubfire. “We use the guitar, some vocals, just basic elements. You know you have a good song when you can reduce it to that state — it’s just the voice and the guitar, just acoustic instruments.”
Those basic melodies and ideas are recorded directly into Logic Pro or a sampler and developed in their new digital environment. “That way you can get to the heart of the song,” says Dubfire. “And when you throw it into the computer, you can expand on your ideas.”
Ideas are fed by a vast library of samples — kick drums, snares, guitar riffs, vocal tracks, horn hits — that has been cultivated for almost 15 years. “We always had a Kurzweil K2500 and a lot of our old samples were on floppies,” says Dubfire. “Those samples are still around on ZIP disks and we’re constantly grabbing new samples.” Deep Dish never travels without music — or Macs — and the group usually captures samples on planes or trains using Peak and PowerBooks.
“They’ll be on a plane and they’ll hear a hi-hat or a kick drum and just sample it,” says Nordstrom. “Those samples will usually be used in a new song right there. We just grab all the new samples, put them on one EXS24 instrument, load them up, and store them in folders on the hard drive.”
The organic recordings and snared samples come together in Logic Pro on the road, in the Deep Dish Washington, D.C. studio, and at home. “We have built little home studios for those 3 a.m. bursts of inspiration,” says Dubfire. “The home studios have really reinvigorated us, inspired us to produce a lot more music. It makes me really excited about where music and technology are going.”